He had boxed me in. I could not now get inside the house without raising the alarm. I glanced past him into the gloom of the hallway. On the wall behind, set into the expensive wallpaper, was a door, a coded keypad beside it glowing red. Did red mean locked? I remembered another thing. Suzi showing me round the cottage. And that’s Nick’s music room down there, God knows who’s going to steal his stupid guitars, but he insisted on this lock. Had I seen it locked before, that door? ‘Alright. If she calls, tell her I’m looking for her, will you?’

‘Of course. Bye.’ The front door shut with a click, its hermetic seal locking the house up. I looked at the glowing alarm keypad, so out of place on this old cottage. Nick had turned the place into a fortress, remote-locking doors and windows all operated by codes, automatic blinds and shutters, the cable of a burglar alarm snaking around the house. Of course, a fortress also made a pretty good prison.

I squelched around the side of the cottage, counting its dimensions from the few times I’d been inside. The large kitchen – a light showed beneath the shutter but no shadows moved. Suzi’s studio, in darkness but for a faint blue glow. Her computer had been left on, maybe, but she wasn’t in there. The downstairs loo, the pantry, all the rest of the house in darkness. If Suzi wasn’t at her mother’s, and she wasn’t in any of the rooms, where was she? They had dug into the cellar to make the music room. If you were middle-class, it seemed you could create a virtual dungeon in your house and no one would even notice.

It was a crazy thought, but no more so than anything else that had happened recently. Was Suzi in there?

Suzi

Suzi

‘You can’t keep me a prisoner here for ever,’ I said coldly, when Nick next came down. I felt like a zoo animal. I had food, water – the large bottles he’d bought, ostensibly as snow supplies – books, a comfortable bed. But all the same I wanted to tear a hole in the wall just to get out. To have space, light. Down here, I could barely tell what time of day it was.

Nick set down my lunch, a bowl of tepid carrot soup. Perhaps he was worried I’d throw it at him, anything piping hot.

‘Prisoner? Suzi, you’re in your own home. You’re warm and dry and well fed. I’m taking care of you! You were out of control, running all over the place in the cold. You just need to calm down a bit.’