The Kitchen Drawer

A small card was taped to the inside of the front door. The tape was worn. SLEUTEL MEE, it said: take your key. The second E had been squeezed in between the other letters. Someone had left it out and added it later.

Lena held the door open a moment longer. Two strips of sunlight lay across the hall floor. Nothing else. No shoes, no bags on the coat hooks. The humidity meter in her hand gave the same reading as it had outside. She put her bag where the shoes had been and checked the job details on her phone.

Bremstraat 18. Final inspection following tenant’s departure. Occupants present: none. Key supplied by client.

Pieter Drost had opened the key safe for her. He was on the pavement now, making a call, his free hand resting on the roof of his car. Beside the house, a paved passage led to the back of the block. In the corner between numbers 16 and 18, an elder bush grew through a crack in the paving. Lena had seen it on her last visit. The branches were fuller now.

‘How long do you reckon you’ll need?’ Pieter asked when he hung up.

‘Depends what’s changed.’

‘Half an hour?’

His car key was already hooked round one finger. In an hour, he had told her on the way, he had to be at a handover on the other side of town. Lena hadn’t arranged the visit with him. The woman who had emailed him on Friday worked in scheduling. The job description said the damage at the back had been repaired and the property was ready to be signed off.

‘I’ll call you when I’m done. Who carried out the repairs?’

‘It’s in the file.’

‘I can’t see a job sheet.’

‘We’ll ask for it, then. Today’s mainly about the status.’

He jerked his chin towards her phone. Something about the gesture was hurried, as though the house existed on her screen and the little wooden number beside him was only there for the delivery drivers.

‘The condition of the property,’ Lena said.

‘Yes. Exactly.’

‘And you’re sure nobody lives here any more?’

‘Not since the end of March. You did the first report yourself, didn’t you?’

He didn’t wait for an answer. His phone rang again. He gave her a thumbs-up and walked to his car.

Lena watched him get in. Her first visit had been on 6 May. Not in March. Sofie van Dijk had answered the door in a dark blue jumper, her trouser legs tucked into mismatched socks. She had just got home from the early shift and asked if Lena wanted coffee. Lena had wanted water. She remembered it because Sofie had given her the water in a coffee mug with a small crack by the handle.

The living room had been cleared of furniture. A rectangle remained on the wall where a cabinet had stood. A pale strip of paint above it, a darker patch at knee height. There were grains of sand on the floor below a window that stood slightly open. Where the sofa must have been, three coins and a pen lid lay close to the radiator.

Lena walked slowly towards the back, leaving her bag in the hall. In an empty house, she liked to hear her own footsteps. A loose board was easier to notice without a radio or a conversation drowning it out. The floor creaked beneath the doorway. She had noted the same sound on 6 May. Nothing dangerous, just a loose fixing under the board. She went into the kitchen.

The curtain was still there. Pale grey, with a small red rectangle near the bottom where a tear had been mended. Too neat a repair to have been done in a hurry. A half-circle of soil clung to the windowsill. The pot that had stood there was gone. Lena’s eyes went straight to the damp patch beside the back window.

Nobody had painted over it. The edge was as sharp as before. The four holes were still in the wall where Sofie had taken down a little shelf to show her the patch. During the visit, the shelf had been propped against the fridge. Sofie had knocked her upper arm on it and said something Lena hadn’t needed to put in the report.

Now the fridge was gone too. The water pipe ended at a capped tap. There was no fresh sealant round the window. Below the sill lay old dust that couldn’t have come from recent work. She raised the blind a little and shone her torch into the corner. A spider disappeared behind the edge of the frame.

She photographed the patch and made a note: no visible repairs corresponding to the job description.

That was all she could say for now. She wouldn’t put a figure on anything today, or give an opinion on the cause without looking at the outside wall. On her previous visit, her preliminary assessment had been straightforward: find the leak, let it dry, then make good. That corner hadn’t held any great surprises. Just a woman who had left her bread on the worktop because she hadn’t got round to breakfast.

Lena put her torch on the worktop. As she opened the cupboard under the sink, a plastic tub slid forwards. She caught it with her knee. Inside was a sponge, hard and bent with age. The pipe beneath the sink was dry.

The drawer above stuck halfway out. She pulled it a few centimetres further. Behind one corner of the cutlery tray lay a key, a blue cotton loop threaded through its head. Where the cord had been handled most, it wasn’t blue any longer. It was almost grey.

‘In case I lock myself out,’ Sofie had said. ‘Though of course I’d need someone who could get in here and fetch it.’

She had laughed at the flaw in her own arrangement, and Lena had asked how many sets were in use. Two. One in her bag, one in the drawer. The housing association had needed to make its own arrangements for maintenance access. Sofie had said something about Niels, but Lena couldn’t remember what. She had been looking at the ceiling.

She didn’t touch the key.

On her phone, she opened the documents from the earlier visit. The file was at the top: inspection report, Bremstraat 18. Her name below it, the logo of her small firm. The date of the visit was right. Further down, beside the occupancy field, it said: property vacant since 31 March.

She scrolled back to the top. Sometimes a file for the house next door ended up under the same project number. She checked the house number, postcode and date. Everything pointed to this house. The photograph of the back window was hers. She recognised the slanting reflection of her torch in the glass. But the image was narrower than the one she had taken. The loose shelf and the edge of the fridge had been cropped out.

She could still see the key in the drawer out of the corner of her eye.

Lena read the section on the damp patch. Her thumb moved slowly down the screen, line by line. It said prolonged. And severe. A few sentences on, it described a combination of defects that made continued occupation of the property inadvisable. She hadn’t written that sentence. She hadn’t even used the word continued. Of that she was certain.

Her phone vibrated. Pieter.

‘How’s it looking?’ he asked.

‘I have a question about the first report.’

‘Yes?’

She could hear an indicator at his end. He was evidently driving already.

‘The status doesn’t match what I found on my visit. And the section about the damage isn’t what I wrote.’

‘Have you got the right attachment?’

‘It’s got my name on it.’

‘That’s what I mean. Perhaps your old version’s in there somewhere. I’ve only got the latest one.’

‘The latest one says the house was empty at the end of March. The tenant was here on 6 May.’

The clicking stopped.

‘I can’t answer that off the top of my head. You need Niels for that. He deals with the housing association’s properties.’

‘I want to speak to him before I go any further.’

‘About the repairs?’

‘About the job, and how my report’s being used.’

Pieter’s sigh was quiet, but she heard it. ‘I’ll pass it on. Can you get on with the inspection in the meantime?’

‘I’m not signing off a final inspection now.’

‘We’re asking for an observation. Nothing more.’

‘Then you’ll get an observation. I won’t confirm that a house was empty on a date when I wasn’t here.’

She hung up before he could suggest another term for the same thing.

The kitchen was cold. Not unpleasantly so, but enough for her to feel it across her back beneath her shirt. The window had only been open a few minutes; the radiator was cold. The clock above the door showed seventeen minutes past eleven. Its old cable ran down the doorframe to the socket. Her phone said nine minutes past ten.

She closed the cupboard and pushed the drawer back. It stuck out a little further than the others. That was where it had caught before.

A sound came from the hall. One tentative knock, then another. Through the living room, Lena could see the open front door. A woman stood on the threshold, holding a shopping bag in both hands. A leek stuck out of the top. She wore a blue coat that was too warm for the weather.

‘Will you be moving in here?’ she asked.

‘No. I’m a property surveyor.’

‘Oh. My mistake, then.’

The woman looked at the bare wall and moved one foot back.

‘Are you looking for Sofie?’ Lena asked.

The woman’s expression changed. Barely; she just didn’t answer straight away.

‘Have you spoken to her?’

‘I was here two weeks ago. I was told the house would be empty today.’

‘It is now.’

‘Do you know when she left?’

The woman shifted the bag to her other hand. A plastic bag crackled beneath the leek. ‘You’ll have to ask her that.’

‘I don’t have her number. The appointment was arranged through the client.’

‘Well, they must have it, mustn’t they?’

Lena almost said she was trying to find that out, but left it. The woman didn’t know who she was dealing with. To most people, an inspector was there to tell them what they’d done wrong, or how much they would have to pay. Lena could show her a business card. All that would prove was that she had a business.

‘My name’s Lena Wouters. I came to look at the leak. Do you know if anyone’s been round to fix it since?’

‘I wouldn’t know.’

The woman was already heading for the pavement. When she turned, her eyes settled on the key safe beside the door.

‘You won’t leave that thing open, will you?’

‘No.’

‘Good.’

She crossed to the house opposite. A delivery driver had to stop his van for her. She raised a hand without looking at him.

Lena went into the hall, picked up her bag and took her business cards from the side pocket. Then she put them back. She wasn’t going to corner the woman with questions on her own doorstep.

The permission to enter in her instructions rested on the tenant having left. Perhaps Sofie really had moved and the date in the file was wrong. That would be carelessness. Perhaps there was some administrative arrangement Lena knew nothing about. But her text had been changed. She could see that already. If the tenant’s departure was also in doubt, she had no business being here until it was clear who could give permission.

She took no photographs of the key or the card. She already had the damp patch. She noted the time at which she had suspended the inspection, then called the number Pieter had sent her in a message. Niels Vos didn’t answer.

His name was on the voicemail greeting. She left her own and asked him to call her about Bremstraat 18. She didn’t say someone had lived here after the end of March. She didn’t say anything had been falsified. She wanted to have that conversation with him, not leave it sitting on his phone.

She paused by the front door. The card hung crookedly; the tape had come away at the top. She raised a hand to press it back into place, then let it drop.

She pulled the door shut, checked the handle and returned the access key as agreed. In the car, she opened the report again. Beneath the final paragraph was her abbreviated signature, the same little hook she used to add to her full surname. For the past few years she had used the flourish on its own.

Above it, the report listed seven sets of keys.

Lena put her phone on the passenger seat and didn’t start the car. Sofie had shown her both keys herself. She had put the blue one back in the kitchen drawer. There had been two of them in that kitchen. Lena had made one visit to one house that day, and someone else had since turned it into a different visit altogether.