The Lake House by Kate Morton

as a dealer of illicit adult books to a minor very seriously, had vacillated briefly over whether non-fiction might be the best place to start (what harm, she’d reasoned aloud, could possibly come to a child’s mind from the pages of history?), before deciding a grounding in the classics was capital and plucking the library’s copy of Great Expectations from the shelves. Peter had fallen hard for gaslight, frockcoats and horse-drawn coaches, and never looked back. (Or forwards, as the case may be.)
    Funnily enough, it was his obsessive consumption of nineteenth-century fiction that had brought him together with Alice. Peter had been at a crossroads after he graduated from university—there didn’t seem to be many jobs for people with postgraduate degrees in Constellations of Allegory: Enlightenment, Self, and Sensibility in Victorian Novels, 1875– 1893—and had given himself the summer to come up with a firm plan. The rent still needed to be paid so he was making some extra money by helping his brother David in his pest-extermination business; Alice’s call had come through first thing on a Monday morning. There was an ominous ticking noise in her wall that had kept her awake all weekend and she needed someone to see to it at once.
    â€œThorny old girl,” David had told Peter as they hopped out of the van on Heath Street and headed towards Alice’s place. “But harmless enough. Strange habit of calling me out and then telling me what she thinks I’m going to find. Even stranger habit of being right.”
    â€œI suspect the deathwatch beetle,” she’d said as David unpacked his kit at the base of her bedroom wall and pressed his listening glass to the plaster. “ Xestobium —”
    â€œâ€” rufovillosum ,” Peter had murmured simultaneously. And then, because David was staring at him as if he’d started talking tongues, “Like in ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’.”
    There’d been a brief, cool silence and then, “Who is this?” Alice had spoken in just the sort of voice the Queen might have used had she dropped by to inspect the pest-eradication progress. “I don’t recall your having had an assistant, Mr Obel?”
    David had explained that he didn’t have an assistant; that Peter was his little brother, helping out for a few weeks while he worked out what to do next. “Needed a break from all those books,” he’d added. “Getting too smart for his own good.”
    Alice had given an almost imperceptible nod before retreating, her footsteps echoing as she climbed the stairs to the room in the roof Peter knew now as her writing bower.
    David had clipped him on the shoulder later, when they were sitting in the smoky back booth at the Dog and Whistle. “So you woke the dragon and lived to tell the tale,” he’d said, draining the last of his beer and gathering up the darts. “What was it you said to her, anyway—that thing about the heart?”
    Peter had explained about Poe and his unnamed narrator, the careful precision of the murder he committed, his claims to sanity and his eventual undoing by guilt, while David, not of a gothic temperament, continued to hit one bullseye after another. Darts spent, he’d suggested cheerily it was lucky Alice hadn’t put Peter in the wall. “That’s what she does, you know: murder. Not real ones—at least, not that I know of. Commits all her crimes on paper.”
    Alice’s letter had arrived a week later, tucked inside the same envelope as the cheque to settle her account. It had been typewritten on a machine with a faulty “e’ and signed in navy-blue ink. The message was simply expressed. She was interviewing for a temporary assistant, someone to fill in while her permanent person was away. She would see him at midday on Friday.
    Why had he fronted up obediently as ordered? Hard to remember now, other than to