Page 52 of Then She Vanished

Her hallway felt different.

She flicked her light switch, but the light didn’t come on. Maybe there had been a power cut. Putting Ebony down, she grabbed her personal phone and used the torch.

The cat meowed from the kitchen and she knew Ebony needed feeding. Hurrying through, Gina grabbed a pouch from the cupboard and squeezed it into the cat bowl. She placed it on the floor and Ebony ran over and began eating.

Removing her coat, she placed it over the back of a kitchen chair and opened the fridge. Instinctively, she reached for the kitchen light switch and it came on. Maybe there had been some sort of surge and the hall light had tripped?

She grabbed a bottle of cold water and some leftover pasta salad that she’d made the other day, and began chomping on it as she kicked her shoes off. She’d check the fuse box once she’d eaten.

A door creaked above as a gust of wind bellowed outside.

That didn’t feel right.

Could she have left an upstairs window open? Her hands were shaking.

She blew a breath out slowly. She was letting those messages – and Pete – get to her. She was home and she was safe.

Grabbing her phone, she started looking at the footage from the camera at the front of her house, whizzing through the whole day until she was seeing the live feed again. No one had come to her door except the postie at ten that morning. Ebony had walked across the drive several times, but that was it.

She left her dinner on the table, and followed the breeze upstairs. All she had to do was close the window and chill the hell out.

She stopped on the top step, holding her phone out to light up the landing, and she flicked the bathroom switch.

Nothing seemed out of place.

She pressed the camera app on her phone, showing the view of the main camera outside her front door again. There was still no one there.

The back-garden camera was still offline.

She peered into her bathroom and saw that the window was on the latch, so she pulled it closed. The spare room was as she had left it, spare bed made up and a pile of her clean laundry on the chair under the window. The curtain began to blow as another breeze caught it.

That must be what was causing the breeze to travel through the house.

She shivered. It might be early September, but it was chilly at night.

Hurrying over, she closed it and went back down to open the cupboard under the stairs. She flicked the only switch that had tripped and heard the click of the hall light coming on.

It was nothing. Just her imagination playing her up.

She strode back to the kitchen to grab her food, and then noticed that one of her drawers wasn’t closed.

Opening it fully, she saw that all the tea towels had been ruffled and the random lighter and tin opener that used to live there had been moved. Then she opened the next drawer and saw that some of the knives had been placed in the fork section of the holder.

Running into the living room, she opened the cupboard to her sideboard and noticed that a couple of boxes containing house paperwork were not in the order she kept them in.

Her heart was banging.

She hurried back upstairs and peered out of the spare room window into her back garden.

That was when she saw that her camera had been broken and was lying on the slabs below.

Running into her bedroom, she began checking her drawers and bedside tables before returning to the spare room.

Someone had been in her house.

Everything was only slightly out of place, but she knew someone had been through her things.

Had Pete Bloxwich been in her home looking for the memory stick? Or was it one of the sickos who had been sending her emails. It was obvious now, he had to have climbed in through her spare room window after damaging her camera.

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