“Is house, Mr Boyle. Guest House. Is no empty, I think. Is guest people still inside.”

Rufus blinked. Magda was a fine cleaner, but holding a conversation with her could be like trying to carry water in a sieve. Not only was her grasp of the language tenuous at best, Rufus had also come to the conclusion that she was thick as pigshit.

Never exactly a winning combination.

Still, she was a hard worker, knew her way around a vacuum cleaner, and the one thing she had a worse understanding of than English was the minimum wage regulations.

“Was that a question, or are you telling me?” he asked.

“Pardon?”

“‘Is guest people still inside,’ you said. Was that a question, or are you saying they’re still inside?”

“Still inside. I think. Curtains…” Magda hesitated, like she was replaying the word to check it was the right one. “…closed. All closed. Up. Down. Closed.”

“They might have left them shut.”

“Pardon?”

“I said… Nothing. Forget it. Have you looked?”

“Looked?”

Rufus removed the phone from his ear, pushed out his lower lip with his tongue to imply the woman on the other end of the line suffered some sort of disability, then swallowed back his rising irritation.

“Just knock. Check. They should have left.”

“They should have left.”

“I know. That’s what I just said!”

The sound of a titanium driver striking a golf ball made him look back over his shoulder. The hissed, “Yes! Get in!” only served to further spoil his mood.

“Just knock on the door and go in,” he instructed.

“I no like to go in if people inside.”

“They won’t be inside, Magda,” Rufus snapped. “If they are, then they bloody well shouldn’t be. So knock, go in, and if they’re in there, tell them to sling their hook.”

The silence from the other end was riddled with confusion. Rufus sighed and rubbed his forehead with a gloved hand.

“Look, I’ll hold on. Go in. If they’re there, you can put me on speakerphone. I can talk to them.”

“I… I should go in?”

“Yes! For Christ’s sake, Magda. It’s not hard. Go in. In you go. You go in. Understand?”

The sound changed on the line. A breeze blew. Birdsong echoed. A car door thunked shut.

“I go in. But I no like.”

Rufus wanted to point out that he didn’t particularly like having his morning golf game interrupted for the sake of some unopened curtains, but the linguistic gymnastics that would be required to get his point across would only frustrate him, so he elected to remain silent.

“You about done?” his opponent asked. “We’ll have people wanting to play through if we don’t get a shifty on, and I’m working at two.”

Rufus held up a finger for silence. “Just… one moment.”