The Sorting Out

SHE WALKED HOME in the warm night air, feeling the wind from the sea, sensing rather than hearing the movement of trees and bushes. Melvina was tired from her day in town, from the slow train journey home afterwards, but it had been a successful trip. Two commissions received, and a medium-sized cheque, as well as a general feeling that her career was back on track after recent upheavals. The bag on her shoulder weighed her down, because she had celebrated in her own preferred way, in a bookshop close to the railway terminus. She thought about the weariness of her legs and back, and the prospect of a shower before falling into bed. She planned to sit up in bed browsing through her new books. Also, because thoughts are not linear or orderly, she was musing in disjointed fragments about an article she had just thought of writing, while she was on the train, inspired by watching some of the passengers as they dozed. Thoughts of Hike intruded as well at random moments, the familiar irritation.

Now she was walking alone, almost home. It was a clear summer’s night, with the stars brilliant above. It was a pleasant time to walk, although she would have enjoyed it more if she had not felt so weary. She passed the small park and war memorial on her left, where some of the houses that overlooked the open space still showed lights in their windows. Then at the end of that street came the flight of steps up to the loneliest part of the walk, a short passage across an area of open land. This was in fact the mound of one of the clifftops, with the sea away to her right and just a well-worn but unpaved path between the large bushes of gorse and tamarisk. Night scents briefly wafted by on the wind. At the end of this path was the terrace where her house was situated. Soon she saw the shape of the tall houses in their long darkened row, the single streetlamp close to where she lived.

As she approached the short path that led through her overgrown front garden, she noticed there was something wrong. Her white-painted door was hanging ajar, an angle of the dark interior visible behind it. Suddenly alert to danger, she felt her breath tightening. left it open that morning? Was the door open all day? Had someone broken in? Had Hike called round again while she was out? She hurried anxiously up the path to the door, pushed through.

Light from the streetlamp fell in from behind, casting her shadow at a steep angle across the floor, a shape of unexpected dread. She put her hand to the light-switch, felt the sharp-edged plastic, the metal ring that held it in place, both so familiar to the touch. Her chest was heaving, her breath coming in uneven gasps. She felt as if she was suffocating. Terror of intrusion gripped her. The light came on: the familiar dim beginning, then the quick gain to full luminosity.

At first, nothing appeared to have been moved. Nothing she could see. The books on the shelf, the coats and scarves on the hooks, the two small paintings by the mirror. Hike’s paintings.

Behind her, the door swung open with another gust of wind. Melvina went back and saw where some tool or heavy instrument had been bashed against the hasp, breaking it irretrievably, wrenching the lock out of the body of the door.

Frightened of the darkness outside, the darkness that so recently she had relished, Melvina pushed the door to. There was a pile of books on the door mat, apparently knocked to one side when the door opened. She had no memory of putting them there. She eased the door across them, then propped it closed by leaning her bag against the base of it.

She stacked the books neatly, out of the way.

Now. She took a deep, shuddering breath. The house.

There were two rooms off the entrance hall, both on her right. She pushed a hand through the crack of the door to her study, reached around the door jamb to find the light switch and clicked it on. Dreading what might be in there, she kneed the door open and peered into the room. Her computer was there, her printer, the scanner, her cluttered desk, the bookshelves, the filing cabinet. Nothing disarranged. A green LED flickered on her answering machine.

Familiar calm rested in the untidy room. There was no one in there, no one hiding. She walked across to the windows, feeling her knees tremble with the temporary relief. At least the intruder had not come in here, stolen or broken anything. She swayed, so she stepped back momentarily from the window and pressed down on the surface of the desk with a hand, steadying herself. She could see her own reflection in the rectangle of window and beyond it the light from the streetlamp.

She stepped back close to the window and peered out into the night. There was a car parked in the road not far from the entrance to her house. It was unusual to see any car here after dark. She swished the floor-length curtains closed.

A book fell off the windowsill, landed on the carpet by her feet. She picked it up, closed it, laid it on the cupboard.

She had lived alone in this house from the start, when she bought it after Pieter’s sudden death. Then it had been an escape, a new challenge and a fresh start. She became an unwilling widow, a single woman again, a role she had not expected. Piet’s death was something she had no control over, but she had felt that a change of scene afterwards was necessary. As the months and years went by, she grew comfortably into this place by the sea, always missing Piet, full of regrets about things they had never had the chance to do together, but getting by.

She had never felt threatened by her solitude, before this. There was no one to help her. The silence of the house surrounded her, enveloped her fears. Who had been in? Were they still there?

In the hallway again, she called, ‘Hike? Is it you?’

So silent. She heard a familiar clicking sound from the kitchen, and the thump of the gas boiler igniting itself. Emboldened momentarily, she pushed open the second door, which led to the living room with the kitchen beyond, and stood in the doorway as she turned on the light.

For a moment she realized how exposed and vulnerable she was, should there in fact be anyone lurking in the darkness within, but the light came on and filled the room with comforting normality. Nothing appeared to have been disturbed. One of her books lay in the centre of the carpet, held open by one of her shoes. She walked past, went into the kitchen and turned on the light there. The fluorescent strip flashed noisily twice, then settled to its pink-white glare. In the corner was the boiler with its blue flame, visible through the inspection glass, the same as always. No one was there, no one concealed under the table, behind the open cupboard door. She looked everywhere. The door that led to the back of the house, the yard, the garden, finally to the open clifftop, was still securely locked and bolted.

She did not remember leaving the cupboard door open when she went out. It was normally kept closed, because it jutted into the room. She looked inside – everything seemed to be in place. She looked in the fridge: no food had been taken.

She knew she had to go upstairs, search the rooms there.

She returned to the hall, looked at her bag holding the door closed. The lock hung away from its fitting. Bright scratches of exposed metal flared around it, where the paint had been scraped away. There was a deep groove where whatever had been used had dug in.

Why should someone be so desperate to break in? It had to be Hike – he was furious when she made him give her key back. But would Hike, even Hike, attack the door so violently?

She stood still, holding her breath, trying to detect the slightest sound from the upper floors. Next, she had to search upstairs. She was shaking with fear. She had not known such a reaction was possible, but when she looked at her hands she could not keep them still. Both her kneecaps were twitching and aching. She wanted to sit down, lie down, stop all this, return to the fear-free sanity she had known until three or four minutes before.

At the bottom of the stairs she laid a hand on the bannisters, looked up at the familiar carpet, the old one that had been here when she bought the house and which she had been meaning to replace ever since. Every worn patch, every strand of exposed canvas, was reassuringly familiar. She took another breath, then changed her mind. She hurried into her office, leaving the door in the hallway wide open so that she could see into the hall, and pulled her mobile from her pocket. She pressed the numbers that unlocked the keypad, but she fumbled it. She could not make her fingers go where she wanted. She tried again, muffed it again. She remembered Hike had an instant-dial number. Numero Uno, he said, when he had set it up for her five weeks earlier, just before he drove away.

She pressed the speed-dial key, then the ‘1’ on the keypad. The ringing tone sounded in her ear.

She moved the handset away briefly, to listen for sounds from upstairs. She went back to the door, peered out at the bottom of the stairs, the part of the wall where one of Hike’s old paintings still hung. The ringing tone continued.

How late was it? She glanced at her wristwatch: it was just after midnight. Hike was sometimes asleep by this time. She felt the back of the handset growing slippery, where she held it so anxiously. Then at last he answered.

‘Hullo?’ He sounded curt, muffled, annoyed at being woken.

She started to say, ‘Hike...’, but as she tried to speak the only noise she could make came out as a single gasping syllable. ‘Ha-a-a-a!’ That uncontrollable sound amazed and appalled her. She sucked in air, tried again. This time she managed a high-pitched squeak:

‘Hi-i-i-i!’ Silence at the other end. Humiliated by her own terror, she tried to control herself.

Finally, she got his name out, nearly an octave too high: ‘Hike?’

‘Yeah, it’s me. Is that you, Mel?’

‘Hi –!’ She swallowed, took another shuddering intake of breath, concentrated on the words she had to say. ‘Hike! Help me! Please?’

‘It’s the middle of the night. What’s up?’

‘Someone – there’s someone in the house! Here, when I came in. I found the door –’ Again she remembered what had happened at the start, just those few minutes earlier. That dread feeling when she found the door open in the night, the darkness within, the silence. She almost let go of the handset at the memory. She sat down, lowering her backside against the edge of her desk, but immediately stood up again. Trying to keep her voice low, but hearing the stress make it harsh, she added, ‘I think someone’s still here.’

‘Have you looked?’

‘Yes. No! I haven’t been upstairs. I’m too frightened. They might still be in the house!’

‘Is this what it takes to get you phone me?’

‘Hike, please...’

‘How long has it been? Five or six weeks?’ Melvina could not answer, cross-currents of Hike and the fear of an intruder flooding together. ‘Is there anything missing?’ he said.

‘I don’t know. I don’t think so.’ The cross-currents gave her thoughts sudden freedom. ‘Was it you, Hike? Have you been over here while I was out?’

He said nothing.

‘Maybe it was just local kids,’ he said after a moment. ‘Kicking the door in for fun.’

‘No... it’s been forced. A chisel, a hammer, something heavy.’

‘Are you asking me to drive over?’

Hike lived more than an hour away, by car. He had always said he disliked driving at night. She had kept him away all this time.

‘No, I’m OK,’ Melvina said. ‘I’ve just had a fright, that’s all. I don’t think there’s anyone still here. I’ll be all right.’

‘Look, Mel – I think I’ll drive over and see you anyway. You want me to pick up my stuff, and this might be an opportunity to do that.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I told you and you agreed, you bloody agreed, that you would send a friend to get the stuff. I want that room cleared out.’

‘I know. But you need me, otherwise you wouldn’t have called me in the middle of the night.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I’ll call the police. That’s what I ought to do.’

Suddenly the phone went dead at the other end. Hike had cut off the call.

She put down the phone, laid it on her desk next to her keyboard. A mistake! A mistake to call him... but there was no one else. The flashing LED on the answering machine radiated normality, and for a moment she reached over and rested her finger on the play button. Then she remembered what had happened to the house. Talking to Hike had changed nothing. Just delayed things, just as always.

In the hallway she returned to the front door, looked again at the broken lock. She tried pressing the door into its frame and discovered that if she let the hanging lock be pushed back she could hold the door closed long enough to shoot the bolt at the top. As soon as she had done this she felt safer.

She picked up the pile of books that had been on the doormat when she came in, and without examining them stacked them roughly on the end of the lowest bookshelf.

Looking anxiously ahead of her Melvina began to climb the stairs, pausing for a few seconds on each step. She was straining to hear any sound from above. The silence was absolute: no apparent movement, nothing being moved about, no footsteps. No one breathing.

The mobile handset suddenly rang, behind her in the study where she had put it down. She went rigid for a moment. Then, relieved, she ran down the four or five steps she had climbed and hurried back into her study.

‘Mel, did you call me because you wanted me to drive over tonight?’

‘No, I –’

No, I just wanted to be sure it wasn’t you, Hike, she added silently, looking over her shoulder at the light coming in from the hall.

‘I’m a bit more awake now,’ he said. ‘Have you noticed anything stolen? Has anything been moved? Is there any damage?’

‘It’s OK. I’ve searched the house. There’s no one here and nothing’s gone.’

‘Couldn’t you ask one of the neighbours if they saw anything?’

‘Hike, you know I’m alone here. The other houses are still empty.’

Some of them were used as summer lets and would start taking visitors in the next few days, but because of the recession most of the houses in this terrace were permanently vacant. Hike knew this, he knew the collapse in property values was why she had been able to afford the house on her intermittent earnings.

‘Where did you go today?’ he said suddenly.

‘What?’

‘You’ve been out of the house all day, and I’ve been trying to call you. Are you seeing someone?’

‘It’s none of your damned business! Is that all you’re thinking about? What I’ve been doing all day? Someone’s broken into my house and for all I know is still in here somewhere.’

‘I thought you said no one was there.’

‘I was still looking when you called again.’

‘Are seeing someone, Mel?’

She tried to think of some answer, but she was obsessed with thoughts of the house, the open door, that darkness and silence. She felt the paralysis of her throat again, the mysterious seizing up of breath and vocal chords, the dominance of fear, the dumbness it caused. She gasped involuntarily, then moved the phone away from her ear. No more Hike.

She pressed the main switch on the top of the handset, watched the logo spinning back into oblivion, then darkness.

There were fourteen messages waiting on the landline answering machine – most of them would be from Hike, just as they were every other day. She flicked it off. Her hands shook.

Something moved upstairs, scraping on the floorboards. Involuntarily, she glanced at the ceiling. The room above, the spare room, the one where Hike’s stuff was still piled up awaiting the day when he or one of his friends would collect it. She strained to hear more, thinking, hoping, she had misheard some other sound, perhaps from outside. Then again: a muffled scraping noise, apparently on the bare boards above.

She emitted another involuntary, inarticulate noise: a sob, a croak, a cry of fear. Propelled by the fright that was coiled inside her, but at the same time managing to suppress it somehow, adrenaline-charged, she ran two steps at a time up the stairs. She went straight to the door of the spare room, threw it open and pressed her hand hard against the light-switch inside. She went in.

Familiar chaos filled the room, the remaining debris of Hike’s departure. His uncollected stuff had been pushed against one of the walls: piles of paper, canvases, pots, boxes. His broken computer scanner and a tangle of cables. Three large crates of vinyl records and CDs. That bloody music he played so loud when she had been trying to work. Two suitcases she had never opened, but which she assumed contained some of his clothes. Shelves where he had stacked his stuff, but not books – these were the only shelves in the house that were not crammed with books. This was the only room without books. Hike was not a reader, and had never understood why she was.

There were other traces of him everywhere, reminders of him, his endless presence in the house, the upset he had caused her almost from the first week, later the resentment, finally the anger, the days and weeks of pointlessly wasted time, all the early curiosity about him lost, the endless regrets about letting him move in and set up a studio, the feeling of being invaded, of trying to make the relationship work, even at the end.

Nothing in the room had been moved or interfered with and nothing had apparently been taken. The window was wide open as she had left it that morning, but the wind was blowing in from the sea. She pushed it closed, and secured it. There was a cupboard door hanging open, a glimpse of the dim interior beyond. Still fired up by anger and fear, she strode across the room, stepped past Hike’s cases and pulled the door fully open.

The cupboard was empty. The rack where his clothes had hung, the shelves where he had crammed his messy things, were all vacant. Nothing in there. Just a paperback book, tossed down so that its cover was curled beneath the weight of the pages.

She picked it up: it was Douglas Dunn’s Elegies. It must be her copy – Hike had no interest in poetry. She straightened the cover and gently riffled the pages of the book, as if comforting a pet animal that had been hurt. Holding it in her hand she left the room, but deliberately did not switch off the light. She now had an aversion to unlighted rooms, dark corners.

The light on the landing had gone out while she was in Hike’s room. She turned it on again, only half-remembering if she had switched it off herself as she dashed upstairs to this floor. Why should she have done that? It made no sense.

The room next to Hike’s was her own sitting room, a room set aside for reading, with more books, hundreds more books. There were shelves on three of the walls, floor to ceiling, a large and comfy armchair which she had bought as a treat for herself after Piet died, a reading lamp, a footstool, a small side table. A desk with papers and a portable typewriter she sometimes used if she didn’t want to break off and go downstairs to the computer. The room had a closed, concentrated, comfortable feeling. She remembered Hike’s derision when he saw the room the day he moved in. He said it was middle-class, bourgeois. No, it’s just where I like to sit. The room had become a sort of battleground after that, a minor but constant aggravation to Hike. After he left, she realized that she had frequently found herself making excuses to be in here, to explain that which could not be explained to someone who would never understand.

She was glad he was gone, glad a hundred times, now a hundred and one. She never wanted him back, no matter what.

She glanced around the room: it was lit only by her reading lamp, but everything seemed to be untouched. Just books everywhere, as she liked them to be, in their familiar but comprehensible jumbles. She pressed the Dunn into a space on a shelf beside the door, preoccupied still with her worries, not noticing or caring which books she placed it beside.

She went next to the bathroom. Three of her books lay on the floor beneath where the glass cubicle door overhung the rim of the shower cubicle. They were three recently published hardback novels she had reviewed for a magazine a month before, and which she expected would have a resale value to a dealer. How had they come into the bathroom, though? She never took books in there.

She picked them up, examined them for damage. As far as she could see no harm had been done by water dripping on them. She opened the top one, and immediately discovered that it was upside-down. The paper dust-wrapper had been removed and put back on the wrong way round.

The other two books were the same.

Melvina stood on the landing outside her reading room, replacing the dust-wrappers one by one. She felt her throat constricting again – her hands were shaking. She could not look around, fearful of everything now in the house.

She took a step into her reading room, and placed the books on the shelf near Elegies. She backed out of the room without looking around too closely, horribly aware that something in there had been changed and she did not like to think what, nor look too closely in case she found out.

Hairs on her arms were standing upright. She was sweating – her blouse was sticking to her body under her armpits, against her back. But she was now determined to finish this. She climbed the final flight of stairs to the top floor of the house. She went to her sewing room first, under the eaves, with a dormer window looking out towards the road. The bluewhite glare fell on the car parked close to her house. It looked like Hike’s car, but then most cars did.

She checked the room for any sign of intrusion. It was here she kept her sewing table

with the machine, the needlepoint she had been working on for a year or more, the various garments she had been meaning to get around to repairing. There was a wardrobe, and in that she kept the old clothes she was planning to take one day to a charity shop. Some of those clothes were Hike’s.

The unshaded lightbulb threw its familiar light across everything – there was no one in the room, nowhere that anyone could be hiding.

Finally, quickly, she went to her bedroom. This was the room with the best view of the sea. She had originally planned it to be her office, but once she moved in she realized she would be distracted by staring out all day.

She turned on the central light, went straight in, saw her reflection in the largest pane of the window. She paused just inside the door, remembering. Hike had tried to change this room, said it was too feminine. He hated lace, frills, cushions, things he deemed to be womanly. He never found out that for the most part she did too, and that there was no trace of them, never had been. It had not stopped him criticizing. He did move the bed away from the wall where she had initially placed it, because, he said, he did not want to fall over her stuff if he had to get up in the night.

Melvina planned to move the bed back soon, but she wanted to put up more bookshelves before she did. Money was tight, so she had been delaying.

Everything she remembered of Hike was negative, unpleasant, rancorous. How had it happened? Since he left she had grown so accustomed to being weary of him that she had to make a conscious effort to remember that Hike Tommas had once been eagerly welcome in her life. The early days had been exciting, certainly because they brought an end to the long aftermath of Piet’s death. Hike intrigued her. His wispy beard, his hard, slim body, and his abrasive sense of humour, all were so unlike genial Piet. Hike changed everything in her life, or tried to. His opinions – they soon became a regular feature, his attitude to life, his harsh judgments on others, a constant undercurrent of ill-feelings, but at first she found his reckless views on other artists and writers stimulating and entertaining. Hike did not care what he said or thought, which was refreshing at first but increasingly tiresome later. Then there were the paintings he executed, the photographs he took, the objects he made. He was good. He won awards, had held an exhibition at a leading contemporary art gallery, was discussed on the arts pages of broadsheet newspapers. And the physical thing of course, the need she had, the enjoyment of it. They had done that well together. They made it work, but the more it worked the more it came to define what it was she disliked about him. She hated the noises he made, the obscene words he uttered when he climaxed, the way he held her head to press her face against him. Once she gagged and nearly suffocated as he forced himself deep into her mouth, but it did not stop him doing it again the next time. Hike was always in a hurry about sex. Get it over with, he said, then do it again as soon as possible.

Well, now, it was no longer a problem.

There was a pile of her books balanced on the end of the bed, placed exactly at the corner, leaning slightly to one side. Ten books, a dozen? They were paperbacks. She recognized them all, but they belonged in her study or reading room. She could not remember bringing them up here. On the top was another by Douglas Dunn: Europa’s Lover. Then Nell Dunn’s Poor Cow, J. W. Dunne’s An Experiment with Time, Dorothy Dunnet’s The Unicorn Hunt, Gerald du Maurier’s The Martian.

She never alphabetized her books by author. She either stacked her books by type, or more commonly left them in unsorted heaps that she would get around to tidying up one day. She always knew where her books were, or could find them quickly using the habitual reader’s radar. The poetry came from her study, the other books from her reading room. She felt her fingernails biting into the palms of her hands, the cold press of her perspiration-soaked blouse against her back.

Trying to stay calm she went to the books but the slight pressure and vibration of her feet on the floorboards was enough to cause the pile to topple. She lunged forward to catch them but they thudded down on the floor, some of them landing with pages open and the spines bent. She knelt to pick them up.

On that level, face close to the floor, she paused. She was next to the bed, close beside the dark area beneath the bed.

Melvina bit her lip, leaned forward and down, so that she could look under it.

No one there. As she straightened with some of the paperbacks in her hand she felt exposed and vulnerable, moving backwards and getting to her feet without looking, not being able to see behind her, or to turn quickly enough.

But she stood up, looked around the room, then placed the books on the floor so that they would not fall again. She headed for the stairs.

Still feeling her knees quivering as she walked, Melvina went through every room in the house one more time, feeling that perhaps the worst was over. Both doors to the outside were secure, and everything was as she expected it to be.

Just the books. Why had the intruder moved her books around?

She went to the kitchen, closed the Venetian blinds and made herself a cup of hot chocolate. It was already long past midnight, but she was wide awake and still jittery.

She returned to her study and switched on her computer. Her mailbox would be full of Hike but tonight she would just delete everything from him without reading. She stared at the monitor, sipping her chocolate drink, while the computer booted.

She browsed through her emails, skipping over Hike’s or simply deleting them unread. For a while he had been sending his messages from an email address that did not contain his name, apparently trying to get under her guard, but he had quit doing that last week. She stared at the screen, only half-seeing, half-reading the other notes from her friends. None of them ever mentioned Hike; to all her friends, he was a figure of the past.

She knew Hike was stalking her, and that one of a stalker’s intentions was to make the victim think constantly about him. She also knew Hike was succeeding. It must have been him who came to the house. Who else would it have been? But then why had he taken back none of his property, which he knew she repeatedly asked him to have moved, but which he constantly used as one of his excuses for keeping in close contact with her? Perhaps he had said something about coming to the house in one of the emails she had already deleted?

Changing her mind, she found the trash folder of previously deleted emails and opened every one of his messages from the last three days. She skimmed through them, deliberately not reacting to his familiar entreaties, threats, reminders of promises imaginary and real, his endless emotional blackmail about loneliness and abandonment, his pleas for forgiveness, etc. Nothing new, nothing that explained what had happened today.

All she had to do was wait him out. Give it time.

She clicked away the trash folder, but a new message had arrived in her in-box, from Hike. The date stamp showed it had been sent a few seconds before.

Melvina closed her eyes, wondering how much time it would really need. When would he leave her alone?

Behind her there was a sound, heavy fabric moving.

Immediately she stiffened, was braced against fear. She strained to hear. There was a slight sense of movement, then a quiet noise that sounded like a breath.

In the room with her. Someone was behind her, while she sat at her desk.

She froze, one hand still resting on the computer mouse, the other with her fingers beside the keyboard. The computer’s cooling fan was making a noise that masked most of the quiet noises around her. Noises like the sound of someone breathing.

She waited, her own breath caught somewhere between her chest and her throat. She hardly dared move.

Her desk was about a metre away from the bay window, so there was space for someone to stand behind her. She turned in a hurry, accidentally knocking some pencils from her desk with her hand. As they clattered to the floor she looked behind her.

She stood.

Every light in the room was on. She could see plainly. There was a figure standing by the window, concealed by one of the full-length curtains.

She could make out the bulge, the approximate shape of the body hidden behind. She stepped back in alarm but her chair was there and she knocked against it. She stared in horror at the figure. The bulge in the curtains, the sound of breathing, the source of every dread.

Whoever was there had taken hold of another of her books, because she could see it, a black hardcover without a paper jacket, held at waist height in front of the curtain. It was the only clue to the actual presence of the person hidden there. She was so close she could reach out and touch the book. It was being held somehow at an angle, an irregular diamond halfway up the curtain, in front of the bulge, supported from behind... by someone breathing as they stood behind the curtain.

The curtain moved slightly, as if lifted by a breeze. A breath.

Another involuntary sound broke fearfully from her. She pushed back, shoving her chair to one side until she was pressing hard against the edge of her desk. She groped behind and her hand touched some pens, her notepad, the mouse, her mobile phone... and a ruler. A wooden ruler, a solid stick, the sort that could be rolled.

She grabbed it and without a thought of what she was doing she struck with revulsion at the book, like someone trying to kill a snake or a rat. The wooden ruler thumped hard against the book, dashing it to the ground. It fell in a violent flurry of pages, spine upwards, pages curled beneath it.

The curtain shook, swung, fell back against the window. She had expected a cry of pain as the book was dashed away.

Using the ruler, she parted the curtain.

No one was there. Just the black oblong of night-darkened window. She saw her reflection dimly in the pane. Her hair was wild, disarrayed, as if in fright. She smoothed it down without thinking why. The half-light window at the top of the frame was open, admitting a breeze, a breath of night air. She felt the cooling flow, but now she wanted the house to be secure, sealed. She balanced herself precariously on her office chair and closed the window.

The solitary car was still parked outside, under the streetlamp. It looked like Hike’s, but he was more than an hour away. It could not be him – although mobile phones, wireless broadband, could be accessed from a car. Because of the light shining down from above, the car’s interior was shadowed and she could not make out details – was there someone inside?

She stared, but nothing moved.

Stepping down from her chair she picked up the book that had given her such a fright. It was John Donne’s Collected Poetry, a hardback she had owned since she was at university. She clutched it with the relief of recognition, closed the pages, checked that none of them had been folded back when she knocked it to the floor. There was a dent at the top of the front cover where she had brought down the ruler. The spine, the rest of the binding, the pages, looked none the worse for the incident, but as she turned to put the book on the shelf where it belonged she discovered that there was a large patch of sticky stuff on the back board. She tapped her finger against it and was surprised at the strength of the glue that had been smeared there.

She sat at her desk, despairing, and holding the damaged book. Why this one? She dabbed at the sticky stuff with a paper tissue, but it only made a mess, made the problem worse.

She put the book aside and closed down the computer. She wanted no more incoming emails. At last the room was silent – no whirring sound of the cooling fan, or of the wind from outside, or of anyone or anything moving inside the house. No footsteps or moving objects, no one breathing around her, no suggestion there was anyone near her, or hidden somewhere in a corner she had forgotten to search.

Tiredness was finally sweeping over her, as the physical exertion of the day’s travels and the trauma of arriving home combined against her. But still she could not end the day without being sure.

She moved swiftly from her study, walked straight to the front door, pulled back the bolt and went outside. At once she was in the wind, the sound of trees and foliage moving, the night-time cleansing of the air.

She headed directly for the car parked beneath the streetlamp.

No one was inside, or no one appeared to be inside. She went forward, suddenly alarmed that there might in fact be someone hiding, who had ducked down as she left her house. In her haste she had not thought to bring a torch. She reached the passenger door of the car, braced herself, leaned forward, looked in through the window.

A parallelogram of light fell in from the streetlamp. There was a laptop computer on the front passenger seat, its screen opened up, and lying next to it was a mobile phone. Both revealed by their tiny green LED signals that they were in use, or at least were on standby. There was no sign of anyone hiding in the car. She tried the door, but it was locked. She went to the other side, tried the door there too.

When she turned to go back to her house she realized she had made no attempt to close the front door behind her. In a disturbing reprise of the first sign she had seen of the intrusion, it was swinging to and fro in the wind, a seeming invitation. She hurried back, rushed inside, pushed the door into place and slid the bolt closed.

She stood at the bottom of the stairs, looking up, listening for sounds from any of the rooms downstairs. The books beside the door, which she had not examined closely before, were still on the shelf where she had thrust them in haste.

Melvina picked them up with a feeling of dread certainty, and looked at the authors’ names: Disraeli, Dickinson, Dickens, Dick, DeLillo, De La Mare...

Once again, full of fear, she toured the house. She checked all the doors and windows, she looked in every room and made sure that no one could be in any conceivable place of concealment. Then, at last, she began to relax.

It was past one o’clock, and although she felt tired she was not yet sleepy. She went back to her cup of drinking chocolate, now lukewarm, and finished it. Then she climbed up the stairs to the bathroom, brushed her teeth and took a shower.

For the first time since she had bought the house, she found being inside the shower frightening: the closing of the cubicle door and the noise of the rushing water cut her off from the rest of the house and made her feel isolated and vulnerable. She wanted to extend sensors throughout the house, detect the first sign of intrusion at the earliest opportunity. She turned off the water almost as soon as she had started, even before it had become warm enough, and stepped out of the shower feeling wet but unwashed. She towelled herself down, still on edge, nervous again.

In the bedroom, she collected the books that had been stacked on the end of her bed, took them down to her reading room. Most of them belonged there, and she would put the others back in her study in the morning. She went downstairs, found the other books, all with authors whose names began with ‘D’. Why?

She turned on the central light in her reading room, and once again she had the unmistakable feeling that something was different, something had changed.

The books on the shelves looked tidier than usual: no books rested face-up on the tops of others. No books leaned to one side. None stuck out.

She looked at the shelf nearest her. Rossetti, Rosenberg, Roberts, Reynolds, Remarque, Rand, Rabelais, Quiller-Couch, Pudney, Proust... All sorted into alphabetical order. By author. In reverse, Z to A.

She put down the pile of ‘D’ authors she was carrying, and turned to the shelves by the window. On the top shelf, to the left, were Thérèse Raquin, Nana, Germinal, La Débâcle, a volume of letters, all by Émile Zola. Next to him, Israel Zangwill’s play The Melting Pot and his novel Children of the Ghetto. Next –

She went to the other end of the shelves, by the door. Here was the copy of Douglas Dunn’s Elegies, where she had hurriedly stacked it with the three review copies, after she found it in the spare room cupboard. She now realized she had pressed it in beside Le Guin and Kundera.

She took it down, added it to the pile of ‘D’ authors.

One of the hardcovers close at hand was her treasured copy of Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. She removed it from the shelf carefully, with her hand shaking again. When she opened the book she found that it was upside-down inside its paper dust-jacket.

Carrying the ‘D’ authors, Melvina went downstairs again to her study. The first book at the top left-hand end of the main shelf was Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird, and several more of his novels. Next to those, Koestler. Next to him –

Immediately beside her desk was a long gap in the sequence, which began after Dunstan and the sequence resumed with Defoe. The books she was carrying in both hands, a tall heap of mixed paperbacks and hardcovers, fitted loosely in the space.

She put them back, instinctively sorting them into the reverse sequence – she could not help it.

At the far end of her study, where there was another kind of gap, a space for new acquisitions, the last title was Inter Ice Age IV, by Kobo Abe.

Melvina went around the house one last time. She double-checked that every window was closed and curtained, that the front and back doors were securely closed, and that every light in the house was on. At last, she went to bed.

She read for a while, she listened to music on her MP3 player and she turned on the 2:00am BBC news. She lay in the half-dark, with a reading lamp on but turned away towards the wall, and with light spilling into the room from the hall. She turned, she fluffed pillows, she tried to cool down and then to warm up. Eventually she drifted into a state of half-sleep: lying still with her eyes closed, but with her thoughts circling and repeating. Time passed slowly.

She must eventually have fallen into a light sleep, because she was awakened suddenly by a blow to her face. Something hard and heavy, and with a sharp corner, landed painfully on her cheekbone and temple. It rested there inexplicably. Instantly she was awake, and moving. Whatever it was slid off her face, landed on the mattress beside her and fell to the floor.

She sat up, and swung her legs out of the bed so that she could sit upright. She swivelled her reading lamp around, and in its glare she picked up the book that had fallen on her. It was Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species. It was her old paperback annotated edition, purchased years before, one of those many titles she was intending to read all the way through. One of these days.

From outside the house she heard the starter-motor of a car, followed by an engine being revved. Still naked from the bed she went quickly to her sewing room next door, pulled aside the curtain, and looked down at the street. The car that had been parked outside her house was accelerating away. She could not see who was driving.

Melvina waited at the window, resting her hands on the sill, leaning her forehead against the cool glass. She watched until the car had driven away, out of sight, and could no longer be heard.

Pre-dawn quietude began to spread around her – in the east there was a grey lightening of the sky, a mottled paleness, unspectacular but steady. The trees across the road from her house gradually took on clarity and shape. She returned briefly to her bedroom, pulled on her robe, then she went back to the window. Almost imperceptibly, the world was sliding into visibility and colour around her – the trees, the curving road, the closed sheds of the council cleaning depot at the end of her street, the roofs of her nearest neighbours’ houses down the hill, the flowers in her overgrown garden. Melvina opened the window fully, leaned out into the air, relishing the cool atmosphere. She had not been awake at sunrise for many years. Now she could hear the sea, away behind her on the far side of the house, making a constant shushing on the shingle beach. Calmness spread through her. She waited until the sun had fully risen, but almost as soon as it became visible it disappeared behind a bank of grey cloud. A bird, hidden somewhere, began to sing. The daylight spread inexorably but gently.

Fully awake, Melvina returned to her bedroom and dressed in her oldest work clothes.

She went to the spare room and began to carry Hike’s stuff downstairs. It took her an hour to collect up and move everything, and at the end of that time she was sweaty, tired and in need of a bath, but when she had finished Hike’s belongings, all his photographs and paintings, including the two that had been hung in her entrance hall, all his art materials, his photo equipment, his papers, magazines, records, broken scanner, bags of cables and clothes in need of recycling lay in a heap outside. But not anywhere near her own house. Two of the houses a short way from hers were due to be let to visitors in two days’ time, and she knew someone would clear away all the junk that had inexplicably appeared outside them.

It was going to be another warm day. Melvina opened every window, and settled down to work.