Free I Found You by Lisa Jewell

her mind again. Her blood feels cold and then hot. Gangsters. Criminals. These things had not crossed her mind in the dark of night. ‘You know,’ she says, ‘it may be nothing, but last night I noticed, in the new building that has been built next to our apartments, a light. Just one light. In just one window. With no one living there. It made me think . . .’
    She pauses. What did it make her think? She has no idea. It made her feel creepy. That was all. Creepy and cold.
    ‘I don’t know,’ she continues. ‘It seemed strange.’
    ‘Right,’ says Beverly, hurtling straight past her comments and on to the next thing. ‘Are you there now? Can I come now? And collect the computer?’
    ‘Well. Yes. Of course. But you know, I don’t have his password.’
    ‘We can get the guys on to that. That’s not a problem.’
    ‘Well, then, fine. And maybe, when you come, we can go to the building site? We can look at that flat? With the light?’
    ‘Not sure there’ll be time for that. But I’ll see what I can do.’
     
    Beverly arrives with a young man wearing plain clothes and big glasses, carrying a filing box. He spends an inordinate amount of time in the spare bedroom where the computer lives and Lily sits anxiously at the edge of the sofa, cupping her elbows and checkingthe clock on the wall. ‘What is he doing in there?’ she asks Beverly.
    ‘Oh, you know, just procedure. We can’t just walk in here and unplug it.’
    Lily nods. A few more minutes pass. She hears drawers being opened and closed. Then the man appears at the door and looks at Lily. ‘Do you have a key?’ he says, ‘For the bottom drawer of the cabinet?’
    ‘No,’ she says. ‘I have been looking for it for two days. I think it must be on his key ring.’ She shrugs.
    ‘Do you mind if I drill it out? See if there’s anything in there? Memory cards, that sort of thing?’
    Lily stiffens. She thinks of Carl walking into the flat, seeing his brand-new filing cabinet from Ikea with a dirty big hole in it, his personal effects plundered and rifled. But then she thinks: Carl has lied to her. She does not even know what his real name is. He has kept a locked drawer in their shared home. Taken the key to work with him. There must be a reason for that.
    ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Fine. But please don’t make a mess.’
    The young man smiles and heads back into the spare room. Ten seconds later she hears the high-pitched wail of wood being ground away. A moment after that the young man appears again, holding the card box.
    ‘Well,’ he says, lightly, as though what is happening here is completely normal, ‘all done here. Have you finished . . .?’ He looks down at the sheet of paperhe gave her earlier, the one with personal questions on it: memorable dates, pets’ names, parents’ names, nicknames, significant place names.
    ‘Yes.’ She slides it across the table to him and he adds it to the contents of the box.
    ‘Awesome,’ he says. ‘OK.’ He says this to Beverly, who gets slowly to her feet.
    They go together to the door and Beverly says, ‘We’ll be in touch.’
    There is no mention of the empty apartment with the flickering light.
    Lily stands still for a while after they’ve gone. She looks about the flat, as she’s done a hundred times since Carl didn’t come home on Tuesday night. At first all she’d seen was Carl’s absence. Now she sees his deceit. She walks slowly to the spare bedroom and kneels down to examine the contents of the locked drawer.

Eleven
     
    ‘Oh,’ says Alice, ‘you’re back.’
    It’s nearly ten o’clock at night and he’s standing in the doorway in Barry’s jacket, backlit by a cloud of sodium glare, looking like the weariest person in the world. He’s been gone for thirty-six hours.
    ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘If that’s all right.’
    ‘Well, it’ll have to be really, won’t it? Where’ve you been?’ she says.
    ‘On the beach.’
    ‘All this time?’
    ‘Yeah, well, most of it. I slept