Chapter 21 Pics,It Didn’t Happen
Pics, or It Didn’t Happen
All the footage is gone the next morning.
I bolt up sharply in bed, dislodging the computer from my lap, just managing to catch it before it hits the floor.
The footage of the woman in the basement is gone. Not just her footage, but all that preceded it: Matt, the bike man and his wife…gone.
Blue stretches and yawns beside me, his breath warm and sweet.
“It’s all gone, Blue,” I tell him. His warm golden eyes take me in impassively, before he lets out a hungry meow.
Anxiety mounting, thoughts of the trapped woman pulsing through my mind, I search the app for an answer as to where the hell my evidence has gone.
And finally I find the answer in all its infuriatingly bureaucratic simplicity: my three-day trial storage period lapsed at 4 a.m. this morning.
I hadn’t signed up for the basic package so my footage was removed.
Stricken with immediate panic I sweep out of bed, grab my wallet, pull out my card to desperately sign up for the ￡3.99 monthly basic package, my card shaking in my fingers.
Subscription complete, I search the features to work out how to bring back the lost footage.
Then finally, after prompting and re-prompting the app chatbot for several minutes, it informs me that unfortunately the footage was not permanently stored due to the lack of subscription plan and is no longer retrievable.
It’s gone-gone. I collapse back onto the pillows, defeated.
—
Downstairs, Blue eats breakfast on the counter, while I sit at the table holding a coffee, staring into space, trying not to think about what an idiot I’ve been.
There’s a grogginess even to my negative self-talk though, which makes me realize that perhaps my new tablets are stronger than I expected.
If I want to be able to function in the mornings after taking them, I will probably need to stick to a half or single sleeping tablet instead of the recommended max of two that I took last night.
But what smarts the most in all of this is that I have no idea if what I think I saw last night is even real. Not having it to check back this morning means I have no way of knowing.
There’s a chance I drifted off to sleep momentarily while watching the footage last night and imagined the face, the room, the whole thing.
I did feel my attention drift as I scrubbed the last video on.
There could be no woman at all. It might be nothing more than my sleep deprivation and Ben’s true crime documentaries drifting into my half-sleeping mind.
Moving here, starting again: this was supposed to be the bit where it all got better.
I push my coffee away and stand abruptly.
Blue looks over, sensing the shift. I pluck his camera collar from the charger and gently reattach it to him, as he sits patiently, chest puffed, letting me.
“Just one more trip out, Blue,” I say, kissing his soft forehead. “Just so I know I’m not losing my marbles.”
The black iris of the camera stares back at me, an all-seeing void. Recording. I open the back door and let him out, staying long enough to watch him disappear into the tall flower beds.
—
Ten minutes later, I’m at the chic local deli, standing in line for the raspberry pastel de nata Matt had recommended, in front of me cool twentysomethings, with their ecru trench coats, baseball caps, and Salomon sneakers, their laptops grasped in cases or slung in canvas totes.
A sprinkling of thirty- and forty-year-olds, too, with clear-framed glasses and cashmere jumpers slung over shoulders, working remotely or chatting in small clusters at the few available tables; the women among them tap their cards at the register for takeaway coffee orders, their expensive bracelet stacks clattering.
When I finally get to the front of the line, I order my pastry and a coffee, then take both to have on the outside seating, my nerves jittering as the sun warms my face.
Around me, London seems to come alive for the first time since I moved back.
I realize, unnervingly, that I feel safer here than on my own in my house.
Voices mingle and shift; I sip my coffee, warm and pleasantly bitter. I am part of the crowd now, invisible but not alone. This is how animals must feel in the wild. Protection in numbers.
I take a breath; everything is going to be OK.
And then my sun is blocked.
I squint up and see a man with his back to me chatting to a woman in line; I catch the name: Greg.
So, this is the Greg Pam mentioned, and he is, as I suspected, the same man I saw in running shorts on my first day.
This is the man who Pam told me had wanted to buy my house and owns the two either side of mine.
I try to block out the noise of the café so I can isolate his words.
“No, she doesn’t know. Obviously, there’s no way she’d be living here if she knew,” he tells the woman in the cherry-red cardigan. She frowns, clearly concerned.
“But what if she works it out?” the woman asks, with a shake of the head at the imagined implications of that.
Greg shrugs. “We’ll see, I guess. We had a scare the other day. The police arrived at her house, middle of the night. It was weird. Then nothing. I don’t know what’s up with her. Pam says to leave it be. I don’t know. But every day I’m thinking shouldn’t we just get on with it and—”
He stops abruptly as a redhead with a large Irish wolfhound asks to squeeze past him. He smiles politely and lets her pass, suddenly turning in my direction.
I spin away in my seat in case he catches a glimpse of my face. When I peek back around, they have disappeared inside. I blink, the sunlight suddenly blinding now that the shadow of the queue has moved on.
I feel my face flush, and the deli I had momentarily felt calm and safe in now feels like a microscope slide I have been affixed to for examination.
I pull out my phone, open the message app, and tap on Arabella’s name.
We haven’t spoken since she came over but I feel like I could ask her, couldn’t I?
But what would I say? What’s wrong with my house, Arabella?
Heard Greg gossiping about it. But what if she’s in the same camp as Pam and she doesn’t want me knowing—whatever this is—either?
I’ve spoken to both of them recently; they had ample opportunity to tell me whatever “this” is.
If it was in their interest to tell me wouldn’t they have already?
I down the remainder of my coffee, grab my bag, and slip from my seat, joining the anonymous street traffic and regaining my invisibility, London embracing me, hiding me with its usual, unsentimental hive mentality as I desperately try to make sense of everything.
I walk from the café to the canal, then cut down and walk all the way to the river, my thoughts finally loose and free as I stride alongside the wide and choppy waters of the Thames: liners and water taxis glide beneath and cut white waves in its surface all the way to where the river bends and they disappear from sight, the gusting wind over the water battering those brave enough to be out on the sunny boat decks, cold spray spritzing them, their eyes squinting against it.
As I walk back over Millennium Bridge from the Tate Modern, hair whipping my face, my mind finally begins to clear. The couple at Number 15. The angry bike man and his threatening message. Greg’s conviction that I would never have moved onto the street if I’d known.
And the footage.
Of the basement window.
How the woman limped.
I stop suddenly, someone bumping my shoulder as they rush past, and pull out my phone to open my internet browser.
I tap the address of my new house into the search bar.
Sales photos and listings for my house fill the screen, going back all the way to the 1990s: unflattering photos of it with old box aerial televisions on entertainment cabinets, Artex ceilings, and flouncy floral curtains.
I scroll through two pages of internet searches before results morph from 18 Northcroft Road into 18 North Court Street, Edinburgh.
I tap the street name alone into the internet search, then click on the news tab. Only the top result is relevant, an article about the street’s annual charity-fundraising party from the local gazette.
Maybe Greg’s comment was about something pedestrian like my house being riddled with damp—which wouldn’t be ideal but would definitely not be as off-putting as anything else my thoughts have conjured.
Just as they might currently be conjuring a nightmare happening somewhere else on the street, in a basement. Yet I know she is real, the video was real.
All I need is to get her on film one more time and take that footage to the police.
My thoughts stumble once more, doubt creeping into my still-bleary-around-the-edges thoughts: What if there is something wrong with my mind, if it’s not solely a question of sleepwalking? What if no matter how real what I saw feels, it wasn’t? There’s a chance I’m not right and there was no woman.
I think of Blue out there now, collar on, filming, breaking the law, and wonder if perhaps I might have put myself in a very vulnerable position.
A criminal caution would destroy my chances of getting the kind of job I want.
I could so easily send myself down a track that is impossible to come back from, all on the basis of a feeling, the memory of something.
—
When I return to the house, Blue is not yet back. Doubt compounds inside me.
I resign myself to the fact he might not be back until the evening. So there is no more I can do until then.
I am about to head up to the spare room office when the doorbell sounds.
I swivel on the bottom step and look at the unknown figure through the glass; there’s no pretending I’m not in, as I imagine they can see me as well as I can see them.
The shadow waves at me through the frosted glass.
I wave back.