Killing Kate. Alex Lake

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       7

      She was back. Phil knew this because he had been waiting for this day to come the entire time she had been gone, had been thinking about her incessantly every minute of every day, had been hard-pressed not to call her on the hour, every hour, contenting himself with a few – well, maybe a few more than a few – phone calls each evening.

      None of which she answered, until, desperate, he had tracked her down by calling nearly every hotel in Kalkan, a place which was, it seemed, littered with hotels. It wasn’t very big, looking at it on Google Earth – which he had done at least three or four times every day in the stupid hope that he might see her, even though he was fully aware that Google Earth was not a live feed from a satellite and that the images he was looking at were months or years old – but, small size notwithstanding, there were a lot of hotels.

      And all of them full of men looking for someone to have a summer fling with, perhaps a pretty woman in her mid-to-late twenties who’d recently broken up with her boyfriend and was emotional and vulnerable, and would easily fall for their cheesy lines.

      Only once in the entire week had he heard her voice and it had been such a relief to know she was alive, to be in touch with her again, to be connected to her in however paltry a form, at least until she had hung up on him and then it had all been even worse than before.

      Yes, it had been a long week, but now she was back. She. Was. Back. He’d tracked her flight on the Internet, watched the tiny plane crawl across the screen from Dalaman airport to Manchester airport, then, when it landed, gone online and checked the arrivals board just to be sure.

      Of course, he was only sure that the plane had landed, not that she was on it. So, unable to sleep, he got on his bike – a cyclo-cross, designed to work both on and off-road, that he had bought second hand a few months back – and rode to her house – their house – at midnight (when he was pretty sure she’d be through Customs and back home). He used his bike as often as possible these days; riding it cleared his mind. He tended to stay off the roads, preferring the paths and snickets and alleys that connected most parts of the town, routes that most people didn’t even know existed, leaving them quiet and unused, which was perfect for the solitude he craved.

      As a cloud obscured the moon, he turned into the street their house was on, and there it was.

      Her car. Parked outside the house. Proof, absolute proof, of her return.

      And upstairs, a light on. Her – their – bedroom was at the front of the house. The house he had offered to move out of, even though she wanted to break up, an offer he now regretted. He’d hoped it would show her how unconcerned he was, how magnanimous, but all it meant in the end was that he was squatting at a friend’s flat.

      He stared up at the windows and, as he watched, her silhouette appeared behind the blinds that they had installed together.

      Even though it was only a silhouette, the sight of her shocked him, and he gasped. She was safe. She was home. She was back.

      And now he was going to fix this.

      He was going to fix this, whatever it took.