We left the kitchen and crossed a hallway. I opened one of two doors that led off from the hallway and we entered a room with a bed in it. The bed was unmade and a few pairs of men’s underwear dotted the floor. The room smelled like bad breath and sweaty armpits. There was no window in the room. I grimaced, backed out and shut the door. We tried the next and final door in the house and I smiled, pleased to see a living room of sorts. A black box with a window in it sat on top of a table at the back of the room. A television maybe. Like telephones, I had read about televisions but never seen one. Facing the black box was a brown sofa. Drink cans littered the floor around the sofa and magazines lay on a table in the centre of the room. On the table beneath the window sat a black, square object with numbered buttons on. It had to be the telephone.

Emma let go of my hand and ran over to the odd contraption. She picked part of it up and waved it at me.

‘Telephone!’ she said.

I walked over and took hold of the black thing she was holding.

‘Hold it to your ear and I’ll do the numbers,’ Emma said excitedly.

I did as she asked, feeling strange, uncomfortable, not sure I was doing it right. Emma nodded at me as I placed one of the round end parts to my ear and the other round part to my mouth. She stabbed the number nine on the machine three times and I heard something beep. Then I heard a ringing sound. Then a voice, but the voice wasn’t coming from the telephone; it was coming from behind me.

Chapter 29

‘Who the hell are you?’

I jumped and dropped the telephone. It fell to the carpet with a thud, a black, curling wire snaking up from the ground to the machine on the table. Vaguely I registered a crackly voice coming from the ground, but the voice in the room seemed to echo inside my skull.

I spun around, inhaling sharply.

A man with a large, round stomach stood just inside the living room doorway. He was dirty-looking, his white vest stained and too tight across his belly. He wore badly fitting jeans and no shoes, only dirty socks with holes in the toes. Long hairs poked out of the top of his vest. Even in the gloomy room I could make out dark circles under his eyes and red blotches on his bulbous nose. His hair was long and stringy and he had a thick, bushy beard. Down by his side he clutched a bulging carrier bag.

‘We – er – we—’ I tried to speak, but the man held up one large hand.

‘Give it me!’ he barked, lurching into the room.

‘Give you what?’ I said.

‘Whatever you’ve stole,’ he said.