The Stone Wife

Where then?

The king-size bed stood against a wall unit with lighting and shelving across the centre and matching bedside cabinets. Nathan slept on the side closest to the wardrobe. Some coins were stacked on his cabinet top, probably the loose change he had emptied from his pocket. A leather wallet, card-case and gold Omega wristwatch were with them. There was a digital alarm clock. But no keys. Had he grabbed them before rushing from the room?

She tugged open the cabinet drawer. Only paper tissues, packs of condoms, sleeping pills and baby oil. She ran around the bed and checked Lee’s drawer, just in case. Without result.

More in frustration than necessity, she swept a bunch of paperback thrillers off the shelf above. Nothing was behind them.

Increasingly frantic, she cast around, taking in every surface in the room. If the keys were still here, they certainly weren’t in sight.

She scooted through to the shower room and checked the shelf where the toothbrushes were. And the vanity unit. The only items were those you would expect to find.

Hand tugging distractedly at her hair, she returned to the bedroom. The big bed was in disarray, the duvet doubled over where the sleepers had roused themselves when the alarm started. She flung it back, with no result. Tossed the pillows aside. He wouldn’t leave the bloody keys on the bed, she chided herself. This is desperation.

What does a man do with a set of keys he knows have been removed once from his room? He makes sure no intruder can sneak in and steal them a second time. He can’t rule out the possibility that his sleeping partner assisted in the first theft. He places them within reach, his side of the bed.

Under the mattress?

Ingeborg lifted the mattress, slid her hand in the space above the box spring and found nothing. She dropped to her knees, put her head to the carpet and checked under the bed.

I made a big mistake, she thought. I should have asked Lee.

Then her eye was caught by the glint of something metal. Large mattresses are fitted with handles. This one, tight to the side, was made of padded fabric at least an inch in width. Wedged behind it, so close to where Nathan slept that he could have reached down and checked them at intervals through the night, were the goddamn keys.

Come on!

She tugged them free and ran out of the room, back to the locked door. She found the right one, inserted it and turned the lock. After pocketing the ring of keys, she entered Nathan’s secret bathroom and slammed the door behind her.

Everything was still in place. She knew already what she needed to check. She’d been over and over it in her mind.

The shower unit.

Guns wouldn’t be hidden under the shower floor. If she was right, this was much more ambitious. She stepped up to the curved glass doors and tried them. They glided smoothly aside. The fittings appeared genuine enough: power selector, temperature control, riser rail, flexible hose, soap dish and drain. The two walls forming the corner were tiled in the same duck-egg blue as the rest of the room.

‘All right, you bugger,’ Ingeborg said aloud, ‘let’s see if I’m right.’

She stepped back, closed the doors and put her weight against the metal framework. It didn’t shift a centimetre. With a sharp, impatient sigh, she moved to her right to try from the other angle. The shower was robust and entirely unyielding.

But so was Ingeborg.

She tried pulling instead of pushing, still without success.

‘There’s got to be a way,’ she said. ‘Got to be.’

Outside, the house alarm stopped its nee-na. She didn’t have long now.

She checked along the floor and up the sides for a release switch. Thwarted, she took a step back, arms folded, and tried to bring some intelligence to the problem. There had to be an answer.

And it came.

She forced the sliding doors apart and stepped inside. She pressed her foot on the drain and there was movement. The criss-cross grille with its circular flange disconnected from the floor and sank an inch. It had a spring mechanism. The drain had been acting as the brake.

She stepped out, gave the sides a push and the entire shower unit including the two tiled walls slid forward on rollers. She had found the way in.