Page 71 of The Man Made of Smoke

My body arched with grief.

And my face a smeared mask of tears.

Twenty

I slept downstairs that night.

Even with all the doors and windows locked and bolted, the room in the attic felt too isolated for safety. The house below offered too much empty space, and I knew my mind would transform every slight creak into the steady approach of a ghost or worse. And if someone did attempt to break in, I wouldn’t hear it from all the way up there.

It made little difference; I found it almost impossible to sleep after receiving that photograph. I drifted a little, but mostly just lay on the settee in the darkness, my skin crawling from the knowledge that someone had been watching me. That I had been in such close proximity to danger without even realizing.

But most of all, because of the moment that had been captured.

The circumstances amplified the sense of violation. It was almost unbearable to me. I had allowed myself to be vulnerable in a way I would never have wanted anyone to witness, and the fact that someone had made my throat tighten up with anxiety. It made me feel helpless and exposed. And the timing of the image seemed deliberate to me.

Mocking me.

The night seemed to go on forever.

But at some point, I became aware that the darkness outside wasstarting to lighten. Ever so gradually, the shadows in the front room began to shake off their cloaks and reveal themselves as objects of furniture. And the blackness of the night eventually resolved into the dismal, dark gray of morning.

I yawned and stretched. Rubbed my face.

Then went through to make coffee.

While the kettle boiled, I clicked open the blinds on the kitchen window. The back garden stretched out behind the house, the grass there ashen in the dull morning light. The hedge down at the far end was solid. Impenetrable. There was no way anyone could take a photograph through the foliage there, which meant that whoever had done it must have been standingright there. Just meters away from me. Invisible in the darkness.

Nobody sees, a voice said in my head.

And nobody—

Someone knocked hard on the front door.

I turned around quickly. For a moment, the door at the end of the corridor seemed to be receding from me, but then I shook my head and it steadied. I walked slowly down, unhooked the chain, and slid the bolt back.

Braced myself and opened it.

Sarah was standing on the doorstep.

“You’re up!” she said. “That’s good. I was worried I was going to have to keep knocking.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I didn’t sleep too well.”

That was probably obvious enough from the state of me, but she didn’t make the usual wisecrack. In fact, she looked tired too, as though her night hadn’t been any more restful than mine.

I frowned. “Are you okay?”

“I’m… okay-ish,” she said. “Can I come in?”

“Of course.”

She stepped in past me.

“So this is going to sound weird,” she said. “But after you left lastnight, I kept thinking about what you told me, and I decided to do a little bit of digging. And I found something really strange.”

“Something strange happened here too.”

“Oh?”

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