Quietly, so the kids won’t hear, I tell her about the other cameras we’ve found. Her eyes widen in alarm as I indicate the top of the freezer, where I’ve put them for the time being.
“What the hell?” She puts her half-eaten slice of toast onto her plate. “This is absolutely mad. I’m calling the police again.”
“Dom’s doing it,” I say. “A sergeant he knows through work. Listen, are you around to meet in town for lunch today? I can get out for an hour, and we could go to that place near your office, talk about all this properly.”
I hate lying to her. I hate that I’ve gotten better at it over the last two weeks, that it’s started to become almost routine. We’ve always tried to be honest with each other, no matter what. But maintaining the fiction of stability and security seems more important than ever this morning.
She shakes her head. “I can’t. Morning meeting plus lunch with some colleagues from the Zurich office and then I’m straight into back-to-back catch-ups with my team leads this afternoon.”
“Then we’ll talk about this tonight, OK?” I bring her into a quick hug. “It’ll be all right. I reckon the cameras were just left over by the previous owner’s son, wanting to keep an eye on his dad. But we’ve found them, we’ve switched them off, it’s dealt with.”
“Have you heard anything back from the person who texted me?”
“Nothing yet.” I kiss her on the forehead. “We’ll probably never hear from them again.”
I herd Daisy and Callum upstairs to get them dressed, shoes on and faces washed, while Jess showers and gets ready in the en suite. While the kids are brushing their teeth, I put on a clean shirt and grab my work bag from the bedroom.
As I’m gathering shoes and bookbags in the hall, Leah finally thunders downstairs, grabs a banana from the fruit bowl, and throws us a wave before dashing out the front door, saying she’s late for her bus.
Dom emerges through the back door.
“I’ve had a quick scan of your back garden but it’s a needle in a haystack out there, mate. Big plot, overgrown the way it is—there are a million places you could hide another camera if you really wanted to.”
Pointing upward with an index finger, he says to me: “Priority next is to check the upstairs. The bathrooms. And the bedrooms.”
I nod. “When they’ve gone to school.”
He gives me a quizzical look. “Aren’t you going to be late for work?”
I make a show of looking at my watch. Deceiving Dom feels almost as bad as lying to my wife, but for a different reason: because he is very good at sniffing out lies. He deals with people lying to him on a daily basis—mostly students who are drunk, drugged, or otherwise misbehaving—and it has turned his bullshit detector into a finely tuned instrument.
“Yeah,” I say. “Should probably head into the office, actually. I’ll give the upstairs rooms a thorough check later.”
He pulls his car keys from a pocket. “I can give you a lift to work, if you like?”
“You’ve done enough for one day, Dom.” I grab my own car keys from the hook by the door. “You should get home and get your head down for a few hours. I’ll drive myself.”
I lock up the house behind us, making sure I wait until he’s walked out to his Skoda and driven off before I start the engine of my own car.
I wait another minute, idling on the drive, to make sure he’s gone.
Two minutes later, I pull up to the junction with Derby Road. A right turn here will take me uphill toward the city, toward the job I no longer have, the place where I no longer work.
I swing the car left instead and accelerate away down the hill.
17
It feels good to be out of the house.
Which is crazy, because we’ve just mortgaged ourselves to the hilt to buy it, sunk all our savings into it too. We spent six months searching for a dream home, and another six waiting for the chain to complete, for the paperwork to go through—but it still feels like someone else’s property. Like it is still full of old ghosts waiting to be exorcised. Full of old questions that don’t yet have answers.
Perhaps I could answer one of those questions today.
I head northwest out of the city, beyond the snaking gray artery of the M1 motorway until I see signs for Kimberley, a small town just beyond Nottingham’s western suburbs. After pulling off the dual carriageway, I pass warehouses and industrial units, allotments and football pitches, bypassing the main shopping street as the maps app on my phone guides me to the address on the old dog tag. Sumner Street is on the edge of the town, a long row of unremarkable post-war semis with small front gardens and short drives of pockmarked block paving. Kimberley is a former mining pit village and has seen its share of hard times over the years—full of good people, for sure, but it feels alongway away from an upscale neighborhood like The Park.
Number 167 is two-thirds of the way down. I pull the car to a stop across the street and study the house for a moment. Thecurtains are open and there is no car outside, no other signs of life visible through the downstairs window. I’ve put the dog collar into a plastic shopping bag—it feels too weird just carrying it around in my hand as if I’m looking for a lost pet—and I grab it from the passenger seat before locking the car and walking up the drive. The bell is an old-fashioned two-tone chime, ading-dongthat clangs mournfully through the dappled glass of the front door.
There is no answer.
