Surveillance

       They had said to keep away from the windows in case anyone saw him. So, when they left and the front door had made its rattly, banging noise, echoing through the empty rooms, Finn went to find himself a safe spot, well away from any of the windows, but from where he could keep watch on the house.

           They’d made sure, before they’d left, that he had everything he might need: something to eat and drink, and there was plenty to keep him entertained, though he would not leave his spot, since it never felt right if he moved away and the house was out of sight. And, of course, there were the emergency contact details, but Finn was determined he would not need them.

           “Not need them,” muttered Finn, settling himself in the safe spot, and adjusting the focus on his binoculars.

           The house front pulled itself together, ceasing to be a blur of blocky colours outlined by watery rainbows. There in the middle was the front door, painted a bright red like a post office letter box. Anyone casually passing by would think that the owners were jolly, optimistic people because of the colour of their door, but Finn knew better. The same went for the flowery print of the curtains in the upstairs windows. Only jolly, happy people would choose curtains like that. Finn moved the binoculars up a couple of clicks and panned across the upper storey. Three windows, one for each of the bedrooms, all hung with the same patterned fabric. That was unusual, though. Most houses that Finn had been to had different patterned curtains in each of the rooms, but these were all the same. It wasn’t really surprising; the man and woman in the house were, he knew, unusual, strange people, which was why he was keeping watch.

           He lowered the binoculars back to the ground floor, scanning left and right. So far, everything was quiet, and there was no movement, neither in the large picture window to one side of the front door, nor in its pair on the other side. The frontage of the house was very balanced, very symmetrical. Finn swung his lenses up to the roof: a set of chimneys at one end and another set at the other. He set down the binoculars for a moment, and considered the house as a whole. It looked like the sort of thing you would draw if someone asked you to draw a house. A big, comfortable house. A long oblong with a door and two big windows on the ground floor; three bedroom windows on the first floor; and then a sloping roof with chimneys. Under the roof, there was a long attic space, which you couldn’t see, but Finn knew it was there. The man and the woman sometimes went up there.

           Today, though, they weren’t in the attic. Finn raised his binoculars again, training them on the downstairs window to the left of the door. The man was in the living-room. Finn watched him for a while, but he didn’t seem to be doing anything. The living room was a comfortable kind of place with armchairs and settees, all with cushions. The man wasn’t sitting in any of them, though. He was standing in the middle of the room, facing the window, as though lost in thought.

           Finn swung to the right, across the house front. The door passed in a sudden blur of red. Through the other window, he could see the woman standing in the kitchen. She, like the man in the other room, didn’t seem to be up to much, just standing still, facing the window, although maybe she was cooking something because she was wearing an apron. Finn moved the binoculars back and forth, monitoring the man, the woman, the man again. Still, all was quiet. They did not move. But, he knew, very soon they would, and then he would not be safe.

           Suddenly, Finn’s phone, which he had placed next to him along with the emergency contact details, gave out its jangly ringtone, making him jump. They would be calling to check up on him. He lay aside the binoculars and picked up the device, swiping across the screen with a clumsy index finger.

           “Hello?”

           As he had guessed, they were checking up, asking questions. Finn answered ‘Yes’ to everything they asked: the usual, checking-up questions.

           “’Bye,” he said at last when the check-up was complete. He set down the phone and picked up the binoculars once more.

           The focus had drifted, and the house was again blurry blocks of colour, tinged with rainbow outlines. Finn manipulated the mechanism, bringing edges and details, walls and windows, the central, red oblong back into sharp alignment.

           The man had moved. While Finn had been talking on the phone, distracted by dealing with the checking-up questions, the man had moved. He was still in the living-room, still facing out of the window, but he had clearly come closer to get a better view. Finn froze. It wasn’t likely that the man could see him, but he did not want to risk a careless movement betraying his position. Very cautiously, he inched the binoculars over to look at the kitchen. The woman had moved too. Closer to the window. Still with the apron round her waist, as though she were engaged in cooking the dinner or baking a cake. Finn could have laughed aloud. It was such an obvious trick to make it seem that this was an ordinary house with an ordinary couple living there. A man standing in his living-room; his wife in the kitchen; both just happening to be looking out of the windows, maybe just enjoying the view, watching the world go by.

           Finn gave a derisive snort, and trained the binoculars onto the living-room window again, fiddling with the focus, trying to get a little more definition into the man’s face, but it was just an expressionless blur. However, although it was impossible to be certain, it seemed, from this distance, that the man was staring straight towards Finn in his safe spot. Panning carefully over to the kitchen, Finn saw that it was the same with the woman. You couldn’t make out much of her features, but from the tilt of her head, she seemed to have fixed her gaze exactly where Finn had taken up position. A cold prickle of apprehension, as though someone had brushed his back with the sharp point of an icicle, ran down Finn’s spine. Surely, they could not see him in his safe spot. But they had definitely moved. And they were definitely looking straight at him. The safe spot was no longer safe. Finn would have to move. To relocate. Although it would mean his ability to observe would be restricted. But there was no alternative.

           Quickly, not worrying too much about his movements being spotted, Finn gathered up some of his provisions: his drinking bottle, the container with the biscuits, the sandwiches; he began to scramble away to one of his hiding places, leaving behind the binoculars and, he realised just too late, his phone and the emergency contact details . Not that he would think of using them. This was by no means an emergency. He was just taking precautions, although the feeling in his stomach and the coldness shuddering down his spine made it seem like an emergency. As he scurried from the safe spot, he cast a glance down at the house. He could have sworn, though without the binoculars it was impossible to tell, that he saw the man moving in his window, and in hers, the woman moving too.

           Keeping low, Finn scuttled into his hiding place, cursing himself for his carelessness, but really what had he done wrong? He had kept away from the windows, just as they had said; and, honestly, from the safe spot there should have been no possibility of his being noticed by anyone in the house. It was almost as if the man and woman had known he was there. Almost as though they had been keeping watch on him.

           In the hiding place’s warm darkness, Finn drew his knees up to his chest, and tried to steady his breathing. The cold prickle, which had turned into a shudder down his back, had almost stopped, but he was breathing faster than normal, and he could feel his heart racing, pounding in his chest. That was because he had had to move so quickly to get to the hiding place. When you did any kind of physical exertion, your heart had to beat faster and you breathed harder. It wasn’t because he was scared. There was nothing to be afraid of. And it couldn’t be the start of a panic attack, because there was nothing to panic about. Finn breathed in slowly through his nose, and out through his mouth, emptying his lungs, feeling a void expand inside his chest. In through the nose, slowly. Out through the mouth. Gradually, the thumping against his ribs and in his temples began to slow. In. It was perfectly safe in the hiding place. Out. The man and the woman would not come out of their house. In. They would stay inside, in the living-room, in the kitchen. Out. There was nothing to be afraid of, and very soon it would be safe to come out.

           Finn’s heart was returning to normal, and he was just about to feel around in the dark for his water bottle to take a drink, when from somewhere outside the hiding place there came the jangling ringtone of his phone. The sudden unexpectedness of the sound set his heart racing once more. They would be calling to check up on him again, although it didn’t seem long since they had last called. Maybe it was someone else calling, although Finn could not think who it might be. The pounding of his heart in his chest and the thud of blood pulsing through his temples made thinking difficult, especially when you had to concentrate on breathing. Slowly in. Slowly out.

           After a moment, halfway through a set of jangles, the phone stopped ringing. In the sudden silence, Finn heard what sounded like someone moving but immediately becoming still. A kind of move-freeze sound, like in a game of musical statues when the music stops. He held his breath, and listened hard, his eyes wide open in the blackness, as if to see the slightest noise of motion. It was almost impossible to hear anything, though, over the dreadful throbbing and thrumming in his head.

           He could hold his breath no longer, and had to suck down a draught of the warm, black, hiding-place air. But even though Finn gulped at the air, he could not catch his breath, and a bright red panic began to take hold of him, first in his throat and then welling outwards, down into his chest and up behind his eyes. It was the red of the front door of the house: the front door that he could imagine opening as the man and the aproned woman, with their expressionless faces, stepped across the threshold and came in search of him. Somebody must have told them he would be here. Or they had found out somehow. Perhaps they monitored everything. There were noises outside the hiding-place. Movements and footfalls, shuffling and rustling, as though whoever was there no longer cared whether they could be heard.

           Finn pushed with his limbs to raise himself upright. At least he could try to make a run for it. But his arms and legs would not work properly, and he still could not catch his breath. The red panic was filling his head fuller and fuller, while his chest felt as though an enormously heavy weight was pressing down, both from the outside and from the inside at the same unbearable moment.

           Then, suddenly, the redness became black.

*         *         *

           Zoe hated this part of her job, and no matter how many times she had to do it, it never got any easier. Nor did she get any better at it. They gave you training, of course, but it never really prepared you for the distress of it. The vacant ordinariness of everything. The stupidity.

           The woman was sitting on the settee. Perching. They always perched. And the man was hovering, staring out of the living-room, up at the banisters of the staircase which led from the tiny entrance hall up to the first floor. His eyes were fixed on the banisters, as though he’d never seen such things before, and could not tear his gaze away. Ordinary, white-glossed banisters, in an ordinary, three-bedroomed semi, which would never seem ordinary again.

           “I’m sorry?” said the man, blinking and turning his head to face Zoe, who was standing awkwardly in one of the few spots on the carpet which was not occupied by toys: cars and lorries, action figures, building blocks, a large doll’s house, boxes of wooden railway track.

           Zoe repeated her question. “How long were you gone?”

           The man shook his head, as the woman on the settee made a sobbing, choking noise. “I don’t know. Not long. A couple of hours, maybe.”

           “You know that…” Zoe began to say, but stopped herself. All the things you were supposed to say and to ask always seemed to evaporate from her mind. The man and the woman were looking at her with their blank, stricken faces, expecting her to say something. She was relieved when there was the noise of movement from upstairs and two sets of legs were visible through the banisters coming down the stairs. The woman stood up from her perch.

           “Oh no. No. No.” Her voice was a flat, breathy whisper. The man moved towards her, enfolding her in his arms, but she pulled away, and watched the legs with their hi-vis stripes descending. Zoe watched too, wishing that she could think of something to say. Something that didn’t begin with ‘You know that…’”

           The two pairs of legs disappeared from view and another, dark-trousered pair appeared. Thank god, thought Zoe, it’s Terry. He’ll know what to say.

           A young man, much younger than Zoe, appeared in the living-room doorway. “All right, Sarge?” he addressed Zoe, who looked blankly back at him. How could it be alright? she thought.

           Terry came into the living-room, a tall, dark figure amidst the colourful chaos of the toys. He was carrying something, some things, proffering them to the man and the woman.

           “These were on the stairs,” he said in his straight-forward, understanding, sympathetic voice, the kind of voice that people listened to, and responded to at times like these.

           The woman took in her hands the mobile phone and the pair of binoculars which Terry was holding towards her.

           “And these were on the landing, outside the airing cupboard,” Terry went on. “I’ll just pop them back where they belong, then I’ll see about making us all a nice cup of tea. Is that alright, Sarge?”

           Zoe nodded silently, as her colleague, PC Terry Orwell, crouched before the big, oblong doll’s house. The man and the woman, Mr and Mrs McGill, the parents of seven-year-old Finn McGill, whose body the ambulance crew had just taken away, watched vacantly as the officer pulled open the house frontage with its central front door, red like a letter box, and placed two tiny doll’s house figures, a man and an aproned woman, inside.