The Inventory

The estate agent gave Cormac a clipboard, a torch, and a number to call when he was finished, and told him the electricity had been off since the spring.

"List everything," she said. "Room by room. Don't value it, don't move it, just write it down."

"How long do these usually take?"

"Depends on the house."

It was a bad answer and he took the job anyway, because it paid ninety pounds and he had four days until rent.

The house was called Ardnaveigh and it sat at the end of a lane that the map had given up on. Three storeys, grey, with the particular blank look of a building that has outlived everyone who ever thought about it. The key turned easily. That surprised him. He had been expecting to fight it.

He started in the front room and wrote:

One walnut sideboard. One mantel clock, stopped. Two armchairs, upholstery perished. One rug, rolled.

It went quickly. It was almost pleasant, in the way that any small closed task is pleasant. By the time the light started going he had done the ground floor and half the first, and he had filled six pages, and he had stopped noticing the smell.

It was in the second bedroom that he found the list.

It was on the dressing table, in a hand that sloped hard to the right, and it began: One walnut sideboard. One mantel clock, stopped. Two armchairs, upholstery perished.

He read it three times. It was his inventory. It was, item for item, in order, his inventory — and it ran on for pages past where he had got to, describing rooms he had not yet entered, in a hand that was not his.

He sat down on the edge of the bed.

The sensible thing, he told himself, was that a previous surveyor had done exactly this job, in exactly this order, because there was only one sensible order to do it in. That was all. Two people walking the same house would produce the same list. It would have been strange if they hadn't.

He turned to the last page.

The final entries were on the third floor, in a room he had noted from the landing but not opened. They read:

One iron bedstead. One washstand. One chair, ladder-back.

And then, in the same sloping hand, one line lower:

One man, seated. Clipboard. Torch.

Cormac looked at the clipboard in his hands for what felt like a long time.

Then he did the thing that he would afterwards be unable to explain to anybody, including himself, including the estate agent when she rang on Thursday and got no answer.

He did not leave.

He went up.

The third floor was colder than it had any business being and the door at the end was already open, and inside there was an iron bedstead, and a washstand, and a ladder-back chair set square to the window as though someone had recently got up from it.

He wrote them down. One iron bedstead. One washstand. One chair, ladder-back.

His pen hovered.

Downstairs, very faintly, he heard the front door open, and a woman's voice say — brisk, professional, entirely reasonable — "List everything. Room by room."

Cormac sat down in the ladder-back chair, because his legs had stopped consulting him, and he put the clipboard on his knee.

The light was going.

He waited to be written down.