Chapter 11
I’m about to go back outside to check for more cameras when the doorbell rings.
I’m greeted by a tall woman in her sixties, pencil thin, dressed in a gray cardigan and skirt. My son stands sheepishly beside her, rather reluctantly holding her hand, a scuffed orange football tucked under his other arm.
“Good afternoon,” she says briskly. “One of yours, I believe?”
“Hi.” I point at my son. “Sorry, has Callum—”
“I found this young gentleman in my back garden,” the woman says. “Foraging among my geraniums. So I thought perhaps best to return him to you. I’m next door at number ninety-three.”
“Thanks,” I say. “I’m Adam, by the way.”
“Eileen,” she says, her face expressionless. “Nice to meet you.”
We shake hands awkwardly. Her palm is cold, the grip surprisingly firm, and I’m aware my own hand is still grubby with tree bark.
I gesture to my son, who looks as if he’s desperate to get away.
“What were you doing, Callum?” I say. “What happened?”
“Kicked my best football over.” He stares at the floor. “There was a hole in the fence so I just wanted to see if I could get through and then I was trying to find my ball but I couldn’t find it and then the lady came and I—”
“It doesn’t matter now,” she says, cutting him off. “Does it, young man?”
“Sorry,” Callum says. “Can I go back to Daisy and Leah?”
She releases his hand, and he scampers off toward the kitchen without looking back.
“Settling in all right?”
“Yes, thank you. Lots to do.”
“I’m sure.”
Her voice has the slow, languorous tone of a teacher or a barrister, someone who is used to addressing others and being listened to.
But she’s standing slightly too close after our awkward handshake, the faintest smell of lavender rising from her cardigan.
I step back into the hall and she seems to take this as an invitation, following me in, her eyes sweeping over the staircase, the tiled floor, the kitchen doorway.
“It’s been such a long time since I last saw inside this old house,” she says. “Such a long time.”
“Did you… know Mr. Hopkins well?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say well. Eric was the kind of person who liked to keep himself to himself, if you know what I mean?
” She continues to look around the hallway, full of curiosity, before her eyes finally come back to me.
“His son was cut from very much the same cloth. Rather an antisocial type, from what little I saw of him.”
“They liked their privacy, did they?”
“Put it this way,” she says. “I’ve lived at number ninety-three for seven years now, ever since I inherited it from my mother, and this is only the second time I’ve set foot in this house.”
In the late afternoon light streaming through the stained glass above the front door, she looks younger.
Mid-fifties rather than sixties. I gesture toward the kitchen and she follows me in, declining my offer of a drink.
There is an awkward silence as her eyes take in the cardboard boxes, the tired units, a pan of peas simmering on the old gas cooktop, the worktops dull and chipped with age.
Her gaze returns to me and I have the uncomfortable sense that she’s sizing me up too, making a swift judgment of this new neighbor in torn jeans and an old paint-spattered Pearl Jam T-shirt.
I lean back against the counter. “We’re discovering new things about the house every day.”
“I’m sure you are.”
“This might sound like a weird question,” I say. “But I don’t suppose you know if Mr. Hopkins ever had CCTV installed?”
A strange expression flits across her face, a tightening of her lips, a pulse in her jaw. But then it’s gone, her features settling back into neutral.
“How do you mean?”
“Cameras,” I say. “For security. We found one today in the garden and I’m trying to work out who put it there.”
“I honestly have no idea about anything like that,” she says, with a quick shake of her head. “As I said, he kept himself to himself.”
Through the window, I can see Jess playing catch with Daisy in the garden.
Callum sprints past them, across the lawn and out through the side gate.
He seems to be running laps around the house with the orange football under his arm and Coco in hot pursuit, barking happily.
He was delighted to discover that having a detached house meant he could run an entire circuit around it on a continuous loop.
Eileen gazes after them with a slight pursing of her lips.
“It’s so nice to see some children in the house again. It’s been too long since there were youngsters living here, a big family home like this.” Her pinched expression, the hard frown line between her eyebrows, seems at odds with her words. “Far too long.”
“So you didn’t know Mr. Hopkins well?”
Her gaze lingers on Daisy, trying to catch a sponge ball and giggling as she drops it.
“Not as well as I would have liked.”
“I would have loved to talk to him about the house,” I say. “The history of it, you know? The work he had done to the inside, remodeling and—”
She turns her sharp eyes on me. “You’re not planning any ghastly extension work, are you?
” She pronounces the words slowly, as if they leave a bad taste in her mouth.
“Tearing out all the original features and replacing them? Builders vans parked on the street, skips on the drive, and noise at all times of day, dust and rubbish and goodness knows what else for months on end?”
“No, no,” I say, shaking my head. “Nothing like that. I love all the old features—we both do—that’s one of the reasons we fell in love with the house in the first place. The stonework, the hallway tiles, the stained glass. And there’s no way we could afford to have major work done anyway.”
She makes a noise in her throat, either of agreement or disdain, I can’t tell.
“Such a shame,” she says. “That it’s not been looked after properly.”
I try to remember what Jeremy had told us—months ago—when we’d viewed the house for the second time.
When both Jess and I had already fallen in love with it, had already been talking about which bedrooms the kids could have, how we might remodel the kitchen, and put in French windows out onto the back garden.
When Jeremy already knew he had us on the hook.
From what I can remember, the son had moved abroad years ago—to France or Spain?
—and the owner had lived here mostly alone in the years that followed until the house became too much for him to manage.
His son had acted on his behalf in the sale and in dealings with Jeremy from their end.
“Had Mr. Hopkins lived here for a long time?”
“Twenty years or so,” Eileen says. “But he never really recovered from the stroke, poor chap. And that was years ago, long before I moved in next door.”
“Can’t have been easy, looking after such a big house on his own.”
“Oh, he had help with the day-to-day things. A gardener in the summer and a cleaner all year round. Although goodness knows she was more interested in sitting around and chatting on the phone from what I ever saw of her. Still, she was better than nothing, I suppose, especially after his health deteriorated. And that boy of his was never here.” She shakes her head.
“Always gallivanting off overseas, back for a flying visit once in a blue moon, never really seemed to want much to do with the place. Such a pity. It all got too much for Eric in the end, after the dementia took hold.”
I check that there’s water in the kettle, switching it on. “Are you sure you won’t have a cup of tea, or coffee?”
Her eyes flick to the unopened boxes on the floor, dirty breakfast dishes and cups stacked around the sink, before they come to rest on me again.
“I dare say I should leave you to it,” she says with a tight smile. “You seem to have your hands full.”
I see her out through the front door and watch as she marches back up the drive, her black slip-ons crunching on the gravel. She walks quickly, shoulders back, spine straight, as if she’s on parade.
When I return to the kitchen, Jess is shepherding the two younger children through the back door and telling them to wash their hands before tea.
To me, she says: “Guess what?”
“You found another camera?”
She shakes her head, switching off the gas cooktop where the peas have been simmering. “I’ve just had a reply.”
I take two plates from the cupboard and lay them on the kitchen table, adding cutlery and ketchup.
“A reply from who?”
“That mystery number in the ancient flip phone you found upstairs.” She lowers her voice. “They’ve texted me back.”