I peered at the white plastic shower curtain.
It was suspended from a U-shaped metal rail bolted to the wall.
The curtain was drawn and hanging motionless.
It looked new and spotlessly clean and it bore a chemical scent, as if it was fresh from its packaging.
I stared at it for a moment longer, not breathing, the pain in my head swelling and magnifying, a cluster of bright lights firing behind my eyes.
Turning slowly, I allowed my gaze to flit around the rest of the room.
Empty.
There was nothing else down here.
What had Donovan found that could have occupied him for so long?
Most people, if they’d been viewing this space, would have reached the bottom of the stairs, taken a quick glance around, maybe paced out the dimensions, checked the head height, and that would have sufficed.
And all right, I knew now that he hadn’t been here for a legitimate house viewing. He’d come here for something other than that. But even so, what could have kept him down here for so long?
I supposed it was possible he could have used the time to check his phone, send a message, place a phone call. Maybe it was while he was down here that he’d summoned the courier.
He definitely could have been lingering to unsettle me.
But perhaps those weren’t the only reasons.
He’d said he was an intelligence officer. He was good at following clues. Maybe he’d found something down here that had stirred his curiosity and raised questions in his mind.
He’d already proven to me several times how observant he could be.
‘Listen to me. You’re making a mistake. You need to—’
Donovan had said those words to me just before Sam had attacked him with the stool.
At the time, I’d thought – if I’d thought about it at all – that Sam had come at him while he was distracted, seizing the chance to spring an attack on him.
But what if Sam had attacked him then because he’d wanted to prevent Donovan from telling me something?
What if he’d been afraid of what Donovan was about to say?
Donovan had told me to put down the wine bottle. He’d told me to take my time. To think.
Very slowly, I looked back at the shower curtain again.
The swelling and the pain. The stutters of bright light.
It was just a plain, inexpensive item. It should have been totally innocuous.
Except for two things.
One, I couldn’t think what it was doing down here in the basement, not least because Sam had never mentioned it to me. It hadn’t featured in any of his photographs of the basement.
And two, just looking at it made me want to shrink back into the corner of the room, drop down to the floor and curl back into a ball.