He bent double. He felt as if someone had punched him in the kidneys. Lucy and Chris had not only been listening to them. They been watching them. There had to be a tiny camera hidden somewhere in the flat, somewhere opposite the sofa. He tried to picture it, but couldn’t work out where it could be hidden. But he would look for it later. He would find the fucking thing and tear it out of the wall and stamp on it, grind it into the floorboards.

Jesus Christ. How long had this been going on for?

He noticed something else. The CCTV monitor was resting on top of a hard drive. It wasn’t recording now, but…

Oh fuck.

He looked around, frenziedly scouring the shelves of the bookcase which housed mostly DVDs with handwritten titles on the spines: J&K 1: PARTY; J&K 2: DECORATING; all the way up to 12: J ALONE.

He pulled the DVD labelled J&K 11 from the shelf and inserted it into the player attached to the ordinary TV. He pressed ‘play’ and after a few seconds an image appeared. It was him and Kirsty standing in the living room. Kirsty doing the ironing. The video was silent, but Jamie could remember what they had been talking about. He watched their lips move. He watched them move over onto the sofa. They were talking about the baby; the miscarriage. Kirsty started to cry and Jamie held her, crying too.

He pressed stop. Hatred and anger flowed through him, replacing the sadness. He clenched his fists and stood up. He wanted to smash everything in the room; he wanted to destroy this place, the home of the those fuckers, those…

He told himself to calm down. He took more deep breaths.

Then he noticed a DVD labelled J&K 8: AWAY. He slotted it into the DVD player and pressed play. Again, it was the interior of their living room, empty. Nothing happened for the first couple of minutes and Jamie almost switched it off, but something told him to wait – and at the two minute mark someone entered the room. Chris. Jamie’s mouth went dry. He watched Chris walk over to the hidden camera and peer into it.

Staring straight at the lens, Chris smiled coldly, then licked his lips.