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 bedsidetable,
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 horsechestnut
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 fastfood
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.