She put her staff through a drill for entering empty premises. The handbook instructed vigilance; keep the key at all times. Do not leave the door open even to go out to the bins: a burglar needs only seconds to slip inside.
Besides her van, four cars were ranged along the nearside kerb; the bays by the bushes were empty. A gust sent leaves and a squashed milk carton racing along the gutter and somewhere a can clattered and bounced on tarmac. The lamp went out and the carton was subsumed into velvet blackness. Stella concluded that leaves and twigs scraping and sweeping on stone could sound like shuffling soles. She was uptight and letting her imagination run riot, she told herself.
In the hall she skidded on a heap of mail-order catalogues in plastic wrappers silted up on the brush mat and had to kick them out of the way to shut the door.
Upstairs a clock ticked and from the kitchen came the drip-drip of a tap. The air was cold but lacked the stale atmosphere she would have expected of a place shut up and unoccupied even for a couple of days. She identified Lavender and Vanilla from Glade’s Relaxing Moments Collection, which she reserved for middle-range clients prior to a sale or new letting to lend a positive impression to the most tired or drab of interiors and reinforce the conviction that Clean Slate did a thorough job. Terry fitted this ‘average’ profile; most of her clients in this district preferred a less synthetic scent.
Unwilling to attract attention with lights, she twisted on the miniature Maglite attached to her key ring.
Always carry a torch in case the lights fail.
Phantoms shivered and re-formed when she levelled the beam around the hall. An old man flinching and jerking morphed into a coat stand draped with jackets, the telephone table was an arching cat that evaporated as the newel post, a slip of a cartoon character, rose to attention and then swooped up the stairs. Stella picked her way over the catalogues and along the passage to the kitchen.
Something had triggered the security light; Stella leant over the sink but could see no one beneath the window sill and decided it was branches of a forsythia bush waving in the wind. She turned to the room; pale appliances and worktops were clinical in the vibrant light.
There were none of the items that often take up kitchen surfaces: coffee-makers, toasters, cooking implements stuffed upright into ceramic pots, cutting boards harbouring germs; she guessed that little cooking or eating took place and recalled the Coke and two bacon rolls in the Co-op bag. Terry grabbed his food on the run; it was fuel only. She closed off the dripping tap, comforted by a whiff of bleach from the plughole.
On recent visits to Terry, Stella had seldom gone beyond the front room but remained on the sofa, drinking tea. They both knew that the sooner she finished it the sooner she could leave.
The American-style fridge with an ice dispenser dwarfed a reproduction country pine dresser that Stella remembered from her childhood. Ever the opportunist, Terry had snapped it up with a double bed, the kitchen table and her bedroom wardrobe from a man doing a house clearance next door to the scene of one of his crimes. Her mother told friends the cherry-stained pine was the tipping point to divorce, although much of the pine, darker with age, filled her small flat in Barons Court.
The dresser was stacked with white crockery; plates propped up like blank faces in the unremitting light. In Stella’s day the cupboard had been a dumping ground for household odds and ends: a basket of pegs, her mother’s cookery books, chipped cups and plates that her mum got second-hand, not caring if they matched, light bulbs, candles, lengths of cables and trinkets from Christmas crackers.
The fridge, its defrosting cycle complete, shuddered to meditative quiet. Stella was surprised to be greeted by beer and bottles of wine on racks and in the vegetable storage area. She had not thought of Terry as a drinker; whenever she saw him he was about to go on duty or was already working. In a pub he would nurse the same shandy all evening. Three eggs wobbled in a compartment along the top of the door; the only other food was jars of pickled onions, a lump of cheddar and a foil dish of half-eaten shop-bought shepherd’s pie. Terry would not have left food in the fridge if he’d been planning be go away. The drawers of the freezer were packed with more shepherd’s pies. Her mother was sure that Terry would disapprove of her recent decision to be a vegetarian; he disliked vegetarians, she said. Stella doubted Terry cared what her mother ate. Disliking waste, Stella would take his shepherd’s pies home. It felt like stealing; discouraged, she abandoned the idea.
A subtle drop in temperature came not from the fridge but elsewhere in the house.
Along the passage she made out the two panes of glass in the front door: oblongs suspended in darkness. The front door was shut. Above, a floorboard groaned; the house was adjusting to her presence.
She returned to the kitchen. Lit by the halogen beacon the garden was a stage set awaiting performers. Terry must have recently swept because only a sprinkling of leaves were strewn in the flower beds. A plastic picnic table with rainwater collecting in a dip was in the middle on the patio. Matching chairs had been tipped against it in the way Stella would have put them, to keep birds from soiling the seats. Clean Slate offered pressure-washing of paths and garden furniture in a ‘Get Ready for Spring’ package. She would hose down the paving and turn over the soil; the furniture could go.
She had never sat with Terry drinking a beer in the sunshine at the table, telling him about her latest contracts while he related his latest cases.
The security lamp went out. Stella groped for her Maglite.
He was watching.
Spangles of light floated before her. The torch’s battery was failing; the beam wavered to a watery yellow.
She was distracted by the acrid smell of kettle descaler from beneath the sink and bent to investigate. She had searched for a plunger in this cupboard, vast to a child, sent by Terry when the bathroom sink blocked. Stella dismissed the hazy memory.
Stella Darnell judged a person by their cleaning cupboard. Those who stashed materials on shelves, penning stray bottles into plastic boxes, folding dusters, chamois, dishcloths, scourers in stacks and hung up the dustpan and brush, rarely paid invoices on time and picked holes in the service. If she opened a cupboard and the contents spilled on to the floor she could expect to make the place her own and never chase payment.
Terry’s cleaning store was one of the tidiest Stella had seen.
A bowl, a dessertspoon and a mug were placed in a line on the draining board: Terry’s last breakfast. He had eaten cereal and drunk coffee. His six-foot-one-inch frame had briskly crossed the kitchen, leather soles clicking on the tiles, and with swift economic motions he had scooped the inside of the bowl and the mug with the soapy scourer, sluicing each item under the hot tap, careless of scalding already roughened skin. With a fling he had shaken excess water off his hands, drying them with a flapping cloth poked into a rubber holder suctioned on the side of the fridge.
Terry had left unaware that he was walking out of his house for the last time.
The tea towel was dry. Terry had been gone two days. Why was he in Seaford?
Take deep breaths. That’s it. In. Out. In. Out. Keep your eyes on the horizon. Once you get your sea legs, you’ll be right as rain.
He could not loosen her grip on the handrail as a force-nine gale tossed the ferry like one of her bath toys. Passengers were being sick on the deck above and the wind spattered them with flecks of vomit. He would break her tiny fingers if he tried to prise them off the rail. Her bird shoulders rose and fell as she obeyed his instructions. The little thing was quaking; he hugged her close.