I thought my wife was being paranoid. Then she showed me a…
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I thought my wife was being paranoid. Then she showed me a picture of myself sleeping.
My wife put a photograph of me asleep on the kitchen table and then told me she had hired the man in it. I was on my side with one arm hanging off the bed, wearing an old grey T-shirt and breathing through my mouth. Somebody was sitting on the floor beside me, mostly outside the frame. His hand was wrapped loosely around my fingers.
I had seen him outside our house the night before. He was across the road at about half eleven, looking at his phone beneath a streetlight that hasn't worked since Christmas. I watched him for maybe a minute before he walked away, and that morning I'd told Laura I was calling the police if I saw him again. She went upstairs, came back with the washing-machine manual and took the photograph from between the pages.
“I know who he is.”
I looked at her.
“I hired him.”
For a few seconds I thought she meant private investigator. Then she said his name was Dean K and that she'd paid him six hundred pounds in October to follow me for four nights. I looked back at the photograph because it was easier than looking at her.
“To do what?”
“Make you notice him.”
If Dean had been holding a knife, I think my brain would have known where to put it. Instead he was holding my hand gently enough that I hadn't woken up. Laura was asleep on the other side of me when the photograph was taken.
It had arrived on her phone at 2:14 in the morning on the fourth night, with no message attached. Laura told me she'd woken to the notification, seen the photograph and then spent nearly an hour lying beside me listening to the house because she didn't know whether Dean was still downstairs. She didn't wake me because, according to her, she was frightened I'd go looking for him. At six she told Dean the arrangement was finished and transferred the final two hundred pounds she owed him because paying him seemed safer than giving him a reason to argue.
He replied with a thumbs-up.
“You got this six months ago?”
“Yes.”
“And you slept next to me after seeing it?”
“I didn't know he was coming back.”
“He was already in the fucking bedroom.”
“I know.”
I picked up my phone. Laura asked what I was doing, and when I said I was calling the police she pointed out that I'd have to explain why Dean had been following me in the first place. I remember staring at her because she still seemed to think embarrassment belonged anywhere in the calculation.
“Good.”
I called anyway. Because the photograph was six months old and there hadn't been a direct threat, the woman I spoke to took the details and gave me an incident number. She told me not to approach Dean if he appeared again and to call 999 if we believed he was inside the house or we were in immediate danger.
Laura explained the rest while we waited for someone to call back. Earlier that year she'd become convinced a man was following her home from the hospital where she works. She saw him outside the staff entrance several times, then at the station where she changed trains, then near the supermarket by our house.
I had believed she'd seen somebody. I just hadn't behaved as though I believed what she thought it meant. The more certain she became that the same man was following her, the more certain I became that there had to be another explanation.
“I asked you to collect me.”
“I did.”
“Twice.”
I didn't have anything useful to say to that.
Laura found Dean through a woman at work whose brother had used him for debt collection and serving court papers. She wanted me followed just long enough to recognise the same stranger in different places, then she planned to tell me what she'd done. Her idea, if you can call it that, was that four days of wondering whether I was imagining something might make me understand what I'd been asking her to live with.
I asked her whether Dean could have been the man following her in the first place. She stared at the photograph for a moment before answering. She'd never seen the other man's face clearly enough to know.
“I don't know.”
That was worse than no.
Dean had asked her quite a lot about the original stalking when they first met. Which hospital entrance she used, where she changed trains, whether the man had ever followed her all the way home. Laura had assumed he was checking that she wasn't hiring him to threaten somebody she already knew.
Then he'd asked about me. My work address, registration, gym, the pub I go to with Daniel and my brother Jamie's address. He asked what I did when I was angry, whether I'd confront somebody following me and which side of the bed I slept on.
“Why would he need to know that?”
“He said he needed your routine.”
“For four evenings?”
Laura didn't answer.
She'd told him I always sleep nearest the bedroom door. I get up before her most mornings and hate climbing over people, which is the sort of boring fact about yourself you don't realise counts as information until somebody you've never met asks for it. She'd also told him that if somebody was certain I was wrong about something, I tended to become even more certain I was right.
I nearly argued with that description. Then I remembered why she'd hired him.
There were other questions she couldn't remember properly anymore. Dean had asked where I'd go if I needed somewhere to stay, and Laura thought she'd mentioned Jamie. He'd asked whether I still saw people I'd grown up with. At the time she'd answered because questions were what she'd paid him to ask.
I remembered something in my car while she was talking. A few weeks earlier I'd found a petrol receipt folded beneath the driver's seatbelt exactly where it crosses an old scar on my collarbone. I sometimes put folded paper there on long drives to stop the belt rubbing, but the receipt hadn't been mine; it was from a petrol station I'd never used.
I had assumed somebody had left it in the car before I bought it and only just worked loose. That explanation hadn't bothered me because I'd wanted one for about three seconds and then had one. Laura didn't even know the scar bothered me.
“What about your shoulder?”
I showed her where the belt catches.
She went quiet.
On the second night of the original arrangement, Dean had told Laura that following me wasn't working because I hadn't properly noticed him. He suggested entering the house while we were at dinner and moving one harmless thing, just enough that she could eventually prove how easily somebody could interfere with my life without me noticing. Laura said no the first time.
He brought it up again the next day. She knew his name, knew who had referred him, and had already convinced herself that the entire thing was controlled. She left the laundry door unlocked and told him to move the mug beside my bed into the kitchen sink.
Dean messaged when he entered and again less than a minute later when he said he was out.
“You let him into our house.”
“Yes.”
“And when I couldn't find the mug?”
Laura looked at the table.
I remembered that without her help. I'd blamed her because I'd been looking for it, she'd laughed and told me I'd probably carried it downstairs myself, and we argued about it for maybe thirty seconds before ordering a film. I'd forgotten about it completely.
Our spare front-door key disappeared the following month. I remembered searching the kitchen drawers because my mum was coming over to feed the cat while we were away. Laura had helped me look.
“You thought he'd taken it.”
She rubbed both hands over her face.
“I thought about it.”
“And said nothing.”
“I kept thinking if he'd wanted to do something, he'd already done it.”
I had to leave the kitchen after that. I stood in the bathroom for several minutes with the tap running even though I wasn't using it, then came back because I didn't want Laura alone with the photograph or my phone. That didn't make sense, but I didn't especially care by then.
Sometime around Christmas, while Laura was working a night shift, I woke at about three and found a full glass of water beside the bed. I sometimes get up half asleep and don't properly remember doing it, so I drank it. The next morning I told Laura that apparently I was sleepwalking now.
When I reminded her, she stopped rubbing her hands.
“I wasn't home.”
I could still see the glass more clearly than I wanted to. There had been condensation underneath it and a little crescent of water on the bedside table where I'd lifted it. I had drunk the whole thing and gone back to sleep.
The police came that afternoon. Laura gave them Dean's number, his registration, the messages and the address where she'd met him. The number went to voicemail and the address turned out to be a room he'd stopped renting months earlier.
One of the officers asked Laura again about the man who had originally followed her. She said she couldn't identify him, but after describing Dean she admitted the age and build were possible. She also remembered the man outside the hospital wearing a dark raincoat, though she couldn't swear it had been navy.
The officer wrote it down. Nobody said what all three of us were thinking. I don't know whether that was because it sounded ridiculous or because it didn't.
They advised us to stay elsewhere. Laura went to her sister's because I couldn't stand the idea of sharing a room with her, and I started driving toward Jamie's before remembering that Laura had given Dean his address. I booked a Premier Inn near the airport instead.
I took two shirts, my laptop, three pairs of socks and forgot my toothbrush. I parked at the far end of the car park, used the stairs instead of the lift and slept on the far side of the bed instead of the side nearest the door. Every choice now seemed to have two versions: the thing I normally did and the thing I did because I knew somebody knew what I normally did.
At some point after three I woke needing the toilet. My shoes were beside the door, lined up with the toes facing outward. I remembered putting them beneath the window because I'd looked at them there before turning the light off.
At least I thought I remembered it.
I stood there until the air conditioner shut itself off. I checked the bathroom, wardrobe and corridor, then went downstairs and asked whether another key had been made for my room. The night receptionist checked and said there was no record of one.
I nearly called the police. Instead I stood at reception trying to decide whether I was willing to tell an officer that someone had broken into my hotel room and moved my shoes when I couldn't prove I hadn't moved them myself. Eventually I went back upstairs and put a chair against the door, then lay awake wondering whether I'd moved that too.
At breakfast I watched an older man butter toast for about ten minutes because his raincoat was the same colour as Dean's. His wife came over carrying two coffees and kissed him on the cheek. I went back for another piece of toast so it would look like I'd had a reason to be standing there.
Jamie called while I was eating it. A man had come to his house just after seven and asked whether I was staying there. Jamie described somebody around fifty, thinning dark hair, average height and extremely polite.
“He left something.”
Jamie still lives in the house we grew up in. By the time I arrived with two officers, he'd put what the man left into a freezer bag. It was a brass Yale key with green tape around the top.
Our missing spare.
I asked where Dean had handed it to him. Jamie said he hadn't.
“He put it behind the drainpipe.”
When we were teenagers, Jamie and I used to leave Mum's spare key there if one of us got home first. She eventually caught us and went mental because, in her words, any burglar with functioning eyes could have found it. We hadn't used that hiding place in nearly twenty years.
Laura didn't know about it. Jamie couldn't remember telling anyone recently, but Mum used to tell the story whenever somebody mentioned spare keys because she still considered it evidence that she'd raised idiots. That meant there were people Dean could theoretically have learned it from.
I preferred the version where there was no explanation.
The other version meant he'd asked.
The police still hadn't located him the following afternoon. Laura and I went back to our house for clothes, with her sister waiting outside in the car. Laura had stayed with her the entire time and hadn't been back since we left.
Post was scattered inside the front door and one of the kitchen lights was on. A mug was drying beside the sink. Laura picked it up by the handle and asked whether I'd washed it before leaving.
I hadn't.
Upstairs, the bed was made. Laura tucks the duvet beneath the mattress at the foot and folds the top down the width of one pillow. I pull it straight and throw the pillows wherever they land because I don't care.
“Was that you?”
“No.”
“You haven't been back?”
“No.”
We checked the room anyway. Under the bed, inside the wardrobe, behind the curtains, the loft hatch, the bathroom cupboard. We weren't really looking for Dean so much as looking for some object that would tell us what else had happened.
Nothing did.
Before we left, Laura stood in the kitchen looking at the clean mug. She said the man who followed her from the hospital had once appeared in the supermarket aisle with a basket containing nothing except a bottle of the orange juice she bought every week. She hadn't mentioned that before because at the time she'd decided it was coincidence.
“Was it Dean?”
“I don't know.”
For the first time all day, I didn't try to help her decide.
I am writing this from Jamie's spare room. We came here after the police checked the house again because I refused to go back to the hotel and Laura's sister has two young children, which none of us wanted anywhere near this. Jamie has cameras on the front and back after a burglary a few years ago, and there's a patrol car coming past during the night.
I'm writing because I keep changing the order of things in my head. No, that's not quite true. The hotel was before Jamie called, and I've already had to go back and fix that twice. I want the sequence somewhere outside me before I start deciding some of it didn't happen.
Laura came upstairs about forty minutes ago. I'd put my bag beside the window, my shoes beneath the radiator and chosen the far side of the bed, away from the door. She noticed immediately.
“You told him which side I sleep on.”
Her face changed.
“I told him you always sleep nearest the door.”
“I know.”
She stood there for a few seconds before speaking again.
“He asked what you'd do if you knew somebody expected you somewhere.”
I looked at her.
“I said you'd go somewhere else first.”
I lay on the far side anyway after she left. Maybe that's the part that bothers me most. I knew exactly what she had just told me and still felt that changing sides would somehow count as my decision if I did it deliberately enough.
I reached toward the bedside table without turning the lamp on and touched a glass.
It was full of water. When I switched the light on, condensation was running down the outside and there was already a wet ring beneath it. The water was cold.
I called 999.
Two officers arrived in under ten minutes. They searched the house, the garden, the loft and Jamie's garage, then checked the camera recordings. Nobody had come through the front or back since we arrived.
One of them asked whether a window had been left open. Another asked whether I could have brought the glass upstairs myself and forgotten. He didn't say it dismissively; he was asking because I'd already told them about the water at Christmas and the hotel shoes.
“No.”
Laura was sitting on the bed behind him.
I looked at her when I said it. She looked back at me but didn't say anything.
The officers took the glass and told us to call again if anything else happened. One of them is still parked down the street. Jamie has gone through every room twice and has now started checking the cameras every few minutes even though they only show the same empty garden.
Laura stayed upstairs after they left. She sat on the edge of the bed while I was on the floor with my laptop and said my name once. When I looked up, she reached down to take my hand.
I pulled it away before she touched me.
Neither of us said anything after that. She looked at my hand, then at the space on the floor beside the bed where I was sitting. A few minutes later she went downstairs.
I'm still here now. The photograph is on my phone because the police sent me a copy for the statement, and I looked at it again before I started writing this. Dean is sitting in almost exactly the same place I am.
I've got my left hand tucked underneath my leg while I type. I didn't realise I was doing it until a minute ago. I'm not moving it.
#entertainment
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My wife put a photograph of me asleep on the kitchen table and then told me she had hired the man in it. I was on my side with one arm hanging off the bed, wearing an old grey T-shirt and breathing through my mouth. Somebody was sitting on the floor beside me, mostly outside the frame. His hand was wrapped loosely around my fingers.
I had seen him outside our house the night before. He was across the road at about half eleven, looking at his phone beneath a streetlight that hasn't worked since Christmas. I watched him for maybe a minute before he walked away, and that morning I'd told Laura I was calling the police if I saw him again. She went upstairs, came back with the washing-machine manual and took the photograph from between the pages.
“I know who he is.”
I looked at her.
“I hired him.”
For a few seconds I thought she meant private investigator. Then she said his name was Dean K and that she'd paid him six hundred pounds in October to follow me for four nights. I looked back at the photograph because it was easier than looking at her.
“To do what?”
“Make you notice him.”
If Dean had been holding a knife, I think my brain would have known where to put it. Instead he was holding my hand gently enough that I hadn't woken up. Laura was asleep on the other side of me when the photograph was taken.
It had arrived on her phone at 2:14 in the morning on the fourth night, with no message attached. Laura told me she'd woken to the notification, seen the photograph and then spent nearly an hour lying beside me listening to the house because she didn't know whether Dean was still downstairs. She didn't wake me because, according to her, she was frightened I'd go looking for him. At six she told Dean the arrangement was finished and transferred the final two hundred pounds she owed him because paying him seemed safer than giving him a reason to argue.
He replied with a thumbs-up.
“You got this six months ago?”
“Yes.”
“And you slept next to me after seeing it?”
“I didn't know he was coming back.”
“He was already in the fucking bedroom.”
“I know.”
I picked up my phone. Laura asked what I was doing, and when I said I was calling the police she pointed out that I'd have to explain why Dean had been following me in the first place. I remember staring at her because she still seemed to think embarrassment belonged anywhere in the calculation.
“Good.”
I called anyway. Because the photograph was six months old and there hadn't been a direct threat, the woman I spoke to took the details and gave me an incident number. She told me not to approach Dean if he appeared again and to call 999 if we believed he was inside the house or we were in immediate danger.
Laura explained the rest while we waited for someone to call back. Earlier that year she'd become convinced a man was following her home from the hospital where she works. She saw him outside the staff entrance several times, then at the station where she changed trains, then near the supermarket by our house.
I had believed she'd seen somebody. I just hadn't behaved as though I believed what she thought it meant. The more certain she became that the same man was following her, the more certain I became that there had to be another explanation.
“I asked you to collect me.”
“I did.”
“Twice.”
I didn't have anything useful to say to that.
Laura found Dean through a woman at work whose brother had used him for debt collection and serving court papers. She wanted me followed just long enough to recognise the same stranger in different places, then she planned to tell me what she'd done. Her idea, if you can call it that, was that four days of wondering whether I was imagining something might make me understand what I'd been asking her to live with.
I asked her whether Dean could have been the man following her in the first place. She stared at the photograph for a moment before answering. She'd never seen the other man's face clearly enough to know.
“I don't know.”
That was worse than no.
Dean had asked her quite a lot about the original stalking when they first met. Which hospital entrance she used, where she changed trains, whether the man had ever followed her all the way home. Laura had assumed he was checking that she wasn't hiring him to threaten somebody she already knew.
Then he'd asked about me. My work address, registration, gym, the pub I go to with Daniel and my brother Jamie's address. He asked what I did when I was angry, whether I'd confront somebody following me and which side of the bed I slept on.
“Why would he need to know that?”
“He said he needed your routine.”
“For four evenings?”
Laura didn't answer.
She'd told him I always sleep nearest the bedroom door. I get up before her most mornings and hate climbing over people, which is the sort of boring fact about yourself you don't realise counts as information until somebody you've never met asks for it. She'd also told him that if somebody was certain I was wrong about something, I tended to become even more certain I was right.
I nearly argued with that description. Then I remembered why she'd hired him.
There were other questions she couldn't remember properly anymore. Dean had asked where I'd go if I needed somewhere to stay, and Laura thought she'd mentioned Jamie. He'd asked whether I still saw people I'd grown up with. At the time she'd answered because questions were what she'd paid him to ask.
I remembered something in my car while she was talking. A few weeks earlier I'd found a petrol receipt folded beneath the driver's seatbelt exactly where it crosses an old scar on my collarbone. I sometimes put folded paper there on long drives to stop the belt rubbing, but the receipt hadn't been mine; it was from a petrol station I'd never used.
I had assumed somebody had left it in the car before I bought it and only just worked loose. That explanation hadn't bothered me because I'd wanted one for about three seconds and then had one. Laura didn't even know the scar bothered me.
“What about your shoulder?”
I showed her where the belt catches.
She went quiet.
On the second night of the original arrangement, Dean had told Laura that following me wasn't working because I hadn't properly noticed him. He suggested entering the house while we were at dinner and moving one harmless thing, just enough that she could eventually prove how easily somebody could interfere with my life without me noticing. Laura said no the first time.
He brought it up again the next day. She knew his name, knew who had referred him, and had already convinced herself that the entire thing was controlled. She left the laundry door unlocked and told him to move the mug beside my bed into the kitchen sink.
Dean messaged when he entered and again less than a minute later when he said he was out.
“You let him into our house.”
“Yes.”
“And when I couldn't find the mug?”
Laura looked at the table.
I remembered that without her help. I'd blamed her because I'd been looking for it, she'd laughed and told me I'd probably carried it downstairs myself, and we argued about it for maybe thirty seconds before ordering a film. I'd forgotten about it completely.
Our spare front-door key disappeared the following month. I remembered searching the kitchen drawers because my mum was coming over to feed the cat while we were away. Laura had helped me look.
“You thought he'd taken it.”
She rubbed both hands over her face.
“I thought about it.”
“And said nothing.”
“I kept thinking if he'd wanted to do something, he'd already done it.”
I had to leave the kitchen after that. I stood in the bathroom for several minutes with the tap running even though I wasn't using it, then came back because I didn't want Laura alone with the photograph or my phone. That didn't make sense, but I didn't especially care by then.
Sometime around Christmas, while Laura was working a night shift, I woke at about three and found a full glass of water beside the bed. I sometimes get up half asleep and don't properly remember doing it, so I drank it. The next morning I told Laura that apparently I was sleepwalking now.
When I reminded her, she stopped rubbing her hands.
“I wasn't home.”
I could still see the glass more clearly than I wanted to. There had been condensation underneath it and a little crescent of water on the bedside table where I'd lifted it. I had drunk the whole thing and gone back to sleep.
The police came that afternoon. Laura gave them Dean's number, his registration, the messages and the address where she'd met him. The number went to voicemail and the address turned out to be a room he'd stopped renting months earlier.
One of the officers asked Laura again about the man who had originally followed her. She said she couldn't identify him, but after describing Dean she admitted the age and build were possible. She also remembered the man outside the hospital wearing a dark raincoat, though she couldn't swear it had been navy.
The officer wrote it down. Nobody said what all three of us were thinking. I don't know whether that was because it sounded ridiculous or because it didn't.
They advised us to stay elsewhere. Laura went to her sister's because I couldn't stand the idea of sharing a room with her, and I started driving toward Jamie's before remembering that Laura had given Dean his address. I booked a Premier Inn near the airport instead.
I took two shirts, my laptop, three pairs of socks and forgot my toothbrush. I parked at the far end of the car park, used the stairs instead of the lift and slept on the far side of the bed instead of the side nearest the door. Every choice now seemed to have two versions: the thing I normally did and the thing I did because I knew somebody knew what I normally did.
At some point after three I woke needing the toilet. My shoes were beside the door, lined up with the toes facing outward. I remembered putting them beneath the window because I'd looked at them there before turning the light off.
At least I thought I remembered it.
I stood there until the air conditioner shut itself off. I checked the bathroom, wardrobe and corridor, then went downstairs and asked whether another key had been made for my room. The night receptionist checked and said there was no record of one.
I nearly called the police. Instead I stood at reception trying to decide whether I was willing to tell an officer that someone had broken into my hotel room and moved my shoes when I couldn't prove I hadn't moved them myself. Eventually I went back upstairs and put a chair against the door, then lay awake wondering whether I'd moved that too.
At breakfast I watched an older man butter toast for about ten minutes because his raincoat was the same colour as Dean's. His wife came over carrying two coffees and kissed him on the cheek. I went back for another piece of toast so it would look like I'd had a reason to be standing there.
Jamie called while I was eating it. A man had come to his house just after seven and asked whether I was staying there. Jamie described somebody around fifty, thinning dark hair, average height and extremely polite.
“He left something.”
Jamie still lives in the house we grew up in. By the time I arrived with two officers, he'd put what the man left into a freezer bag. It was a brass Yale key with green tape around the top.
Our missing spare.
I asked where Dean had handed it to him. Jamie said he hadn't.
“He put it behind the drainpipe.”
When we were teenagers, Jamie and I used to leave Mum's spare key there if one of us got home first. She eventually caught us and went mental because, in her words, any burglar with functioning eyes could have found it. We hadn't used that hiding place in nearly twenty years.
Laura didn't know about it. Jamie couldn't remember telling anyone recently, but Mum used to tell the story whenever somebody mentioned spare keys because she still considered it evidence that she'd raised idiots. That meant there were people Dean could theoretically have learned it from.
I preferred the version where there was no explanation.
The other version meant he'd asked.
The police still hadn't located him the following afternoon. Laura and I went back to our house for clothes, with her sister waiting outside in the car. Laura had stayed with her the entire time and hadn't been back since we left.
Post was scattered inside the front door and one of the kitchen lights was on. A mug was drying beside the sink. Laura picked it up by the handle and asked whether I'd washed it before leaving.
I hadn't.
Upstairs, the bed was made. Laura tucks the duvet beneath the mattress at the foot and folds the top down the width of one pillow. I pull it straight and throw the pillows wherever they land because I don't care.
“Was that you?”
“No.”
“You haven't been back?”
“No.”
We checked the room anyway. Under the bed, inside the wardrobe, behind the curtains, the loft hatch, the bathroom cupboard. We weren't really looking for Dean so much as looking for some object that would tell us what else had happened.
Nothing did.
Before we left, Laura stood in the kitchen looking at the clean mug. She said the man who followed her from the hospital had once appeared in the supermarket aisle with a basket containing nothing except a bottle of the orange juice she bought every week. She hadn't mentioned that before because at the time she'd decided it was coincidence.
“Was it Dean?”
“I don't know.”
For the first time all day, I didn't try to help her decide.
I am writing this from Jamie's spare room. We came here after the police checked the house again because I refused to go back to the hotel and Laura's sister has two young children, which none of us wanted anywhere near this. Jamie has cameras on the front and back after a burglary a few years ago, and there's a patrol car coming past during the night.
I'm writing because I keep changing the order of things in my head. No, that's not quite true. The hotel was before Jamie called, and I've already had to go back and fix that twice. I want the sequence somewhere outside me before I start deciding some of it didn't happen.
Laura came upstairs about forty minutes ago. I'd put my bag beside the window, my shoes beneath the radiator and chosen the far side of the bed, away from the door. She noticed immediately.
“You told him which side I sleep on.”
Her face changed.
“I told him you always sleep nearest the door.”
“I know.”
She stood there for a few seconds before speaking again.
“He asked what you'd do if you knew somebody expected you somewhere.”
I looked at her.
“I said you'd go somewhere else first.”
I lay on the far side anyway after she left. Maybe that's the part that bothers me most. I knew exactly what she had just told me and still felt that changing sides would somehow count as my decision if I did it deliberately enough.
I reached toward the bedside table without turning the lamp on and touched a glass.
It was full of water. When I switched the light on, condensation was running down the outside and there was already a wet ring beneath it. The water was cold.
I called 999.
Two officers arrived in under ten minutes. They searched the house, the garden, the loft and Jamie's garage, then checked the camera recordings. Nobody had come through the front or back since we arrived.
One of them asked whether a window had been left open. Another asked whether I could have brought the glass upstairs myself and forgotten. He didn't say it dismissively; he was asking because I'd already told them about the water at Christmas and the hotel shoes.
“No.”
Laura was sitting on the bed behind him.
I looked at her when I said it. She looked back at me but didn't say anything.
The officers took the glass and told us to call again if anything else happened. One of them is still parked down the street. Jamie has gone through every room twice and has now started checking the cameras every few minutes even though they only show the same empty garden.
Laura stayed upstairs after they left. She sat on the edge of the bed while I was on the floor with my laptop and said my name once. When I looked up, she reached down to take my hand.
I pulled it away before she touched me.
Neither of us said anything after that. She looked at my hand, then at the space on the floor beside the bed where I was sitting. A few minutes later she went downstairs.
I'm still here now. The photograph is on my phone because the police sent me a copy for the statement, and I looked at it again before I started writing this. Dean is sitting in almost exactly the same place I am.
I've got my left hand tucked underneath my leg while I type. I didn't realise I was doing it until a minute ago. I'm not moving it.
#entertainment
source
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