Cathy picks up her pace. It’s raining, a thin drizzle that sweeps over the pines and down the hillside, gusted fitfully by the wind. Inher hurry to leave the house, she hadn’t brought a coat, and so she wraps her cardigan more tightly around her.Maybe Danny’s right, she thinks, head down, walking across the playing fields that serve as a shortcut,maybe I am overreacting. After all, Hazel’s only been missing a day or two. She might have decided to take off for a few days. It’s still autumn, right? She might be digging somewhere for mushrooms, up to her wrists in dirt.
But still, that feeling persists. An ache, like the stirrings of a migraine behind her eyes. That unopened divorce letter, the mess in Hazel’s bedroom. Those poor cats, stuffed into a suitcase. Hazel wouldn’t have done that, would she?
She might. You know she might.
Even so, Cathy reminds herself, if that was the case, then who was the man Mr. Jenner saw going into the house with a key?
Cathy reaches the gate on the far side of the field, near where the play equipment sits empty and dripping with rain. The swings creak in the wind. It’s an eerie, melancholy sound, like whale song. She used to bring Danny to this playground. She still brings Scout sometimes, but the equipment is old and rusting now, the sandpit turned a slurry gray like concrete. The council say there isn’t the budget to replace it, so it all gets left to softly fall apart under the children’s hands. Cathy turns her back on the fields and heads through the gate. She has business to attend to.
She approaches the house on Polmen Avenue the back way to avoid the watchful eye of Mr. Jenner. Before she’d left, Cathy had locked the French doors and slipped the key into her pocket, and now she uses it to open them, ears strained for any sound of life within. In the darkened kitchen the cats are there to greet her, eyes like headlamps in the dark. They are hungry, so she empties food into their bowls and makes a quick inspection of the kitchen. After Suzie had walked out on her yesterday, Cathy had sat alonefor a long time, smoking and drinking tea. Then she’d washed up and swept and tipped the rancid milk down the sink. Now, looking around, she can see that nothing has been touched. The cups are still on the draining board, stools pushed beneath the counter. In the last twenty-four hours, no one has been inside, and no one is feeding these cats. That thought again,If that man wasn’t Laurence Mitchell, then who was he?
Cathy moves up the stairs, turning all the lights on as she goes. Unease rises like a pale, swelling dough as she walks past the doorway to Hazel’s old bedroom. Back when they were younger, both girls had shared that room. There were bunk beds and a fish tank and a huge dolls’ house which opened at the front like double doors. Then Hazel went into hospital, and when she came back out, Cathy hadn’t wanted to share a room with her anymore. She’d told her parents it was because she was getting older and needed her own space, but it hadn’t been that—at least not entirely. It hadn’t even been the way that Hazel insisted on sleeping with the window open, even though it made the room cold and sometimes insects got in. It had been theother sisterthat Hazel had brought home with her. The one who lived under Hazel’s bed.
Cathy shakes herself. She doesn’t want to think about all that right now.No good comes of digging up the past, she reminds herself, rushing past the open doorway so she doesn’t have to glance into the darkened room beyond and see the way the wardrobe door hangs open as if pushed by a skinless hand.Head down, she tells herself,don’t look. It doesn’t stop her heart pounding, and even when she has reached the door to her old room, she doesn’t dare risk looking back, just in case something is peering round the doorframe with round yellow eyes like Christmas baubles.
Cathy still thinks of this asherbedroom, even as she pushesopen the door, but of course her old room is barely recognizable anymore. Where Cathy’s bed had been is a chaise longue upholstered in purple velvet. The old wardrobe and matching dressing table have been replaced by scratching posts and cat baskets lined with cashmere and wool. Framed photographs dominate the walls; there’s her mother grinning at various award shows, and there’s the Persians, looking down the lens with that particular feline contempt. There are quirky photographs of the cats dressed up at Christmas and Halloween, all cardboard pumpkins and funny little elf hats. Cathy turns away. She knows what she is looking for and it isn’t cute pictures. She finds the camera quickly, tucked up on the shelf between two trophies.I think she’s set up a nanny cam, Hazel had joked, but it hadn’t been a joke at all, because here it is, small and plastic and futuristic looking in Cathy’s hands. After investigating it for a minute or so, she pulls her phone from her pocket and calls Danny, tapping her foot impatiently as the phone rings and rings.
Finally, he picks up, his voice a slow, familiar drawl. “What’s up, Mum?”
“Danny, how do I get a video off a camera?”
He laughs. It is a good sound. It rinses some of that dread away.
“What kind of camera?”
Cathy frowns. She has happily watched technology accelerate away from her since she hit her twenties, content to use an ancient mobile and a creaky old laptop. She tells Danny it’s because she doesn’t care about keeping up with the tech, but that’s only half right. Truth is, it costs a lot, and Cathy has priorities—none of which include herself.
“God, I don’t know, Danny. It’s white and looks like it came from outer space. Your grandmother rigged it to spy on the cats when she’s away.”
Another laugh. In the background she can hear Scout cooing.
“Aw, you should have said!Iset that up for Grandma. It’s called a Motion Monitor. It records when it captures movement. I set it up to send the notifications to her phone and laptop. If you go to her laptop, you can see what it’s picked up.”
“Okay. You know what her password is?”
“Guess.”
Cathy looks around at all the framed pictures and certificates, the folds of soft gray cashmere in the baskets. She rolls her eyes.
“Yeah. I got it. Thanks, Danny.”
Her mother’s laptop is in the study. Cathy takes a seat at the desk there, clearing a space in all the paperwork, and opens it up in front of her. She types in the password—Conquest&Celeste, of course—and finds the file marked Motion Monitor. As she clicks on it, her eye falls on one of the letters lying open on the table. It is headedBelle-Vuein curlicue gold writing. She squints at it. It’s an invoice maybe, or a breakdown of charges, she isn’t sure. One thing Cathy does know is that it is alotof zeros. Looking closer, she notices that in the upper left corner in her mother’s handwriting is written the wordPaid. Cathy can’t help but feel a tingle of resentment. When she’d come home from America trailing debts and litigations behind her, her parents had refused to help.It’s your mess, her mother had told her sternly,and you’re a grown woman now, Catherine. You need to fix this by yourself.Seven years later, and she’s still trying to fix it, living in a house with woodchip wallpaper and rising damp. She called the landlord back in June about the broken latch on the window of Scout’s bedroom, and they still haven’t got round to fixing it.
Cathy feels an old, familiar bitterness congeal in her stomach andtries to push it aside, clicking onto the Motion Monitor icon. A list of dated thumbnail photos pops up and she scrolls through until she reaches the most recent. Most of them, she knows, will be the cats playing, fighting, jumping. She isn’t interested in those. She wants to see if it captured the man Mr. Jenner had seen coming into the house. Two of the most recent are from the day that Hazel went missing, and so she clicks on the first, leaning closer to the screen because she doesn’t have her glasses with her. It’s a short video, barely more than seven seconds, and captures nothing more than one of the cats—Cathy can’t tell the difference between them and doesn’t care enough to learn—leaping up onto the shelf where the camera has been placed and licking its paws. Sighing, Cathy clicks onto the next. Her heart sinks when the thumbnail shows that this video is also very short. Only five seconds long. Whatever it is, it won’t give her much.
The beginning of the footage shows the cat room with the open door to the left of the screen, giving a glimpse through to the hallway beyond. The movement it captures is unmistakably Hazel walking past in a bathrobe, presumably heading for the shower. The doorway remains empty for a second, and then something else appears, crawling along the floor behind her.
Cathy gasps, shoving the chair away from the desk. All the saliva dries up in her mouth. With a trembling hand, she reaches out and replays the footage, almost unable to believe what she is seeing.There.A black shape, creeping on its belly. It has no facial features that Cathy can define; just an impression of eerily long limbs snaking out beneath a tangled mat of dark hair.
When her phone rings, Cathy screams. She looks down at the screen. It’s Danny.
“What’s going on?” She knows she sounds hectic and afraid. Out of breath, as if she’s been running. “Is Scout okay?”
“You haven’t forgotten I’m going to Zac’s this afternoon, have you?”
Cathy curses and looks at her watch. Even with the shortcut, she’s been out longer than she intended. She looks at the frozen screen in front of her, that blurred black shape.
“Mum? Did you hear me?” He sounds alarmed. “What’s wrong? Have you found something?”