Kate slams the phone down, mimicking the woman’s silly voice. He’s a little busy in a meeting right now. The vast apartment suddenly feels airless. This is ridiculous. She’s trapped, a victim of modern technology. She walks back over to the front door, looks around and notices a small security camera mounted in the corner of the room, to the right of the entrance. Rob wanted cameras inside the house in Cornwall, but she put her foot down. So he installed some around the outside of the property instead. This camera is definitely pointing into the room, straight at her. She walks over to it and peers up into the dark lens, trying to ignore a growing sense of dread.

65

Jake

‘She’s probably at a gallery or something, turned her mobile off,’ Bex says, calling from the car. The drive up from Cornwall has been traffic-free and she reckons she’ll be home within the hour.

‘I’ve been trying her all evening,’ Jake replies, putting away some cutlery. It’s the last bit of tidying up he needs to do before Bex arrives. ‘Texts, calls.’

He knows what Bex is thinking. It’s none of his business what Kate’s doing in London, why she’s not replying.

‘Did you have a row today?’ Bex asks. ‘When she stopped by the village?’

‘Nothing like that.’

Quite the opposite. Jake felt they’d got on almost too well.

‘Maybe she’s just feeling guilty,’ Bex says. ‘You know, seeing her ex on her way up to be with the new man in her life.’

‘Maybe.’

There’s no one new in his life. He can’t imagine it. An image of them in their first few months together flashes through his mind. Walking back from the pub to the boat 12 years ago, drunkenly singing ‘Alarm Clock’ by The Rumble Strips, the two of them wrapped in his tatty old overcoat. He blinks away the memory. He’ll be crying in a minute.

‘What’s the urgency anyway?’ Bex says.

Jake glances at the computer in the other room, thinking back to the light that came on beside Bex’s ‘interactive porn camera’, the cursor moving by itself. And the way the screen woke up when Kate was here earlier. Was the computer’s built-in microphone listening to their conversation? It can happen. Either way, he’s increasingly confident that Bex’s computer has been compromised in some way.

‘That guy Kirby I was chatting with on Facebook Messenger, when I was signed in as Kate,’ he says, stepping out of the back door into the cool air, away from the computer, ‘it was a fake account. “Kirby” died five years ago.’

He wanted Kate to be the first to know, but there’s no harm in telling Bex.

‘Died?’ Bex says, unable to conceal her shock. ‘So who the bloody hell were you chatting to?’

‘I don’t know.’