by Tim Weaver
I started moving, more of the driveway coming into view, and as it did, I could see that it went past the last house, around towards the back of it, in the direction of the nature reserve. On the wall, at the entrance to the driveway, was a sign.
THE OLD CHECKPOINT
I thought of the map in McMillan’s office and remembered that, at the east wall, there had once been a second entrance – not just a footpath like there was now, but a place for vehicles, horses and carriages to enter – as well as a second security checkpoint.
This must have been it.
I checked on Field and Kent, who were distorted by the snow. I could only vaguely see Kent on his phone. But Field was watching me from the same place, her head tilted, as if she was curious about what I might have found.
Now I was level with the driveway.
Offset from the other houses was another home. It was detached, fashioned from yellow London stock brick just like the structures that were crumbling to dust in the nature reserve, and was much bigger than the terraced houses that lined Mountford Road. Judging by its name, it must once have been the building that had accommodated the guards at the second security checkpoint; maybe, given its size, it had doubled up as something else back then too – a series of admin offices, even part of a ward. In the century since, though, it had been converted into another home.
I took a few steps forward.
At all the windows, top and bottom, the curtains had been pulled. As I left the road and headed along the driveway, I spotted a car as well, parked out front.
It was a light blue Mondeo.
Its registration plates had been removed.
I thought of the traffic warden the day that Melody was left at the pharmacy, of how he’d described the man who’d dropped her off as driving a Mondeo or a Lexus, in light blue or grey, with a plate ending in MX. But the realization about the car, of noting that every single curtain was pulled in the middle of the day, came fractionally after something else.
Before either of those, I’d seen the front door.
I recalled those two hours alone with Melody in my home, and then a sliver of a memory coming back to me, one that I could never fully understand and had pretty much forgotten entirely in everything that had happened since.
The vague, fractured image of a red door.
I’d started to believe it didn’t matter, that it had been a glitch, a mistake, some trivial piece of information that I’d attached to that time with Melody. But it wasn’t a glitch and it wasn’t a mistake.
It was real.
The same red door was the entrance to this house.
74
I banged on the door.
‘Melody? Melody, are you in there?’
When I got no response, I knelt down, peeled up the letter box and looked into the house. A hallway extended out in front of me, modern and tidy. Wooden floors, pale walls. A side table with a plant on it.
‘Melody?’
I waited. Nothing.
‘Melody?’
And then something occurred to me: she doesn’t know who Melody is. She’d spent most of the last eight years thinking her name was Derryn.
‘Derryn?’
Her name almost caught in my throat.
I swallowed. ‘Derryn?’
I glanced behind me, not wanting Field to follow me down here and see me like this, crouched at a letter box, shouting my dead wife’s name into the void.
But I was still alone.
I turned my attention back to the house. Ahead of me were the stairs. Beyond that was a kitchen, or what I could make out of one: its door was pulled most of the way shut. To the left was another door, maybe into a living room.
I bent down a little further, seeing if I could get a better vantage point for the top of the staircase, but instead, my eyes locked on to something else.
A bookcase.
On one of the shelves, all twelve of Eva Gainridge’s novels were lined up, their titles showing on the spines, each of them identical in colour and design.
I got up and hurried around to the side of the house, but there was a locked gate, with barbed wire on top. When I leaned in closer to the slats, I could see another door in the spaces between them.
Returning to the front door, I dug around in my pocket, my wallet, the zip inside: I got out my picks and switched my focus to the lock. My fingers fumbled. I was frozen by the cold, nervous, angry, frightened. They slipped again, and then again. Finally, the door popped open.
There was no alarm.
I headed inside. The house was smart and contemporary, but felt unlived in, soulless, as if it had been deserted. In a small living room, I found a television and a DVD player, but no other technology. When I returned to the hallway, I searched for the phone socket. Nothing was plugged into it. There was no Internet, maybe not even a working landline.
Off to the left was a poky office with a desk and a chair. No PC, no laptop, nothing on the desk, no filing cabinets or storage. Beyond that was a toilet. I went upstairs and found two bedrooms and a main bathroom. One of the bedrooms was actually being used as a bedroom, the bed made up, nondescript men’s clothes in the cupboards and drawers, but the other was totally empty. There was no furniture in it, only a carpet on the floor and empty built-in wardrobes.
Worse, Melody wasn’t in either of them.
She wasn’t in the house at all.
When I got back down to the kitchen, I could see it had been cleaned and there was the faint smell of food in the air, as if something had been cooked in here recently. Out of the back windows, there was a small garden, well maintained and looked after, lined by thick oak trees on one side and at the back. It meant the neighbours couldn’t see into it and, from here, there were only flickers of the nature reserve – of the fence too – in the moments when the wind picked up and the branches moved.
I turned and looked back down the hallway, towards the front door. I couldn’t put any of this together.
Where the hell was Melody?
Panic took flight in me. I’d forced my way into someone’s home and found absolutely nothing – and now what? Now I was just breaking and entering.
But this has to be it.
The car on the driveway. The Gainridge books.
The red door.
This had to be the place.
I kept telling myself that as I wandered through the house for a second time, going into all the rooms again, and by the time I was back downstairs in the kitchen, something had started to dawn on me: why was this place so small on the inside? The living room was undersized, the office was tiny, there were only two bedrooms upstairs, and only half of the house looked like it was being lived in.
Yet, from the outside, the property had appeared large.
I hurried back into the kitchen, a memory starting to flicker, something I’d seen but not properly taken in the first time, and then I stopped and looked across to the left-hand wall, at the end of the kitchen unit.
There was a door.
I’d overlooked it because it was in the same style as the rest of the cabinets. I’d assumed it was a pantry or a cupboard.
But it wasn’t.
When I pulled it open, where there should have been shelving full of condiments, food packets, cereal boxes and plastic storage tubs, there was, instead – a couple of feet further inside – another door.
It had slide bolts on it.
I popped both bolts across, grabbed the handle and yanked it open, and then I finally realized what was going on, why the house felt so small.
It wasn’t one home.
It was two.
75
I went through to the other side and found myself in a narrow corridor with two doors on the left and one on the right, much further down.
Looking around me, I searched for a weapon, something I could use, and saw a steel pipe among some building debris. It looked like it had been ripped out of a wall, perhaps was once part of the plumbing system. It was old and rus
ted, but it would do.
I reached back and pulled the door closed again, trying to recreate the same noise levels as before I’d entered, in case someone was listening. As soon as the door clicked shut, the faint noises of the main house faded to nothing.
Gripping the pipe, I moved towards the first room on the left. Both this one and the next were open, but evidently they were usually kept shut and secured: there were no handles, just metal plates with padlocks hanging loose.
I looked into the first room.
It was tiny. There was a workbench against one wall, hand-built, the surface gouged and blemished. At the end of the bench were medical supplies – plasters and bandages; antiseptic, a sewing kit, thread – and then a medical encyclopedia. It was open to a page halfway in and I could read the title.
‘Treating Infected Wounds’.
That was exactly what Melody had.
Next to that were a laptop and a nest of leads, charging cables, plugs, and a pile of USB sticks. There was an old-style video camera that took DV tapes as well, and then a digital SLR with a long lens, and a photo printer. A set of speakers. A microphone. Beside the microphone was a very large desktop storage unit with a flip-up lid. I opened it.
Dictaphone tapes were piled up inside it, one on top of the other.
Some were facing up, spines out, each tape case marked with a hashtag and a number. #0012. #0184. #0430. #0635. #0734. There were hundreds and hundreds of them. I pulled one out at random – #0858 – and dug around for the Dictaphone. It was under a pile of leads. Sliding the tape in, I turned the volume down and pressed Play: ‘It was your wedding anniversary yesterday. I know that from going through some of the papers in your loft. I watched your house most of the afternoon and evening, to see if I could catch a glimpse of you. I thought your husband may have done something for you, the kind of perfunctory celebration that only he would think was deserving of you. A cake, perhaps. A meal. Some tacky little gift –’
I stopped it, fast-forwarded for a couple of seconds, and then pressed Play again. My hands were shaking so badly they almost slid off the button.
‘I walked to the bedroom door,’ the same voice said. ‘Even before I got there, I could hear you, the air rattling in your chest. Your breathing sounded like an old motor struggling to turn over. When I looked in at you, you were under the sheets, asleep, your eyelids fluttering, your skin waxy and pale. You looked like a mannequin –’
I switched it off.
But it was too late. Even as I threw it against the wall, watching the Dictaphone shatter, it was too late. He’d been there at the end. It was true.
The fucking bastard had been alone with Derryn in my house.
I backed up, into the corridor, clutching my hand to my mouth. I dry-retched, did it again, and then again, and then I swivelled in the direction of the second room.
Did I even want to look inside?
Slowly, I approached the door. It was difficult to make anything out at first. My eyes were drawn to a desk in the corner and a solitary lamp on top, slim-line – like a metal tube – its neck facing down so that the bulb was barely inches from the desk’s surface, creating a perfect disc of yellow on the wood. Not much of its glow escaped out elsewhere. Even as I used my phone to illuminate the rest of the room, it took me a second to understand what was in here; a second to grasp properly what I was looking at. And then I did, and it felt like my throat was closing up.
There were photos everywhere.
Every wall, every surface, even the ceiling.
I shuffled further in, barely able to carry myself. The photos had been divided into vertical strips, each strip separated by subject. I saw images of me, of the places I’d been during the past week – my routines documented by shots with infinitesimal differences – and then, higher up, pictures from way before that, long before Melody Campbell entered my life. Some were a decade old, taken by me, by Derryn, stolen, without me ever realizing, from the boxes I’d had in the loft. They were of the two of us: holidays we’d had, moments we’d shared, our marriage, our history. In many of them, my face had been scratched out with the point of a blade.
I barely processed the next strip of photos – tens, maybe hundreds, of close-ups of Melody Campbell’s face – or the ones after that of Erik McMillan going about his life, his work at the hospital. And then there was Gavin Roddat in a blown-up 10 x 8, his arm around a woman in a nightclub. There was something off about the photograph, something that didn’t sit right about it, and then I looked at the woman again, her face, and it dawned on me.
She was a girl.
They might have been in a nightclub, she might have fooled the people on the door, but the picture – the white of the flash, the shape of her face and eyes – exposed the lie: she wasn’t eighteen. She was beautiful, mature enough to muddy the waters, but she was a child. A wave of dread crashed through me. This must have been how Bennik had controlled Gavin Roddat: his knowledge of the girl, of what Roddat had done with her, and what the consequences would be if anyone found out. And then I looked at her face for a second time, started to see more of her adolescence, and nausea began burning in my stomach again. What if it was worse than that? What if she hadn’t even been sixteen?
Bile seared behind my ribcage as I realized what was in the next strip: hundreds of pictures of my house. They went back years, to old furniture I’d got rid of, to walls I’d long since painted a different colour. In the middle, filling the margins of another 10 x 8, was a shot that instantly chilled my blood: it was taken in the doorway of the bedroom, a wide-angled shot of the layout, the dresser, the wardrobes. Derryn was on the bed, her eyes shut.
‘No,’ I said quietly, unable to stop myself. ‘No.’
It had been taken in the last weeks of her life.
Tears blurred my vision as I looked at her, her face grey, her bones pushing out through her skin. I swung the light around and it got even worse. Her entire last year was plastered across the walls: her leaving the house for work; the months after she got sick; her going in to see the doctors; me wheeling her around in a chair; a shot over the back fence of her sitting in a seat on the rear deck. There were photographs of her inside the house, taken when Bennik was inside with her, and she didn’t even realize it. He’d been behind doors, at the edges of frames.
And, in those moments when I wasn’t home, he’d got his close-ups. When she slept, he’d photographed her from every position, like a scientific study. The angles of her. The way she held herself.
This time, I threw up.
Stumbling out of the room, into the corridor, I covered my mouth, trying to prevent myself from being sick for a second time, and leaned over, hands on my knees, gasping for air, breathing as deeply as I could. I wiped tears away, again and again, but they kept coming and, when I finally gave in and let them fall, I suddenly remembered something: there was a third door.
I blinked, trying to clear my eyes, and looked sideways. Just like the one leading from the kitchen, it had been slide-bolted shut from the outside.
I gripped the metal pipe harder, my head full of static, and looked over my shoulder, back the way I’d come in, wondering how far behind me Field and Kent were now, or whether they were coming at all. I thought of the tapes, Bennik’s voice burning into my skull, and then the photographs of Derryn, of his camera in her face as she faded from this life. How could it be worse than this beyond the door?
And then my eyes returned to the slide locks.
He’s keeping something inside.
Or someone.
As quickly and quietly as possible, I slid both locks across, their mechanisms giving a gentle squeal, and – as soon as they released – the door bumped back towards me.
Light spilled out.
My heart was thumping with such ferocity I could feel its tremor in my bones, the noise like a fist on a wall, pounding, ceaseless.
I eased the door all the way open.
The smell of furniture polish and air freshener wafted out
towards me. Directly in front of me was a short hallway. At the end was a living room, but not the one I’d already been into. On the left was a kitchen, but not the same kitchen I’d just left.
This was a different part of the house.
It was a different house.
‘What the fuck …?’
I stepped into the hallway. My hallway. The carpet was identical, the furniture an exact match. The kitchen was laid out the same way, the units and the lino almost indistinguishable from mine. The dimensions of the hallway and the kitchen – of the living room, of all of it – was smaller, the rooms narrower, the ceilings lower, more cramped, some of the finishing and details were ever so slightly off, but it hardly seemed to matter. Even attempting to build something like this was enough, let alone almost getting it right. It was brilliant, and devastating, and absolutely deranged.
It was a work of art and a work of insanity.
He’d built a recreation of my house.
76
I stood there, stunned, my lungs like stone in my chest. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t move, I just looked at it, the intricacy of the design, the incredible attention to detail. How long had this place taken to build? How many times had he been inside my house in order to make this possible? How many photographs, measurements, drawings?
I could barely process it all.
I took a couple of steps forward, realizing now why I’d always felt so anxious about that night alone with Melody in the house, why my internal alarm had sounded: not just because she was there, and she was pretending to be Derryn, but because the house had never felt quite right. I hadn’t ever put it together fully – not even for a second – but now I got it: the night McMillan had drugged me at the hospital, and most of the thirty-five hours that followed, weren’t spent at home.
They were spent here.
The house had smelled of furniture polish that night; it had been spotlessly clean, just like now, because that was the way this version of the house was kept. I’d heard birds out in the garden – but it wasn’t the garden, it was the birds in the nature reserve. All the curtains had been drawn that day, only thin shafts of daylight getting in, and now I understood why: because the windows didn’t look out to my garden, or my driveway, or my garage. There was no decking on the other side of the living-room doors like I had at home, there was a lawn enclosed by oak trees and the fence of the nature reserve. If I’d got up and looked through the windows the day I woke up here, I’d have seen it and known straight away. So he’d closed the curtains, and he’d made Melody tell me it was because of my headaches.
