Chapter Thirty-eight

Katie forced herself not to stare at Michael Hyde as he drove toward her.

Instead, she looked down at the steering wheel and rubbed her jaw, trying to give the impression that she was lost in thought and not paying attention to her surroundings. She didn't want him to know she'd seen him.

He was driving slowly, keeping pace with the steady flow of traffic. But as he drew level, she could tell he was staring out the window, as though daring her to look back at him. It took all her strength to keep looking down. But she caught a glimpse of him turned in her direction, and even out of the corner of her eye, she could tell there was something wrong with his face. One of his eyes seemed smaller and blacker than the other.

The skin on the side of her cheek began crawling.

She counted slowly to five before risking looking up.

Hyde had kept driving. Ahead of her, she saw his rusted red car amid the other traffic and watched as it disappeared around a bend in the high street.

She sat there with her heart beating hard and the quiet of the car ringing in her ears. Her skin was still itching. Suddenly, without realizing she was doing it, she found herself rubbing furiously at her cheek, as though attempting to scrub away some kind of filth his gaze had left.

Oh God.

It had been Hyde outside her daughter's day care. It had to have been.

His face at her kitchen window last night.

He who had followed her—and still was.

As she continued staring at the road ahead, she started to shiver. She had been trying to work out what connection there might be between Chris's disappearance and what was happening to her family, and surely she had just found it. The realization sent a cold spread of fear through her. Sam already thought she was overreacting. If she tried to explain that she thought Michael Hyde was stalking their family, he was only going to be even more certain she was seeing ghosts and jumping at shadows.

You're always scared that something terrible is going to happen.

But she wasn't imagining any of this. Chris had gone missing. Her family was in danger. And somehow Michael Hyde was involved in it all.

She sat there feeling helpless.

Then:

So… what are you going to do, Katie?

How are you going to deal with this?

She had no idea. But she knew she had to do something to keep her family safe—that if she just waited and hoped everything would be all right then it might not be. Because that was how the world worked. Things came out of nowhere and changed everything and right now felt like a moment in time she would wish she could come back to and do things differently.

What to do?

Something.

And so, without really thinking about it, Katie started the engine.

She parked up by the corner of Michael Hyde's street.

What exactly are you doing here, Katie?

She had no answer to the question because she hadn't thought that far ahead. What she had done was turn around outside her brother's apartment and then drive the quickest route here possible, breaking the speed limit along the way whenever it had been safe to do so. So the one thing she was certain of was there was no way Hyde could have beaten her back here.

Before she could talk herself out of it, she got out of the car. The slam of the door echoed around the empty street. There was an odd cast to the light, and a chill breeze in the air, and she pulled her jacket around her as she walked toward the end of Hyde's street and turned the corner.

The whole area was run-down, but this street was particularly dilapidated. Many of the properties were boarded up, while the few that appeared still occupied had overgrown gardens strewn with litter and children's toys blanched pale by the sun. Hyde's house was about halfway down. When she reached it, she saw the front door was flimsy and that old graffiti stained the brickwork in places. The mortar had crumbled away beneath the gray windows, creating the illusion of tears.

A narrow driveway led along the side of the house. After one last look around, she headed down it. Round the back, she found an old door, the white paint peeling off the wood in jagged vertical strips.

Are you really going to do this, Katie?

Yes. She had to find out what was happening.

With her heart beating hard, she reached out and tried the door handle. It turned easily, and the door opened inward with a gentle creak. She stepped quickly inside and then stood very still for a moment, listening.

Silence.

She was in a narrow kitchen, dim light filtering in through a single small window beside her. Her gaze moved slowly over the old cabinets on the wall, some of them missing their doors, revealing rows of cans. The counter below was cluttered with dirty plates and empty bottles. The only clear spaces were the stove, crusted with burned, blackened food, and the sink, where more plates stuck up like pale fins from the gray water. A couple of flies were buzzing mindlessly round.

Her shoes squeaked on the greasy tiles as she moved over to the doorway at the far end of the kitchen. It opened onto a gloomy hallway. Stairs led up to the right, while ahead of her was a living room of sorts, dust hanging in the air. There was a couch and armchair that appeared decades old, faded floral curtains, and a portable television resting on a wooden packing crate. Breathing in, she could smell a sweet and sickly odor, like the stink of old wine coming out of a drunk man's skin.

Hurry up, Katie.

Whatever you're looking for, find it quickly.

She moved back into the hallway and headed quietly up the steep, narrow stairs. There were three doors on the landing up here. One was open onto a small, grimy bathroom. Another was partially ajar, and through the gap she could see the base of a bed. The sweet smell was stronger there, and bad enough now to make her cover her mouth and take a step back. She turned to the third door instead. It was covered with small, colorful stickers, the kind that come free with comics.

A child's bedroom, perhaps.

Hyde didn't have children. But looking more closely, she realized the stickers were very old and had probably been on the door for years.

She turned the handle and slowly pushed the door open.

Pitch-black inside. Her hand moved over the wall to her left, searching for a light switch, eventually finding one lower down than felt natural. When she pressed it, the room in front of her burst suddenly into life.

Katie gasped.

For a second, she didn't understand exactly what she was looking at, only that her mind had immediately registered that whatever she was seeing was profoundly wrong. Against the wall to her left, there was a single bed, with a stained pillow at one end and a tangle of covers scrunched-up at the other. Tucked in between the base of that and the far wall was a small desk, with a printer on the floor beneath it and a laptop on the surface, closed but humming quietly.

But it was the wall directly opposite that captured her attention.

She stepped across, the floorboards creaking as she approached it and then tried to make sense of what she was seeing. Hyde had tacked perhaps thirty photographs to the plaster in neat rows and columns. To the right of those, he had taped up what appeared to be notes and crude drawings done with felt-tip pens.

And when Katie looked at the photographs more closely, something tilted inside her. So much so that it felt like the whole house was in danger of toppling over. She had thought that Hyde was stalking her brother, but there was no sign of him on the wall here at all.

But she and Sam were here.

And most of all, Siena was.

Her gaze moved over the photos, her heart beating harder and a sick feeling rising inside her. They all appeared to have been taken covertly, most of them from a distance. Here were the three of them in a supermarket. Siena was standing between her and Sam, looking back over her shoulder with a curious expression on her face as she made eye contact with the camera.

Their kitchen window. Siena was sitting in her high chair wearing a bib stained with juice, while Katie held a spoon in front of her mouth.

Sam sitting on a bench in the park with his headphones on and his eyes closed, Siena playing in the sandpit in front of him.

Siena's bedroom window at night, her daughter a black shape behind the glass peering down toward the garden. Katie remembered the pale, misshapen face she'd seen in the red car driving past her at her brother's apartment.

Moon came to say hello again.

She tried to swallow, but her throat failed her. And as she looked at the pictures and notes tacked up beside the photographs, the sick feeling inside her intensified. They were basic and badly drawn, but she could tell what she was seeing. Lists of dates and times—who was where and when. School start and end times. Sam's gigs. There were maps of the streets around their house and the day care and the local places they visited, all of them dotted with arrows and circles.

Parking spots, she realized. One-way systems. Cameras.

Escape routes.

She stared helplessly at the whole awful lot of it.

A soft creak outside the room.

Katie froze. Her gaze moved from the display on the wall to the single bed against the wall—and then something fell away inside her. Because it had clearly been slept in recently. And yet there was another bedroom up here. The one with the door ajar, the air outside it stinking of old, sour wine.

Faltering footsteps now, out on the landing.

"Michael?"

A man's voice.

"Is that you?"

Cold panic washed through her. She looked quickly around the room, but there was nowhere obvious to hide. The best she could do was step quickly over behind the open door and press her back to the wall there. A second later, a figure moved into the doorway. The stench coming off him was terrible.

She held herself still. The voice had sounded tentative and wavering. An old man—Hyde's father, perhaps. She braced herself for him to come all the way into the room, but he remained on the threshold, just inches away from her. Her heart was beating so hard now that it seemed impossible he couldn't hear it.

And yet he just stood there, breathing shallowly.

The photographs and drawings were right there, in full view on the wall in front of him. He must have been able to see the family his son was stalking—her family—and the plans he had been making. But as Katie listened to the old man breathing beside her, she realized he didn't seem shocked or appalled.

He didn't even seem surprised.

A moment later, he turned off the light.

Then he closed the door, and the room was pitch-black. Katie heard those same faltering footsteps moving slowly away on the landing. A few seconds later, she was alone again, standing in the darkness, the silence broken only by the quiet hum of the laptop and the thudding of her heart.

And then by a sudden blast of music.

She looked around the darkness frantically, not understanding what was happening—and then panic flared as the volume of the music grew even louder, and she felt the vibrations against her chest from her jacket pocket.

Her phone was ringing.