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scrolling through her head. This was To Do number one: get her sister out of bed, find out why she’d sent such a crazy email, smooth things over between them.
    She parked the bike, dragged off her helmet and buzzed Flat Nine. No answer. After a moment’s hesitation, she tried Flat Eight instead. While she waited she ruffled her hair wildly to make the curls spring back into place – helmet hair was the bane of her life. It was such an automatic reaction now that she wasn’t even aware of doing it. Thirty seconds later, a sleepy male voice came over the intercom: ‘Yerrghello?’
    ‘Hi, Gary, it’s Amy, Becky’s sister. Sorry it’s early. Can you buzz me in, please?’
    The door clicked open in response, and Amy heard another door opening upstairs, the sound bouncing down the concrete stairwell. She strode up to the second floor, taking the stairs two at a time. Gary stood waiting for her, bare-chested in stripy cotton pyjama pants. He wasn’t bad looking, Amy thought. He and Becky were good friends, although Amy suspected this was mostly because Gary was nifty with a screwdriver and willing to unblock Becky’s U-bend at any hour of the day or night. She remembered Becky confessing this to her in a mock-suggestive comedy accent, and grinned. For the first time she felt a real pang of worry about where Becky was.
    ‘Sorry,’ she repeated, taking in his bed-head hair and sleepy eyes. He smelled of morning breath and slight BO.
    ‘S’OK,’ he replied, scratching his chest. ‘Becky all right?’
    ‘Probably. Just had a weird email from her last night, and now she’s not answering her—’
    ‘Phone,’ interrupted Gary, and Amy instantly remembered the most annoying thing about him was his habit of trying to finish people’s sentences. She wondered if he was aware he was doing it.
    ‘Her mobile
or
her landline,’ she corrected. ‘Yeah. Anyway. Do you have a key? Just want to check she hasn’t had an accident.’
    ‘Accident,’ he agreed, ushering her into his living room and rooting around in a drawer under a black-ash coffee table. ‘I think I’ve still got her keys, they should be in here somewhere.’
    While Gary went into his bedroom to fetch a T-shirt, Amy put down her helmet and bike keys on the smoked-glass dining table. Gary was in his bedroom for a good minute, and Amy tapped her foot impatiently. When he came back he didn’t say anything apart from, ‘OK, let’s go.’
    They walked from Gary’s flat to Becky’s. He put the Yale key in the top lock and the door swung open.
    Amy stared at it, then at Gary. ‘It wasn’t double-locked. She always double-locks the door, even if she’s just going to bloody Sainsbury’s.’
    Amy realized she was holding her breath as they stepped inside. The flat was dark and silent, blinds drawn.
    ‘It looks tidy,’ she said. ‘Well – as tidy as Becky’s flat ever is. Becky?’ she called out, feeling foolish and strangely light-headed. She went straight to her sister’s bedroom, dreading the sight of her spread-eagled face down on the bed. But all was in order. The bed had been made, in a perfunctory sort of way, with a few items – a bra, a T-shirt – hanging from the bedpost. She opened the wardrobe. Clothes were crammed inside, so tightly that Amy wondered how Becky ever found anything to wear. There was no sign that she had packed a suitcase, although it was difficult to tell. Amy kept her own suitcases under her bed, but Becky’s bed was too low to the ground to fit much underneath it.
    In the kitchen, a mug stood in the sink, rinsed but unwashed, with no other washing-up in sight. Amy opened the fridge. It was empty apart from a jar of pickles that looked as if they would survive a nuclear holocaust. The freezer was empty too and appeared to have been recently defrosted. Both signs that she had planned to go away. But the boiler, attached to the wall beside the sink, had been left on.
    Gary stood in the doorway of the kitchen, watching her