The Apple and the Trail

“A house can look clean, but it still remembers where the mess was.”

Moving on from the bedroom, I entered the kitchen—a small, neatly ordered space where everything seemed to have its place and purpose. The air carried a faint chill, touched by the scent of polish and rain.

The surfaces gleamed beneath the muted light from the window above the sink—the kind of cleanliness that spoke less of obsession and more of deliberate restraint. There were no crumbs, no clutter, no traces of daily life—just clean countertops and the quiet hum of the old refrigerator.

Only the essentials remained: a vintage Aga cooker, its enamel softly glowing, and a few copper pots hanging above it, their surfaces catching the light like warm coins. On the counter, a single fruit bowl—empty but for one bright green apple—offered the only hint of colour. It looked almost deliberate, like punctuation in an otherwise silent sentence.

A lone mug sat upside down on the draining board, resting on a folded tea towel, edges carefully aligned. Not perfect, exactly—just careful. Considered.

The kind of tidiness that came from someone trying to keep the world at bay—to hold on to control in a place where too much had already slipped away.

I moved to the fridge, drawn by the same compulsion that had driven me to check the bedroom drawers. The appliance hummed quietly, still running. I pulled the door open with deliberate slowness, aware that what I found—or didn't find—would tell a story.

Inside, the barrenness confirmed what I'd begun to suspect. This wasn't a functioning household. A half-empty bottle of milk sat on the top shelf. A small block of cheddar wrapped in wax paper like an heirloom, the kind of old-fashioned food storage that spoke of different generation's habits. A jar of plum preserves bearing a handwritten label in faded ink—homemade, probably, created in summer abundance.

And that was all. No eggs. No vegetables in the crisper drawer. No leftovers in containers with sticky notes marking dates. No condiments crowding the door shelves. Not even a bottle of water or soft drink. The shelves were pristine, gleaming, wiped clean of spills or residue.

They weren't here. The realisation settled with certainty. And they hadn't been here for days—long enough that the ordinary rhythms of eating and cooking had stopped completely.

Still, the memory of the slightly ajar front door hovered in my mind, creating cognitive dissonance. Its invitation felt uncomfortably personal now—as if it had been left open specifically for me. For us. For someone expected who would know what it signified.

But the mystery, as compelling as it was, felt like a detour from my primary purpose. Jamie was still out there somewhere, possibly in danger, possibly already dead. Every minute spent here examining empty rooms and strange details was time not spent finding him, time not spent following leads that might actually locate a living person rather than documenting the absence of missing ones.

This side investigation, though it bore all the signs of something darker, couldn't be allowed to consume me. Not again. I'd already sacrificed too much to obsession—had assaulted my partner, had alienated my supervisor, had put my career in jeopardy. I couldn't let another tangent pull me away from the case I was actually supposed to be solving.

A thunderclap cracked through the silence like a rifle report, so close it felt as though it had exploded just above the roof. The violence of the sound was shocking, visceral. The windows rattled in their frames, glass vibrating visibly. My entire body flinched involuntarily, weapon rising instinctively to ready position before conscious thought could intercede, heart suddenly pounding against the walls of my chest.

"Is anyone there?" I called, the edge in my voice honed to command, projecting more confidence than I felt.

Only silence answered. That same heavy, expectant silence.

I moved from the kitchen into the dining room, weapon leading the way, steps slow and careful. The air carried a stillness that made each movement sound louder than it should.

The room held the same understated order as the rest of the house—restrained, deliberate—but not untouched. Four chairs stood around a broad oak table, not perfectly aligned but close enough to suggest someone had straightened them without fuss. A few water rings marked the polished surface, and a scattering of papers and a pen sat off to one side, as if someone had paused mid-thought and never returned.

It was tidy, but not sterile. The kind of tidiness that came from people who valued space to think rather than an urge to impress.

Yet something about the room felt different. Subtle, but present. As if this space still carried the echo of conversation, of minds at work, of lives once fully engaged.

My eyes caught on a bookcase against the far wall—tall, dark-stained, and overflowing with contents. In a house otherwise defined by restraint, the bookcase was an eruption of life, a disorder that felt human.

Environmental science volumes packed the shelves in no clear order. Botanical field guides with weathered covers and pages swollen from fieldwork. Academic journals wedged between folders of loose notes, their margins filled with small, hurried handwriting. Post-its in fading colours jutted from the pages, curling at the edges, their ink bled from damp fingers.

The chaos of real lives. The accumulated evidence of people who cared deeply about what they studied—who didn’t just collect knowledge but chased it.

I took a cautious step forward, drawn to the shelves, to the faint trace of purpose they represented. Moving between table and bookcase, I passed too close to the dining surface. My elbow brushed a slim journal lying near the edge, its spine half-hanging over the polished wood.

It slipped free, landing with a muted thud that sounded enormous in the silence. Loose pages slid out and drifted to the floor in a quiet flurry that somehow seemed louder than thunder.

I cursed silently—clumsy, careless, contaminating the scene. Then crouched to gather the fallen pages, reaching instinctively for the nearest one—before freezing, my hand recoiling as though shocked.

Wet.

A cold, sticky sensation clung to the pad of my finger, the texture wrong, unmistakable. I brought the finger closer to my face and squinted in the low light filtering through the dining room window. A smear of deep red glistened against my skin, viscous and dark.

My heart rate spiked immediately. "Blood!" I gasped.

Adrenaline surged through me like a live electrical current, fight-or-flight chemicals flooding every system. My entire frame tensed involuntarily, every muscle tightening. My eyes swept the room with new urgency, alert to the shift in atmosphere. No longer was I standing in a strangely tidy cottage conducting a welfare check. This was now, possibly, a crime scene. This was evidence of violence or injury. This changed everything.

I scanned the floor systematically, looking for more, for context, for pattern. There it was—a trail. Small droplets. One just at the corner of the table leg, already darkened and absorbed slightly into the grain of the wood, oxidised and aged. Another, leading from table towards the lounge visible through the doorway. Then another beyond that. A dotted path of red breadcrumbs, subtle but undeniable once you knew to look for them.

Each spot was dry to the eye. Rust-coloured rather than bright red. Days old, perhaps forty-eight hours at most based on the degree of oxidation, the way the blood had separated into components as it dried.

But the drop I'd touched? That had been wet. Fresh. Still liquid. Inconsistent with the others in the trail.

I stood slowly, blood-smeared finger hovering in front of me like it might offer answers through examination, like the evidence itself might explain its own contradiction. But none came. Only more questions multiplying exponentially. If the blood had dried days ago, what had I just touched? Why was it still wet? Had it been rehydrated somehow by moisture in the air? Had someone returned and bled recently in exactly the same spot? Or was this something else entirely—not blood at all despite appearances?

Had someone come back after the initial incident? Had they remained hidden whilst their earlier blood dried? Were they still here, bleeding, injured, hiding or held somewhere in this cottage or the outbuildings?

Had they never left at all?