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  1

  IF YOU WERE TO put a gun to my head and ask me to explain myself, I suppose I might begin by saying that we are all creatures of habit. But then, you might wonder, what creature of habit is a slave to the habits of others? All I can say is that the habitual is what I love most and am made for; that the best I can do is hang on, have faith, and hope what has lately blown through our unremarkable but well-ordered town will be forgotten and all will be calm again. Right now I feel lucky to hear myself breathe. The air is dangerously thin. It seems to rush in my ears. And yet the scene is peaceful here in the half-lit, slumbering pre-dawn: a white coverlet glowing in the room, a discarded necklace of beads, a shelf of books, one face down, splayed on the bedside-table, as though it – like the whole town at this hushed time – is dead to the world. I cannot make out the title but the sight of this book with its familiar cover image (the shape of a man in raised gilt) returns me to that day, not too long ago, when the wind changed and the sky blackened and ordinary life – startled by the sudden thunderclap of the unusual – reared, kicked over the lantern and turned the barn into a raging inferno whose leaping, thrilling flames could be seen from a hundred miles away.

  It was a day that started as quietly as this one. Another dawn – a dawn suffused with love, I am not afraid to say – though if I pause to mention the girl at the heart of things (or at least her habits) it is only to illustrate the contrast of events, how beauty and ugliness can live so surprisingly cheek by jowl, the one unseen by the other. How one moment you can be lying in the warm, ticking dark, awaiting the return of your special one (and here she was, arriving back from her early run, the rattle of her key in the lock, the sound of water thudding into a fragrant tub), and the next contemplating horror, drama and scandal.

  This is the route my memory instantly takes to capture that day, though the truth is I didn’t hear the news until she had pedalled off into the crisp, bright morning, and I had walked to my office. The rest of our leafy, prosperous community will recall it in their own way. The point is that this was the day the Cooksons of Eastfield Lane returned from their annual spring break in the Seychelles to find a week-old dead body ruining the visual flow of their well-stocked garden with its established fruit trees, landscaped lawns and hand-cut limestone patio.

  * * *

  Every estate agent has a client like the Cooksons, so don’t judge me too harshly when I say I had to suppress a smile when my third in command, Zoe, her eyes wide with excitement and alarm, broke the news. We’d had the Cooksons’ house – a handsome character property at the very edge of town, surrounded by fields and woods and yet only a ten-minute walk from the tennis and cricket club – on our books for eighteen months or more. In a falling market, my senior consultant Katya, an extremely efficient Lithuanian, had sold the place twice – to buyers desperate to own it but who had pulled out in acrimony and tears to take their depreciating financial packages elsewhere, reduced to an emotional frazzle by the Cooksons’ failure over weeks and months to find a new ideal home for themselves, by their refusal to consider going into temporary rented accommodation to rescue these deals, and not least by their general destructive haggling over trifles. I’d lost count of the properties the Cooksons themselves had walked away from at the eleventh hour – upscale dwellings that ticked every box on an evolving wish list that had taken the three of us out to look at converted windmills and maltings, a superior Georgian townhouse on the square, a riverside apartment with long views and finished in oak and granite, a wool merchant’s cottage with sizeable vegetable garden out towards Wodestringham. The paths of the couple’s individual whims – hers, at any moment, for a circle of yews, his for an authentic chef’s kitchen with wine cellar – rarely crossed. If one light went on, another went off. You saw them bickering quietly in their car. Once I heard Mrs Cookson refer to me as ‘that fucking creep, Heming’, which seemed a little severe, though in the circumstances – I was lurking in a recess on the landing directly below them as they stood disagreeing about the aesthetic merits of porthole-style windows – I suppose she was right.

  ‘Do you think the Cooksons actually want to move house?’ Katya said frequently. They probably do now, I thought.

  But who could tell? They’d been in the place sixteen years. Their children had flown. He was a dentist, she owned four pharmacies. Now in their mid-forties, and better off than ever, they seemed to me stranded between possible bad choices: not just between grandstanding and downsizing, but between staying in this marriage for the rest of their lives or breaking free of it. In their terse exchanges about décor or room size you saw a larger sense of purpose draining away. They were looking for something, but a new home together wasn’t it. Rather, they seemed engaged in a passive war of attrition, with house-hunting as their chosen weapon.

  I didn’t like the Cooksons one bit, but they did fascinate me. The last time I had seen them – or, in fact, failed to see them – was some months before their trip to the sun. I’d arranged to show them a new architect-built concrete jewel of a place with a gym and pool. I arrived a little early, checked the rooms, the automatic blinds and lighting. I ran through the blurb Katya had put together. Then I waited, pacing the rooms, pacing the drive. After twenty minutes I called Mr Cookson. He was playing golf. ‘Are you sure it was today?’ he said. I told him that, yes, today was the day, and paused to allow him to apologize. He didn’t. ‘To tell you the truth, I think my wife may have lost interest,’ he said.

  Normally I wouldn’t have minded too much being stood up. In other circumstances I would have used the time to snoop around the house while the vendors were out. But here there were no vendors, or at least none with real lives to look into. Just the usual developers in the habit of dressing their high-spec rooms in modish finery – a leather-and-chrome Corbusier chaise, a shagpile rug, deluxe drapery and linens. Nothing to suggest living, breathing occupancy or personal taste; no stamp of a human form shaping its nest.

  I locked up and walked. The wind was cold but it was dry. When time and weather permit, I walk. From our office – and Heming’s is bang in the middle of the town map, on the north side of the old square – there’s nowhere you can’t get to on foot within half an hour. And what better way to sharpen the focus of everyday blur into readable information? My habit is to take arbitrary diversions. I move like a window-shopper. My antennae are alert to unusual sales clusters, incursions from rival agents. I take the trouble to read the fluttering notices pinned to fences and telegraph poles warning of private building projects or public works. I note what scaffolding is going up, contractors’ vehicles, the contents of skips. The smell of fresh paint puts a spring in my step. I can spot the red dot of a newly installed alarm from a good distance. Occasionally I make use of my opera glasses (an indispensable tool of the equipped agent). But, as I make my rounds, I ask myself: who fits where? In seventeen years in the business, I have sold properties on every street in town, very often more than once. I might
forget a face but, I have to tell you, I never forget a house.

  So, as I approached town, cutting down Boselle Avenue – broad and well-to-do, its pavements blown with leaves and horse-chestnut flowers at this time of year – it was only natural that my eye would register a figure, some fifty yards ahead, emerging from number 4, one of a pair of thirties suburban villas set back from the road. I had handled both these houses in years past. Number 4 had been extended by way of an office-study-cum-box room over the garage. I knew the house. But I didn’t recall the man. Or did I? He was walking a little dog, or, rather, yanking it along. Even at a distance, I sensed his impatience. He was a tall man, which made the poor dog – a terrier of some kind with white tufted hair – look even smaller than it was. He was wearing walking boots and hooded rainwear and his thinning hair was long and swept back. The dog was trying to sniff at gates and fences, and it yapped in protest as he tugged it away. He had the air of a man easily annoyed by life’s fleeting trifles. As if compelled by the stiff wind, I found myself following him and the dog, across the main road, down the hill at the crossroads, then just past the archway and courtyard that my own modest flat overlooked, in a low-rise, honey-bricked development. And it was here, ahead of the entrance to the green, sparkling Common on the right, that he stopped to let the dog defecate in the middle of the path.

  The middle of the path. He barely gave me a glance as I approached. The dog crouched, watchful in mid-strain, then shook its bearded jowls and yawned. I expected the man to produce a bag to scoop up the mess, but he simply waited for the dog to finish, then pulled on the leash and started to walk on.

  ‘Hello?’ I heard myself call out to him. ‘Excuse me…’

  The man – perhaps he was familiar – turned with a vexed look that seemed to call for the counter-balance of a civic smile and a jocular observation. ‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘but I think your dog dropped something?’

  We both looked at the turd I was pointing at, a neat steaming coil that struck me as unusually large for a small dog.

  And then he stared at me. ‘Well, what do you want to do about it?’

  ‘What do I want to do? I rather thought you might want to do something about it.’ I smiled again.

  ‘Well, I do not, so piss off. And just mind your own business, you bourgeois knob.’ He stared at me, lips apart, for a second more, then yanked the leash, and turned on to the path for the Common and park. I stood and watched, the dog once more protesting as they crossed the grass and headed down the steps and along the riverside path. He didn’t look back.

  Bourgeois knob? I’ve always thought of myself rather as a concerned citizen – a model citizen. There was a thin piece of card to be found in a nearby refuse bin. I eased it beneath the pyramid of cooling sludge and transferred it into a discarded fast-food carton. This I carried back up the hill to the courtyard where my car was parked outside my flat. OK, I reasoned, this maniac had humiliated me, but so what? You could either burn with fury or you could do the right thing.

  I put the carton in the passenger-side footwell of my car, then nipped up to my flat to consult the files I keep there. It didn’t take long. I’m very organized. It turned out we had sold the house to a Judith Bridgens in 2007. Perhaps she had resold to this rude oaf. I called the landline number I had on record. There was no answer. I drove up there and parked some way along Boselle Avenue, then strolled back down to number 4 with an armful of sales literature covering the carton. In the garden behind the high, overgrown privet, only a passer-by glancing over the gate would be likely to see me, and even then only for a second or two. I rang the bell and called the landline again. I heard the phone ringing inside. No one answered. I produced the key now from my waistcoat pocket, unlocked the door, waited, and then stepped over the threshold. Oh yes. I always enjoy the first moment of an empty house before the spell of its silence and stillness is broken by my own breathing and movement. I found my way to the kitchen and contemplated the clean oatmeal tiled floor. Would it do the job? Not quite. Perhaps the sitting room … I pushed open the door on to an airy space with tasteful dining area. French windows overlooked a patio and an uncut lawn and flower borders bedraggled by the weather and neglect. The owner was no gardener. He did, however, have an eye for attractive modern soft furnishings, not least a handsome, chunky, white – you might even say bourgeois – hearth-rug.

  There we are, I thought.

  I slid the turd, still improbably intact – like a novelty plastic one – into the rug’s luxurious centre, pausing for a moment to appreciate its caramel perfection, its pleasingly vile aroma – freed now to explore this forbidden interior – rising to my nostrils. The dog would almost certainly sniff it out the moment it returned with its owner. ‘Woof, woof, master! Look at this!’

  I made my retreat. Not least because of the disappointments of the morning, I would have liked to embark on a full tour of the house while I was there. Mostly, I would have loved to remain, in hiding, and see the shock and bafflement on the man’s face when he returned. But I did have a business to run. I exited carefully, leaving a leaflet stuck in the letterbox. The wind had dropped, and with some satisfaction I retraced my steps up Boselle, posting leaflets also at the houses on the way back to the car, then drove back to my flat where I popped the key safely away. Sweet success.

  But, I hear you ask, with some scepticism (and with that gun to my head) … of all the many splendid houses you’ve sold in your seventeen years in the business, you just happened to have the key to that particular one? To which I would answer, of course not – I have the keys to them all.

  2

  I AM SIX YEARS OLD, and the things I know to be true are dissolving. The rooms have become quiet. The talking is elsewhere – my mother and father, my aunt. At night my mother kisses me, but says little. The book of rhymes she reads to me lies unfinished. My father comes home from his office. He and my mother eat dinner while I count the coins in my moneybox or watch TV in my pyjamas. Look at me, cross-legged, my ears sticking out, a glass of milk before me. Riley purrs and closes his eyes when I stroke him between the ears. These are many days rolled into one, but sometimes the memory is singular and sharp: the rough of the dark curtain on my cheek as I stand hidden, the smell of my mother’s cigarette. I discover where they speak in low voices. They are wherever they think I am not. I lie squeezed beneath the sofa with a piece of bread, or behind the wicker chair in the garden room. I watch my mother touch her stomach where her baby lives. Here I am an invisible boy. When my mother is lying down, my father will not allow me in the dark room. Riley comes and goes. Sometimes I follow when my mother is asleep and creep beneath the bed.

  Another time, Aunt Lillian is speaking in a low voice to my father. Her hand is on his, making my breathing stop.

  Uncle Richard takes me out to the football, with its uproar and smell of fried onions. On the way home, he stops the car and the lady takes us upstairs to her house. It’s strange to go upstairs to a house. The room is small. ‘This is William,’ Uncle Richard says to the lady, ruffling my hair. I am left alone in the room. The television is on, but when I have eaten my biscuit I go into the kitchen. It’s smaller than the kitchen at our house and there are damp clothes hanging to dry. In the drawer I find a blue-and-white spoon. It is made of what cups are made of. One day, the lady will say ‘Who has taken my spoon?’ and the answer will be, Mister Nobody.

  Later still, I am a missing child. I hear them call my name – my father, my aunt, my cousin. Soon, even our new neighbours are out looking for me. But I am snuggled down in the marshmallow-coloured velvet ottoman that stands at the foot of the bed my father now shares with Aunt Lillian. From my place among the blankets, I can hear voices in the street. In my mouth is a sweet I have taken from the jar. The house is silent. A long time goes by, though there is still light in the summer sky. Perhaps I have been asleep. When my father returns with the constable and Mr Damato, the Italian man from across the road, I am sitting on the front step reading my book. ‘Where h
ave you been?’ my father demands. I blink in a way my father sometimes calls impertinent. ‘Nowhere.’ I refuse to satisfy them with more. He shakes me by the shoulder and the constable looks stern. Aunt Lillian comes rushing out, as if they have found me dead. Some days later, the newspaper has a picture of my unsmiling face. It says, ‘Joyful William Heming, eight, safe at home after his mystery disappearance.’ My cousin Isobel is thirteen. She is rubbing my nose in the newspaper because of all the trouble I have caused. ‘You are nothing but trouble,’ she hisses.

  One afternoon when Isobel is fifteen and I am ten, she finds me standing in her wardrobe and screams the house down. All I am doing is being as quiet as a mouse. What is her problem? But now I am in worse trouble. ‘I wasn’t spying on her,’ I tell Aunt Lillian, when she accuses me of spying on her (even with my eye to the crack, I could hardly see her face as she sang along to the pop tunes and painted her toenails), but she just glares at me with her mouth open. ‘Look, he has my comb!’ cries Isobel, and snatches it out of my hand. My father is furious and he cannot help but deliver me two or three sharp smacks about the head. He puts me in my own wardrobe and locks the door. ‘We’ll see how you like that,’ he says. In fact, I don’t mind at all.

  In the dark I take out my moneybox key and dig a line in the wood, and then another above it. This will be my mark and no one else’s, hidden here for ever. The space between the lines is as wide as my finger, which is perfect. I imagine crawling into the space and lying very still.

  Isobel will not find me again. But her things are often mysteriously moved around or missing – her cotton-wool sticks and perfumed things. One time she sees me watching her kissing a boy from the lane, his arms around the back of her neck. She is furious. Now, every time she kisses a boy – there is more than one – she thinks I am there. She is always looking out for me, but I am hidden. If I wanted, I could just step out from the shadows in the park, like a spectre.