You thought it must be him, though you couldn’t be sure enough to contact the company. Besides, it wasn’t as if he’d changed the locks, only the hinges, and no more messages came. 79

There hasn’t been another noise for a while now: long enough that you allow yourself to think you must have imagined it after all. Or maybe you didn’t imagine, but misheard and it came from your son’s room: a flung arm hitting the bedstead, a book falling to the floor.

You should check on your son. He begged and begged, this evening, to sleep in your bed, the way he used to until the baby came. You almost said yes. You half-wanted it yourself, the warmth of his smooth body, the way he cuddles right into you as if skin is no boundary. But you knew you’d all sleep badly if you did: the baby would wake him and he’d wake the baby, she’d see him and think it was morning and time to play, so you stayed firm.

Your son has been frightened of burglars recently, and so you’ve been reading him the rhyming books of your own childhood from the library: the Robbers with names like Grabber Dan and Grandma Swag, thwarting and thwarted by Cops in an intricate, uneasy dance; the burglar who accidentally steals a baby and then goes straight, returning the things he’s stolen.

You really should check on him, but somehow your body won’t move. If there is someone in the flat – there isn’t, you tell yourself, but if there is – then surely it’s best you’re all asleep, or seem that way? Let that person, or persons, take what they want and go swiftly. Your laptop is on the kitchen table, your bag’s by the sofa. There’s a ceramic apple of loose change on the bookshelf, mostly shrapnel. It shouldn’t take long. It might be done already.

You try to remember whether the noises, if there were 80noises, were moving towards the bedrooms or into the living room: getting closer or further away.

There’s a drug problem in the area, groups of addicts on the streets like some dystopian film, abandoned needles and scorched crack pipes. You sometimes watch the drug deals from your balcony; teenage boys standing lookout on corners, their mini-messenger bags wedged with thick rolls of cash. The cars speeding the wrong way up the one-way street, the shuffle-run of the addicts once the drop-off’s made. There have been leaflets from the police about muggings in the street, about home security. But there was stealth, not urgency, in the movements you heard.

Would-be rapists who creep into houses late at night and lie in wait for their victims, listen to them breathe. Abductors who take children to order: a little boy, blond-haired, no older than three.