Georgia Percy had decided, somewhere between the third drag and the fourth, that her neighbour was a liar, and she had never wanted to prove anything so badly in her life.
She sat on the floor of the iron balcony with her legs dangling through the railings, wrapped in a wool blanket that smelled of dust and cedar and the faint ghost of someone else’s house. It was night. The first-floor balcony hung off the stone flank of the converted mill like a rusted lip, and below it lay the neighbour’s patio, black and still, and beyond that the garden, and beyond that nothing at all. A heavy, damp mist clung to the walls. She could taste it. In her good hand, a hand-rolled joint glowed like a firefly that had lost its way.
Freak, she thought again, tenderly, because the word had been warming her all evening. She had said it to the dark of the hallway as the timer clicked off, with white dust still settling on her eyelashes and her wrist screaming under its splint, and she had bent down to the mess he had refused to touch and begun, with her one good hand, to clean it.
She took a drag. Deep. Held it until her lungs burned, then exhaled slowly, and the thick white smoke drifted lazily downwards, carried by the night.
Then came a CLACK. She froze. It was the sound of a sliding door opening on the ground floor. She tilted her head, listening, the way a fox listens, and heard footsteps on the stone patio below. Heavy. Deliberate. A man walking as if every paving slab were a negotiation he intended to win.
“…I’m afraid that’s not possible.”
Georgia raised an eyebrow.
It was his voice. It was undeniably his voice, but the broad Yorkshire accent had gone. Vanished. She had not even known, until it was gone, that it had been there at all, as natural as a coat, because the voice she was hearing now was something else entirely: clipped, glass-cut Received Pronunciation. The voice of Westminster. The voice of dinner parties where people discussed other people’s pensions. It slid up through the mist like a blade through silk, and the hair stood up along her arms.
Oh, she thought. Oh, you absolute fraud.
Oliver stepped into the pool of light cast by the garden lantern. He was in a white shirt, unbuttoned at the collar, the sleeves rolled, and he held his phone to his ear and stared out into the black void of the garden. From where she sat she could see the top of his head, the dark crown of hair, the straight line of his shoulders. She could see how his free hand had curled into a fist at his side.
“Don’t press it,” he said. “My presence won’t alter the optics of the evening.” A beat. “Send my regrets.” A pause, in which she could almost hear him calculating. “And send the Petrus. The ’82.” He listened briefly. “Yes. That will suffice.”
He lowered the phone. He ended the call without saying goodbye, and then he stood there for a moment, quite alone, quite motionless, with the lantern light sliding over his face. And he looked tired. It was not the tiredness of a man who needed sleep. It was an older thing than that, a tiredness with sediment in it.
Georgia watched him, and something odd shifted in her chest, a small, unwelcome pang that she did not recognise and did not care for. She crushed it at once. She smirked, lifted the joint, took a hit, and blew the smoke out in a deliberate, heavy cloud that swirled directly down into the patio.
Below, Oliver stiffened.
She watched the scent reach him. Sweet. Pungent. Herbal. She saw his shoulders change, saw his whole body understand, and for one thrilling second she was certain he would look up.
He didn’t. He refused to give her the satisfaction of an audience.
Instead he reached into his pocket and withdrew a silk handkerchief, and pressed it firmly over his nose and mouth. Then he turned and walked back inside, brisk and efficient, a man escaping contamination.
SLAM. The sliding door shut, hard. SWISH. The curtains were drawn below, and a total blackout swallowed the patio.
Georgia was left alone in the dark. She stared at the empty stone where he had stood. She flicked the ash into the night.
“Fraud,” she said.
The hallway the next evening was a chaotic fortress of cardboard boxes stacked against the peeling wallpaper. JACKSON’S ART SUPPLIES, the brand name screamed, from every side, on a dozen boxes. The air was a toxic cocktail of damp carpet, uncollected post, and the eye-watering stench of White Spirit and synthetic strawberry smoke, and Georgia, perched on a stack of boxes on the first landing in oversized dungarees and combat boots, vaping like a very small dragon, felt entirely at home in it.
On her lap sat a black box. Matte finish. Gold lettering: HUNTSMAN & SONS, 11 SAVILE ROW.
She had not planned to sit with it. It had been delivered, unasked, to the door of a house in which, as far as she knew, only two people lived who could possibly have ordered anything from Savile Row. She had signed for it, because the courier was going to leave it on the step, and because the part of her that had been raised among such boxes could not bear to see one rained on. And then, because she was a Percy, and because the sight of the gold lettering had set a small, bright, nasty clock ticking in her head, she had sat down on the stairs to wait.
The front door opened.
A gust of wind rolled in with the sound of rain. Oliver entered, shaking out a black umbrella with sharp movements, though the grey pallor of a twelve-hour NHS shift hung on him like a second coat. He walked three steps. Then he stopped dead, blocked by a wall of cardboard marked SOLVENTS, FLAMMABLE.
He physically recoiled. His lips pressed into a thin, white line, and what came out of them was muffled by the handkerchief that appeared from nowhere.
“Good God.”
He looked up the stairs.
Georgia did not move. She kept her eyes on the box in her lap and let him see her not looking at him. It was the most delicious feeling she had had all day.
“Are you actively trying to asphyxiate the entire building?”
She did not look up. She ran one finger, slowly, over the gold lettering. “Delivery. I can’t get them up the stairs yet.”
“This is a fire escape route, Miss Percy.” His voice was cold. “Not a warehouse. The concentration of volatile organic compounds in this corridor is already bordering on negligent.”
He stepped gingerly over a stray tube of paint, searching for a path through the wreckage, and she kept her gaze lowered and her ears open and listened to the exact moment the rhythm of his steps changed. Because his eyes had found the box.
He froze.
There, Georgia thought, there you are.
“The courier was going to leave this one on the doorstep,” she said, so pleasantly that it hurt. “I thought the damp might ruin the… craftsmanship. So I signed for it.”
“Give it to me.” His voice was low and clipped, and under it something moved that she had not heard before, a tightness, a note too high.
He climbed the stairs, squeezing past the boxes, two steps at a time. It was urgency masked as irritation, and the mask was good, but not good enough, not to someone who had spent twenty-two years learning exactly how people hid what they wanted.
“It’s light,” Georgia said. “But the insurance value on the manifest is five thousand pounds.” She looked up at him at last, and was gratified to find him already looming over her. “An NHS Registrar earns what? Forty-five thousand a year? Before tax? That box is worth three months of your life.”
He reached the landing. He was very close. She could smell wet wool and cold air and, beneath that, the same plain soap that had hung about him in the examination room, a clean smell, almost cruelly clean.
“It’s none of your business.”
He snatched the box. Too quickly. He tucked it under his arm and curled his body around it, shielding it like a dirty secret, and she watched his knuckles whiten on the black cardboard.
“It’s an heirloom,” Oliver said. “My grandfather’s. I sent it away for repairs.”
Georgia let out a short, dry laugh. Smoke escaped her lips in a thin silver thread. “You’re a terrible liar, Doctor.”
It was wonderful. She had not known she could be so happy about someone’s discomfort.
“Huntsman doesn’t patch up old tweeds for sentimental reasons,” she went on. “They do bespoke. They serve Mayfair.” A beat. She let the silence stretch, and then she touched the one place she knew would hurt. “That box smells of equity. You don’t belong in this dump, do you?”
“And you?” His eyes had gone black. “The trust-fund revolutionary playing at poverty for the aesthetic? You’re a tourist, Miss Percy!” He nodded at her combat boots, then at the strewn boxes, with a disgust so complete it was almost admirable. “Smashing up a listed building because Daddy didn’t hug her enough?”
Georgia’s smile vanished.
It did not fade. It went, all at once, the way a light goes when a fuse blows. Her eyes narrowed. Somewhere beneath the dungarees and the swagger and the vape, something very small and very old flinched, and she was furious with it for flinching.
He doesn’t know. He can’t know. He’s guessing, he’s just good at guessing.
“You’re very sensitive today,” she said, and was pleased that her voice held. “Bad night?”
“My night was perfectly adequate.”
“Really?” She stood up, deliberately, slowly, and blocked his path to his door. The box was between them now, a black shield. “Because I heard you. On the patio. Very late. Last night.” She tilted her head, and watched him. “You sounded… different. Annoyed. But posh. Something about a bottle of Petrus?”
Oliver stood very still.
For a micro-second, the mask flickered. A flash of genuine alarm crossed his face, naked and quick as a startled bird, and Georgia saw it, and her heart gave a mean little leap of triumph. But it was gone almost at once, swallowed by the cold, hard stare, and what replaced it was worse. It was calm.
He sniffed the air. Ostentatiously. His eyes went to the empty box of White Spirit beside her, and then to the vape in her hand, and she felt the trap close before she understood how.
“Ah,” he said, softly, condescendingly. “I see.”
“You see what?”
“Turpentine fumes. Highly neurotoxic in an unventilated space. Combine that with the Grade-B cannabis you were inhaling…” He stepped closer, invading her personal space, clinically, as though she were a specimen on a slide. “And the result is predictable.”
She could not step back. The wall was behind her. His voice dropped.
“You heard a fox screaming.” He tilted his head. “Your temporal lobe simply improvised the rest.”
“What?” Georgia blinked.
“A vixen. They scream when they mate.”
He turned his key in the lock.
Georgia stared at him. Her mouth was slightly open. The explanation was so technical, so fluent, so completely and insultingly reasonable, that for a moment she actually faltered. Did I? Then she remembered the glass-cut vowels, the Petrus, the handkerchief, and the doubt burned off like mist.
“I know what I heard,” she said. “You were speaking RP.”
Oliver offered her a tight, pitying smile. “If you start hearing voices commanding you to hurt people, do let me know. I can write a referral.”
He checked his watch. It was the most contemptuous gesture she had ever seen a human being make.
“You have until 8 AM to clear this hazard. Or I’m calling Environmental Health to seize the lot.”
He adjusted his grip on the Huntsman box and his medical bag, and turned sideways to shimmy past her to his door, so close that his sleeve brushed her dungarees. It was a small touch, accidental, and her whole arm lit up with it as though she had grazed a live wire. Stop it, she told her skin. Stop it, he’s a monster. He unlocked the door.
“Open a window,” Oliver said. “Before you lose any more brain cells.”
He entered his flat. SLAM. The sound echoed up the stairwell like a gunshot.
Georgia stood alone in the strawberry-scented chemical haze. She looked at the closed door, her heart still going too fast, her face hot. Then she kicked the box of solvents, hard, hard enough that her toe sang in the combat boot.
“TOSSER!” she yelled at the door.
Nothing answered. Only the smell, and the hum of the timer light, and somewhere in the walls of the old house, a pipe ticking as it cooled. She stood with her breath unsteady and her good hand clenched, and she knew with total clarity that she had lost something in that exchange, though she could not have said what, and that she had found something, too, and that the second was much more dangerous than the first.
A vixen, she thought, and could have screamed. He actually said a vixen.
She did not scream. She sat back down on the stack of boxes and smoked in the dark, and listened to her own heartbeat, and the silence behind his door.