Read Kick Back for Free Online

couple of days after the conservatory went. My husband said she probably had to move suddenly, on account of her work, and maybe took the conservatory with her to a new house.”
    â€œHer work?”
    â€œShe told my Harry that she was a freelance computer expert. It takes her all over the world, you know. She said that’s why she’d always rented the house out. There’s been a string of tenants in there ever since we moved in five years ago. She told Harry this was the first time she’d actually had the chance to live in the house herself.” There was a note of pride in her voice that her Harry had managed to get so much out of their mysterious neighbor.
    â€œCan you describe her to me, Mrs.—?”
    She considered. “Green. Carole Green, with an e, on the Carole, not the Green. Well, she was taller than you.” Not hard. Five three isn’t exactly Amazonian. “Not much, though. Late twenties, I’d say. She had dark brown hair, in a full page-boy, really thick and glossy her hair was. Always nicely made up. And she was a nice dresser, you never saw her scruffy.”
    â€œAnd the man you mentioned?”
    â€œThere was more than one, you know. Most nights when she was here, a car would pull up in the garage later on, about eleven. A couple of times, I saw them drive off the next morning. The first
one had a blue Sierra, but he only lasted a couple of weeks. The next one had a silver Vauxhall Cavalier.” She seemed very positive about the cars and I commented on it. “My Harry’s in the motor trade,” she informed me. “I might not have noticed the men, but I noticed the cars.”
    â€œAnd you haven’t seen her since she moved out?”
    The woman shook her head. “Not hide nor hair. Then the house was rented out again a fortnight after she moved. A young couple, just moved up from Kent. They left a month ago, bought a place of their own over towards Widnes. Lovely couple, they were. Don and Diane. Beautiful baby girl, Danni.”
    I almost pitied them. I bet they’d not thought fast enough to get out of the little social events of the Grove. I couldn’t think of anything else to ask, so I made my excuses and left. I considered trying the other neighbors, but I didn’t see how anyone could have succeeded where Carole with an e had failed.
    Â 
    Scarborough Walk was only a mile away as the crow flies. Clearly the crow has never inspired a town planner. Only a Minotaur fresh from the Cretan labyrinth would feel at home in the newer parts of Warrington. I negotiated yet another roundabout with my street map on my knees and entered yet another new development. Whitby Way encircled a dozen Walks, Closes and Groves like the covered wagons pulled up to repel the Indians. It was about as hard to breach. Eventually, second time round, I spotted the entrance to the development. Cleverly designed to look like a dead end, in fact it led straight into a maze that I managed to unravel by driving at 10 m.p.h. with one eye on the map. Sometimes I wonder how I cope with a job as glamorous, exciting and risky as this.
    Again, there was no conservatory. The couple who lived there now had only been renting it for a couple of months, so the harried mother with the hyperactive toddler wasn’t able to tell me anything about the people who’d actually bought the conservatory. But the woman next door but one had missed her way. She should have been on the News of the World’ s investigative desk. By the time I escaped, I knew more than I could ever have dreamed possible about the inhabitants of Scarborough Walk. I even knew
about the two couples who had moved out in 1988 after their wife-swapping had turned into a permanent transfer. However, I didn’t know much about the former inhabitants of number six. They’d bought the house the previous November, and had moved out at the end of February because he’d got a job out in the