The Dream Home, page 1
Praise for
‘Smart, intense and with a humdinger of a mid-point twist. I loved it’
GILLIAN MCALLISTER
‘Taut, tense and compelling. Thriller writing at its finest’
SIMON LELIC
‘T.M. Logan’s best yet. Unsettling and so, so entertaining.
The perfect thriller’
CAZ FREAR
‘A tense and gripping thriller’
B.A. PARIS
‘Assured, compelling, and hypnotically readable – with a twist at the end I guarantee you won’t see coming’
LEE CHILD
‘A compelling, twisty page-turner, and that’s the truth’
JAMES SWALLOW
‘Outstanding and very well-written . . . so gripping I genuinely found it hard to put down’
K.L. SLATER
‘A terrific page-turner, didn’t see that twist!
A thoroughly enjoyable thriller’
MEL SHERRATT
‘Another blistering page-turner from psych-thriller god
T.M. Logan’
CHRIS WHITAKER
‘Even the cleverest second-guesser is unlikely to arrive at the truth until it’s much, much too late’
THE TIMES
For my amazing children,
Sophie and Tom,
who make me proud every single day
The dead keep their secrets.
—Alexander Smith, Dreamthorp
Contents
PART I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Edward
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
PART II
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Adrian
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Carys
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Sian
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Dean
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
PART III
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
PART IV
Chapter 60
Pamela
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
PART V
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Acknowledgements
T.M. Logan’s Readers’ Club
Letter from Author
About the Author
Read more from the Master of the Up-All-Night Thriller
More from T.M. Logan . . .
Copyright
PART I
You never get used to it. Not really. It hangs over your head, always waiting, a debt that’s never been settled. The knowledge that it’s waiting somewhere to trip you up – and that you need to be ready in case the past comes knocking. Hoping that day will never come. Knowing what will have to happen if it does.
1
SUNDAY
It’s towards the end of moving-in day that I find it.
A day full of lifting and carrying and making cups of tea for the removal team, of going up and down the broad staircase a hundred times, of unloading boxes, building bedframes and giving the children small jobs to keep them occupied. A non-stop day bringing this old house back to life.
It still doesn’t quite feel real, even as Jess and I are debating where to start with the decorating. None of the rooms have seen fresh paint or new carpet for decades. A fixer-upper, the estate agent had said with a hopeful smile. But we had fallen in love with the place on the first viewing, had both known it was something special, this rambling Victorian house with its high ceilings and tall windows, its soaring chimney stacks and half-timbered gables, the date in delicate raised stonework over the big front door: 1889. Six bedrooms, three bathrooms, two reception rooms, a cellar, a pantry, a snug – there was so much space.
We knew it needed a lot of work, that was one of the reasons we’d been able to afford a house in this part of the city. The Park, first named for the old deer park next to the castle, maintained for the king’s hunt – now an enclave of grand nineteenth-century houses and wide-spaced streets, a tree-lined oasis of walled gardens and leafy calm right in the heart of Nottingham.
By late afternoon, I’m clearing left-behind rubbish from the second floor. My legs are heavy, my back starting to ache after going down two flights of stairs carrying stacks of old newspapers, an ancient put-up bed that had been left on the landing, a broken bookcase, boxes of tiles and bin bags of musty clothes. In the smallest of the top-floor attic rooms, where the air is stale with neglect, the carcass of an old fitted wardrobe hangs off the wall. Its chipboard shelves are splintered, one door is jammed shut and the other has fallen off its runner completely. Nails and screws protrude from the broken frame, ready to catch small hands. The whole thing looks like it might collapse at any moment, and it doesn’t take me long to prise it away from the wall with a crowbar, flattening the nails and breaking the whole wardrobe apart, stacking the broken wood in the corner.
Every room in this house seems to have some quirk or curiosity that we hadn’t anticipated.
And this room is no exception.
Because the wall behind the fitted wardrobe is not painted plaster, or wallpaper or brick. Instead, it’s panelled in dark wood like the hallway on the ground floor. Panels of walnut or teak stretch floor to ceiling across the width of the room. It’s a big improvement on the fitted wardrobe, a shame to have hidden away this handsome facade behind something so ugly. The whole thing is seven panels high and a dozen or so wide. The workmanship is very fine, each piece seamlessly fitting into the next, the only blemishes a handful of holes where the wardrobe had been attached.
I run my hand over a panel, the grain of the wood smooth under my palm. Standing back to admire it, I snap a quick picture on my phone to show Jess what I’ve discovered. The late afternoon sun coming through the skylight makes the wood almost glow, like burnished bronze, as if carved from a single piece of—
I look again at the picture, then back at the panelling. Comparing the high-definition image with the reality in front of me.
The way the sun catches it in the photo, at just the right angle, I can see the workmanship is not quite perfect. Not all the way along. Perhaps there’s been some movement over time, the house shifting its old bones slightly in the years since this wall was added. In the phone image, there is a very fine vertical line running between two panels at the far end of the wall.
But with the naked eye, I still can’t make it out. I run my hand up and down the right side of wall, between two of the panels. I don’t see it. I feel it. My fingertips brush an almost invisible join, a seam in the wood. I run my hand up higher, then down to the floor. Up again, across, down.
Not just a seam.
It’s the outline of a door.
Perhaps there was old pipework behind here, the wood panelling a smart solution to disguise it, with discreet access if there was ever a problem. Or perhaps a little extra attic space beneath the eaves of the sloping roof.
There doesn’t seem to be any kind of keyhole, or lock, or latch, or anything that will open or close it. I spend a minute feeling all the way around the seam again but there is nothing at all to give any leverage, to pull or push or turn. No button or handle.
In frustration, I place my palm flat against the middle panel and push.
With a reluctant click, the door opens towards me. Just half an inch. I pause for a second, taking a breath, then pull it open all the way on silent hinges.
Over the threshold, there is total, perfect darkness. The air is musty and stale, a blunt spoiled smell of old bricks and slow decay that has not been breathed in a long, long time. My heart beating a little faster, I take the phone from my pocket and flick the torch on, white light throwing leaping shadows over an armchair, a side table, a dresser pushed up against the wall, all of it thick with dust and cobwebs.
It isn’t just a panel to hide ugly pipework.
It isn’t extra storage space either.
It’s a whole new room, hidden behind the wall.
2
I knew something about this top bedroom wasn’t quite ri
The dimensions seemed a little too small, the wall didn’t quite match the one in the bedroom next to it. This hidden space is small and cramped like a hide, a priest hole – but the house was nowhere near old enough for that. According to the stonework over the front door, it was built in 1889 and I knew it had been extended at least twice since. On my phone, I pull up the floorplan from the estate agents’ website and zoom into the top floor layout, checking the dimensions of this bedroom – ten feet by twelve, give or take a few inches. That looks about right to me. No indication of more space to the side, of a hidden annexe that must have been built into the fabric of this place so long ago that people forgot it was even there. An extra four feet of width that had been turned into something else.
Ducking my head, I step through the door.
The air is thick with years of dust, smells of old timber and crumbling brick that catch at the back of my throat.
A floorboard creaks beneath my feet and I freeze. There is the weird sense that I’m somehow intruding on someone else’s private space. I know it’s ridiculous. We own this house now – and everything in it. From the swirling 1970s carpets on the top landing to the stack of rust-crusted paint pots in the cellar, the fading cookbooks abandoned in the pantry and the stippled Artex ceiling in the sitting room, stained a dull yellow from years of cigarette smoke. All of it left behind by the elderly previous owner. All of it belongs to us now.
The bright light from my phone throws dancing shadows as it sweeps over the room, cobwebs filling every corner. Old rugs nailed to bare brick on one side, the slope of the eaves on the other. There’s a low, tatty armchair with a tiny side table next to it, a brown ceramic coaster where someone long ago might have placed their cup of tea. A battered Welsh dresser crammed against the wall, the wood dark, almost black.
A bare bulb dangles from the ceiling. I pull on the cord but nothing happens; the bulb is long dead.
The dresser has a single large door on the right, with eight small drawers to the left, in two columns of four. I pull the handle of the door and it opens with a rusty creak.
Empty, except for more cobwebs and the cocooned carcasses of dead insects. I try the top drawer. Locked. As is the one beside it, and the one below.
Curiosity piqued, I feel a small spike of frustration added into the mix – a dangerous combination for me ever since I was a child. A locked dresser, a hidden door, a secret room. Now I definitely need to see what’s inside. Maybe there was something valuable hidden here, money or jewellery, a stash of gold coins or the key to a safe deposit box at a private bank. All of which would come in extremely handy, especially now.
I’m pretty sure I can lever the drawers open if I use a little brute force and ignorance. I bend to duck under the low doorway and back out into the main room, to my toolbox on the landing, where I find the biggest flathead screwdriver I’ve got, an old chisel and then – as a last resort – my crowbar, the steel smooth and heavy in my hand. Dumb, dumber, dumbest.
I start with the chisel, sliding the blade into the gap between the top drawer and the wooden frame. Levering the handle back, putting my weight into it—
With a dull snap, the blade of the chisel breaks off.
I’m left with just the old wooden handle in my clenched fist. I pull the broken blade free and study the dresser with a new curiosity.
This old thing was really well made. Before I mangle this antique with the crowbar, I should at least have a proper look at it.
I make my way down both sets of stairs to the Minton-tiled hallway on the ground floor, taking a sixty-watt bulb from one of the boxes labelled ‘MOVING SUPPLIES’ in Jess’s neat capitals. In a bowl on the windowsill are a bunch of house keys handed over to us on the day we exchanged contracts, for the front and back doors, the garage, the shed and some others I haven’t identified yet.
I take them back up to the hidden annexe and go through them one by one, trying to fit them into the locks by the light of my phone, perched on the edge of the old armchair.
None of the keys work.
None of them are even the right size to fit into the eight identical keyholes of the small dresser drawers.
I let out a sigh and shove the bunch of keys back into the pocket of my jeans, the pulse of my curiosity beating stronger now. In all likelihood the right key was lost forever in a box or a cupboard or an old jar of odds and ends. Or buried beneath a ton of rubbish on some landfill site, separated forever from the drawers to which it belonged.
Or . . . maybe not. Would you go to all this trouble to create a hidden place, but then keep the key in plain sight? Where it might be easily found?
I replace the bulb and pull the light switch again, blinking against the glare for a moment while my eyes adjust. The room seems older, less grim and more functional in the wash of white light. Everything is more unnerving in the dark, I suppose. Using the torch on my phone for extra illumination, I play a beam of light all around the dresser, on the wall behind it, the wooden door frame beside it.
A floorboard creaks beneath me again and I crouch down, testing each dusty plank to see if one might be loose. Studying the rows of bricks, I run my fingers over rough mortar to seek out any gaps. The bricks are flaking, the mortar unevenly applied, but I can’t find any obvious place for a key to have been tucked away. The exposed wooden frame around the doorway is like the back of a stage set, the side of the wall that no one ever sees, the timber raw and unfinished. But it’s very solid and it is wide enough to accommodate a key.
I reach up to feel around the top of the frame and almost immediately there is a sharp stab of pain in my index finger.
Pulling it back with a curse, I see a dark orb of blood rising from the skin of my fingertip.
Shining the phone torch directly onto the frame I can see what I’d missed: nails that have been hammered through from the other side. Half-inch points showing through around the door, on the wooden panels, some above my head in the sloping ceiling. A dozen at least dotted around the small space, tiny traps for the unwary.
I stand back, sucking the blood from my punctured finger, staring at the dark wood of the dresser, the untouched layer of dust on every surface. Each of the small brass handles on the drawers taunting me, goading me.
They’re probably empty. But that’s not the point.
There’s something else weird about it, I realise: it’s too big to have fitted through the doorway into this little room. It’s not a huge piece of furniture, but it’s still too large, too tall to have been manhandled through such a small opening – the angles are all wrong. Ditto the old, low armchair I’m sitting in. So they were put in place before the extra wall was built, bricked in here with no prospect that they would see the light of day again. Stuck in here for good.
I heft the thick steel crowbar in my hand, ready to wedge it into a gap in the drawers and crack the wood, break the lock to force it open.
This old thing was not going to beat me.
I jerk up at a sound behind me, banging my head on the low ceiling.
‘You going to smash that up, Dad?’
Behind, me, silhouetted in the light from the bedroom, is a slight figure in jeans and a T-shirt, ducking her head under the wooden door frame. My eldest daughter stares around the small space, nose wrinkling at the smell.
‘Hey, Leah.’ I put the crowbar down. ‘How’s your unpacking going?’
‘Slowly.’ She peers into the gloom. ‘What is this?’
‘Some sort of storage room, I think.’
‘Storage for what?’ she says. ‘Stuff you never want to see again?’
‘Perhaps,’ I grunt. ‘I think maybe it was just forgotten about, years ago.’
‘Creepy.’
‘I know, right?’
‘Maybe we could put Callum in here,’ Leah says with a mischievous smile. ‘When he’s naughty?’
She leans in further and I hold a hand up. ‘Don’t come in, there are nails sticking out of the wood all over the place.’
‘You’re bleeding,’ she says, pointing at my hand.
‘Just a nail.’ A thin red line of blood tracks through the creases in my palm and drips from my wrist, dark drops spotting the floor. ‘There’s some kitchen roll on the landing, could you grab me some?’
She disappears for a moment and returns with a couple of sheets.
‘Probably better if you don’t come in here for the time being, OK?’ I wrap tissue around my bleeding finger. ‘Not until I’ve flattened these nails and made it a bit safer. And we need to make sure your brother and sister don’t either.’
