Page 186 of The Sleepwalker

Nina moves back behind the camera and stops the recording. She presses play and watches the take on her computer, and has just started to wonder if she should adjust the angle of the reflector slightly when she notices a figure in the background, on the steps by the terrace.

She moves over to the window and looks down.

A blonde woman in a shiny padded coat is standing outside in the falling snow.

Nina decides that it must be the girl doing some sort of work experience with Frank, the daughter of one of his business partners.

Whoever she is, she thinks, he’ll have to take care of her himself.

She moves the reflector a few inches and turns back to the camera. If she is going to manage to record three takes and edit the footage before she has to leave for a meeting with Tiger of Sweden, she needs to keep going.

Nina’s thoughts turn back to the woman outside, and she feels a sudden sting of jealousy.

For some stupid reason, she suspects that Frank is still in love with his ex-wife. They are both major shareholders in one of his companies, and regularly eat lunch together.

Nina often consoles herself at night by telling herself that his ex is a wrinkly forty-eight-year-old, whereas she is just thirty-five and has been voted sexiest influencer two years running. She works out every day, and has a perfect body – aside from a few stretch marks on her stomach, a slight case of scoliosis and a couple of bunions.

Nina decides the filming will have to wait until Frank hasseen to his guest, and she turns off the camera and unplugs the cable, then heads back over to the window.

The blonde woman has let herself in, she realises, through the doors by the pool.

Frank clearly doesn’t know she is here.

Nina takes a few steps to one side and sees that he is in the dressing room, still naked after his shower. She watches him dry his hair and then drop the towel to the floor like a spoilt child.

With a sigh, she takes out her phone and sends him a text:

Get dressed. You’ve got a visitor.

He doesn’t reply to her message, too busy sucking his stomach in as he admires himself in the mirror.

Frank is a good-looking man, tanned and in decent shape for his age, though he does have a thick rug of hair on his chest and a stubborn roll of fat around his waist. His penis looks small and red from where she is standing, but in truth it is perfectly normal, with a ring of hypopigmentation from where he was circumcised.

She should talk about that on Instagram, she thinks cynically.

The woman starts making her way through the lounge towards him. She is wearing a pair of rubber boots, and her broad shoulders move jerkily as she walks.

Nina tries calling Frank, but his phone is on the charging pad on the bedside table with the sound turned off.

He has started rubbing lotion into his skin.

The woman has paused in the sunken area in the middle of the lounge, and she lowers a canvas bag to the white leather sofa and takes out an axe.

Nina gasps. She can’t quite process what she has just seen, and she blinks hard, but the woman really is gripping an axe in her right hand.

Adrenaline pumps through her veins as she tries to come up with a plausible explanation. This must be a joke, some sort of weird event, a psychotic client.

Has Frank made himself an enemy? Is he mixed up in something shady? Has he been buying drugs or gambling illegally?

Nina reaches for her phone with shaking hands, hides behind the curtain and dials 112.

‘Emergency, which service do you require?’ a woman with a warm voice answers.

Feeling oddly removed from her words, Nina tells her about the blonde woman with the axe.

The call handler seems completely unfazed by everything she is saying, immediately taking her seriously without questioning any of it.

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