The Turn of the Key

There was sweat on his forehead in spite of the chill in the air, and when he sat down at the kitchen counter, the tablet in his hands, I could see his hands were shaking.

Mine, as I set Petra beside Maddie, were trembling too.

Jack plugged the tablet in and now he put it down to wait until it had enough charge to turn on.

“Th-thank you,” I said shakily. Ellie was still sobbing in the hallway. “Ellie, there’s no need to cry, sweetie. It’s okay now. Look . . . um . . .” I crossed the kitchen and began rummaging in the cupboards. “Look . . . here we are, have a jammie dodger. You too, Maddie.”

“We’ve brushed our teeth,” Maddie said blankly, and I suppressed a hysterical laugh. Fuck teeth, was what I wanted to say, but I managed to bite it back.

“I think just this once, it’ll be okay. We’ve all had a shock. Sugar is good for shock.”

“Aye, it’s true,” Jack said, rather solemnly. “Back in the old day they’d make you drink sweet tea, but since I don’t really like sugar in my tea, I’ll have a jammie dodger too, thanks, Rowan.”

“See?” I handed one to Jack and bit into one myself. “It’s fine.” I spoke around the crumbs. “Here you go, Maddie.”

She took it, warily, and then shoved it in her own mouth as if I were about to take it away again.

Ellie ate hers more slowly.

“Mine!” Petra shouted, holding up her arms. I gave a mental shrug. I wasn’t going to win any prizes for child nutrition, but I no longer gave a fuck about that. Breaking one in half, I gave her a piece of biscuit too, and then threw a chunk to each of the dogs for good measure.

“Okay, we’re up and running again,” Jack said, as Petra began joyfully stuffing the biscuit into her mouth. For a minute I didn’t realize what he meant, and then I saw that he was holding the tablet, the screen casting a glow onto his face. “I’ve got the app open. Try your PIN first.”

I took the tablet from him, selected my username from the little drop-down menu, and put in the PIN Sandra had given me for the home-management app.

You are locked out, flashed up on the screen, and then when I tapped the little i button next to the message, Sorry, you have entered your Happy number incorrectly too many times and are now locked out. Please enter an admin password to override this, or wait 4 hours.

“Ah,” Jack said ruefully. “Easy mistake to make in the circumstances.”

“But wait,” I said, annoyed. “Hang on, that makes no sense. I only entered my pass code once. How can it lock me out for that?”

“It doesn’t,” Jack said. “You get three goes, and it warns you. But I suppose with all the noise—”

“I only entered it once,” I repeated, and then, when he didn’t reply, I said, more forcefully, “Once!”

“Okay, okay,” Jack said mildly, but he looked at me sideways beneath his fringe, something a little appraising in his eyes. “Let me try.” I handed him the tablet, feeling irrationally annoyed. It was clear that he didn’t believe me. So what had happened then? Had someone been trying to log in under my username?

As I watched, Jack switched users and entered his own PIN. The screen lit up briefly, and then he was inside the app.

His screen was laid out differently to mine, I saw. He had some permissions that I didn’t—access to the cameras in the garage, and outside—but not to those in the children’s bedroom and playroom, as I did. The icons for those rooms were grayed out and unavailable. But when he clicked on the kitchen, he was able to dim the lights by tapping on the controls on the app.

The realization was like a little shock.

“Hang on.” The words blurted out before I had thought through how to phrase it. “You can control the lights in here from the app?”

“Only if I’m here,” he said, clicking through to another screen. “If you’re a master user—that’s Sandra and Bill, basically—you can control everything remotely, but the rest of us can only control the rooms we’re in. It’s some sort of geolocation thing. If you’re close enough to the panel in the room, you get access to that system.”

It made sense, I supposed. If you were close enough to reach a light switch, why not give you access to the rest of the room’s controls. But on the other hand . . . how close was close? We were directly beneath Maddie and Ellie’s room here. Could he control the lights in there from his phone down here? What about outside in the yard?

But I caught myself. This was pointless. He didn’t need to access the controls from the yard. He had a set of keys.

Except . . . what better way to make someone think you weren’t involved . . . when really you were?

I shook my head. I had to stop this. It could have been Ellie, fiddling with the iPad in the middle of the night. Perhaps she had come down to play Candy Crush or watch a movie, and accidentally pressed something she shouldn’t have. It could have been some kind of preprogrammed setting that I’d switched on without realizing, the app version of a butt dial. It could have been Bill and Sandra, if it came to that. If I was going to be paranoid, I might as well go the whole hog, after all. Why stop at random handymen? Why not extend the suspicion to everyone? The fact that they had only just recruited me and had least reason of anyone to drive me away was neither here nor there. Or, for that matter, there were other users. Who knew what permissions Rhiannon might have?