The Locked Room (Ruth Galloway #14)(60)

‘She’s probably at work,’ says Ruth. But it’s six o’clock now and Zoe is normally home at half past.

‘Are you staying?’ she says to Nelson. For almost the first time since she’s known him, he looks awkward.

‘I’d like to,’ he says. ‘But it’s difficult with Laura . . .’

‘I understand,’ says Ruth. ‘Well, you’d better get back to her.’

Nelson stands up. ‘Lock your doors,’ he says. ‘And if Zoe comes back, let me know immediately.’

But, although Ruth watches the window all evening, her neighbour does not return.





Chapter 31


At first, she thinks that he’ll be coming back. It’s all a mistake, she thinks. He can’t mean to leave her locked in the dark for ever. And it is dark. She doesn’t have her phone. Where did she leave it? There are blanks in her memory which scare her even more than the locked room.

She tries to pace it out. Eight paces forward, eight paces across. When she reaches a wall, it’s cold and clammy. There’s no window. The door is metal. She heard it clang behind him. She can’t remember entering the room. Did he drug her? She thinks, from the cold and damp, that she must be underground. She imagines earth above her head, fathoms of it. Is she in the basement of a house? Is anyone above her?

What did he say? That he’d be coming back later? Why can’t she remember any more than that?

She sits down on the stone floor. Tries to breathe. In for four, out for eight. ‘My breath is my anchor, my anchor is my breath.’ But her mind keeps skittering away. She can’t keep the rhythm going. Why is she here? What did he mean when he said he would see her later? She gets up again and, in her pacing, barks her shins against metal. What is it? She bends down and touches slippery nylon. There’s something familiar about it, something that takes her back to childhood camping trips. Of course, it’s a sleeping bag. And it’s lying on a camp bed, the old-fashioned metal kind that opens out like a concertina.

For some reason, this discovery makes her more scared than ever. He must have planned this, she thinks. He’s prepared a bed for her.

Does he, in fact, mean to leave her in the dark forever?



When Zoe still isn’t home in the morning, Ruth starts worrying about Derek. She can hear him meowing from the other side of the wall. He hasn’t got a cat flap because Zoe’s worried about him getting lost. Zoe had mentioned giving Ruth a spare key but it never materialised. Is that strange? Ruth wonders. She and Zoe have become friends quickly, by Ruth’s standards, but Ruth hasn’t been inside the next-door house since its new occupant moved in. They’ve shared a bottle of wine; they’ve been for a walk and played tennis on the sand, but they’ve never been inside each other’s houses. Lockdown, of course, is partly to blame but is Zoe actually slightly reluctant to let Ruth into her life?

‘I’m going to try the back door,’ she tells Kate.

‘Can I come?’

Ruth is torn. If there’s something terrible in the house next door, she doesn’t want Kate to see it. But she doesn’t want to leave her daughter alone either.

‘OK,’ she says. ‘But stay with me all the time.’

They walk round the side of the houses. Ruth’s cottage, being in the middle, is the only one without side access. Zoe’s back door, like Ruth’s, is the stable kind with a lower and upper part. Ruth tries the top handle and it opens. She reaches in and opens the lower door.

‘Perhaps it’s an April fool,’ says Kate. Ruth had forgotten that today is the first of April.

Ruth and Kate step inside a kitchen that looks bigger and brighter than Ruth’s, partly because of the new, shiny, white units. Bob put them in, on orders of the agent, when he decided to rent out the house. But Zoe might have added the colourful posters, pot plants and orange kettle and toaster. There’s a key hanging from a peg, helpfully labelled ‘back door’. Ruth pockets it. Derek appears and meows accusingly.

Ruth opens several cupboards before finding cat food, apparently made especially for Maine Coons. Another animal with expensive tastes. She puts a generous portion in an orange bowl marked ‘Derek’.

‘Shall we look for Zoe?’ says Kate.

Ruth hesitates. Zoe’s car isn’t outside but nonetheless there’s still a chance that she’s in the house. And, if she’s there, it’s unlikely to be good news. Nelson recently told her about another case where a woman was found dead on her bed. ‘Verdict was suicide but I’m not so sure.’ Ruth remembers the time she found a man dead behind his desk, the realisation that a human being can turn into an effigy. If there is a corpse upstairs, she does not want to be the one to discover it. But, on the other hand, does she owe it to her neighbour to look?

They go into the sitting room. It’s so strange. Everything is exactly where it is in her house, just the other way around. The weekenders’ place has been so extended and renovated that the resemblance isn’t there any more. This could be Ruth’s cottage, seen through the looking glass. This room, like its twin next door, has wooden floors and exposed beams but there are fewer books here and more ornaments. The sofa and chairs look newer and more comfortable and Zoe’s cushions haven’t been chewed by marauding animals. Ruth sees the chaise longue that she spotted being carried into the house on the day Zoe moved in. You can’t imagine anyone ever sitting on it but there’s no doubt that it does look rather cool. There’s a book, face down, on the coffee table. Atonement by Ian McEwan. The staircase leads directly from the sitting room.