Fifteen minutes before the taxi, my six-year-old put her arms round my waist and whispered that when I travel, her stepmother puts something in her juice and then films her. I looked at the kitchen. Cora was standing in the doorway smiling, still holding the glass.

I have since learned what that sentence was for.


PART 3 — THE HALL CAMERA

Tamsin put cameras in this house in 2019. Front door, hall, and the back.

She set them up herself and she attached them to a cloud account in her own name, and when she died I moved everything to a new system and never touched the old account, because dealing with it was on a list I could not face in 2021.

Cora knew about the current system. She had the app on her phone from about the second month, because I gave it to her, because she lived here.

She did not know about the 2019 account.

The hall camera has been quietly uploading to a service in a dead woman’s name for six years.

On the Tuesday night, sitting in my own study at eleven o’clock with my daughter asleep upstairs and my wife’s car gone, I got into it on the third password I tried.

I want to say plainly what is on it, because I am not going to describe anything involving my daughter and I am not going to.

What is on it is adults in a hallway.

Emory Tice has been inside this house eleven times since the September. Always between nine in the morning and two in the afternoon. Always on days I was away, which I could check against my own calendar in about four minutes.

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