Trust Me - T.M. Logan Page 0,44

car number plates, logos, company names – anything that would help him triangulate her location. Noting all the people who were tagged in her pictures for later perusal. There were more pictures of the cat and the husband than her. In one from May captioned ‘The two men in my life xx ’, the husband was lying on his back on the sofa with the big brown-and-black cat sprawled across his chest. Leon suppressed a shudder of disgust as his eyes skated across the image, searching for clues. It was in high-definition, probably a phone camera with ten megapixels plus, a quality that would have been uncommon even a few years ago.

There.

He saved the picture and opened it in the image handling programme, then zoomed in and enhanced it. Highlighted an area below the cat’s chin and blew it up another two hundred per cent. Then again.

The cat’s tag. It was angled towards the camera, a flat silver disc hanging from its collar. He zoomed in another 25 per cent, sharpened the image, smiled to himself. At normal resolution, you wouldn’t have even noticed the careful engraving. But with a little enhancing, it was right there.

Dizzy

46 Claverton Gdns

07791 626957

He switched to another screen and called up Google Maps.

THURSDAY

22

Mia is crying.

A plaintive, mewling cry that cuts right to the bone, right to my core. I can hear her, feel her. The cry is swelling to fill the room, the sound squeezing tightly around my heart. Mia needs me. She’s afraid, in danger, frightened in the dark. I snap awake. Reach for her, hands searching in the darkness to lift her up and hold her to my chest and—

Mia isn’t here.

I lie back down against the pillow, heart thudding against my ribs. The crying was so real, so near. Almost as if she was in the room with me. I lie in the darkness, waiting for my heart rate to steady, staring at the outline of moonlight leaking in around the edges of the blinds. It’s almost 4 a.m., more than thirty hours now since I last saw Mia. I know she was taken to the hospital for a precautionary check over, but I wonder where she is now. With a foster family? In some council-run facility? Or have they found Kathryn, reunited the two of them?

I shift my legs under the duvet and feel the comforting shape of Dizzy, my tabby cat, curled up at the foot of the bed. Richard had never liked him sleeping upstairs – he claimed his padding about in the night kept him awake – but now Richard’s gone and I like Dizzy’s company. I’m still not used to sleeping alone, to waking up alone. I sit up, the night-time air cool on my arms, and give him a scratch behind the ears. He doesn’t stir but a soft bass purr starts up deep in his chest.

That’s when I hear it.

Not a cry this time. A sound. A creak of wooden floorboards shifting under weight. I lift my hand from the velvety fur on Dizzy’s head and his purring slowly fades back into the dark. I hold my breath, my pulse ticking faster. Ten seconds of silence spools out, twenty, before it comes again. An almost imperceptible creak, slow, deliberate, the kind of sound Richard used to make when he came back from ‘working late’ with the new colleague who was now carrying his baby. The kind of sound you make when you’re trying very hard not to make any sound at all.

Downstairs.

Dominic’s words come back to me.

‘I will come looking for you and I will find you. You’ll wake up one night and I’ll be standing there at the end of your bed.’

I reach for my bedside lamp, half-expecting the light to reveal his face glowering at me from the corner of the room, or blocking the doorway, holding the broad-bladed knife.

But I’m alone in the bedroom, just me and the cat. The air seems suddenly colder and I shiver in my pyjamas, a thick wedge of fear lodging painfully in my throat. Very carefully, I lift my phone from the bedside table and type 999, so I just have to hit the green ‘dial’ button to make the call. The smart thing to do would be to push something heavy in front of the bedroom door, barricade myself in, stay quiet and call the police now.

My thumb hovers over the dial button.

But there’s anger behind the fear, too. How dare he come to my