Chapter 11

The touchscreen was big – about 2m by 1m – and had a grid on it. 10 by 20 squares. Each square had a number on it. But it was completely random in its layout and the numbers only lasted for 5 seconds before they changed and appeared somewhere else.

‘Let’s have another go’ Combat Woman was stood in a ready-for-action pose with a stopwatch in her hand. I started pressing the numbers, watching as they turned green when I got them right. 18, 41, 131, 131, 9…. It flashed red and a siren, like one on an ambulance, went off. I turned and went off down an escalator – I was in a shopping centre but it looked like one of those indoor swimming pools. Probably called Tropical World with wave machines. And then I saw Underpass Woman on the other escalator. She was going up.

I called to her: ‘Where’s the door?’ and she shouted ‘Lezka knows’.

It was 1:23. Day 11.

Gretchen swung her legs out of bed and sat there, slumped with her head in her hands. She’d give anything to sleep. Absolutely anything. But she kept getting the numbers wrong. She’d never find the door. Unless she asked Lezka but she didn’t know who Lezka was. She only knew who she wasn’t.

‘There’s too many women!’ she announced to the dark bedroom, then got up and made a coffee. She had to start work in 6 hours and 37 minutes. Plenty of time to fathom out what was going on with all the women. They were practically crawling out from under the woodwork and that had to mean something. She had to be pragmatic and logical and with that, Gretchen had a brainwave. She drew a logic puzzle grid.

There were three names involved in this: Lezka, Maja and this Finn who hated her job apparently. And three…Gretchen struggled to think of the right word but then went with…characters: Combat Woman, Underpass Woman and Broken Man’s Friend in the tea-room.

With an equal mixture of stern concentration and excitement, Gretchen put crosses all along Maja’s row, because she knew what Combat Woman and Underpass Woman looked like and they weren’t Maja; and Maja had spoken about Broken Man’s Friend, so they couldn’t be the same person.

Then because Underpass Woman had called out to her from the escalator about Lezka, that meant that she couldn’t be Lezka herself. Another cross.

And, ta da! Using the power of deduction, Underpass Woman had to be Finn.

At this stage, Gretchen realised that this was all rubbish because if she was being truly logical, she would never have included Combat Woman in this, on account of her only being seen in dreams and she’d also forgotten about Broken Man’s Wife or Girlfriend, whom he constantly alluded to in the Notebook. She ripped the paper out and threw it away in complete disgust with her own ineptitude. Didn’t she used to be clever?

Gretchen left a message for her boss that she was calling in sick and decided to go back to the tea-room later that morning. The familiar, yet unfamiliar voice murmured in her head:

‘You do remember that he and the friend only went there on a Wednesday?’

‘How do you know that’

‘The waiter. She told you. Don’t you ever listen?’

A disgruntled silence and then: ‘What day is it today?’

Once Gretchen had come to terms with the fact that she had two days to wait until she had a chance of seeing the Broken Man or his friend, she sat pensively on her sofa wondering how to fill the hours.

In the end though, she did go. She simply had to get out of the house; the air was too thick, she couldn’t breathe. The walk would do her good, she heard the voice say. 

It was 10:09 and the tea-room was only half-full. A coach had just dropped off a group of hikers and, no doubt, they would treat themselves before setting off, but for now, it was relatively peaceful. Gretchen sat in the same corner where Maja said the Broken Man usually sits. She was nursing a cup of coffee, when she saw something out of the corner of her eye and turned towards the counter. She hadn’t noticed that before. A thin, horizontal strip of LED lights that produced a scrolling message. Hi-tech and incongruous for the tea-room but a relic from the 80s at the same time. A list of items from the menu staggered from right to left: scone and jam, scone and cream, Earl Grey tea……and as Gretchen watched, mesmerised…..1, 18, 41, 131, 10, 9, 2. Her jaw gaped. Oh my God, the numbers! It’s real.

A jolt as one of the hikers swung a rucksack off their back and hit the table. Her coffee sloshed over the brim into the saucer and Gretchen’s head snapped up. The LED strip had gone. There was no message about the numbers for her. Of course, there wasn’t. There never had been. 

She got up and went to the counter to pay. It was supposed to be table service but they looked short-staffed and run off their feet.

‘Is Maja not in today? She asked as she put down enough coins to cover the bill. The man snorted and not in a pleasant way.

‘She bloody should be. You a friend of hers?’ Gretchen shook her head.

‘So you don’t know where she’s gone then?’

‘Gone?’

‘Yes. Didn’t turn up for her shift yesterday either. Rowena lives near her and called in but no answer. She’s just disappeared.’