He pedalled like fury, a man on a mission, towards home.

20

Sunday 16 December

There had been a time when Jason would spend an hour and sometimes longer in the shower, washing his hair, soaping himself and scrubbing every inch of his skin, before rinsing off and repeating the procedure over and over. Once, at the height of his OCD, he had spent an entire morning – four hours – in the shower. That was the trigger moment when Emily had insisted on him seeking help.

Their GP had referred him to a clinical psychologist, Dr Dixon, who worked with him on his obsessive rituals, and had connected his behaviour to his very deep fear, as he neared forty, of never succeeding as an artist. The real signs of change in his behaviour had come after his successful one-man show at the Northcote Gallery. Now he was down to an average of only ten minutes in the shower, and on some days even less than that.

While Emily slept on, he set a personal best of just two minutes, dressed and hastily ate a breakfast of porridge, and downed a double espresso while glancing through some of the Sunday papers. When he had finished, he hurried into the hall, pausing to scoop up the Cold Hill Village Parish Magazine, which had landed on the doormat, and put it on the hall table before climbing the two flights to his studio, as he now called the loft.

Entering the room, he closed the door behind him. On his left, stacked against the couch, were the paintings and pencil and charcoal drawings he had unpacked from his discarded collection. Much to Emily’s dismay, he had a habit of removing from view any pictures he had not sold after six months on display in either the local gallery, the Bluefern, which took his pictures, or the Northcote in London.

As was his ritual before starting to work, he first opened his laptop and scanned down his emails – always looking with an especially keen eye for enquiries about commissions, either from existing clients or from potential new ones. He would follow that by reading through new messages on Facebook and Twitter and checking the number of followers, before lastly checking Instagram on his phone. His most recent post, a painting he was very pleased with, depicting a local landscape looking fiery in a red sunset, had 210 likes when he had last checked – his record so far – and he hoped there had been more likes for it overnight.

But instead of the laptop screen coming to life in its usual way, with a request for his password, it remained dark all over except for a single row of numbers, in white, which appeared in the centre.

Before he could even read them they disappeared and were replaced an instant later by the familiar password request.

He frowned, wondering what on earth the numbers meant. On Friday, both he and Emily had experienced problems connecting their computers to the new router in the house, and their Mac guru, Matt, had talked them through it over the phone. Since then, there had been further glitches with the high-speed fibre on the estate, and it had taken several more calls with their techie before everything was working. ‘It’s a Mac thing, they don’t always like new routers until they get used to them,’ the techie had said, as if he was talking about a family pet.