Transgressions by Sarah Dunant Page A

surprised.”
    She made him a cup of tea and he set to work. It took him the best part of an hour and a half, replacing the Ingersoll and adding a Chubb. She sat on the stairs watching him. For a recluse she was entertaining a lot of men tonight. It seemed important to keep them all in her sights.
    If he found her presence strange he didn’t remark on it. No doubt he was used to nervous women watching his every move. It must be a bit like being a doctor, she thought, always getting called out in times of emergency and distress.
    After a while she got hungry and went back into the kitchen and resurrected the pizza. It wasn’t at its best, but he accepted the slice she offered and it started them talking.
    When he asked why she was changing the locks, she told him. He listened, eyes still on the wood, chiseling into the hole where the second box would go. She got the impression that the story didn’t surprise him. But, then, presumably he’d heard worse.
    “And it was the police who told you to change the locks?”
    “Yes.”
    He sniffed.
    “Why?” she prompted. “What do you think?”
    He shrugged. “Well, it can’t hurt, can it? But it doesn’t sound to me like you’ve got anyone coming through your front door.”
    “No?”
    “Well, to start with, all this stuff happened in the kitchen, right?”
    “Yes.”
    “So why go in there and not in the living room or upstairs? You can scare someone a lot more by doing stuff up there, I can tell you.”
    And it was clear that he could. She decided not to ask. She wondered how old he was. Late fifties? Maybe older. Her father would have been seventy-eight now had he lived. Her mother nine years younger. When she was growing up, she had got used to him being old, to being the only child of aging parents, but she still wondered what she had missed, not having him around when she was an adult. Maybe she would have depended less on Tom. Made him more a lover and less a parent. Well, it was all academic now. To lose one parent prematurely is a misfortune, to lose two is what? Bad luck or bad karma? Do orphans have more trouble with long-term relationships? She offered him another slice. He shook his head. “So what do you think?”
    “About this?”
    “Yeah.”
    He stopped chiseling and tried the box. It slipped in neatly. He stood back and looked at his work. “You’ll think I’m daft.”
    She gave a laugh. “No dafter than everyone thinks I am, I can tell you.”
    He looked at her. “I think you might have some kind of poltergeist.”
    And as he said it something turned over in her stomach, something hot and cold at the same time, and she realized that she had been waiting for someone to suggest if not this, then something like it. “Have you . . . I mean, have you come across things like this before?”
    “There’s not a lot I haven’t come across doing this job. But yeah, I’ve seen houses that have had some kind of spirit in them. One lady in the East End had me change all the locks on the doors and windows six times in as many months. It didn’t do any good. She’d still wake up in the morning to find them open again. Nothing taken, nothing harmed. Just wide open again. Back door mainly and the two upstairs skylights. Mischievous little tyke that was.”
    “My God. What did she do?”
    “No idea. All I know is I stopped doing her locks. I think she probably moved in the end. It’s usually either them or you. Unless you just get on with it and leave them to it.”
    “And what makes you think that’s what’s happening here?” she asked almost in a whisper.
    “Nothing, except it fits the facts, that’s all. You’ve got stuff happening you can’t explain. It’s not—what’s the word that the woman used to use to me?—not malevolent. Peculiar rather than serious. You say the house feels all right, that you don’t feel scared in between times. And it always happens in the same place. The only funny thing is you’ve not come across it before.