“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. “Sucha long time.”
“Did you… know Mr. Hopkins well?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t saywell. 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 ratherthan 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.”
