Chapter 10
“It was pointing directly at the house,” I say quietly. “Right at the drive and the front door.”
We’re sitting at the kitchen table nursing cups of tea, Jess opposite me.
The bird box is opened up on the table between us, the equipment inside removed.
It’s a gray rectangle about the size of a packet of cigarettes, the clear plastic hemisphere of a small camera connected to it by red-and-blue coiled wire.
Another wire, dark brown—presumably to camouflage it against the bark—had led up and out of the box to the next branch above, where a palm-sized solar panel was attached in a position that made it invisible from the ground.
It had taken me three-quarters of an hour to remove all of it from the oak tree, which made me wonder how long it had taken to put up in the first place.
Jess crosses her arms. “Makes my skin crawl just thinking about it. How long do you think it’s been there?”
“Hard to say.” I gesture with a screwdriver. “Although… you see these? The screws that were holding the bracket to the tree are still shiny, not corroded or discolored by the weather. So I don’t think it could have been there very long.”
Jess leans away as if the device might come to life and bite her.
“You’re sure you’ve disabled it?”
“I’ve isolated the battery. There’s no power going to it.”
The children are in the back garden, their excited voices reaching us through the open window as they play frisbee with the dog.
We’ve told Daisy and Callum that the camera was for studying nesting birds inside the box—Leah silently agreeing to play along with the fiction so as not to alarm her younger siblings too much.
“I don’t understand,” Jess says. “What the hell is it even there for?”
I pick up the device and peer into the smooth glass eye of the camera lens as if it might hold the answers.
“I guess the last owner could have installed it,” I say. “Keep an eye on his house when he was away?”
“But… twenty-five feet up a tree?” She doesn’t look convinced. “In a nesting box? I thought half the point of having cameras was to make them obvious, so a burglar would know he was being filmed?”
This was new territory for us—we had never owned a house big enough to merit this kind of security.
“Maybe some are visible,” I say, “and some hidden. This was one they forgot to take down, or something?”
“But you just said it looked quite new.”
“I’m thinking aloud.”
“We should call the police anyway,” she says firmly. “Just in case.”
I shrug. “To say what? We found a camera left by the previous owner?”
She fixes me with one of her serious stares, the little line deepening between her eyebrows.
“And what if it was someone else?”
“Like who?”
“We should report it, at the very least. Get someone around to look at this thing.”
She picks up her phone and dials 101, bouncing through a series of call handlers and waiting to be connected to someone who can take the details.
While she’s stuck on hold, I go into the hall and call Jeremy Swann, the estate agent who handled the sale of this house, to ask whether he knows about any kind of CCTV system installed at the house or cameras in the garden.
“I believe there was a really old burglar alarm,” Jeremy says after a moment’s thought.
It sounds like he’s driving. “But to the best of my knowledge it’s not worked for years.
My recollection is that Mr. Hopkins let it lapse a long way back and it was never renewed.
I’m not even sure the security company still exists.
I’ll double-check for you, but I don’t recall any external cameras being on the fixtures and fittings list.”
Jeremy had been there for all three of our viewings at 91 Regency Place, quietly professional with a knowledgeable calm that inspired confidence.
A contrast to the estate agency we’d used to sell our own house in Woodthorpe, particularly the junior staff sent to handle viewings—who were perfectly nice but often had no more idea about the selling points of the house than the average stranger off the street.
Whereas Jeremy always seemed very well informed; he was a specialist who handled higher-end properties, most of them in The Park.
“Listen,” he says. “I’m actually in the area, just finished a viewing around the corner. I could pop in if you like? There’s some paperwork I was going to drop off anyway.”
His gleaming white Tesla rolls carefully onto the drive a couple of minutes later.
He climbs from the driver’s seat and greets me with a wave and a smile, striding across the gravel in a dark navy three-piece suit.
He’s a small, neat man, his dark hair cut short but not too short, always punctual and impeccably dressed.
He hands me a thick cream A4 envelope with “Welcome to Your New Home” in embossed gold lettering on the front, his estate agency’s discreet branding on the back.
With his other hand, he proffers a bottle of Moet & Chandon champagne in a gift box.
He really was keen for us to use his agency in the future.
“To celebrate your arrival,” he says. “So how’s it all going, Adam?”
“Pretty hectic,” I say. “But we’re settling in. Actually, since you’re here, I wonder if I could ask you something else? When you draw up the floorplans for a new property you’re putting onto the market, who does that?”
“Typically that would be me.”
“And you calculate the square footage of each room?”
“With a laser measure.” He gestures vaguely at the house. “To be honest, I just hold it up and point, and it does all the rest. Calculates it automatically. I pass it on to Fliss in the office and she uploads it.”
“But those measurements wouldn’t include voids and storage spaces, rooms like that?”
“Not as a rule, only if they are potentially livable spaces accessible without a ladder. Although we’ll usually add the dimensions of cellars, outbuildings, and garages for completeness. It all has to be accurate for the Energy Performance Certificate.” He hesitates. “Is there a problem, Adam?”
“No, not at all. I’ve just discovered an extra bit of space next to one of the bedrooms. It’s not much, maybe an extra fifty square feet, but it definitely wasn’t on the plans on Rightmove.”
“Some of these older properties have all sorts of nooks and crannies,” he says, a wistful tone to his voice.
“They can get overlooked, particularly when you have a place that’s been extended or remodeled multiple times—things can sometimes get closed off and forgotten about.
There are stories about old houses in the West Country that used to have secret chambers behind the fireplace so that when the Royal Navy came to press-gang the men into service on board warships, they’d have somewhere to hide. ”
“A fair way from the sea here though, aren’t we?”
“But it wouldn’t be unheard of for some older parts of a property to be forgotten about. Particularly when a vendor is, shall we say, more elderly? Then other factors can come into play, of course.”
“Other factors?”
“A vendor’s… recollection,” he says carefully. “If you’re talking about a vendor who’s lived in a property for twenty, thirty, forty years, and that person is in their eighties or nineties when they move, you can see how it might happen.”
“Of course.”
“Things can get missed, forgotten about, or information not passed on to relatives. I had a client once who found six cases of wine hidden behind a false panel in a walk-in wardrobe, a few weeks after he moved in. Good stuff it was, too. The story was that the previous owner hadn’t wanted to declare them in his divorce settlement, but then he’d forgotten all about them. ”
“And legally, that wine belonged to the new owner?”
He makes a non-committal sound in his throat.
“Hmmm. It’s a gray area. To be honest, most of the time the things that get left behind, nobody wants.
It’s old mattresses and broken garden furniture, or an old sofa the vendors can’t be bothered to dismantle.
Then it becomes about whose responsibility it is, and you can get into legal wrangling and all sorts. ”
“How about if something hadn’t been touched in twenty-plus years?”
“I suppose… if you’re going back to the owner before, then yes, it would probably default to the current owner due to passage of time.”
“The house remembers, even if the owner forgets?”
He’s silent for a moment. “That’s one way of looking at it, I suppose.”
“The last owner, do you think he might know about this extra bedroom space?”
“Mr. Hopkins?” Jeremy sounds doubtful. “His son told me he found the stairs very difficult, hence the ground floor study at the back being converted into a little bedroom. He had a cleaner who came in once a week, but between you and me, I don’t think he’d been upstairs for years.”
“Would it be possible to speak to him?”
“He’s not a well man. He’s moved into a care home nearby. Was rattling around in this big old house for years, all on his own. Rather sad, really.”
“Another family member, then? Whoever handled the sale.”
“I could pass on your number to the son if you like, ask him to give you a ring?”
“Thanks, I appreciate it.”
“Kevin’s… a busy chap though,” Jeremy says, his tone neutral. “A bit of an unusual character. So you shouldn’t hold your breath.”
We say our goodbyes and I thank him for the champagne as he returns to his Tesla.
When I walk back into the kitchen, Jess is taking pictures of the bird-box camera from different angles and sending them to her brother on WhatsApp.
Dom works as a security supervisor at the University of Nottingham and is a guy who might know about this sort of thing.
I gesture at her phone. “What did the police say?”
She waves a hand dismissively. “Nothing much. Took my details, told me to call back if we notice any suspicious behavior. The lad I spoke to—who sounded about twelve years old—said it had probably been left there by the previous owner.” She points a finger at me. “And don’t say I told you so.”
I relay a brief version of my conversation with Jeremy.
“Whatever it’s doing here, I don’t want it in the house,” she says, pushing the camera away from her. “Can’t bear the thought of it being in here, even if it is switched off. I don’t like it. Don’t like it at all.”
I gather up the box and its contents. “I’ll put it in the garage for now.”
“We should keep it for the time being, though,” she says. “For evidence.”
“Evidence of what?”
“There must be some sort of law against violating another person’s privacy.” She stands, blowing out a heavy breath. “I’m going to make the kids’ tea. How was work, anyway?”
“Same as ever.” I turn away so I don’t have to meet her gaze. “You know. Same stuff, different day.”
I stash the box on a high shelf in the garage.