Chapter 3: The Visit

By lunchtime, Bill had still not managed to settle. It was Saturday, and the normal plan for a Saturday was to do precisely nothing, to laze about the house in the specific, guilt-free way you're only allowed to on a day that doesn't belong to Harkness and Co. Getting the policeman's knock at stupid o'clock in the morning was not part of that plan. It was not, in fact, part of any plan Bill had ever drawn up for himself, in any version of his life, going back as far as he could remember. But then, he reflected, precisely nothing about the last twenty-four hours qualified as normal behaviour. Normal behaviour did not involve fake burgers, glowing dirt, or waking up with soil under your fingernails like some sort of amateur, incompetent grave robber. Normal behaviour was macaroni cheese and daytime telly and possibly, if he was feeling ambitious, a trip to the big Tesco. He was rapidly losing faith that today was going to deliver any of that.

When he'd finally opened the door that morning, hands still filthy, heart still trying to relocate itself somewhere up around his collarbone, there hadn't really been a choice in the matter. When you get a knock like that on your door, at that hour, in that rhythm, you answer it. You don't lie there under the duvet weighing your options like it's a business decision. Bill had never lived a life that invited the police to his doorstep, no youthful indiscretions worth mentioning beyond the blue-roll incident, no unpaid fines, nothing, and yet some deep, ancient, bone-level part of him had known exactly what that knock meant the second he heard it. Something in the DNA. Something passed down from a long line of ancestors who'd learned, the hard way, that a knock like that never came with good news attached.

The officers had at least been polite. Well. Polite-adjacent. Polite in the way a phone menu is polite, right before it puts you on hold for forty minutes and plays you the same eleven seconds of saxophone on a loop.

Now, hours later, he stood in his kitchen, staring down at a saucepan of water that had been boiling for considerably longer than it needed to. He'd been standing there watching it the way you watch a kettle you don't trust. The packet of boxed macaroni cheese sat open on the counter beside him, bright cardboard, a grinning cartoon block of cheese giving him a thumbs up it had absolutely no right to be giving anyone, given the day he'd had. This was the sort of thing you bought for convenience, for the days you genuinely could not be trusted to make a decision more complicated than add water. Bill had eaten this exact box a hundred times before without a second thought. Today, somehow, simply deciding to eat it felt like a genuine achievement, a small flag planted on a very small hill. He'd take what he could get.

He tipped the pasta in and watched it vanish under the surface, little beige commas disappearing one after another, and told himself, not for the first time that morning, that he was being ridiculous. That there was a perfectly sensible explanation for everything. He did not, even slightly, believe himself.

The kitchen was quiet except for the low hiss of the gas ring and the soft, steady bubble of the water. Everything else was reassuringly, aggressively normal. The table by the window that wobbled slightly if you leaned on the wrong corner. The sink under the cupboards, still bearing yesterday's single unwashed mug like a small monument to his own laziness. The fridge magnet advertising a local takeaway he had never once used in the four years he'd lived here, and yet had never quite got round to peeling off either, because apparently that was a decision too. All of it entirely, boringly familiar.

And yet he could not shake the sense that something had shifted underneath all of it. Like a picture on the wall hung a few degrees crooked, the kind you walk past a dozen times without noticing, until somebody points it out, and then it's all you can see, and you start wondering how long it's been like that, and whether you've been living slightly off-kilter this whole time without realising.

The knocking replayed in his head. Not the sound of it any more, that had already faded to something distant and abstract, but what had come after.

They'd been standing there when he opened the door. Two of them. One in uniform, one not.

Polite. That was the first thing that came back to him clearly, pushing its way in over the top of everything else. Polite, but not warm. Pleasant, in the specific, hollow way of customer service staff working from a script, the kind of pleasant that's been trained into people rather than felt by them. The uniformed one had done most of the talking at the start. Male, middle-aged, short dark hair under the hat, an accent so neutral it could have come from anywhere in the country or possibly nowhere at all, sanded down to nothing by years of reading things off a form. He'd introduced himself. Bill, for the life of him, could not now recall the name. It had gone in one ear, been logged somewhere, and evaporated completely, which struck him now as its own small kind of strange, because Bill was usually decent with names. Comes with the IT job. You remember names when half your working life is spent being polite to people who've forgotten their own passwords for the ninth time this month.

"Morning, sir," the officer had said. "Mind if we come in for a quick word?"

Bill stirred the pasta with a wooden spoon and noticed, with mild professional detachment, that his hand was shaking slightly. He steadied it against the rim of the pan and focused very hard on the movement of the water, the small clacking bump of pasta against pasta, anything that wasn't the memory currently unspooling in his head like it had been waiting all morning for an invitation.

They'd asked where he'd been the previous afternoon. Straightforward enough. Reasonable, even. Bill had told them. Left work early, drove home the back way, took a bit of a detour. Nothing dramatic. And then, and this was the part that bothered him now, in the cold light of a Saturday lunchtime, he'd found himself explaining far more than the question strictly required. Filling in gaps nobody had asked him to fill. Justifying decisions that hadn't needed justifying, the way you do when you've done absolutely nothing wrong but some ancient lizard part of your brain is convinced otherwise.

I sound like the guilty man, he'd thought at the time, and thought again now, stirring cheese powder into milk with the same shaking hand. Over-explaining. Fishing for validation nobody's offering. It was a deeply unflattering realisation to have about yourself twice in one day.

The plain-clothes one had watched him talk. That was the second thing that had stuck. Not aggressively. Not with suspicion, exactly, nothing so straightforward as suspicion, which at least you could work with, could push back against. Just attentive, in a way that made Bill feel like a document being proofread. Like every sentence out of his mouth was being filed somewhere for later cross-referencing.

Jacket. Shirt. No tie. Sensible shoes. Exactly the sort of man you'd walk past in a supermarket without your brain bothering to register a second look, a face built entirely out of unremarkable, the human equivalent of beige. That was how Bill had filed him at the time, anyway, somewhere in the part of his brain that dealt with strangers and moved on.

Standing in his kitchen now, he frowned at the memory, because something about the jacket refused to sit right.

It hadn't been obviously wrong. Nothing you could point at and laugh, nothing you'd mention to a mate down the pub as evidence of anything. But the cut of it hadn't quite made sense, the way a word looks wrong if you stare at it too long, the letters swapping places in your head until definitely and definately start looking equally plausible. The lapels had been a fraction too wide, and not evenly so, one very slightly wider than the other, like the pattern had been eyeballed rather than measured. The pockets sat a touch too shallow, more decoration than storage. And the buttons had been stitched on with thread that seemed to catch the light and hold onto it a beat too long.

Glimmer. Like the light in the dirt, in the dream. Like a jacket assembled by someone, something, that had encountered the concept of a jacket, secondhand, and done a genuinely admirable job replicating it, without ever quite grasping why any of the individual bits were there in the first place.

Bill drained the pasta and tipped it back into the pan, and the steam rose and fogged his glasses over completely for a second, turning the kitchen into a soft grey blur. He took them off, wiped them on his sleeve, the same corner he always used, worn slightly thin from years of the same habit, and leaned back against the counter, letting the cold edge of it press into the small of his back, grounding, solid, actual.

The uniformed officer had asked about times.

"What time did you leave work, sir?"

"And what time did you arrive home?"

Bill had answered honestly, both times, and had even managed a small, awkward laugh when he mentioned the gap between the two. "Must have been stuck in traffic," he'd said, and even as the words left his mouth they'd felt thin, unconvincing, like a coat two sizes too small trying to cover something it clearly wasn't built to cover. He'd felt an immediate, prickling regret at having drawn attention to the missing hours at all, as though he'd handed over something private and watched it get logged in a notebook, something that should have stayed his and his alone. Something too weird to say out loud to two strangers on his own doorstep.

The uniformed officer had nodded and made a note.

Bill paused now, spoon hovering over the pan, and thought back properly, deliberately, the way you press on a bruise to check if it still hurts.

The notebook had been wrong too. He was sure of it now, in the specific, unshakeable way you're sure of things only in hindsight. The spiral binding along the top had seemed to run into paper that had never actually been punched, the coils simply vanishing into a solid block of the same beige material, as though someone had drawn a very convincing notebook rather than manufactured one.

And the warrant card. It had been sitting on the table beside the notebook, ID and badge together, and the crest on it had been slightly off. Not fake in the cheap, Halloween-costume sense, nothing so crude as that, but off, the crown the wrong proportion, squashed a fraction too wide, the lettering beneath it cramped and huddled together as though it had been resized to fit a space that was never quite big enough for it.

And the name.

Bill closed his eyes at the memory, the way you do when you're bracing for something.

The name on the card had been spelled incorrectly. Not glaringly. Not a mistake anyone would flag in the moment. One letter wrong, an extra vowel slipped in somewhere, or one quietly missing, close enough that your brain smoothed straight over it without so much as a flicker of alarm, the way you don't notice a typo in your own name until someone else reads it aloud and you hear the wrongness of it land.

All only available in recall, Bill thought, opening his eyes again, staring at the wall above the sink where a faint tea-coloured splash mark had lived, unaddressed, for the better part of a year. Not live. I noticed none of this at the time. Only now, going back over it, turning it over like a coin I didn't realise I'd been given.

Fake, the word arrived, unbidden, and it landed with the exact same sick, sliding certainty the fake burgers had brought with them in the dream. Same texture. Same wrongness. His stomach did the same slow roll it had done then, as though his body had already worked out the connection well ahead of his conscious brain and was simply waiting, patiently, for the rest of him to catch up.

The questions had kept coming, after that. Had he stopped anywhere on the way home. Had he spoken to anyone unusual. Had he noticed anything out of place. At the time Bill had assumed, reasonably, he'd thought, that they were fishing for an accident somewhere down the line, a suspicious vehicle, somebody behaving oddly on the roadside. Standing here now, stirring orange powder into milk with the focused intensity of a man defusing something, he wasn't nearly so sure any more.

The plain-clothes man had leaned forward at one point, elbows on his knees, in the universal posture of someone about to ask something that mattered more than the question sounded like it should.

"Do you often lose track of time, Mr—" a small pause, a glance down at notes that Bill hadn't been able to read from where he sat, "—Bill?"

That pause hadn't registered as anything at the time. It rang now, in memory, loud enough that Bill actually stopped stirring for a second, spoon hovering, cheese sauce thickening unattended.

Like a concept of cheese, his brain unhelpfully supplied, watching the mixture turn that bright, artificial, slightly-too-orange colour that no dairy product had ever naturally achieved in the history of the world. He swallowed, and kept stirring, because stirring was at least something to do with his hands.

"No," he'd told the man, at the time. "No, not really."

The plain-clothes officer had smiled at that. A small smile. Polite. Well-practised, the kind of expression you could tell had been used successfully many times before, on many different faces, in many different kitchens and doorways. It had not, Bill was now certain, gone anywhere near his eyes.

"And your dreams?" he'd asked, mild as anything, as though enquiring about the weather. "Have they been... vivid?"

Bill's stomach had clenched at that, hard, and he remembered the sensation now with total clarity, the way his body had reacted a full half-second before his conscious mind had even registered what had been said, some older, faster part of him flinching first and asking questions later.

"I don't see how that's relevant," he'd said, and even then it had come out slightly too fast, slightly too defensive, the verbal equivalent of stepping backwards when nobody's actually thrown a punch yet.

The uniformed officer had cleared his throat. "Just part of our process, sir."

Process.

That word had lodged itself somewhere in Bill's chest and simply stayed there, the way certain words do, small, ordinary, entirely reasonable words that somehow carry ten times their normal weight depending entirely on the tone they arrive in.

Standing in his kitchen now, stirring orange sauce into pasta that had gone slightly past the point of al dente and into the territory of simply done, Bill realised something else. Something that hadn't occurred to him at the time, too busy as he'd been with the dirt on his hands and the general sensation of his own life quietly rearranging itself without his consent.

Neither of them had asked for identification. Not once. From him, that is. They hadn't needed to check who he was, hadn't needed his name, his date of birth, his address, any of the usual small verifications that come baked into every interaction with officialdom in this country. They had simply known. Known where he lived. Known his movements clearly enough to question the specifics of them, down to the hour. And yet they had offered him precisely nothing back by way of proof, no request for paperwork, no cross-checking, nothing. Just their own cards, laid on his table like a magic trick, there to be glimpsed and believed rather than actually examined.

And when they'd left, the uniformed one had paused at the door, half turned, the way people do when they're about to add the thing that actually mattered after twenty minutes of things that didn't.

"If you remember anything else," he'd said, "anything at all, you can contact us."

He'd handed over a card.

Bill's grip tightened on the wooden spoon, hard enough that his knuckles went faintly pale.

The card.

He hadn't looked at it properly at the time, hadn't looked at anything properly, really, by that point, his whole body running on the fumes of adrenaline and confusion. He'd nodded, closed the door, and slid straight down it to sit on the hallway floor, breathing hard, the way you do after a near-miss on the motorway, when your body needs a solid minute to agree that the danger's actually passed.

Now, he realised, with a small cold drop somewhere behind his sternum, that he could not for the life of him remember where he'd put the card. Or what it had said. The phone number that had presumably been printed on it, because these things always have a phone number, don't they, that's the whole point of a card, had gone from his memory completely, wiped as cleanly as if someone had reached in and taken it out on purpose.

The cheese sauce was ready. Bill poured it over the pasta and stirred until every piece was coated, bright, glossy, uniform, every strand of macaroni exactly the same improbable shade of orange as the one next to it.

Fake, he thought again, and this time the word simply refused to leave.

Fake jackets. Fake badges. Fake names, spelled just wrong enough to slip past unnoticed. Fake questions, wrapped around a real one they hadn't quite managed to ask outright.

Not disguises, he thought. Disguises implied someone, or something, trying deliberately to deceive, and there was a kind of intelligence in that, a kind of intent that would almost, almost, have been reassuring, in the sense that at least it would mean something familiar was going on underneath. This felt different. Worse, somehow, in a way he couldn't fully articulate even to himself, standing alone in his own kitchen on a Saturday afternoon holding a bowl of orange pasta like it was the last normal thing left in the world.

Like the burgers. Like the van itself. Like something out there had encountered the surface of things, jackets, badges, questions, burgers, small talk, without ever once grasping what sat underneath, what any of it was actually for. Concepts of things, assembled by something that had done its research thoroughly and understood absolutely none of it.

Bill spooned the macaroni into a bowl and carried it to the table, and sat, and did not eat.

His hands had stopped shaking, which should have been a comfort, and somehow wasn't. He realised, with a small, distant sort of surprise, that he was scared, properly scared, the kind he hadn't felt since he was small, since the age when the dark under the bed still had teeth in it. It was an oddly clarifying thing to notice about yourself in your thirties, sitting at your own kitchen table, being frightened the way you were frightened as a child, except this time nobody was coming to check the wardrobe and tell you it was fine.

The thing that scared him most, he realised, wasn't even the missing hours any more. It was the shape of the whole thing. The pattern of it.

BurgerVan. The dream. The dirt. The cold that had climbed up his legs like it had somewhere specific to be. And now the police, or whatever they had actually been, wearing 'Police' the way you might wear a coat two sizes too big, convincingly enough at a glance, just plain bad up close.

All of it connected. Threaded through with the same wrongness, the same faint, careful counterfeit quality, like everything he'd encountered in the last day had been built by the same unseen hand out of the same unfamiliar material.

And all of it, somehow, pointed at him.

Bill stared at the bowl of macaroni until the steam thinned to nothing and the orange sauce began, quietly, to skin over.

He did not know what he had touched behind the van.

He did not know what had touched him back.

But he knew, with a certainty that had settled deep and cold and permanent somewhere behind his ribs, that whatever it was, it was not finished.

And that terrified him more than anything the dream or the 'Police' had managed.