At least the power is still on. She gets up from the sofa and walks towards the bedroom. Rob’s not here, she can sense it. The flat feels empty. Sure enough, the sheets have been stripped back, the bedside light left on, a note beside it. She reads the message without picking it up:
Sorry you had such a rough night. Hope you’re feeling better. Power working but blinds still not responding. I’ll call mid-morning. Had to leave early for Brittany – looking forward to you joining me… R xxx
Her passport, which he’d asked her to bring to London, is beneath the note. She doesn’t want to go to Brittany. She wants to get out of here, back to Wiltshire, to Bex’s house, where she feels safe. The events of last night have left her shaken, disorientated. She reads Rob’s note again, the breezy tone, written as if nothing happened. But then she thinks of the strange man lying on the bed, the shock and the nausea. She tried so hard, wanted to believe in Rob, in the two of them, but she was being naive, wishful, by avoiding the sight of his face all evening. Denying her eyes, her most reliable sense.
She spots the phone and picks it up. At least there’s a dial tone. She calls Jake’s number, but the line doesn’t connect. She tries Bex’s, but it’s the same. No outgoing calls. She searches for her mobile phone, but she can’t find it anywhere. Has Rob taken it?
Ten minutes later, she’s showered and changed, filled with a deepening unease. She’s still trapped in this apartment and she’s not convinced it’s for her own safety. She’s about to brush her hair when she hears the front door open. Her whole body stiffens. It’s like a repeat of last night.
She creeps out of the bathroom into the main room, turns on the lights and sees… Ajay. He is standing inside the front door, wearing his usual dark-blue suit and holding an attaché case, bigger than the one he normally brings to their meetings.
‘Thank God it’s you, Ajay,’ she says, with a loud sigh of relief.
‘I’m sorry, I was told to let myself in,’ he says apologetically, glancing at the hairbrush still in her hand.
‘By Rob?’ she asks.
Ajay nods, walking over to the kitchen table. Rob would have been worried by her behaviour, would have told him to visit her again.
‘I tried ringing you last night,’ she says, watching Ajay as he puts his case down beside the kitchen stool. His manner is subdued today; there’s no sign of his usual bonhomie. Something’s not right. ‘You were engaged.’
‘I’m sorry. Was there a problem?’ he asks.
‘Yes, there was,’ she says, trying not to revisit the events of last night. ‘I don’t think I have Capgras.’
‘As I think I said yesterday, it’s a very rare condition and I’d be surprised if you—’
‘I saw him on the other side,’ she interrupts. ‘In my right field of vision, not my left. And it wasn’t Rob.’ She moves her head from side to side, trying to reinforce her words. ‘If I had Capgras, I would only see a double on my left, isn’t that what you said?’
Ajay looks at her. Is it pity in his eyes? For a second she thinks it might be fear.
‘How did he sound?’ he asks, ignoring her question as he opens up his attaché case. ‘Did you try closing your eyes and just listening?’ He pulls out his laptop and a reporter’s notebook and puts them on the table.
‘He sounded like Rob,’ she says quietly, thinking of the scarf. Her plan seems so naive now. ‘But it wasn’t him. It’s scaring the shit out of me, Ajay. This isn’t him either,’ she adds, nodding at the blinds. ‘Shutting me in like a bloody prisoner.’
‘I can understand,’ he says in his best bedside voice. The one he used when he first came to visit her at the hospital.
‘What’s going on, Ajay?’ she asks, walking over to the sink. Her hair’s still a mess after her shower – there isn’t a hairdryer in Rob’s bachelor pad – and she starts to brush it as they talk, tilting her head to one side.
‘How do you mean?’ he says.
‘You have a key. So does Rob. But oddly I don’t seem to have one. That’s not right, is it? Not bloody normal at all.’ She sounds deranged as she vents her frustration on the tangles in her hair.
‘Rob’s nervous about you being in London,’ Ajay offers.
She’s brushing too vigorously now. ‘Is that so?’ she asks, unable to disguise her anger. She walks over to the bathroom and checks her hair in the mirror. ‘I’m thirty-bloody-three, Ajay,’ she calls out through the open door, still looking at herself. God, she’s a wreck. ‘I’m not a child.’
She doesn’t mean to be angry with Ajay. They normally speak so freely at their meetings. He’s helped her through a difficult recovery, become a friend.
‘What’s that for?’ she asks, coming back over and nodding at the laptop.
‘Rob wants me to run some final recognition tests.’ Ajay manages a pinched smile. ‘The results from the weekend were so encouraging.’
She shakes her head in despair. She’s too tired. She was hoping that Ajay might have come to get her out of this place.
‘I’m not doing any more tests,’ she says, glancing at his laptop as she sits down on a stool opposite him.
‘I understand,’ Ajay says, writing something down in his notebook. ‘Rob thinks you’re still at risk from the criminals you helped to identify,’ he continues. ‘Hence all this.’
He gestures towards the blinds, the front door. She follows his gaze and spots the camera. It’s been angled further into the room. Is Ajay reassuring her or trying to warn her? Let her know that they’re being filmed? He adjusts his laptop with one hand, positioning it so that the screen is facing towards her. His other hand is on the notebook. She watches as he makes sure it’s turned towards her too. And then she glances down at what Ajay’s written on the page.
Please do the tests – for my sake and yours. He can see and hear everything.
80
Silas
‘I know this is difficult, Silas. Kate was a good friend of yours as well as a colleague. We were all upset by her accident. And the decision to close the super-recogniser unit was not one that I took lightly, as you know.’
Silas looks out of his boss’s window. He’s never heard such tosh.
‘I still think we should call Rob in for questioning,’ Silas says. ‘At least ask him what he was doing on the night of Kate’s crash.’
His boss, Detective Superintendent Ward, is ten years younger than Silas, and the talk in the force is when, not if, he’ll become Detective Chief Superintendent. Silas has always tried to like him, but he’s not making it easy today.
‘You say a Tesla was spotted at the scene of the accident, but we have to look at where this information’s come from,’ he continues. ‘An anonymous local drug dealer who was told by the barman of the Bluebell, now deceased. It’s not exactly gospel, is it?’
Put like that, Silas can see Ward’s point. Except that he hasn’t come clean, told him that the anonymous local drug dealer is Conor, his own son. How could he?
‘And Rob’s not the only person in Britain who drives a Tesla,’ Ward adds.