Eri brings the car to a stop when Jen doesn’t reply. They are about three hundred feet from Kelly’s dot. Jen should get out, but she hesitates. Wanting to enjoy these last few moments until … until something.
With Eri’s headlights now off, Jen’s eyes adjust to the twilit drive. It winds to the left, then to the right. The sky is a bright mother of pearl, close to the summer solstice. The trees are full, shaggy, the leaves of one meeting the other.
Headlights sweep the skies like laser beams. ‘He’s driving,’ Eri says. He reverses quickly backwards and out on to the main road. Jen glances at her phone as the blue dot begins to move.
Kelly drives past them and into the distance, not seeming to notice them. ‘Shall we follow?’ Eri asks.
‘No. Let’s … I want to see where he was, what’s at the end of this drive.’
Eri heads wordlessly all the way to the top. It winds this way and that, the bends obscuring what lies at the end of it. Jen is expecting to see a wedding venue, a castle, a stately home, but instead a small and shabby housing development slides into view, one building at a time. Seven houses dotted around a shingled driveway. Eri pulls the car to a stop. The houses are old stone. The windows are illuminated in four of them; the others in darkness.
One is untidier than the rest. Roof tiles missing. An old-fashioned wooden front door that looks rickety, near rotten. One bay window on the first storey is boarded up, QAnon looped on it in pink spray paint. Eri sits in silence while Jen gazes up at it. That’s the house. She’s sure of it. It’s the only one without a car outside.
‘I have no idea what this is,’ she says.
‘Looks dodgy.’
Jen’s mind is spinning in overtime. A place to deal. A hideaway. A place to cut drugs. A place to kill people. A place to keep missing children, dead policemen … it could be anything. Nothing good.
‘He said he was going camping,’ she whispers to Eri instead of all this.
‘Maybe he is. Looks pretty outdoorsy,’ he adds with a laugh.
‘In the Lake District.’
‘Oh.’
‘Will you wait here?’ she asks, easing the door handle open. ‘I need to go and look.’
‘’Course,’ he says, but his facial expression has become more wary. Her fleeting friend the Uber driver, the person she has confessed the most to. She glances back at him as she goes. He’s lit up by the interior light, a snow globe in the dimness.
She walks tentatively across the grey shingle. The air outside is holiday air. Summertime smells, the sound of crickets.
And suddenly, she wishes to be back there, on the landing with the pumpkin, watching Todd kill a man. She’d just let it happen. Accept it. He’d do his time. He’d be able to have a life afterwards. She wants, for the first time, to re-cover this wound she has discovered. Stop discovering its depths. Move on.
She walks through the darkness, up to the house, and tries the front door, but it’s locked. It sits slightly apart from the other houses. None of them are boundaried, no fences, no front or back gardens. The neighbour has manicured their lawn up to an arbitrary straight line. After it, the wildness of this garden begins – nettles, weeds, two giant pink lupins which nod and sway in the breeze.
Jen pushes the letterbox open. It reminds her of the one they had growing up. It’s stiff and cold underneath her fingertips, and she thinks of her father and the day he died and how she didn’t get there in time.
Through the letterbox she can see an old-fashioned hallway. Uneven quarry tiles. She presumes Kelly has picked up the post from the floor and stacked it on the hallway table there.
The sign on the render to the side of the door says Sandalwood. The next cottage along says Bay. It’s tiny, two rooms deep. Jen walks a clockwise loop around it. At the back are two old-fashioned sliding patio doors, the glass stained with a blush of moss.
A dark-wood dining table sits in a teal-carpeted room inside, like a doll’s house. No chairs. An empty kitchenette to the left, nothing out on the work surfaces, not even a kettle. She presses her hands around her forehead to lean against the patio doors, peering in, and her fingers come away green. It’s uncared for, but not derelict, maybe recently emptied.
She circles back around to the front. The windows to the living room are mullioned, every other square a distorted circle of blown glass. The living room is preserved, like a museum or a set. A pink three-piece suite sits in the centre, its arms covered in what were once white pieces of lace. A remote control rests on an empty coffee table at a diagonal angle. A full bookcase, nothing she can make out. Two dusty champagne flutes on the top. She’s about to stop looking when she notices something right in the front of her field of vision: the distinctive black velvet back of a double photo frame, right here on the windowsill that’s littered with dead flies on their backs. The distorted glass meant she almost missed it. She shifts against the window to get a closer look.
The air seems to soften and still as it comes into focus, the molecules of the universe settling around her. This is not a wild-goose chase. This is not madness.
Here it is.
It’s a photograph of Kelly – clearly Kelly – that guarded, small smile. He’s much younger, maybe twenty, standing next to somebody else. A man with a shaved head. Their arms around each other. The frame is thick with dust, and she’s a foot away from it, but she can see that they look like each other. Their eyes. And something intangible, too. The way families sometimes bear resemblances that aren’t obvious. Bone structure, the shape of their foreheads, the way they stand: the way they seem to hold potential in their bodies, like runners on the starting blocks.
So who is he? This stranger who looks like her husband? Kelly says he has no living relatives: another thing she’d always believed. She considers this as she stares at the figures in the photograph. It’s one thing to lie about knowing an acquaintance who’s been in prison. It’s quite another to lie about your family, about where you came from.
And why would her husband have a photo of himself if this house is in any way the site of something dodgy? He wouldn’t. Surely he wouldn’t. He’s not stupid.
She walks back to the Uber. He has Kelly’s eyes. He has Todd’s eyes. That’s all she keeps thinking. Three sets of navy-blue eyes. Her husband, her son, and somebody else. Somebody she doesn’t know, won’t be able to find. Even if she breaks in, takes the photograph with her, she won’t have it tomorrow.
Eri is playing some platform game on his phone, holding it horizontal, pressing at the screen as tinny music plays. ‘Sorry,’ he says, then locks the screen. Jen gets in the front, next to him.
‘What …’ he says, in the tone of voice of somebody who feels that they have to ask.
‘I don’t know. It’s empty.’
Jen opens the app and looks back at Find My iPhone. Kelly now looks to be heading to the Lake District, where he always said he was going. But via here, this abandoned house.
‘Who owns it?’
‘Hang on,’ Jen says. You can find out who owns any property from the Land Registry for three pounds.
She downloads the title and scrolls to the registry. The proprietor is the Duchy of Lancaster. That’s the Crown. Unclaimed property reverts to the Crown. The first thing any property lawyer learns. Jen holds her lit-up phone in her lap and stares up at the house.