‘Jamie! You saw me. You saw the state I was in. How scared I was. How can you think I just made it all up?’ Rebecca said, fighting back her tears once again.
‘Because that’s all I saw, Rebecca. You. There was no one else out there. You were hallucinating. And I know you believe what you saw was real, but it wasn’t…’
‘Mr and Mrs Dawson.’ Sensing the rising tension between the couple, Officer Blythe held his hand up to silence them both and restore some normality. ‘If it’s okay with you both, I’d like to have a look at this CCTV tape?’
As the room fell silent, Officer Blythe, Jamie, and Rebecca all stared ahead, eyes fixed to the TV screen as another officer picked up the remote control and pressed play.
All of them thinking the same –this security footage was their only real lead. Everything was hanging on what they were about to watch.
Soon they’d have all the answers they needed.
Rebecca was convinced she’d seen someone out there tonight, but the doubts were creeping in.
What if she’d imagined it after all and the tapes proved she’d made the whole thing up?
What if she really was going crazy?
Chapter Twenty
Lurching forward in her seat to get a better look at the television screen, Rebecca cringes as she recognises the figure running across the screen.
It’s her.
Looking vulnerable and exposed, dressed only in her nightdress and dressing gown, as she runs across the lawn. Her back to the camera, the knife gripped tightly in her hand.
It had been stupid of her to try to confront the intruder by herself, alone in the dead of night, while Ella lay helplessly in her cot. She knew that now.
Only she hadn’t been able to hold back the need to protect herself and her child from whoever it was that had been lurking out there.
Waiting now, she’s holding her breath and her heart is pounding again inside her chest as she braces herself to see him.
She’ll prove to Jamie that he’s wrong. That she didn’t imagine any of this.
It was real.
She narrows her eyes, seeking out his silhouette among the dark, grainy footage, but the seconds turn into minutes and there’s no other movement on the screen.
There’s no one there.
No one in the room speaks. No one says a word.
Until Rebecca has no choice but to break the silence herself.
‘I don’t understand why we can’t see him? He should be there? Over by the bushes?’ Shaking her head in confusion, she points to the corner of the screen, to where the man should be standing. ‘Maybe he’s a little further back than the camera reached…’
But she can see the fence and the hedgerow that had been behind him, so it didn’t make any sense. If he was there, the camera would have captured his image.
‘He was there. Right there.’ Rebecca gets up from her chair and taps at the screen, irritated that the footage keeps cutting out, the recording jumping every few seconds, sending a series of thick, jagged black lines across the screen. ‘What’s wrong with the picture? Why does it keep doing that?’
She knows what Jamie and the officer must be thinking.
That she was lying all along.
That this was all inside her head.
‘It’s the signal. It does it all the time. The company said they would send an engineer over to have a look at it…’ Jamie sighed. ‘But it’s only the picture quality, Rebecca. It doesn’t affect the actual recording. We would have seen him by now, surely, if he was there. Grainy or not.’
‘Go back,’ Rebecca insists to the other police officer. ‘Rewind it. It’s skipped too far ahead.’
Seeing Officer Blythe nod his head in permission, the officer rewinds the tape and plays it again.
But not before Rebecca sees his dubious expression, the doubt lingering in his eyes.
He’s just humouring her.
He doesn’t believe her now either.
Furious, Rebecca turned back to the screen, flinching as she sees herself awkwardly stumble forward, her arms stretched out in front of her, before landing in a heap on the damp, dewy grass. She sees the knife slicing through her skin of her hand.
‘I don’t understand. He was right there. Right there!’ Speaking with such conviction, Rebecca jabs her finger angrily against the glass as another thick black line scrawls across the screen. ‘What’s wrong with this bloody thing?’
About to stop the recording, Rebecca holds her breath as she watched the figure come in through the back gate.
It’s Jamie.
And then she sees herself just as Jamie had. Unable to recognise that it’s Jamie, she fights him wildly. Raising the knife and striking out.
Jamie is right. It’s as if she’s not even present, it’s as if she’s in a dream like state.
But she couldn’t have been sleepwalking, could she?
‘I saw him. He was real?’ Rebecca says quietly, clearly doubting herself, as she dragged her gaze away from the TV screen and stared intently at Officer Blythe. Willing him to talk. To say something. Hoping that he would have the answers.
Only it was Jamie who spoke.
‘Just stop, will you, Rebecca! Please!’ Standing up. His voice shaking with emotion, mirroring the angst on his face. ‘This isn’t real. None of this is real. The attack the other day. This intruder tonight.’ Locking his jaw tightly, Jamie’s brow furrowed, just as it always did when he was angry. Which always set Rebecca immediately on edge. ‘When are you going to admit it? You are not well!’
Pausing, Jamie took a deep breath to calm himself. Aware who was present, he tried to regain control of his temper. ‘No one can get in here. No one is watching you! This has got to stop, Rebecca, because next time someone’s going to get really hurt.’
Rebecca saw it then. The look that Jamie exchanged with the officer. Like an unspoken secret code had passed between them.
She knew Blythe agreed with Jamie. That they didn’t believe her.
Instead of proving her innocence and helping them identify the intruder, the security footage was only proving to serve against her.
They’d only played it to her to prove their point.
They thought she was a danger to herself. To Ella.
She couldn’t breathe, her chest constricted as the pressure inside of her rapidly spread out through her entire body.
Hot and dizzy suddenly, she recognised the onset of another panic attack.
Breathe!
‘Mrs Dawson? Are you all right? Shall we call the paramedics back?’ Officer Blythe says, now also on his feet as he rushes to Rebecca’s aid.
Rebecca shakes her head, doubled over, concentrating on taking slow deep breaths, doing her best to fight it. Not now, she tells herself. Not right now, when they already think she’s going mad.
Calm once more, she stands.
‘What if someone’s tampered with the tapes?’ she asks, her eyes pleading with the officer now to believe her, desperate to make him realise that she was telling the truth. ‘It’s the only feasible explanation. It would explain why there are lines on the screen and why the recording keeps jolting about?’
‘We can take the tapes in and have them analysed, Mrs Dawson—’
‘Jesus, Rebecca, please!’ Jamie interrupts Blythe, shaking his head now, unable to hide his frustration. ‘We can’t all keep pandering to these crazy notions of yours. There wasn’t anyone there. When are you going to accept that?’
Rebecca stared at the two men.
‘Someone was here, in our house, Jamie. In our daughter’s nursery. Why would I lie about that?’