The Magpies A Psychological Thriller - By Mark Edwards Page 0,112

see that their lights were on.

He went down the steps to the basement. Now was the first moment of truth. Had they changed the locks since they had moved in? At first he thought the key wasn’t going to fit, but it was because his hand was trembling. It slid into the lock, he turned it and the door opened.

He stepped inside.

He stood in the hallway, thinking that they must surely be able to hear his heart beating from the top flat. There was a strange smell in the air; a smell that had once wafted up to his and Kirsty’s nostrils. He still couldn’t identify it, but it made him feel ill.

The layout of the flat was the same as those above it: living room and kitchen at the front; bedrooms and bathroom at the back. He opened the door to what he knew must be the main bedroom and squinted into the semi-darkness. This bedroom had patio doors which led into the garden. There was something odd about the room. The curtains were open and the moon shone in, creating a little light. It took him a second, while his eyes adjusted, to realise that the room contained only a single bed.

He must have got it wrong - this must be the spare room. And yet when he opened the other bedroom door he saw that this bedroom too only had a single bed in it. Hanging above the bed were pictures of Chris: huge, blown-up pictures. There were tins of men’s deodorant on the bedside table. Mansize tissues; computer magazines. It was clearly Chris’s bedroom.

He closed the door and looked back into the other bedroom. The walls were blank, painted magnolia, no pictures or posters. There were women’s perfumes, make-up on a dressing table, a hi-fi with large speakers. Lucy’s care assistant uniform hung on the front of the wardrobe.

Separate rooms.

He could imagine Lucy lying alone in this bedroom with her phone, recording him and Kirsty making love. Did she get a thrill out of it? Maybe she masturbated while she did it. Was Chris in the room too? Did they play the recordings back for their own private titillation? He felt angry, all of a sudden.

He pulled the door to, a little too firmly. The door banged and he froze, his heart booming. He flicked the light on in the living room, still terrified that Lucy or Chris would appear at any moment and ask him what the fuck he was doing. It was so strange seeing the place where his tormentors lived. He had begun to imagine them as trolls that lived under a bridge. He thought they would live in some squalid cavern, pages of newspapers stuck all over the walls like the rooms of serial killers in movies. Instead, the room looked perfectly normal with its sofa, armchairs, coffee table and rug – but look closer and there was something ‘off’ about the room. There were no personal touches, no ornaments on the mantelpiece, no books anywhere. There was no mess, no photos of family, nothing that indicated that real people lived here. It was like being in some future museum where a typical early 21st century living room had been reconstructed, but they’d left out all the personal touches, the things that would make it real. There were no wedding photos anywhere either, Jamie noticed, no photos of Lucy and Chris together at all, just a number of pictures of them both on their own. What with the separate bedrooms, it made Jamie wonder if the Newtons’ marriage was a sham. It made a sick kind of sense. Two psychopaths getting together, getting married and living together, but only because they realised they could work better as a team. They were two people who were incapable of love, hugely egotistical – as the pictures of Chris in his bedroom testified – and narcissistic. He shuddered. This place gave him the creeps.

Jamie noticed another strange thing: there were two televisions. One looked like a normal TV – almost the same as Jamie’s, in fact, with a DVD player underneath it – but the other was in one of those old-fashioned wooden television cabinets, with the doors closed. He could see flickering light around the edges of these closed cabinet doors. Weird. He opened the doors of the cabinet.

It wasn’t an ordinary television. The picture was in black and white, grainy and unclear. The present date and time were displayed in the bottom left