--- WTF???
Audrey kept scrolling. She stopped when she saw that, sometime on Friday, Mike had left a comment.
This is Mike, Natalie’s husband. If anyone has been in contact with Natalie since last Monday can they please email me at [email protected]. I’d really appreciate it. Thank you.
Audrey thought that was a truly terrible idea. If the other comments were indicative of the kind of responses Mike was likely to get, she could only imagine the sea of molten shite that was clogging up his inbox right now. And that was if anyone had actually seen his comment, hidden as it was hundreds of comments deep under a week-old post.
She checked Mike’s Instagram account, but there were no posts on it yet. He’d evidently set it up just so he could leave that comment. This also suggested he didn’t have access to Natalie’s account, which explained why there’d been no appeal for information on Instagram, where a hundred thousand people who were borderline obsessed with Natalie would have seen it straightaway and started spreading the news.
You couldn’t walk down the street in this country without someone who knew someone who knew you catching you in the act; as a teenager, Audrey had learned that lesson the hard way. Ireland was the opposite of the Witness Protection Programme. So why hadn’t Natalie been spotted when so many people knew who she was?
Audrey ran a search, first for Natalie’s name and then for #AndBreathe, across all of Instagram. She carefully picked her way through the results, hoping she might stumble upon a blurry picture of Natalie taken from across a street, or maybe even a smiling selfie she’d acquiesced to taking with a fan. There was nothing.
She went back to Mike’s comment on the suitcase photo. There were a number of responses to it, all about as helpful as you’d expect.
OMG is she okay???!?!!
Whoa, shit just got real here …
Oh PLEASE. This is just some stunt. Pathetic!
How do we know that’s really her husband?
Maybe she was trying to get away from HIM – if you’ve seen her, DON’T email him!
Audrey searched for Natalie’s name on Twitter and Facebook too, just to see if she’d stumble across a discussion of any interesting rumours or the like, but found nothing useful.
She sat back, drank her cooling coffee and thought about what she knew.
She had more than enough material to make a story for The Paper, and at least three angles to choose from. Acid-tongued internet trolls force popular Irish Instagrammer into hiding. Followers of Irish Instagrammer speculate about reasons behind her sudden disappearance. Desperate husband of missing Irish Instagrammer pleads for her followers to help him find his wife. She could pick any one of them, tone down the showbiz sensationalism, and it would do the job.
And that’s what she should do, starting right now: the job she’d been assigned. Just that. She knew Joel was waiting impatiently to see the fruits of her labour.
But …
This was the opportunity she’d been waiting for. Wasn’t it? Why she’d stuck it out on the Ents team all this time? Did just doing what had been asked of her qualify as seizing this opportunity with both hands?
Audrey kept thinking about Mike’s email address: [email protected].
The Ents team never interacted with anyone. No emails, no interviews, no statements. They scraped together stories out of preexisting material, already posted in the public domain: pictures, rumours, tweets. Aside from college projects, Audrey had never actually conducted an interview.
But no matter which way she assembled the shape of her Natalie O’Connor story in her head, there was a gaping hole in the middle, an unanswered question that would distract the reader.
It was distracting her, right now.
Why had Mike Kerr waited a week to report his wife missing?
She opened a browser window on her laptop and navigated to the Sea Capital website. Mike Kerr smiled warmly at her from the top of a page entitled MEET OUR TEAM. He looked like he belonged in the pages of a clothing catalogue – a pricey, aspirationally trendy, middle-class one. Underneath a long bio extolling all of his academic and professional accomplishments was a telephone number, complete with extension.
Before Audrey could think too much about it, she plugged the number into her phone and pressed CALL.
It rang once, clicked, then rang two more times. She thought that might suggest the call was getting forwarded to another number. She hoped it wasn’t a reception desk or a voicemail.
A male voice answered.
‘Yeah? Hello?’
‘Ah, hi. Is this, ah … Is this Mike? Mike Kerr?’
‘Yeah, who’s this?’
‘My name’s Audrey. Audrey Coughlan. I’m, ah, writing a piece about Natalie – about the appeal – and I’m wondering if you would—’
‘What do you mean, writing a piece?’ He sounded suspicious now. He’d sounded merely impatient before. ‘Are you a reporter?’
‘Yes,’ she said, while wondering if that was even true. Could she actually call herself a reporter? On this story she could, yeah. That’s why it was important to do it right. She added, ‘With ThePaper.ie,’ then braced herself for abuse or a dial-tone. When neither came, she pushed on. ‘I thought, maybe, if you don’t mind, I could ask you a couple of quick questions? It won’t take l—’
‘That’s fine.’
‘Great.’ She punched the air. ‘Thank you.’
‘I’m at home now. Does that suit?’
‘Now would be great, yeah.’ Audrey was pulling her laptop closer to her, trying to open up a new blank document with just the fingers of her left hand. It was harder than it seemed. ‘I’ll just—’
‘I’ll text you the address.’
Audrey pressed the phone into her ear, thinking she’d misheard. ‘Sorry?’
‘Are you in the city centre? We’re in Sandymount.’
She’d been anticipating that if Mike was willing to answer questions at all, he’d do it over the phone. It hadn’t occurred to her to do it in person.
She didn’t need to do it in person, but …
Natalie O’Connor’s husband was inviting her to their house. The one Audrey had drooled over on Instagram. The one where Natalie had, apparently, been seen last.
‘That’d be perfect,’ she said, slapping down the laptop’s lid. ‘Text me the address and I’ll head there now.’
The room was dark. Andrew was cold. His neck was stiff and hurting, his mouth fuzzy and dry. He could hear a quiet but insistent hissing noise, like a radio stuck between stations.
It was the middle of the night, gone 2 a.m. according to his watch. He’d fallen asleep in an awkward half-sitting position on the couch, long enough ago for the timed heating system to have switched itself off.
The hissing was coming from his laptop, sitting facing him on the coffee table. Its screen was filled with static, the noise the accompanying soundtrack.
Was that what had woken him up?
Andrew gulped down what was left in the can of Coke he’d opened earlier, washing away the fuzzy feeling in his mouth and replacing it with an uncomfortable fizz that stretched all the way down his oesophagus and into his otherwise empty stomach.
Then he pulled the laptop on to his knees.
What had happened to the feed? He clicked the ESC button to exit full-screen mode, shrinking the static to a rectangle in the middle of his desktop, floating amid folders with labels like ‘Accounts 2017’ and ‘Website Images’, and a shortcut to OPERA, the booking system he used for the cottages. A status warning was now flashing red underneath it:
NO SIGNAL DETECTED.
Andrew frowned. He’d never seen it do that before.
He clicked the REWIND button, rubbing at his eyes as the feed skipped backwards.
A minute back there was still only static.
Five minutes back: still, only static.
Andrew used the trackpad to move the starting point to a half-hour ago and clicked PLAY to start the footage from
there.
A view of a bedroom.
Not a total malfunction then. Andrew let his shoulders drop in relief.
He re-entered Full Screen Mode and sat back to watch the footage play out.
There she was: a bulge on the right side of the double bed. Strands of dark hair splayed across a pillow. One bare arm outside the sheets, her wedding band visible on her ring finger.
Exactly as she’d been when he’d last looked, when he’d been looking, watching, after she’d fallen asleep but before he had.
What had happened since?
The image on screen was in greyscale, glowing eerily: night-vision. The camera automatically switched to it whenever the room into which it was pointed went dark. The lens was concealed behind the face of a digital alarm clock that Andrew always set on top of the chest of drawers at the foot of the bed and then crossed his fingers that his guests wouldn’t move it. It captured a view of the bed, one of the bedside tables and a slice of empty wall—
Andrew bolted upright, just catching the laptop before it slid off his knees and on to the floor.
There’s someone there.
On the screen. In the room.
Someone else.
Standing very still on the left-hand side of the bed, looking down at the woman sleeping in it.
A figure, clad all in black.
Something black was even covering their face – a balaclava, Andrew realised. And they were wearing gloves. And holding a—
They have a knife.
Andrew couldn’t fathom what was happening. The longer he looked, the less the scene made sense to him. Was this even real?
Then the attack started and he knew that it must be.
The real thing was so different to the movies. There was no sound, for starters. The hidden camera did have the ability to record audio but because of where it was positioned inside the alarm clock, it was almost completely prevented from doing so. If Andrew turned the volume all the way up and plugged in some headphones, he’d hear something, faintly, but watching it like this on the laptop, the footage was effectively silent.
He didn’t want to hear the audio that went with this.
What was really disconcerting was how the frame didn’t change. There were no cut-aways, no artful camera angles or considered lighting schemes. Nothing left to the imagination. No edits for relief.
And yet Andrew didn’t look away.
He couldn’t. It was as if some kind of paralysis had come over him, pinning his body to the couch, gluing his eyes to the screen.
It went on forever.
The violence left her lying face-down, one bare arm and one bare leg hanging over the edge of the bed. Blood everywhere. Her flesh was a mess of slashes and punctures, a flap of it hanging off her neck like the lapel of an unzipped coat. Skin torn and broken and pushed inwards by the blade. Crimson blooms, spreading, growing, joining up. Splatters on the fabric headboard, a spray of blood across the wall above it.
Bile rushed up into Andrew’s throat and he gagged, spewing a clear, bitter fluid tinged with brown – the Coca-Cola – all over his laptop’s screen, down his clothes, on to his chin.
But there was worse to come because, then, the killer turned to face the camera.
The figure began moving slowly, purposefully, towards the lens, the form growing bigger, an ominous black shadow spreading across the screen like a solar eclipse.
Andrew blinked in confusion. He caught the blur of a black glove, fingers outstretched, reaching—
Then static. And the warning.
NO SIGNAL DETECTED.
This intruder, this killer, had destroyed the camera.
And while Andrew had many questions now – Who was that? How had they got in? Why her? Was she still alive? Were they still here? What should he do? – the most troubling one was this: How had they known the camera was there?
Jennifer spins her phone around on her desk with an index finger and thinks back to the night she first met him.
A Tuesday night in April, it was. Half a year ago now. Sycamore House was unusually busy because the big-name hotel across the road had some kind of medical conference on, and whoever had organised it hadn’t done it very well, and there were overbookings.
Some woman (the front desk manager, excuse you) had called to see if Jennifer had any vacancies and when she said she did, asked if she’d take four or five of their reservations. Jennifer didn’t like the way the woman was talking down to her, as if a purpose-built property filled with identical rooms was somehow more work than a guesthouse converted from an actual house. This woman was able to take any free room and check any guest into it, knowing they’d get what they’d expect. Jennifer had to get a look at their luggage, chat them up a bit to find out where they were from and pore over their reservation for clues to their status before she could decide whether they’d get the big room with no view but a new shower or the small room with traffic noise but a good bed.
In the end, she went with what was good business. She said yes, quoting the front desk manager a rate of one hundred and fifty euro a night, double what they were actually charging.
They’d arrived together, three men and one woman, less than five minutes later, annoyed and frustrated. Jennifer had sympathised with them, agreeing that it was terrible that the hotel had let this happen. She served them tea and coffee and shortbread biscuits that she said were homemade but which she’d actually bought from Aldi, smacking the pack off the countertop in the kitchen to rough them up a bit. While they munched on them, Jennifer had Niall, her bellboy of sorts, take the luggage up to the rooms, turn on the lights and turn up the heating.
Meanwhile, she showed them the endless breakfast menu and gave them maps, and even printed out some tickets the woman needed for her bus back to the airport in three days’ time. As she did, she felt their attitude towards her change. Warm. Like most professionals, they’d greeted her initially with chilly indifference, seeing her not as an equal but as a lowly member of the service industry, only there to meet their every need.
For years, she’d forgiven this behaviour, but nowadays, she tended to hold people’s first impressions against them.
Tomorrow morning, she’d spit in their eggs.
Things had quietened down after that. She’d sent Niall home. She’d fixed herself a cup of coffee and spent some time on the staff rota. She’d swapped her tailored blazer for a cardigan that wrapped around her waist. They had a couple of rooms left but she’d doubted they’d sell them. She was thinking of locking the outer door and going up to bed when he’d walked in.
He wanted a single room, one night. No car. One small piece of luggage: a gym bag. He gave her a mobile number and an address that was practically around the corner. She traced a finger across the raised lettering on his credit card.
MR MICHAEL KERR.
Jennifer had always believed that the idea of love at first sight was absolute horseshit. At thirty-nine, she knew for sure it was. Love was not about knowing in an instant but about knowing someone well, an intimacy that could only grow over time, and to mistake physical attraction for that feeling was silly and immature. But the first time Jennifer had looked into his eyes, she’d realised there was a third option: the promise of love at first sight.
She just knew – she absolutely knew – that this was merely the opening scene of their story.
What she didn’t know was all the twists and turns their story would take. How many times in the weeks and months ahead she’d consider walking away. Leaving it be. Leaving him.
How she’d find herself forced to become the kind of woman she’d never thought she’d be: the other one.
The kind who, inevitably, gives her married man an ultimatum: her or me.
Now, Jennifer picks up her phone and looks for the umpteenth time at the text message Mike sent her less than an hour ago.
Sorry to bother you but I’m having trouble contacting Natalie. If you’ve heard from her, can you let me know? Thanks, M.
/> It’s a group text. Jennifer, obviously, will not respond. That wouldn’t look good for either of them. But she does wonder: why did he send it to her? Did he mean to?
She realises it then: this is his way of letting her know his decision.
It’s not what’s in the message that matters, but the message itself. He’s telling her that his marriage is over without actually typing the words. Mike is a good man, a respectful man. He’s not going to come and tell her that their life together can now begin when his wife’s side of the bed is still warm. He will wait. But in the meantime, he wants her to know that things have changed.
That they will change.
Jennifer smiles, knowing she is about to get everything she wants.
Finally.
When Natalie awoke the next morning she found the bedroom bright with wintry sun; the thin curtains hadn’t even put up a fight. She was reaching for the bedside table before she could even form a conscious thought, the habit of her morning ritual so engrained, but then she had two: she remembered that she’d destroyed her phone the night before and she realised the heating must have gone off overnight. The air in the room was a cold, sharp shock against her bare skin. Natalie retracted her arm and snuggled deep into the cocoon of the duvet, but sleep had left her. She was wide awake, having slept solidly for the first time in weeks.
She wondered how Mike had slept.
Last night.
Some other night, here in this very same bed.
The thought was enough to propel her out of it.
As she descended the stairs, Natalie was taken aback by the absolute silence. The white noise she was so used to back in Dublin – engines, horns, sirens – was entirely absent here. The ground floor of the house was transformed in the daylight, the curtains no longer offering comfort and privacy but looking more like a messy stain that needed removing. When she pulled them back, the space filled with golden light. The neutral palette and bare white walls inside heightened the colours outside – blue sky, grey-brown tree branches, green grass – as if the floor-to-ceiling windows were screens and some amazing filter had artificially enhanced the view.
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