Watching from the Dark

by Lodge, Gytha

  Watching from the Dark is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 by Gytha Lodge

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Originally published in hardcover in the United Kingdom by Michael Joseph, an imprint of Penguin Random House UK, London.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Lodge, Gytha, author.

  Title: Watching from the dark : a novel / Gytha Lodge.

  Description: New York : Random House, 2020.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019035947 (print) | LCCN 2019035948 (ebook) | ISBN 9781984818072 (Hardback) | ISBN 97819848089 (Ebook)

  Classification: LCC PR6112.O275 w38 2019 (print) | LCC PR6112.o275 (ebook) | DDC 823/.92—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019035947

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019035948

  Ebook ISBN 9781984818089

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Victoria Wong, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: The Boland Design Company

  v5.4

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Glossary of British Policing Terms

  By Gytha Lodge

  About the Author

  Something clicked in the house and he froze, looking toward the closed door, his heart racing. Had it been the front door? Had someone come in?

  Aidan turned his head, straining to hear more. A footstep. Rustling sounds of movement.

  But there was nothing. It was just the sound of something contracting somewhere, the normal ticking of the house.

  He tried to breathe out some of the tension. He’d been looking forward to this evening all week. He was, for once, free and unhampered, and had imagined a whole evening with Zoe. But of course, that wasn’t how it had panned out. He might be free, but Zoe still had her own schedule. He was back to waiting for eleven o’clock. A standard, frustrating Thursday.

  Instead of settling in to watch a film on the sofa, he’d ended up hunkered over the desktop PC, checking Zoe’s Skype icon for the moment she turned her machine on. But it had stayed resolutely red, and he’d wasted hours scrolling through newsfeeds and reading articles.

  He’d spent so many nights like this, waiting for Zoe to come online. Half the time she was late. He’d been sulky about it at first, until he’d learned that sulking made her rebellious. She needed to feel free.

  He’d had to learn to accept that he would see her when he saw her. That he wasn’t the only one who had a busy life to work around.

  At 10:52 Zoe’s icon turned green. It took him no more than a second to click on it and connect.

  The pickup was instant, and he was already smiling in anticipation before the image appeared. But then he saw that Zoe’s chair was empty. She was off camera, with only a moving shadow thrown on the wall as evidence that she was there at all. What was she doing?

  He turned up the volume on his speaker and realized he could hear running water. Was she about to take a bath? Now?

  He felt instinctively that this must be some sort of game. Like the times when she undressed for him, her gaze distant and her lips very slightly apart. It drove him wild.

  But what was the point if he couldn’t see her? Frustrated, he adjusted his own screen. But of course it did nothing to the angle of the camera in her room. He could still see only the empty chair and beyond it the wall, with a slice of curtain on one side and the hinges of her front door on the other.

  The sound of the running water tapered and then ceased, and there were other sounds of movement and the squeak of wet skin against the acrylic of the bath.

  Aidan sighed. She really was going to have a bath while he sat there and waited.

  He thought about hanging up in protest. But if she was only going to be quick, he might miss seeing her body dripping with water. Or her breasts barely held in by a towel as she leaned toward the camera and clicked with the mouse.

  There was another sound within his own house, and although it came from somewhere upstairs he still paused to listen, his eyes fixed on the wall. He knew it was nothing and after a moment he relaxed again. He was strangely jittery.

  And then there was a clicking sound. He saw motion and realized that it was the door to Zoe’s flat. It was moving, the hinged edge that was within his view pivoting inward.

  Pure fear hit him then. Had she asked another man over? Was she letting someone in to watch her bathe, perhaps to touch her, while he was forced to watch?

  He expected to hear the newcomer call out, but the door closed almost silently and there was no greeting. No other sound. He reached out and turned the speaker up still further, almost in spite of himself. There was a slight buzzing, and over the top of it the sound of water as Zoe moved in the bath. It was only by straining to hear that he caught soft footsteps. Whoever had come in was moving across the room.

  A moment later, there was the sound of sudden movement from the bath, and Zoe’s voice raised in surprise.

  “What— Jesus. What are you doing in here?” And then what almost sounded like a laugh, but the kind of laugh that comes out of fear. “Look, I’m…I’m really sorry…”

  The water sounds dropped away with a pair of clicks in quick succession. Whoever had come in had closed the bathroom door. Locked it.

  His heart rate was back up again. Who had gone in there? Who the hell was shutting themselves into the bathroom with her?

  And then there were other sounds. Sounds that were, unmistakably, of a struggle. Zoe’s muffled voice sounded hoarse and desperate.

  Then, abruptly, there was silence. Absolute silence.

  The fear was different now. Something was very, very wrong.

  He had to do something. He had to help her. Oh God, what if he was too late?

  He scrabbled around on the desk until he found his phone. He’d started to dial three nines when the realization of what this meant hit him. He stalled. He could see it all: the phone call, the
follow-up, being asked in to see the police. Everything finally coming out, and his life collapsing.

  And then he heard the bathroom door click twice again as it opened. There were those same quiet, even steps, and then a pause. Scuffling sounds, which he couldn’t make sense of. He willed whoever it was to come into the frame. To show their face. But the steps continued after a while, and the door to the flat moved again. The figure he had never seen left, and the door clicked shut.

  Jonah had almost let it go. The call. The report. He’d almost let it go.

  He asked himself, later, what difference it would have made if he had. This was what you did when you were tying up a case. You looked for mistakes and for their opposite. For the good things you’d done. You asked yourself how they had affected the investigation, and in this case, the biggest question mark was over the report of a murder that he almost let slide. Whether things would have gone differently if he’d acted earlier, and how different they would have been if he had never acted at all.

  It was possible that neither scenario would have changed anything. That events would have gone on implacably to their conclusion. But it was also possible that everything would have changed.

  The report made itself known during the tail end of a tortuous Friday-morning caseload meeting, made decidedly worse by Detective Chief Superintendent Wilkinson being away. Without him to push everything through, the meeting had descended into rambling discussions on every detail. It was soul-destroyingly boring.

  But then they had finally limped through to new case allocation, and Jonah had watched his intense counterpart in the uniformed police, Yvonne Heerden, take on three thefts and a traffic accident.

  “We’ve had an unauthenticated murder claim passed on by the crime desk,” Heerden said next. “I’ve given you a transcript,” she added to Jonah, “but I think it’s unlikely to come to anything so we’re happy to take it. The caller claims that his girlfriend was murdered while he was talking to her on Skype, but that he didn’t see the killer. He hung up when asked for his name and details. Crime desk tried to look her up and found no trace of a woman with that name anywhere online.”

  Jonah skimmed over the transcript, noting that the girl’s name was Zoe Swardedeen.

  I need to— My girlfriend’s been murdered…he read.

  Heerden was probably right. This would, in all likelihood, involve admin of a simple kind. Cross-checking with missing persons. Trying a few variations of the spelling.

  “OK?” Heerden asked as he read on.

  There was something in the phrasing used in the call that made Jonah hesitate. Something that unsettled him.

  He was aware that Heerden was waiting for an answer, however, and he trusted her and her team to do this right. His own team was neck-deep in a complex blackmail case and had little time for unnecessary extras.

  “Sure,” he said. “Keep me posted if it comes to anything.”

  The meeting moved on to cover another multi-casualty traffic accident that had probably been caused by a truck driver using his phone. Jonah was glad he didn’t have to be involved. Those were the kinds of cases that scarred you. The kind that made you impulsively check up on all your loved ones. The kind that made life seem flimsy and the world a random, uncaring place.

  With those thoughts foremost in his mind, his uneasiness about a strange, anonymous murder report was pushed aside.

  * * *

  —

  THERE WAS SO much Aidan should have been doing. Three of his students had sent essays over, and he had a whole raft of faculty admin, but he hadn’t managed to read a line. He’d opened email after email but failed to understand them through the pounding of his heart and the ringing in his ears. He wasn’t seeing words; he was seeing the slow opening and closing of a door, played over and over.

  The not knowing was the worst. He would loop through a conviction that it had all been some strange misunderstanding, or a dream, and then he would remember that Zoe had never reappeared from the bathroom. Not while he’d been watching. He knew in his soul that she had been in desperate need of help, and that she might never have received it.

  He’d searched news and social-media sites the moment he was up, looking for any mention of an incident. He’d rechecked at regular intervals since, too, but there was no mention of any murder or violence in Southampton. Nothing about a young woman being attacked. A total void of anything relevant.

  There was a way to find out, if he felt he could take it, of course. He could call the police again. This time, when they asked him for his name and address, he could give it to them.

  He’d come close last night. The police call handler he’d been put through to had been female. He’d heard her typing everything he’d said, turning it into data. She’d typed away when he’d admitted he didn’t know the number of the pay-as-you-go phone he was calling from, because it was a spare he’d dug out from his desk. And then she’d typed up his attempt to tell her that he thought his girlfriend had been murdered.

  Right at the end of the call, she’d asked for his name. There had been a long, tense silence as he’d teetered on the edge of telling her. And then he’d heard a car door slam outside.

  He’d ended the call and listened, tense and sick, for more sounds. He tried telling himself that there was nothing to be afraid of, but he knew it wasn’t true. There was a lot to be afraid of. There was Zoe being killed in front of him. There was the truth all pouring out.

  He couldn’t let it happen. He had everything to lose. Everything.

  He’d thought about closing the Skype window, to shut out the scene. But it was the only way he had of checking on Zoe. Of waiting to see if the police arrived at her flat.

  Midnight had come and gone, punctuated only by his eyes flicking over to the clock at the bottom right of the screen. Where were the bloody police?

  There had still been nothing by two-forty, when he had finally closed the program in a rush of despair and gone to bed.

  It was now eleven hours since he’d seen the door to Zoe’s flat swing open. Eleven hours, and no sign, no message, no news report.

  He could still call the police back. He could still go through it all again, and tell them who he was.

  But every time he thought about that, chilled sweat would bloom on his skin. Knowing that he couldn’t risk it created a frustration that was visceral. He could feel it in his stomach and in his loins, and it made sitting still unbearable.

  Zoe, he thought, willing her to call him. Zoe, please. Fucking call.

  * * *

  —

  JONAH APPROACHED DOMNALL O’Malley, the only visible member of his team, on his way through the bright, modern expanse of CID.

  “Are you genuinely the first one in?” he asked, disbelieving.

  “Ah Jesus, no,” O’Malley answered, leaning his heavy frame back in his chair. “I rolled up about five minutes ago. Juliette’s been here since seven-something. Ben’s a little late, though, he says.”

  “Ben said he was late?”

  “I know,” O’Malley said. “That threw me, too. Maybe he’s finally gone and got himself a girlfriend and didn’t sleep well.”

  “But it’s Ben,” Jonah countered. “He doesn’t need sleep.”

  “Ah, you’re right, so. Well, whatever it was, I plan to take the piss mercilessly.”

  Jonah grinned and went on to his office, leaving the door open. He took his phone out of his pocket briefly, wondering whether he’d have a message today, or whether Jojo was once again in some desolate place with no signal.

  Their communications were an unquestionable bright spot to his days. Her irreverent banter and humor had the power to make him grin for a good while afterward. It was such a refreshing feeling. He’d spent so many months pining for Michelle, his most recent ex-girlfriend. He’d thought he might spend the rest of his life missing her.
>
  The sudden reappearance in his life of Jojo, his teenage crush, had changed all of that. They’d agreed that an investigation she’d been involved in would need to be tied up before they could see each other. And Jojo had then made the decision to take herself traveling until repairs to her house were done. Given that her social circle had also been devastated by a murder inquiry, it was only natural for her to need space. But he’d still felt a pang when she’d told him she was going.

  She was in Namibia now, gradually touring a series of spectacular climbing sites that were miles from anywhere. Jonah should have been nervous at her being out there alone in the wilderness, but for some reason he wasn’t. Perhaps it had something to do with how fiercely capable she had always been, and the fact that she’d survived a serious attempt on her life.

  Well, there was nothing from Jojo. He put the phone down and logged on to his desktop. A few more blackmail files had been added to the database but he took it all in only vaguely. For some reason, looping through his mind were the words Please help her. She could still be alive.

  * * *

  —

  HANSON HAD MADE coffee on autopilot. She didn’t really need it this morning. She knew in her bones that she was a whisker away from a breakthrough, and she’d been awake before six, her mind whirring with a series of payments to different accounts that she was positive were connected to her case. She was enjoying herself profoundly.

  It was strange to think she’d very nearly sidestepped the financial side of it. It was more Ben’s kind of work. Lightman was the most painstaking, meticulous member of the team and easily had the best memory of the three of them. But he’d been in the middle of something else, and she’d felt it was her turn to step up.