“Not these days?”

The smirk got bigger. “Not since he lost his job. They’d a birthday party for one of the kids, back in spring, but that’s the last time I saw anyone go in there. Like I said, though, I don’t be watching. But it just goes to show you, doesn’t it?”

“It does, yeah. Tell us something: have you had any hassle with mice, rats, anything like that?”

That got Jayden’s attention. He even hit Pause. “Jesus! Did rats eat them?”

“No,” I said.

“Ahhh,” he said, disappointed, but he kept watching us. The kid was unnerving. He had flat, colorless eyes, like a squid.

His mother said, “Never had rats. I wouldn’t be surprised, the way the drains are in this place, but no. Not yet, anyway.”

Richie said, “It isn’t great out here, no?”

“It’s a dump,” Jayden said.

“Yeah? Why?”

He shrugged. Sinéad said, “Have you looked at the place?”

“Looks all right to me,” Richie said, surprised. “Nice houses, loads of space, you’ve done the place up lovely …”

“Yeah, that’s what we thought. Looked great on the plans. Hang on—”

She heaved herself out of the chair with a grunt and bent over—I could have lived without that view—to paw through the mess on a side table: celebrity magazines, spilled sugar, a baby monitor, half a sausage roll on a greasy plate. “Here,” she said, shoving a brochure at Richie. “That’s what we thought we were buying.”

The front of the brochure said OCEAN VIEW, in the same curly writing as the signboard outside the estate, over a photo of a laughing couple hugging two catalog kids in front of a snow-white house and Mediterranean-blue waves. Inside was the menu: four-bed, five-bed, detached, duplex, whatever your heart desired, all of them so pristine they almost glowed and so well Photoshopped you could barely tell they were scale models. The houses had names: the Diamond was a five-bed detached with garage, the Topaz was a two-bed duplex, the Emerald and the Pearl and the rest were somewhere in between—it looked like we were in the Sapphire. More curly lettering cooed breathlessly about the beach, the childcare facility, the leisure center, a corner shop, a playground, “a self-contained haven with all the premier facilities of cutting-edge luxe living on your doorstep.”

It should have looked pretty damn sexy—like I said before, other people can get their kicks being snobby about new developments if they want, but I love them; they feel positive, like big bets placed on the future. For some reason, though—maybe because I’d seen what was outside—this brochure struck me as what Richie would have called creepy.

Sinéad jabbed a stubby finger at the brochure. “That’s what we were promised. All that. Says it in the contract and everything.”

“And that’s not what you got?” Richie asked.

She snorted. “Does it look like it?”

He shrugged. “It’s not finished yet. Could be great when it is.”

“It’s not going to be bleeding finished. People stopped buying, with the recession, so the builders stopped building. We went out one morning a few months back and they were gone. Everything, diggers and all. Never came back.”