‘Hi, Ravi, Pip,’ Charlie said with an awkward wave. ‘Evening, Victor.’
‘Hello, Charlie,’ Pip’s dad said in his bright, showy-offy voice, that booming one that always switched on in front of someone he considered a guest. Ravi had outgrown guest a while ago into something more, thank god. ‘How can we help you?’
‘Sorry to disturb,’ Charlie said, a slight nervous edge to his voice and his pale green eyes. ‘I know it’s getting late, and it’s a school night, it’s just . . .’ He trailed off, locking on to Pip’s eyes. ‘Well, I saw your missing poster in the newspaper, Pip. And, I think I have some information about Jamie Reynolds. There’s something I should show you.’
Twenty minutes, her dad agreed, and twenty minutes was all it would take, Charlie had said. Now Pip and Ravi were following him down the darkened street, the orange streetlamps grafting monstrous, overstretched shadows to their feet.
‘You see,’ Charlie said, glancing back at them as they walked up the gravel path to his front door, ‘Flora and I, we have one of these doorbell cameras. We’ve moved around a lot, used to live in Dartford and while there we had a few breakins. So we installed the camera, for Flora’s peace of mind, and it came with us here, to Kilton. I thought there’s no harm in having extra security, no matter how nice the town, you know?’
He pointed the camera out to them, a small black device above the existing faded brass doorbell. ‘It’s motion-detected, so it’ll be recording us right now.’ He gave it a small wave as he unlocked the door and showed them inside.
Pip already knew this house, from when Zach and his family lived here, following Charlie into what used to be the Chens’ front playroom, but now it looked like an office. There were bookshelves and an armchair beneath the bay windows at the front. And a wide white desk against the far wall, two large computer monitors upon it.
‘Here,’ Charlie said, pointing them towards the computer.
‘Nice set-up,’ said Ravi, checking the screens like he had a clue what he was talking about.
‘Oh, I work from home. Web design. Freelance,’ he said in explanation.
‘Cool,’ said Ravi.
‘Yeah, mostly because I get to work in my pyjamas,’ Charlie laughed. ‘My dad would probably say, “You’re twenty-eight now, get a real job”.’
‘Older generations,’ Pip said disapprovingly, ‘they just don’t understand the allure of pyjamas. So, what did you want to show us?’
‘Hello.’ A new voice entered the room, and Pip turned to see Flora in the doorway, hair tied back and a smudge of flour down the front of her oversized shirt. She was holding a Tupperware stacked four rows high with flapjack squares. ‘I just baked these, for Josh’s class tomorrow. But I wondered if you guys were hungry. No raisins, I promise.’
‘Hi Flora,’ Pip smiled. ‘I’m actually OK, thank you.’ Her appetite still hadn’t quite returned; she’d had to force dinner down.
But a wide crooked smile appeared on Ravi’s face as he sauntered over to Flora and picked up a flapjack from the middle, saying, ‘Yes please, these look amazing.’
Pip sighed: Ravi liked anyone who fed him.
‘Have you shown them, Charlie?’ Flora asked.
‘No, I was just getting to it. Come look at this,’ he said, wiggling the mouse to bring life back to one of the screens. ‘So, like I was saying, we have this doorbell camera, and it starts recording whenever it detects motion, sends a notification to the app on my phone. Whatever it records, it uploads to the Cloud for seven days before it’s wiped. When I woke up last Tuesday morning, I saw a notification on my app from the middle of the night. But I went downstairs and checked and everything looked fine, nothing out of place or missing, so I presumed it was just a fox setting off the camera again.’
‘Right,’ Pip said, moving closer as Charlie navigated through his files.
‘But, yesterday, Flora noticed something of hers was missing. Can’t find it anywhere, so I thought I’d check the doorbell footage, just in case, before it got wiped. I didn’t think there’d be anything on it, but . . .’ He double-clicked on a video file and it opened in a media player. Charlie clicked it into full screen and then hit play.
It was a 180-degree view of the front of their house, down the garden path to the gate they’d just come through, and over to the bay windows from the rooms either side of the front door. Everything was green, all light greens and bright greens, set against the darker green of the night sky.
‘It’s night vision,’ Charlie said, watching their faces. ‘This was taken at 3:07 a.m. Tuesday morning.’
There was movement by the gate. Whatever it was had set the camera off.
‘Sorry, the resolution’s not great,’ said Charlie.
The green shape moved up the garden path, growing blurry arms and legs as it neared the camera. And as it walked right up to the front door, it grew a face, a face she knew, except for the absent black pinpoints for eyes. He looked scared.
‘I don’t know him, and I only saw his picture in the Kilton Mail today, but that’s Jamie Reynolds, isn’t it?’
‘It is,’ Pip said, her throat constricting again. ‘What’s he doing?’
‘Well, if you look to the window on the left, that’s the one in here, this room,’ Charlie pointed to it on screen. ‘I must have had it open during the day, for a breeze, and maybe I thought I closed it properly. But look, it’s still open, just a couple of inches from the bottom.’
As he said that, the green Jamie on screen noticed it too, bending down in front of it and creeping his fingers in under the gap. You couldn’t see the back of his head; he had a dark hood pulled up over his hair. Pip watched Jamie pull at the window, sliding it up until the gap was large enough.
‘What’s he doing?’ Ravi asked, leaning closer to the screen too, the flapjack a thing of the past. ‘Is he breaking in?’
The question become redundant a half second later as Jamie lowered his head and climbed through the window, slipping his legs in behind him, leaving just an empty dark green opening into the house.
‘He’s only in the house for a total of forty-one seconds,’ Charlie said, skipping the video to the point where Jamie’s lighter green head re-emerged at the window. He dragged himself outside, landing on one unsteady foot. But he looked the same as before he’d gone in: still scared, nothing in his hands. He turned back to the window, leaning into his elbows as he pushed it closed, right down to the sill. And then he walked away from the house, his steps breaking into a run as he reached the gate and disappeared into the engulfing all-green night.
‘Oh,’ Pip and Ravi said together.
‘We only found this yesterday,’ Charlie said. ‘And we discussed it. It’s my fault for leaving the window open. And we’re not going to go to the police and press charges or anything, seems like this Jamie guy has enough on his plate as it is. And what he took, well, what we think he took, it wasn’t that valuable, only sentimental value, so –’
‘What did he take?’ Pip asked, her eyes flicking to Flora, instinct pulling her gaze to the empty spaces at Flora’s wrists. ‘What did Jamie steal from you?’