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 hand corner of the screen. Jamie realised he was looking at a CCTV monitor which was displaying a live picture of somebody’s living room.

His living room.

He stepped back. ‘Fuck,’ he said aloud. That was his sofa, his bookcase, his armchair. There was the picture Kirsty had brought with her from the house she shared with the other nurses: the picture of the mermaid on a rock.