Now, as she approached her desk, the phone rang, its tone signaling an internal line, and she snatched it up eagerly. “Luke?”
But it was his deputy, Lauren. “Clara? Where the fuck is he?”
She felt herself flush. “I don’t know.”
There was a short, surprised silence. “Right. What, you don’t . . . You haven’t seen him this morning?”
“He didn’t come home last night,” she admitted.
Lauren digested this. “Huh.” And then Clara heard her say loudly to whoever was listening nearby, “He didn’t come home last night!” A chorus of male laughter, of leering comments she couldn’t quite catch, though the tone was clear: Naughty Luke. They were joking, she knew, and their laughter was comforting, in a way, signifying their lack of concern. Still, she clutched the receiver tightly until Lauren came back on the line. “Well, not to worry. Fucker’s probably dead in a ditch somewhere,” she said cheerfully. “When you do speak to him, tell him Charlie’s raging—he’s missed the cover meeting now. Later, yeah?” And then she hung up.
Maybe she should go through his contacts list, ring around his friends. But what if he did arrive soon? He’d be mortified she’d made such a fuss. And surely he was bound to turn up sooner or later—people always did, after all.
Suddenly the face of his best friend, Joe McKenzie, flashed into Clara’s mind, and for the first time, her spirits lifted a little. Mac. He’d know what to do. She grabbed her mobile and hurried out into the corridor to call him, feeling immediately comforted when she heard his familiar Glaswegian accent.
“Clara? How’s it going?”
She pictured Mac’s pale, serious face, the small brown eyes that peered distractedly from beneath its mop of black hair.
“Have you seen Luke?” she asked.
“Hang on.” The White Stripes blared in the background while she waited impatiently, imagining him fighting his way through the chaos of his photographic studio before the noise was abruptly killed and Mac came back on the line. “Luke? No. Why? What’s— Haven’t you?”
Quickly she explained, her words spilling out in a rush: Luke’s forgotten mobile, his e-mail, his missed interview.
“Yeah,” Mac said when she’d finished. “That’s odd, right enough. He’d never miss that interview.” He thought for a moment. “I’ll call around everyone. Ask if they’ve seen him. He’s probably been on a bender and overslept—you know what he’s like.”
But his text half an hour later read, No one’s heard from him. I’ll keep trying though, I’m sure he’ll turn up.
She couldn’t shake the feeling that something was very wrong. Despite his colleagues’ laughter, she didn’t really think he’d been with another woman. Even if he had, a one-night stand didn’t take this long, surely. She made herself face the real reason for her anxiety: Luke’s “stalker.”
Putting the word in inverted commas, treating it all as a bit of a joke, was something Luke had done ever since it had begun nearly a year ago. He’d even christened whoever it was “Barry”—a comical, harmless name to prove just how unthreatened he was by it all. “Barry strikes again!” he’d say after yet another vicious Facebook message, or silent phone call, or unwelcome “gift” through the post.
But then things had gotten weirder. First an envelope stuffed with photographs had been pushed through their mail slot. Each one was of Luke and showed him doing the most mundane things—queuing at a café, or walking to the tube, or getting into their car. Whoever had taken them had clearly been following him closely—with a wide-angled lens, Mac had said. It had made Clara’s skin crawl. The photos had been stuffed through their mail slot with arrogant nonchalance, as if to say, This is what I can do. Look how easy it is. But though she’d been desperate to call the police, Luke wouldn’t hear of it. It was as if he was determined to pretend it wasn’t happening, that it was merely an annoyance that would soon go away. And no matter how much she begged, he wouldn’t budge.
And then, three months ago, they’d come home late from a party to find the door to their flat forced open. Clara would never forget the creepy chill she’d felt as they silently walked around their home, knowing some stranger had recently been there—going through their things, touching their belongings. But the odd thing was, everything had been left in perfect order: nothing had been stolen; nothing, as far as she could tell, had been moved. Only a handwritten message on a page torn from Clara’s notepad had been sitting on the kitchen table: I’ll be seeing you, Luke.
At least Luke had been sufficiently rattled to let Clara report that to the police. Who didn’t even turn up until the next day and discovered precisely nothing—the neighbors hadn’t seen anything; no fingerprints had been found—and as nothing had been taken or damaged, within days the so-called “investigation” had quietly fizzled out.
Stranger still, after that, it was as if whoever it was had lost interest. For weeks now there’d been no new incidents, and Luke had been triumphant. “See?” he’d said. “Told you they’d get bored eventually!” But although Clara had tried hard to put it out of her mind, she hadn’t quite been able to forget the menace of that note—or the idea that the culprit was still out there somewhere, just biding his time.
And now Luke had disappeared. What if “Barry” had something to do with it? Even as she allowed the thought to form, she could hear Luke’s laugh, see his eyes roll. “Jesus, Clara, will you stop being so dramatic?” But as the morning progressed, her sense of foreboding grew and when lunchtime came, instead of going to her usual café, she found herself walking back toward the tube.
She reached Hoxton Square half an hour later, and when she caught sight of her squat yellow-bricked building on its farthest corner, she was struck suddenly by the overwhelming certainty that Luke would
