She could tell him what she knew in about ninety seconds and it took four days to get all of it, because he kept leaving the room.
She was thirty-one. She had lived in flat two for six years. She had gone out of her own front door at some point on a Tuesday evening in July and had come back to herself at the bottom of the flight between the second and third floors, some hours later, with the light in the stairwell doing its automatic thing, on and off, on and off, and nobody there at all.
She had not been able to leave the building since.
She had tried. The front door, the fire door at the back, the window of the laundry room. She could get as far as the frame and then there was nothing on the other side of it — not a wall, not a force, just an absence of anywhere to go.
"How far can you get?"
"Every room of the building," said Sylvie. "Including yours, and I would like to say now that I have been extremely careful about that and you can ask me anything and I will tell you the truth."
James, who had spent four days going through a mental list of exactly what a person might have watched him do, decided not to ask.
"What's the last thing you remember?"
"Half past six. In my flat. I'd made toast and I was standing at the counter eating it, and Arthur's telly was going through the wall the way it always did." Her voice did something. "And then the stairs, and it was dark outside, and my phone was in my hand and the screen was smashed."
"And in between?"
"Four hours."
"Nothing at all?"
"Not nothing," said Sylvie Marsh. "Worse than nothing. It's like a room with the door shut and I know exactly where the door is and every single time I go near it I find that I've thought about something else instead. Nine weeks. I have never once got my hand on the handle."