“Yeah?” said the driver, and I shook my head.
“Never mind. Sorry, just having a brain fart. You carry on.”
“Home, James, and don’t spare the horses, eh?” said the driver with a laugh, and I nodded. But I didn’t laugh back. Home, yes. But I wasn’t sure who might be waiting for me.
* * *
IT WAS MAYBE TEN OR fifteen minutes later that the taxi turned into Salisbury Lane, and for a moment I had a sharp, almost unbearably vivid flashback to the last time I had made that turn—weary after a long night talking to police, happy to be almost home, completely unsuspecting of what I was about to find.
As the car made its slow way down the road, bumping carefully over speed humps, I peered out of the window at my own house, trying to make out any movement inside. There was none—or none that I could detect. The curtains were closed, the front door was shut, and I could see no signs of police presence at all, save a single patrol car parked directly in front of the property, a shadowy form behind the wheel. Either they had finished processing the scene, or they were waiting for a specialist team to come in.
There were no lights on in the house, in spite of the fact that the day was dreary and gray, and the other cars parked in the road were all ones I recognized as belonging to our neighbors. I let out a breath. Out, three, two, one…
“Here all right?” The driver’s voice broke into my thoughts as he turned the wheel, swinging into Salisbury Gardens, and I felt something in my stomach writhe with nerves.
“Yes, great. Thanks so much. How much do I owe you?”
“Twenty-two pounds forty-five. Call it twenty-two.”
I handed over Hel’s notes.
“Could I have five pounds change?”
The driver nodded and counted out the change, and I pocketed the coins and slid from the car, my heart beating hard as I walked down Salisbury Gardens to the rather disreputable garages at the far end.
To the right of the garages was a little overgrown lane, once used by the bin men, before the days of wheelie bins in front gardens. Now it was full of nettles and brambles, but it was just passable, enough people forcing bikes and children’s play sets down it at intervals to keep it relatively clear.
At the near end was a locked gate, with a combination I was supposed to know but couldn’t remember, but it was easy just to swing myself up and over. No one was likely to notice, or to say anything if they did. We didn’t live in that kind of neighborhood.
The houses looked very different from the back, and it took longer than I had expected to find ours, almost to the point where I thought I might have missed it, although I couldn’t think how. But suddenly there it was—white-painted wall; little square of scrappy grass; the thorny rambling roses I had planted, more for security than because I particularly liked the flowers. They had grown since then, and now they covered the whole of the garden wall, an effective deterrent to anyone trying to scale it. Cursing my security-conscious past self, I shrugged off my coat, shivering as the bitter February wind chose that moment to gust up the alley, and flung it over the top of the wall, effectively blanketing the carpet of roses. It wasn’t much, but it helped a little, though I could still feel the thorns digging deep into my palms as I pulled myself up to crouch atop the wall.
I let myself quietly down into the garden, retrieved my coat, then ducked immediately behind the patio table, my heart beating fast in case anyone had seen me. No police officers stuck their heads out of the back door, though, and after a few minutes I straightened and looked ruefully down at my bloodied hands. There was nothing to be done apart from pull out a couple of the biggest thorns, wipe the blood on the back of my jeans, and then turn to face my next challenge: getting inside the house. Without my tools, without even my keys, which were still in my bag at the police station, it wasn’t a simple task—but the fact was that Malik was right: Gabe would never have let a stranger into the house and then sat down with his noise-canceling headphones on while they slit his throat. No, someone had broken in, and without a trace, which meant I could too.
I had two things immediately in my favor: First, I didn’t have to worry about forensics. My fingerprints and DNA were already all over the house, so I had no need to wear gloves or cover my clothes. And second, I knew the layout, and the weak spots.
The problem was, what weak spots? Working in the industry, with a ton of expensive computer equipment in the house, meant that both Gabe and I were pretty security conscious, and the downstairs was clearly a write-off. The back door had a mortise lock and sturdy bolts from the inside, and the ground-floor windows were double locked, with burglar alarm sensors to detect breaking glass. I knew the code, of course, but I also knew that while opening the front door gave you thirty seconds to override the alarm, smashing any of the windows would trigger it immediately, and I needed enough time to get inside and up to the spare bedroom before the cop in front of the house came blundering in.
The upstairs, though… that was more hopeful. Glancing up and down the row of backyards, I dragged a patio chair over to the little single-story kitchen extension and pulled myself up onto the flat roof.
It was, if anything, even colder up there, the wind making me stagger momentarily as I got to my feet. The puddles on the roof were iced over and I picked my way past them carefully. If I slipped now, I was done for.
Immediately in front of me was the bathroom window. It was closed and locked, like always, but I noticed something puzzling. The ventilation fan in the top half of the sash wasn’t turning.
Normally we left it open—the bathroom had three outside walls and was cold and prone to damp; keeping the vent turning was the only thing that kept mildew at bay. On a windy day like today it should have been spinning round at a rattling pace. But now the spokes were silent and static. Had the police shut it off? Why would they?
I examined the fan. It was made of clear plastic. I could see there was a crack running through the outer part of the fitting, a crack I didn’t remember being there before—and I had stared at that fan every morning and every night since we moved into Salisbury Lane, every time I brushed my teeth or washed my hands. Now, as I looked at the fan with fresh eyes, I realized something—something that made my stomach drop with a mixture of hope and dread.
The fan was loose.
Whether it had always been that way or whether someone had jimmied it out with tools, the fan itself was only wedged into the circular cutout, and now, as I inserted my nails beneath the plastic surround, it came out easily.
From there, it was the work of seconds to stick my arm through the hole, down to the bathroom window latch, turn it, and lower the top sash with a squeak of damp wood.
I was in. And unless I was sorely mistaken about that crack, this was likely the way Gabe’s killer had entered the house, breaking the fan as they did.
The thought made me feel a momentary wash of sickness—whoever had slit Gabe’s throat, I was almost certainly standing in their footsteps, my feet resting where theirs had, less than forty-eight hours ago. The last person to touch that fan, this window latch, the last person to drop the sash and slide their way quietly through the narrow opening just as I was now doing—that was the person who had killed Gabe.
For a second, as I lowered myself to the bathroom floor, I thought I might throw up. It wasn’t just the realization that I was following the same route as my husband’s killer, it was everything—the nauseating mix of the familiarity of home, and the terrible alienness of what was happening. The bathroom was still full of my clutter, makeup spilling out of containers, nail varnish leaking onto the shelf of the mirrored cabinet. Gabe’s beard wax was sitting by the sink, and the sight of it brought a lump to my throat. But there was fingerprint dust on the door handle, and when I stepped out into the hallway, plastic duck boards had been laid across the floor to preserve the blood spatter and footprints. In the air was an alien tang of chemicals—presumably from the wipes and sprays they’d used to process the scene. Most of all, most sickeningly of all, I could still smell Gabe’s blood, that metallic butcher shop reek that had assaulted me the moment I opened the front door just a couple of nights ago.