Donovan looked at me as if I’d said something unhinged.
‘You injected me with something,’ I told him. ‘I felt you do it.’
‘I think you may be imagining things, Lucy. It’s probably the bang to your head.’
I thrust out my arm, showing him the puncture mark. ‘Look.’ I pointed. ‘What was it? A sedative?’
‘You think I drugged you? Why would I drug you?’
I didn’t know.
I didn’t want to know.
But I could feel something.
A corrosive heat fizzing under my skin. Contaminating my system. Percolating from cell to cell.
‘You drugged Bethany.’
‘That was a spur of the moment thing. She wasn’t supposed to be here. I’d arranged it so that she wouldn’t make it.’
A spur of the moment thing as opposed to what, exactly? And what else had he arranged?
I was so hot my eyeballs seemed to be sweating. My hair was damp and knotted in lank threads that hung before my eyes. My throat raged with thirst, my skin was itchy and blotchy.
Think.
He’d admitted that he’d drugged Bethany. He’d come to my home with the equipment to be able to do that. So perhaps he’d screwed up. Perhaps he’d used too much of the drug on Bethany that he’d planned to use on me.
‘Tell me,’ I muttered. ‘I want to know what you’ve done to me.’
‘I don’t understand. You want me to make something up, or . . .?’
‘I want to know what is happening!’
He pushed up to his feet, sweeping back the tails of his coat, plunging his hands into his trouser pockets. His expression was rueful, contemplative, but I could sense something darker lurking beneath it. A focused anger rumbling beneath the surface. I was horrified to think he was reining himself in.
‘We’ll get to that, but there’s something I want to show you first.’
As I watched, he removed his right hand from his pocket and held it before my face with his gloved fingers clenched into a fist, as if he was about to perform a close-up magic trick. He monitored me carefully, eyes ever watchful.
‘What is it?’
‘Added motivation.’
‘For what?’
‘For you to follow my instructions and to do exactly what I say when I tell you to do it. No screaming or shouting, remember?’
I waited.
Part of me wondered if he was holding nothing at all. If it was all just a bluff.
But then he opened the bottom half of his fist and – in a glimmer of reflected light – something dangled from his grasp, suspended between his thumb and forefinger.
A set of keys.
Two brass keys. One silver. One a dark, matt metal.
All of them hanging from a simple leather key fob.
One of the brass keys was dulled and oxidized, the other was shiny and new. The silver one gleamed. The dark metal one was thin and flimsy.
I looked closer and something burst inside me, as if a balloon filled with iced crystals had popped inside my stomach.
A tiny Lego figure was attached to the key fob. He was made up of little white and tan plastic components and a blue lightsaber, so that he resembled Luke Skywalker from the Star Wars movies.
Sam had a set of keys exactly like it. He’d been a Star Wars geek since he was a kid. I’d ordered the little Luke Skywalker figurine over the internet as a gift for him last year.
I backed up against the bed frame so hard that it knocked against the wall behind me.
‘That’s right. These are Sam’s keys. The doorbell before? That was a bike courier. For me. Express delivery.’
The floor dropped away from under me, as if I was trapped in a lift where the cables had failed. I looked again at the cupboard under the eaves, picturing Bethany inside, wondering how much worse this could get.
‘Have you done something to Sam? What have you done?’
‘Nothing. Yet.’ He lifted the keys to the light and studied them idly. ‘Sam doesn’t even know these are missing.’
He dropped them on the floor in front of me, near to the ice pack.
I reached out for them instinctively, drawing them inwards, cupping them in my palm as I raised them to my face.
I’m not sure what I was hoping for, exactly. I suppose I was seeking some proof that he was lying to me. But the moment I held them, my heart crumpled and turned to dust.
These were definitely Sam’s keys.
The flimsy metal key was for the padlock on Sam’s locker at work. The old brass key was a spare for John’s place next door. The new brass key fitted our front door downstairs. We’d had the lock renewed after I’d selected and installed new brass door furniture. The shiny silver key was for the doors that opened out from our kitchen into the back garden.
The metal of the silver key was untarnished because I didn’t think Sam had ever used it. It wasn’t as if there was a way into our garden from the rear of the house, so he’d never had any reason to come in that way.
I knew Sam had taken his keys with him this morning because I’d heard him lock the front door when he’d left. He would have zipped them into the front pocket on his backpack, the same way he always did.
‘How did you get these?’
‘Oh, I didn’t,’ he said, offhand. ‘They were taken earlier today by someone who is helping me. Someone who is with Sam right now. That’s the odd thing about his support group, don’t you think? He’ll let just anyone in.’