No Place Like Home

inside. ‘Those bastards. They’re to all intents and purposes at war with the local yobs, and they never saw fit to tell you?’
‘I know. It was pretty unfair of them.’
‘Unfair? Unfair?’ David whistled. ‘I know you like to try and see the good in everyone, Bram, but come on!’
‘Yep, you’re actually right, David.’ And Sylvia had seemed so nice, too. But she’d lied to their faces, insisting that they hadn’t had much trouble recently with yobs in the woods.
Max and Phoebe fitted Bertie with the petcam – not easy as he was still wearing the plastic cone – and they spent a hilarious hour or so watching the first bits of footage from it, Max and Phoebe describing to Linda what they were seeing as Bertie stuck his nose into every crevice in the kitchen that could conceivably harbour crumbs. The sound effects were particularly funny. ‘You’d think the cone would stop him getting his head in there,’ Max chuckled, ‘but it seems not.’
David chuckled too. ‘Oh aye, you’d have to put a hazmat suit on him to keep Bertie and crumbs apart.’
‘Imagine Bertie in a hazmat suit!’ Kirsty exclaimed. ‘How cute would that be?’ And father and daughter exchanged smiles.
Phoebe was delighted with Bertie-cam, and seemed to be reassured by the whole camera strategy in general. ‘They can’t do anything now, can they, Dad?’
‘If they try, they’ll soon be caught, kleintje.’
Then Kirsty had to leave for a meeting with a client, and Bram found himself pressing David and Linda to stay to dinner, but David wanted to ‘swing by’ a building site before dark on their way home.
So it was just Bram and the kids, but he was making a big pan of the risotto, as Kirsty would want some when she got back and Max would probably have at least two helpings. It smelt amazing, garlicky and savoury, and Bram’s salivary glands were already going into overdrive. He’d carefully cleaned the chanterelle and left them to dry on tea towels, and sent a couple of photos to Willie to check that he wasn’t about to give his family the gripes. Willie had been typically reassuring. Not.
Looks like you’re good to go, but don’t sue me if it all goes literally to shit.
But Bram had slit each mushroom to check that it was pale inside, which seemed to be a foolproof way of telling chanterelles from anything that would give you the runs. And at least there was nothing you could mistake for chanterelles that was really dangerous. He’d googled this just to confirm it.
So: chanterelle risotto with truffle oil and Parmigiano Reggiano. Mmmm! He’d added half the chanterelles at the start of the cooking process, after he’d fried the onions and garlic and added the rice and the first splash of vegetable stock, to lend their flavour to the rice. The other half he’d add later, so those pieces would retain their texture better.
It had been a much better day, Bram reflected as he stood at the stove stirring the risotto. He had all the lamps on in the Walton Room and the halogens over the worktops, and it felt cosy and safe in here. He’d closed all the curtains and rigged up a makeshift cover for the panes in the door with a piece of cardboard and tacks, and he and Phoebe had drawn a mandala on the cardboard to match the one they’d painted on the wall of the downstairs loo, using a compass and her felt-tip pens.
It was very soothing, standing there stirring as the fat Carnaroli rice grains absorbed the liquid. He had Chilean cueca music playing on a loop on his iPod in the docking station, and found himself swaying in time and humming along.
‘Da-aad?’ called Phoebe from the Room with a View. ‘Come and see this! It’s so cute!’
‘Okay, Phoebs.’
He turned down the heat under the risotto, added another splash of stock, and walked across the slate floor to the open door to the other room. Max and Phoebe were chilling on the sofas, one each, Max staring at his phone, Phoebe watching YouTube videos on the TV. The screen was filled by a freeze-frame image of an animal. Surprise, surprise.
‘Hold on.’ Phoebe frowned at the remote. ‘I’ll go back to the start.’
‘Sixth time,’ Max muttered.
‘I’m going to watch it a hundred times!’ Phoebe gurgled. ‘A thousand! Max is trying to pretend he doesn’t think it’s cute. He’s trying to be cool. Keep trying, Max!’
‘Ouch,’ said Max, grinning.
Phoebe zapped the remote at the TV. A white rat was sitting on a fluffy pink blanket. Slowly, his eyes closed and his head dropped until his nose touched the blanket and he jerked awake again, only for the process to be repeated. The third time, when his nose hit the blanket it stayed there, little snuffling snoring sounds coming from the soundtrack.
‘How cute is that?’ Phoebe demanded.
‘Super-cute, Phoebs.’
‘Do you want to see it again?’
‘In a bit. I’d better get back to the risotto. Hope you two are hungry – there’s a tonne of it.’
Walking back out to the kitchen, he smiled to himself. Everything was getting back to normal. For maybe the first time, the house felt like a proper home. He shimmied across the kitchen in time to the cueca. Yep. It was –
Oh Christ!
Almost filling the pan of risotto was a big hunk of raw meat.
It was the shape of a massive strawberry, purplish-red with white fatty bits and stubby white tubes poking out of the top –
It was a heart.
A raw heart, oozing blood into the risotto.
And on the worktop next to the stove was scrawled in blood:
Your next
Someone was in the house!
His head snapped up as he scanned the open-plan space between the kitchen and the door. He backed up, and then he turned and ran, he ran back into the Room with a View and slammed the door behind him, pressing his back against it.
‘Max, call the police.’
Both kids looked up at him.
‘Just do it! Now!’
‘Why, what’s happening? Okay, okay.’