Killer Move

The front door was locked. The interior of the house was also exactly as I’d left it. I ran around calling Stephanie’s name. I checked the ground floor first, then went through the whole of the upper floor. Nobody there, nothing that looked any different from the way it had when I’d left. I came back down, heart thudding. When I reached the living room I turned in a circle before suddenly finding myself in motion again. We had a portable phone, naturally, but because we both have cell phones the handset generally lives on the kitchen counter. I saw that’s where it was now, next to the base. I couldn’t remember whether it had been there when I’d left. It didn’t matter. Whoever had been in the house had evidently been standing right there.

I had a sudden thought and turned to look through the window out at the terrace and swimming pool. Nobody there, either.

Resisting the urge to pick up the phone handset was easy. Would there be fingerprints? Possibly. Would there also be a small black card with the word MODIFIED hidden somewhere in the house? Also possible.

Either would be a distraction from the main point, which was that someone had come into the house with the aim of screwing with my life. It wasn’t David Warner.

So who?

At five o’clock I was still standing at the counter, or rather standing there again. In the meantime I’d searched the house more thoroughly and found nothing. No little black cards, and no missing suitcases or clothes. I hadn’t seriously believed that Steph would just take off, storming down the path like something from act one of a romcom (trials and tribulations lie ahead, constant viewer, though expect reconciliation/redemption before the credits roll). But people do actually do that kind of thing in real life, apparently, and I was very glad not to see any evidence of it in my own home.

I’d thought about calling the cops, of course. I’d thought about it every thirty seconds since hearing the woman’s voice on my phone. I hadn’t done so, because I found it too easy to imagine what the response would be.

Your wife is a grown-up, sir. It’s still within business hours. Plus, you had an argument last night. So, uh, what’s your point?

I also felt that if I was going to talk to the cops for a third time in one day, then I needed to feel on firmer ground. A nonlocatable wife wasn’t enough. An alleged voice on my house phone line wasn’t enough, either. It could have been a wrong number, a mishearing, or I could have made the whole thing up for motivations of my own—which could only be suspicious, strange, and of possible terrorist intent.

Did I have any other evidence? There were the cards I’d received. Had I kept any of them? Of course not. I’d thrown each away as it arrived, dismissing the baby steps of chaos until it was too late.

He didn’t know that, of course—whoever he was, the person behind the cards and behind whatever was happening to me. I could have kept the cards. I also had a laptop in the car with folders—and a hard disk—that had been renamed to the same word. I had a copy of the e-mail sent out in my name, and a photocopy of the delivery notice for the book from Amazon. And, it finally struck me, there might have been something else, too: the booking at Jonny Bo’s for our anniversary dinner. Janine said I’d e-mailed her about it. That wasn’t inconceivable—I often gave her jobs when she was looking even more unoccupied than usual—but I couldn’t actually recall doing so. Someone had evidently been digging around in my digital identity even before this week, in order to place the Amazon order. The same person could have sent Janine the e-mail asking her to make a booking at Bo’s.

So it was possible I should add that to the pile, though doing so would mean accepting the idea that someone had a pretty in-depth knowledge of my habits. Why hadn’t I paid more attention to this at the time? How could I have been so wrapped up in my machinations at The Breakers that I’d let this stuff just flow by?

As I listed these pieces of evidence in my head I was also aware of how trivial they sounded—how easy they were to let roll by when your mind was on higher things. That was probably the whole point. Every one of them was like a tiny little chili that was not only perfectly possible for me to have eaten but seemed too small for someone else to have bothered with.

Except the pictures of Karren, of course.

That was a bigger deal, harder to organize, and came with a heavier payload. They might be deemed worthy of being taken seriously. But . . . I could just have taken those myself, too. My “proof” that I’d been deliberately kept out of the house that evening—in order to set up the pictures—had disappeared the moment Melania told the cops she’d never spoken to me. Claiming otherwise now just made me look like a liar as well as a fantasist.