She checks the time on her watch. 1.21 a.m. It’s only been two hours since she went to bed. Patrick had filled her and Maureen in on the show he was watching, so the three of them had sat in silence for the last hour of the evening to see the killer finally caught. Chloe had felt a small thrill when the mystery was solved, the idea of a resolution sitting far closer to the surface of her skin these days. Her attention had dipped in and out as she examined the room and the two people she sat beside. She’d filled two pages of her notebook before she fell asleep: Maureen has a habit of twiddling her feet at the ankles while she watches TV, and Patrick makes a groaning sound each time he gets up out of his chair. Every detail has to go into her book.

She’d come up to bed first, carrying her toothbrush, toothpaste and towel through to the bathroom like she was staying in a bed and breakfast rather than her new home. She still finds it hard to believe she’s here. She can’t say she feels she’s deceiving the Kyles, not when her motivations are so genuine and her focus so fixed. How could she? She is here to help.

In the black of the night, she scans the room, only just making out the shapes of the furniture. Chloe knows it’s going to take some getting used to; it usually does. It’s not just the look of the place, it’s the sounds too, or rather the lack of them. She’d got used to the noises Nan’s house made after dark, the click and whoosh of the central heating, the slow tap of the radiator in her room that they never got round to bleeding. Here she has a whole other after-dark language to learn. And it’s not just the noises, either. There are the smells in other people’s homes, too. We forget each place has its individual notes. Ones we quickly become accustomed to; an infusion of dust and washing powder, perfume and aerosols, cleaning products, human skin. So far she’s been struck by an old-fashioned potpourri smell about the Kyles’ home, that and another bottom note, one she can’t quite put a name to, some kind of earthy, damp scent. She casts her mind back and wonders how she would have once described Nan’s house. Mothballs and old-lady perfume? There had been the cat then, too.

Suddenly light fills her room. Enough to define the shape of the wardrobe, the bed, a pile of her clothes on the floor. She scrambles up on the mattress, folding up her knees and wrapping her arms around them. A strip of light illuminates under the door. She sits on her pillow, holding her breath.