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grounds.
    It was almost 1pm. I’d been procrastinating for at least half an hour. The pointing
finger of God had not appeared to tell me what to do. So I went in, finally, even
though the house had trouble written all over it. I jumped the rusty front gate and
walked up the buckling footpath to the front door.
    Of course there would be no doorbell. Just a heavy lion’s head doorknocker that had
half rusted shut. I tapped that a couple of times, waited a polite interval, then
started bashing the crap out of it. Still nothing. I was not going to get into Hatherlea by the official entrance, that much was obvious.
    I rounded the side of the house, skirting fallen tree branches, abandoned pet-food
bowls, cracked coils of garden hose, a marble birdbath filled with evil smelling
water—a muddy, browny-green, kind of like my eyes.
    At the back, the Victorian sash windows looked solid and impenetrable and welded
shut. I didn’t fancy breaking in through one of those, figuring that the point of
this exercise couldn’t possibly involve me and a stint in a juvenile detention centre.
Eve couldn’t want that, I wouldn’t be any use to her in the lock-up. Still, really
starting to sweat now, I told myself to just take a peek inside then call for backup.
There was something about the whole set-up that had my skin crawling.
    Heading up a set of cement stairs, I noticed a screen door ajar and a pet flap built
into the back door. Kneeling down, I pushed the flap in cautiously and the most disgusting
odour I have ever detected in my life wafted back out of the darkness through the
gap.
    It was piss and shit and worse, all rolled up. Like the toilets at the footy, or
The Star after an international soccer final, except left to stew for days on end—no, years . I let the flap fall back and sat down hard on the top step, gasping for air.
    ‘What do you want me to do , Eve?’ I gagged. ‘Clean up? Jesus .’
    Part of me argued, pretty persuasively, that I should just call for backup now and
get the hell out of there. And then what? It was never that simple. I wasn’t supposed
to be there just to observe. That was Eve’s job. I was her hands, her body, her go-to
girl.
    Shuddering, I stood up and tried the back door. And, bloody hell, it opened .

    I took a deep breath and entered what must have been the kitchen, where the smell
was so bad that I had to take my jumper off and tie it around my face. There were
plates of rotten food piled up high on the kitchen table, around the sink, cups full
of swampy liquid, mould climbing the ends of the kitchen curtains, the fruit in the
fruit bowl, piles of actual shit everywhere.
    As I tiptoed through to the hallway, trying hard not to touch anything, there was
a sudden loud sound of scattering and I rocked back in fear until I figured it must
be animals of some kind. Rats? Cats? I relaxed. They didn’t bother me so much—I’d
encountered them often enough in the cellar at home. Maybe meeting Eve had toughened
me up more than I knew.
    Weak sunlight filtered in through the bedsheets over the windows in the rooms that
led off the hall. I could see some of the old furniture looked really beautiful,
but the effect was spoilt by that overwhelming smell of shit and rot and worse that
was cut through with a top note of… maybe something dead ?
    A chill flashed across my skin. Maybe that was why I was here. I reached into my
pack and gripped my mobile phone, ready to do the deed—whatever the hell it was—and
run, run away.
    As I crossed into the front part of the house I saw it. The body of an old woman,
surrounded by cats, more than a dozen of them, like a furry guard of honour. She
was lying facedown on the carpet in the doorway of a front bedroom. It was piled
high with old newspapers, magazines, boxed-up records, folded paper shopping bags
in their thousands, an army of lined-up shoes and hatboxes, rolls of unused toilet
paper in baskets. If there was a reason for it all, it escaped me. You could