Livia

It was another hot day. From the outside my life probably looked perfectly ordinary. I lived in a converted flat in Hammersmith and ran a modest private investigation business that kept me just busy enough to pay the rent. Most of the work involved situations people preferred not to talk about openly — suspicious partners, quiet financial disputes, the occasional missing person whose disappearance was usually less mysterious than their family hoped. It wasn’t the sort of work people imagined when they heard the words private investigator. There were no dramatic confrontations or clever disguises.

Most of the time it was simply waiting.

That afternoon I had been sitting in my car for nearly two hours on a quiet residential street in Chiswick, pretending to read a newspaper while keeping one eye on the narrow terraced house across the road. The man I was watching hadn’t left yet. A warm haze hung over the street, the kind of thick summer heat London never seemed built for. The pavement shimmered slightly in the sunlight and somewhere nearby a lawnmower droned lazily in the distance.

Surveillance work had a strange rhythm to it. Long stretches where absolutely nothing happened, broken only by brief moments when everything suddenly did. I shifted slightly in the driver’s seat and glanced again at the front door of the house. Still nothing.

Just as I was beginning to wonder if the afternoon might be wasted, my mobile phone rang on the passenger seat beside me. I picked it up. “Lacy Andrews,” I said quietly, keeping my eyes on the house.

“Miss Andrews, it’s Margaret Cartwright.” Her voice carried the familiar mix of politeness and anxiety I had come to recognise in most of my clients. “I was wondering if you’d seen him today.”

I looked toward the upstairs window where the man in question had appeared briefly earlier that afternoon before disappearing again behind the curtains. “Not yet,” I said. “But I’m still here.”

“Oh… I see.” There was a small pause. “Please let me know if anything happens.”

“I will.”

The line clicked and the quiet of the street returned. I placed the phone back on the seat and stretched my neck slightly, feeling the stiffness that came from sitting still too long. Then, almost as if the universe had decided to reward my patience, the front door across the street finally opened.

The man stepped outside. He paused for a moment on the pavement, glancing up and down the street with the cautious air of someone who believed he was being discreet.

He wasn’t.

A taxi rolled slowly to a stop near the corner. The man hurried toward it and climbed inside. A woman was already waiting in the back seat. She was very definitely not his wife. I lifted the camera and took the photographs through the windscreen.

One. Two. Three.

The taxi pulled away. I lowered the camera, reached for the small pad resting beside me, and scribbled the time quickly in my notebook. Case closed.

Back in Hammersmith, life carried on as normal, the evening sun still strong in the sky. I lived on Glenthorne Road and parked outside before making my way to the front door. My flat was on the upper floor. It wasn’t large, but it had everything I needed — a small kitchen, a living room that doubled as an office, and a bedroom where the summer heat tended to linger long after the sun had gone down.

I unlocked the door and stepped inside. The quiet greeted me immediately. Working alone meant the end of the day often arrived without ceremony. No colleagues, no conversation — just the soft click of the door closing and the stillness of the flat settling around me. I set the camera and notebook down on the desk by the window and loosened my jacket.

Another routine day finished.

Most evenings followed the same pattern. Something simple to eat, a cup of tea, and a little time watching the slow movement of the street below before the city finally began to quiet down. It wasn’t a bad life. And yet, if I was honest with myself, there were moments when a strange thought would creep quietly into my mind. A faint feeling that something in my life hadn’t quite arrived yet. Not sadness. Not loneliness. Just the sense that somewhere, somehow, there was meant to be… more.

I simply didn’t know what that “more” was supposed to be.

Eventually the heat drove me to bed earlier than usual. My bedroom held the warmth of the day like an oven. Even with the window open the air barely moved, and the distant hum of London drifted lazily up from the street below. I lay back on the bed and closed my eyes. For a while there was nothing but the quiet rhythm of my breathing and the faint sounds of the city beyond the window.

Gradually the weight of the day began to settle over me. The long hours sitting in the car. The warm air. The slow drifting quiet of the evening. My eyes felt heavy, but sleep would not come at first. The room was still warm, the air thick and unmoving. Somewhere in the distance a car passed slowly along the street, its sound fading into the night.

Gradually the world around me began to blur. The quiet of the room softened, and the line between waking and sleep seemed to dissolve.

Suddenly the atmosphere around me felt different.

I was standing in a room I didn’t recognise. Mirrors surrounded me on every wall, tall and narrow, reflecting my image again and again in endless repetition. But something about the reflections was wrong. My face seemed slightly distorted in the glass, stretched and twisted as though the mirrors were bending the light. I turned slowly, watching the reflections move with me. For some reason I felt uneasy. A strange tension hung in the air, the unsettling feeling that something — or someone — was waiting just beyond the edge of the room.

Then—

Bang. The sound of a gunshot exploded through the silence.

I woke instantly, gasping for breath. My heart was pounding and sweat was pouring down my face and neck. For a moment I lay there in the darkness, trying to understand what had just happened. It was only a dream. But it had felt so real.

I reached for the clock beside the bed and checked the time. Only an hour had passed since I had closed my eyes. I sat up slowly, still trying to steady my breathing.

Maybe a shower would help.