“I’m sorry, we’re not staying long,” says Sam to the screechy person, and he shuts the cover and zips it.

“We’re not staying long”—that’s what Sam said. So, Ruby is still aboard. The man doesn’t want to be seen by her, but the fact that he hasn’t laid eyes on Ruby or Leonie since the village green is worrying him slightly. Recently she’s shown a talent for deception of which he was previously unaware. Right up until the day they attacked him and stole themselves away, he’d thought Ruby was at least partly on his side. No matter. He can get the upper hand again. He already considers himself to be one step ahead of her. The tracker being taken from the phone and placed on the train as a decoy would have been a cunning move if he hadn’t been able to visit the warehouse after leaving the hospital, where he picked up the cloned phone he uses to track her online life, such as it is. It’s inconvenient that he can no longer track her physically, but he can watch, in real-time, whenever she uses the internet to try to evade him. The first escape may have taken him by surprise, but he knows what she’s been planning this time. He was watching as she booked the tickets yesterday. His first thought was that he ought to go there and wait for her, but all of Ruby’s lies have undermined his confidence in predicting what she’s going to do next. If she’s somehow guessed he has access to her search history, there’s a risk that the tickets themselves are a decoy, intended to send him hundreds of miles in the wrong direction.

Part of him wonders if he ought to draw a line under it all. Finish the three of them on the boat now and move on permanently, let Constance go. “Gregor” has become rather tedious, and although he has enjoyed spending all of that rental money, one can get too comfortable. It will be fun to take on another challenge, another persona. He’s done his research, he just needs to take the leap, start again in the new life he knows is waiting for him—once he’s dealt with the man currently living it. A surge of anger turns his thoughts around. The rage he feels now is caused by his humiliation, the injustice of it. He’s been made a fool of, and he no longer wants to finish Constance, but to punish her. Killing Ruby and Leonie is part of that, but if he does it here and now, she’ll never know.

The screechy person cuts through his thoughts. Apparently, they have lots to say, but it seems to be all along the same lines. The injured man stops listening.