Page 18

The feeling in Reid’s stomach as he looked up at Packington Gardens was more than simple unease. He hadn’t laid eyes on Anna’s flat in more than a year and a half, and to be here, now, made him feel lost between the past and the present.

He could almost, almost believe that if he crossed the road and rang the buzzer he would hear Anna’s voice telling him to come on up. And that she would be warm, and welcoming, and here.

It took him a while to go over and press the button for number fifty-two.

He’d half hoped that he might see a light on up there; enough to free him from worry.

But the fact that there wasn’t a light didn’t mean that Anna wasn’t there.

It was still sunny out on the street, and she could easily be sitting in the reflected light from the houses opposite, laptop out and phone off as she worked away at something. Perhaps at figuring out this murder.

Reid realised that he didn’t even know whose murder it was yet. If Anna wasn’t here, then he was going to want a lot more from Seaton. Though ‘want’ was maybe the wrong word. He didn’t want anything to do with this.

It wasn’t just that he was anxious to avoid Anna. It was also the fact that this was all based around Cambridge. She’d managed to make everything worse by getting involved in the city his younger sister had studied in and then died in. And everything he did seemed to involve painful memories.

He’d decided to call Trinity College to ask them for CCTV around the time Anna had left the May Ball, and it had inevitably reminded him of the tickets Tanya had bought for the same event in her third year; tickets she’d never got to use.

He’d had to contact the college a few weeks after her death, asking them to gift them to a student who couldn’t afford them, and it had been profoundly painful.

Though after the college had got back in touch, sympathetically and with huge gratitude, to tell him the students they’d chosen– two of their access students from a state-school background, there on hefty financial support– it had done something to ease the bleak despair he’d felt.

He’d also called Addenbrooke’s Hospital to check whether Anna might be there, and that had taken him right back to the time Tanya had been admitted with a concussion after a hockey match.

Reid had called the hospital switchboard on that day too, beside himself with worry after a message from his dad.

He’d been pacing one of the Finsbury Park meeting rooms as he’d waited to be put through to the ward, and had felt only slightly relieved that she was conscious and talking.

Reid had still got himself onto the King’s Cross train and taken a taxi to the hospital to see her.

He’d ended up feeling like a spare wheel because Tanya had been surrounded by three hockey teammates who’d all been talking animatedly about the remainder of the match while Tanya laughed, an ice pack on her forehead and a slightly drowsy expression on her face.

This had been after she’d broken up with Matt for good. Not so very long before she’d left them all. So there had been no boyfriend there to look after her.

But Tanya had seemed in good spirits nonetheless.

‘Reid!’ she’d gasped as she saw him, somewhere between delighted and appalled. ‘You did not leave work just to come see me!’

‘Too right I did,’ Reid said. ‘Literally the only good excuse I’ve had to skive this year.’

The hockey mates had made room for him, and he’d ended up joining in their conversation, before the on-call doctor had arrived and politely suggested they might limit their numbers.

The three girls– who had all, Reid thought, seemed like nice, thoughtful people in spite of their unbelievably posh accents– had scurried away, promising to see Tanya later.

Reid had stayed on to talk to the doctor and had insisted that his sister needed more painkillers while they waited for her CT scan.

‘I’m fine!’ Tanya had protested.

‘You can’t pull that on me,’ he’d said quietly to her. ‘Not after the broken arm you pretended not to have.’

‘Not the same!’ Tanya had argued, half sitting up, but then had flinched afterwards, and Reid had grinned in victory.

The exchange had done what he’d hoped and got Tanya some proper painkillers.

She’d grumbled, and then grumbled again that having a scan was ridiculous, but submitted anyway.

They’d established that there was no fracture but that she had some swelling and was going to have to take some days off. It hadn’t gone down well.

In the nineteen months since her death, Reid had often thought back to moments like this. He’d been a good older brother to her just then, hadn’t he? He’d seen her pain, and he’d done something.

But he’d somehow missed the more profound pain in his baby sister: the kind of pain rooted in fear which had driven her, only four or five weeks later, to take a cocktail of medications and suffer heart failure.

He knew the signs must have been there, and he’d rehashed and examined memories trying to find them until he was no longer sure what had been the truth.

It was all this that Anna had managed to stir up today, totally aside from his feelings about their break-up. And the number of pain points he was hitting made him begin to think she’d done all this on purpose to torture him.

At least checking the north London hospitals for Anna’s two identities had been less confronting.

He’d been able to get through it without thinking about Anna or Tanya in any great detail and had established that none of them had an Aria Lauder or an Anna Sousa, and neither did they have any unknowns matching her age or description.

So if her flat was empty, he would need to start looking among these Cambridge students and the work she’d been doing.

Assuming he really, truly was going to try to find her.

With that in mind, and the buzzer of Anna’s flat still unanswered, Reid sent a one-line message to the mobile number Anna’s father had used, asking where Seaton was in case he needed him.

Seaton’s reply was swift and– strangely– almost welcome.

Already on my way to London to see you. There in half an hour. Finsbury Park?

Reid’s mouth twisted in a wry grin. It was somehow very Seaton to get on a train before checking whether Reid actually wanted him to.

He messaged back.

Good idea. How about the Blacklock Inn? Give me an hour.

He looked back up at the buzzer for number fifty-two, and the word ‘SOUSA’ next to it. Nothing was happening. He’d pressed it twice now, for a lengthy time. She wasn’t there– or if she was, she wasn’t replying.

He let out a very long breath, wondering what to do next. How far to go.

He knew that Anna had hidden a spare key, including a key fob for the front door of the flats, under an ornamental stone a little way along the wall from the door.

It was a necessary move for someone who frequently forgot her keys and also came and went at strange times of night.

She’d told him she had to be very careful not to get seen using it or her building management would give her hell.

‘So unfair of them,’ Reid had commented. ‘It’s not like you’re leaving easy access to the entire building out for anyone to use.’ But although the idea of doing this had made him itch, he’d said it with a grin. He’d understood pretty quickly that a lot of Anna’s life was about coping mechanisms.

Reid was confident that the key would still be there. Anna was not someone to have become magically organised over a matter of months.

He peered through the glass entrance door into the empty hallway and then checked over his shoulder before he moved along the wall with his eyes on the ground. It didn’t take him long to find a recognisable sparkly grey stone. It lifted easily, revealing a muddy key with a grey and yellow disc fob.

He smiled to himself. A simple victory for once. And then he went to open the door.

The experience of letting himself into Anna’s flat was as painfully disconcerting as he’d expected. A distinct voice was telling him that he shouldn’t be here. This was her space, which he had no right to be in any more.

Another voice was trying to hurl at him every painful memory of that last terrible argument they’d had here: the scathing way she’d spoken to him after he’d begged her to just stop, and let him mourn Tanya properly at last.

‘You’re the one who asked me to look into this.’

‘And now I’m asking you to stop looking,’ he’d snapped back. ‘Can’t you just respect my opinion as a detective and accept that you don’t know more than I do about this?’

‘Oh, I’m so sorry for not immediately bowing to your superior intellect.’

He found himself pausing in the doorway, fists clenched as though he was readying himself to fight her again, his eyes very firmly closed. He could picture the rage rising up in him. What he’d felt as he’d spat his response at her.

‘Jesus. You don’t care about anyone, do you? You’re just a cold, career-hungry bitch.’

He swore that he’d see her there when he opened his eyes. The absolute implacability of her expression. The total lack of empathy as he drowned in grief.

But instead, he saw a hallway full of mess.

The few square feet of floor around the door was full of shoes, reusable shopping bags with unknown contents, empty cardboard boxes, letters that had clearly never been opened and assorted sports gear.

There were also a fair few coats that for some reason weren’t on the coat rack he’d painstakingly installed for her but were instead flung onto the floor with their sleeves inside out.

He felt ambushed. Wrongfooted by a rush of strange, infuriated affection. It was disarming to be reminded of the chaotic, flawed woman he’d fallen for instead of the hard, unassailable figure he’d broken up with.

He couldn’t quite put his finger on why it made him feel so uncomfortable. Was it because her erratic personality had appealed to him in some strange way? Or was it that he’d so thoroughly pushed that side of her from his mind that he was only now facing the full picture?

He’d asked her once if she’d ever had an ADHD assessment.

It had seemed bizarre that she hadn’t mentioned it, considering that she was probably the most categorically ADHD person he’d ever met.

From her scatty brain to her lack of awareness of time; from her fits of energetic talking and activity to her sudden quiet as she became hyper-focused on something; from her profound inability to sit still without fidgeting combined with the way she would forget entirely what she’d just been doing and wander off– all bundled up with the incredibly fast and unique connections she made.

‘Oh, I was convinced for, like, a year that I was ADHD when I was seventeen,’ she’d told him. ‘But my mom told me not to be stupid, and then when I asked my schoolteacher he said probably not.’

Reid blinked. ‘Did he… actually assess you? Or put you forward for a proper assessment?’

‘Well, no,’ Anna had said. ‘But he pointed out that I was probably overinterpreting things that everyone was talking about a lot at the time, and he had a point. Neurodiversity had become this big hot topic. He said we’re all disorganised or fidgety or a bit random sometimes, but that didn’t mean it needed a label.

He said he’d taught ADHD kids, and they threw chairs across the room and picked fights. ’

‘Er,’ Reid had said, thinking of one of the boys in his class.

‘That sounds a bit of an exaggeration. One of the ADHD boys I knew was incredibly people-pleasing. He sat and doodled and talked nineteen to the dozen but missed half of what we were supposed to be doing and could never, ever find his homework.’

Anna had laughed, and shrugged. ‘Well, if I am , then it doesn’t matter now, I guess.’

Except , Reid had thought, that it might help people not to blame you for things that you can’t help. The wandering off. The failure to remember life events. The sudden hyper-focus that makes you forget that other things matter.

A small voice in his head raised a counterthought now: But you blamed her anyway…

And he silenced it, brutally. What he had done– what he had judged her for– it hadn’t been the same. He’d accepted all her scattiness and eccentricity. He’d loved it, truth be told. It had been the cold, hard, selfish actions at the end he’d been so hurt by.

Just find her , he thought, exasperated with himself as he realised he was standing still again. Everything else can wait.

It was hard to know exactly what he was looking for in the flat.

The frazzled pot plants were no guarantee of how long she’d been gone.

Nor was the fact that there seemed to be very little food in the fridge, as she’d always been erratic about shopping, and he couldn’t read much into the dates on the unopened letters.

There was no sign of her laptop, he noted. It hadn’t been in Cambridge, either. Seaton had one of her phones, but the other one didn’t seem to be here.

So laptop, phone and Anna were all missing. A point he tried to note to himself while ignoring a fizz of real worry.

He stood looking around the kitchen, trying to see more. Anna’s usual workstation at the kitchen table held only newspapers (the latest from a week ago), more unopened letters and several plates with crumbs on. He could see no backpack of the kind she usually carried the computer in.

He looked at the chaos of open cupboards and vividly remembered her joking, ‘Don’t judge me for the open cupboard doors. You’ll be able to follow them if I ever get kidnapped…’

It had been a throwaway remark that had turned into a running joke, because Anna hardly ever closed a cupboard once she’d opened it. Somehow she was always on to the next thing, too impatient or too distracted to take the millisecond to shut any door behind her.

But now, here he was, living the reality of her disappearing. And the trail led nowhere.