Chapter 29 Any One of These Houses
Any One of These Houses
I walk back home fast, the streets empty and still in the predawn darkness. I check behind myself as I go, my heart racing at the shadows just beyond the pools of the streetlights. My mood is now so low and my anxiety so high, it’s all I can do not to break into a run.
The same thoughts circle and knot themselves back through my mind. What’s happening now is what has happened all my life. Things get out of my control. I lose a baby, two, three, I lose a husband, a job—it all slips from me the harder I grasp it. But if I let go, it goes even quicker.
People say, What is for you will find you. But that isn’t true. It won’t, and if you wait for the world to do its thing, you’ll end up alone a lot sooner than I did.
What is for you will not find you. No one will find you. No one is coming to find you.
There is a woman in a basement. I saw her, I filmed her, she spoke to me. And the police won’t help her, or me. Now that I know about Anna Derwent, I could be in as much danger as she is.
My fury twists and burns inside me, because I know this scenario would be the same if it were me trapped down there, too.
No one would even look for me. No one would even know to look; I don’t even have a mother. Maybe Pam across the road would look, eventually?
I need to find out where that room is. I just need an address to give them so that they will take this seriously.
I turn the corner onto my street, nearly home, nearly safe. Suddenly, so close to home, I am scared. The street is silent.
And I realize how much of a target I have made myself.
I do not want to end up in that basement room.
It occurs to me that I could just post the video of Anna onto the group, or put it on TikTok. If it is in the public domain, and has enough people behind it, we could force the police to do something.
I’d be sued, or worse, I’m guessing, but they’d have to do something for Anna. The end would justify the means.
People might think it was a prank, or AI—but they would have to check, surely. Wouldn’t they?
And then I think, If Simon knows she’s found a way to ask for help, what will he do to her?
A fox shrieks a street away, and I jump at the sound. There are no revelers this late in the residential sections of North London; it is only me.
The windows of the houses stretch out ahead, dark, unseeing eyes.
If I post the video, Simon will kill her and destroy the evidence in the basement. I’ve seen enough true-crime shows to know how these things work. In the time it would take to find her, she might be moved, or gotten rid of.
If I were him, I’d make sure my basement looked nothing like the one on that video.
I need a location to give to the police.
It has to be one of these basements. She could be in any one of them, right now. They flash past me at ankle height as I stride along.
Several houses ahead of me a front door opens, a fizzle of adrenaline zipping through me as the flash of reflected streetlight on its glass momentarily blinds me.
It’s well after 3 a.m. People should be where they need to be by now.
It’s a man, bundled up in a black coat, a baseball cap on, hefting a large holdall.
A wave of lightheadedness rolls up through me. There is no body in the bag, I tell myself.
Everything inside me tightens, but I do not slow my walk, anger and fear making me far too brave.
The tension balled tight inside me bursts into flame when the figure at the gate turns and I see his face.
It is the blond man, and he is coming out of Number 15.
I don’t know why, but I know I need to do something. And suddenly I am certain that nothing can happen to me out here on the open street, where I know for a fact that voices at night funnel up and echo into every bedroom. Whatever happens here now will be heard in all of these houses.
I speed up my walk and head straight for him.
He looks up, surprised to see me approaching him with clear intent.
“Hello,” I call out pointedly. “Sorry, hello there. You just came out of Number Fifteen there, yes?”
The man stops, turns, gives a wan smile that barely covers his annoyance. But I don’t care.
“Excuse me?” I say, again, louder. “Sir, you just came out of Number Fifteen, yes?”
He looks at me as if I’m mad. “Er, yeah,” he answers, his accent hard to place, Dutch or Scandinavian.
I smile warmly. “Great. It’s Chris, isn’t it? Marina’s husband?” I know he’s not Chris, of course, but I want to hear him say that, out loud.
His face tightens almost imperceptibly. He stalls for a moment, then sees that he’s trapped.
“No. No, I’m not Chris.”
I feign surprise. “Oh, I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize anyone else lived with Marina and Chris.”
“Ah, okay, night, then,” he mutters elusively. He goes to move away, but I am not going to let him do that.
“So you do live with them?” I ask loudly.
The man turns and frowns at me. “I’m sorry, what?”
“I asked you if you lived with Chris and Marina,” I reiterate.
“No, I don’t. I’m just a friend.”
“What’s your name?”
“What? Why?” he blurts, incredulous, before reining himself in. “I’m Eric. Why are you asking me?” he adds, genuinely confused.
It’s a good question.
“I have a package for Marina. If I give it to you, then I’d need to let them know who took it,” I fudge, with confidence.
The corners of his mouth twitch slightly, as it dawns on him that I’m unhinged but in a harmless way.
“Ah, I see. Well, it’s a bit late now for packages? Maybe she can collect it tomorrow?”
“Maybe she can, Eric,” I agree, with a pleasant wave. “Frankie, Number Eighteen. You have a good night, yeah?”
As I walk away, I feel his eyes bore into me until I disappear inside my house.
—
As soon as I get inside the house, I sit down in the hallway and plug in my laptop and look up Number 15 on Zoopla.
According to the listing, Chris and Marina bought it five years ago. I scroll through the old sales photos until I get to shots of the house.
There is a bright, airy kitchen that leads out to a garden rockery.
I stare at the photos on my screen, the living room around me dark.
There is no basement.
I remind myself that it was never going to be that easy.
Eric must, of course, live somewhere else.
He could be holding Anna at his house.
But what about Greg or Richard or Malcolm? Or Matt. What do I really know about him?
I grab a pad from the hall table and jot down each of their house numbers, then painstakingly search the internet, one by one, for old sales shots of each house’s basement.
The only basement I cannot find is Richard’s, as the sales agent seems to have, annoyingly, only listed stylized shots of the primary rooms.
And then I remember Matt’s second home—but when I go to look it up, I realize I have no idea what number it is.
I bring up the cat camera website on my phone and sign in. I tap on the footage of Anna. I need to track back through Blue’s journey again and try to work out what street she is on, at least.
I watch it through again, scrawling anything of note onto the pad. I watch and rewatch until my eyes blur. And when I check the time, it is almost 5 a.m.
I admit defeat. I need more to go on than this.
In the kitchen, I notice Blue is meowing for food.
I grab his food container and he darts past me to his bowl, while I set about refilling it with his breakfast.
As he eats, I look out at the pre-dawn garden, the glow of the backs of houses, people waking up already, living their lives.
I think of Anna somewhere out there watching her window, her door, praying for the cavalry to arrive, knowing in her heart that it might not.
It is only when I shift in the moonlit kitchen that it catches the light—my keys illuminated in the moon’s silver glow—and the idea forms. They told me not to film, but they didn’t say anything about tracking Blue.
Dangling from my keychain, the thin metallic disc winks at me, once, twice: the AirTag on my bunch of keys, wedged tight in its carabiner, stares back at me, offers itself up as the answer to everything.
Buoyed, I double-check all the doors, set the alarm, and haul myself and Blue upstairs, flop onto my bed, pop half a pill, and root Blue’s vandalized collar out of the bin bag still in my room.
I attach the carabiner to it and fasten it around Blue’s neck.
We lie there for a moment—and without meaning to I fall asleep in my clothes.
We’ll need all the rest we can get before the day starts.