House With No Doors

He excused himself, opened the back door and stood there for a moment to get a breath of air. The jungle of the garden, the hidden shed with the dress hanging from the beam, the mystery of it all, the sense of things still to be revealed. He was on the edge of discovery, and he loved the feeling of it, he always did, even if a dead body lay at the

Every contact leaves a trace. That was how they put it. Otherwise known in the trade as ‘Locard’s Principle of Exchange’. Jack Collingworth had taught him this, the DI who had taken Hobbes under his wing back in the sixties. Exchange, lad! Monsieur Locard got that spot on. Tit for tat. You just need to work it out. The perpetrator always leaves som

The inspector nodded. Latimer was always telling him to be kinder to people. Or at least to be more aware of them. Not everyone’s a suspect. That was the phrase she liked to use. But Hobbes had his own rejoinder: ‘No, but everyone’s to blame for something.’ And she’d told him he was a hopeless, irredeemable cause.

And Detective Inspector Hobbes knew then: the house had taken possession of him. The spirits of the family, the occupants. If he made his way back downstairs and peered out through the back door, the garden would be empty; and if he walked across the lawn and looked up at the third-floor window, the same woman would be there, looking down at him, w

He was surprised at the items he saw: not only the food and drink he was expecting, but a curious mixture of objects – a beaded necklace, a pair of spectacles with no glass in them, a Chinese-style fan, a hairnet, two copies of a history of London’s hidden rivers.

Kepple said, ‘You’ve set yourself a pointless task, you do know that?’ ‘You think so?’ ‘Postmodernism works against the sureties of narrative, of linear progression – ultimate goals, beginnings, middles and ends. I truly believe that a coming age will despise such notions. There is no one truth, only a mist of possibilities. We are lost among the v

Made chief inspector. That’s when I knew him. He was the man who taught me the ropes. Near strangled me with them, mind, if I did wrong.’

A fly moved on the wall. Was it the same one he’d seen on the hand of the dead body, biding its time? Hobbes took a book from a nearby shelf and smashed it down on the insect. He muttered to himself, ‘Humans one, decay nil.’ But, of course, decay was never out of action for long.

He wanted to speak, to call out, but was unable to move his lips properly. His limbs felt even heavier than before. The spores were most concentrated here, glowing with their own light. They made their way inside Hobbes’s body, into his bloodstream, casting their spell. He was locked in someone else’s dream. The objects danced and swayed around him