Dead Simple

furnishings looked twenty or thirty years old, as did the design of and appliances in the kitchen. Then he noted, to his surprise, that there was a stack of newspapers on the kitchen table.
    He looked at his watch. It was just gone 6 p.m. He ought to get a search warrant, he knew. But that would take another couple of hours – and with every minute that passed the chances of finding Michael Harrison alive were shrinking.
    How much did he trust Harry Frame? The medium had been right on several occasions in the past – but he had been wrong on just as many.
    Shite.
    The thought of what Alison Vosper would say to him if he was caught breaking into a house without a warrant bothered him.
    He didn’t have enough to back his judgement up, but it would have to do. Time was running out for Michael Harrison.
    With a loose brick from the garden, he smashed a kitchen window pane, then wrapping his hand in his handkerchief, he removed the pieces of glass that remained lodged in the putty, found the window catch, opened it and crawled in.
    ‘Hello!’ he shouted. ‘Hello! Anyone home?’
    The place felt and smelled dingy. The kitchen was clean, and other than some newspapers, all bearing yesterday’s date, there was no sign of anyone having lived here recently. He checked out each of the downstairs rooms. The large sitting room was drab as hell, with a couple of framed prints of seascapes on the walls. He noticed there were lines on the carpet, as if someone had recently moved the sofa. He moved on into a dark dining room, with an oak table and four chairs, and flock wallpaper, then on to a small lavatory, with a ‘God Bless This House’ cross-stitch hanging on the wall.
    Upstairs felt equally unloved and unlived in. There were three bedrooms, all the beds stripped to bare mattresses with old, yellowing pillows, without slips, lying on them, and a small bathroom, with a geyser boiler and stained washbasin and bath.
    Above the bed in the smallest room was a loft hatch. By placing a chair, precariously, on the mattress, then standing on it, he was able to push open the hatch and peer in. To his surprise there was a light switch just inside the hatch, which worked, and he could see in an instant there was nothing up here. Just a small water tank, an old carpet sweeper and a rolled-up rug.
    He opened every cupboard and cabinet door. Upstairs, all the bed linen and bath towels were folded away in the cupboards. Downstairs, the kitchen cupboards contained basics – coffee, tea, a few tins, but nothing else. It could easily have been a year or two since anyone had been here. No sign of Michael Harrison. Nothing.
    Nowhere.
    He checked the hall cupboard, in case there was a cellar entrance in there, although he knew that few houses after the Victorian era had cellars. He needed to find out who owned this place and when it was last lived in. Maybe the owners had died and it was in the hands of executors? Maybe a cleaning lady came up here occasionally?
    A cleaning lady who read every national newspaper?
    Grace let himself out of the back door and walked around to the side of the house, where there were two dustbins. He lifted the lid of the first one, and instantly he had a different story. There were egg-shells, used tea bags, an empty skimmed milk carton bearing a sell-by date of today and a Marks and Spencer lasagne carton bearing a sell-by date that had not yet been reached.
    Thinking hard, he walked round to the front of the house, trying again to work out what it was that was wrong with the design. Then he realized. Where there was now an ugly plastic-framed window to the right of the front door, there should have been an integral garage. He could see it now, clearly; the tone of the bricks didn’t match the rest of the house. At some point someone had converted this into a living room.
    And suddenly it reminded him of something from his childhood: his dad, tinkering with things. He liked to do his own servicing on his car, changing the oil, doing the brake linings, staying out of the hands of the rip-off merchants, as his dad called garages.
    He remembered the inspection pit in their garage, where he had spent many happy hours of his childhood helping his dad service the succession of Fords he always bought, getting covered in oil and grease – not to mention the occasional spider.
    And he thought about the lines on the carpet in the sitting room that he had just seen, where the sofa had been moved.
    On just a hunch, no