Page 116 of Hard Heart

“I deleted it.”

“How much would you pay?” Jerry asked from the doorway. “I have a copy.”

Alexa glared at her. “Oh, really? One word: sea cucumber.”

“That’s two words.”

“Whatever. Where’s my coffee?”

“I’d be interested to hear about the sea cucumber,” I told her.

“So Jez and her boyfriend were⁠—”

Alexa clapped both hands over her ears and began shrieking, and Jerry leaned back against the wall, ankles crossed and a smirk on her face. Ari clenched her fists and took a deep, calming breath before she pointed to Alexa.

“You. Stop winding up Jez and make these damn cameras work. And you…” She pointed at Jerry. “No using sonic weapons in the house.”

Sonic what? I shook my head, incredulous. “Sweet mercy.”

Ari rolled her eyes. “Welcome to my life.”

“The thing I’m having the most trouble believing is that Jerry has a boyfriend. How does he sleep at night?”

“Soundly,” Jerry said, her voice low and slightly scary.

Alexa snorted. “Their meet-cute involved a home invasion.”

You know, that didn’t surprise me at all.

“Cameras.” Ari sighed. “Please?”

“Why do we need cameras?” I asked. “What are we doing here?”

Ari motioned me into a chair at one of the four oversized desks. This used to be Alexa’s bedroom, didn’t it? But where on earth did she sleep? In a drawer? A video of Blackstone House was frozen on the screen, and it looked to be the same video I’d spent the past three days watching. I recognised the clematis creeping its way up the tower, once mildly overgrown and now a tangle of woody stems.

“Watch.” She played the video in slow motion. “Do you see it?”

“See what?”

This time, she pointed, and a black line flicked into view, just for a second, and then it was gone.

“Is it a bird?” I asked.

“We think it’s the end of a rope. You can see the very edge of Ruby’s window, and it was open. Nobody climbed up from the ground, but what if someone came down from the roof?”

“How would they have got up there?”

“From the rear,” Jerry said. “The wall by the pergola has a downspout, and this house is ridiculously over-engineered. It could have held a lightweight person. We’re going to turn on the cameras and make our own video, just to prove it can be done. Won’t you need that for your appeal?”

“So we can’t make another appeal, but we can— Essentially, yes. But how did the intruder get out? I thought Ruby’s bedroom windows were latched shut when you found her?”

“They were. Dawson saw her body through the windows and tried to open them. That’s when we ended up forcing the door.”

“There’s a problem with the circuit,” Alexa muttered. “A fault with the wiring.”

“Can you replace the cameras with wireless ones?” Ari asked. “The existing system is a decade old.”

“They’re high-end analogue cameras—they should still work. And the array at the back of the house is functioning perfectly well. I think there’s a wiring fault in the front circuit. Yes, I could replace them with a wireless system, but the new ones wouldn’t have exactly the same field of view, and we’d still need to fix the power supply issue.”