She explains the issue she’s having with the release system, playing up the silly-woman-doesn’t-understand-tech thing. She’s got no shame tonight. Whatever it takes. She just wants to head out into the summer evening in her new dress.
‘I’m missing something obvious,’ she says.
‘First it’s the pool cleaner, then the gas hob, and now this,’ he says. ‘I’m so sorry, it must be this end.’
‘How do you mean?’
She wasn’t too bothered that the pool cleaner in Cornwall was broken – she prefers to swim in the sea anyway – but he fixed it quickly. The gas hob too.
‘Both properties are run on the same operating system,’ he says. ‘It’s been experiencing a few problems since the most recent upgrade.’
‘It’s a home, Rob, not a bloody computer.’
Hear yourself, Kate, as Bex would say. She sounds like a spoilt brat.
‘I know, I know,’ he says.
She can hardly complain that there’s a glitch in the door software of the luxury penthouse apartment in Shoreditch where she’s lucky enough to be staying. Talk about a First World problem.
‘So how do I get out of here?’ she asks, glancing around at the windows. They’re all sealed; the apartment is regulated by a smart air-con system. ‘I wanted to head over to the Tate for a couple of hours. Before you get back.’
‘Give me ten and it’ll be sorted,’ he says. ‘I’m really sorry.’
Kate walks across the living space and goes upstairs to the roof terrace. It’s a stunning evening: the sun’s beginning to set, softening London’s harsh, jagged skyline with its warm hues. If she is genuinely stuck, could she get out of the building from up here? She peers over the wall. It’s a sheer drop to the street more than a hundred feet below. No chance. The phone starts to ring again downstairs.
‘The door’s going to take a while to fix,’ a voice says. It belongs to the irritating woman in Rob’s office who she spoke to earlier.
‘Can I talk to Rob?’ Kate says.
‘He’s a little busy in a meeting right now,’ the woman replies. ‘He’ll call you right back.’
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.’
Jake has been trying to find out all evening. Using a virtual private network in an attempt to remain anonymous on Bex’s computer, he logged into Facebook as Kate and searched through the list of Rob’s twenty-five other friends – not many for a leading techpreneur, but that was Rob’s personal account not his public one. Jake was unable to find matches in the real world for any of them, apart from Kirby, which suggests they might all be fake accounts.
‘It makes no sense,’ Jake continues. ‘If Kirby’s dead, the whole story, what happened in Thailand, could be fake.’
There’s something about the story though that Jake can’t ignore. His newspaper boss used to hold up an old wine glass and flick it whenever he was presented with a story that bordered on the fanciful. ‘Does it have the ring of truth?’ he’d ask as the glass resonated around his office. Jake can hear the ring now.
‘Maybe it was Rob you were chatting to?’ Bex says, her voice quieter.
The thought has crossed Jake’s mind too. ‘He’s not the sort to play games,’ he says. ‘To make things up.’
The irony of defending Rob isn’t lost on him. ‘Unless, of course, he wanted to deliberately frighten Kate,’ he adds, unable to resist a dig.
‘He’d never do anything like that,’ Bex flashes back. ‘He loves her, Jake. I know you don’t want to hear it, but he truly loves her.’
‘I’m sure he does.’ Cherishes her. Jake has heard it all before.
He glances up at a flock of Canada geese circling late and low over the canal. Something must have disturbed them.
There’s another explanation for the chat he had with ‘Kirby’, one that would change everything. ‘Or perhaps I was chatting with Gil himself, the double on the beach,’ he suggests.
‘Gil?’ Bex says, surprised. ‘I thought you were Mr Sceptical about all that doppelgänger stuff.’
He is. Just not quite as sceptical as he was.
‘All we can be sure of at the moment,’ he says, ‘is that someone who isn’t Kirby wanted Kate to hear about Thailand.’
‘But how would they have known Kate would message Kirby out of the blue? It was Kate – you – who contacted them.’