The Top of the House

The perfect tenant pays in cash, asks for nothing, and knows your house better than you do.

When Eleanor Ashworth lets the attic flat of her late mother's home to a quiet, courteous stranger, she tells herself she has done the sensible thing. Stephen Reede keeps to himself. He is up early and silent at night. He fixes the temperamental boiler before she thinks to mention it. He is, by every measure, no trouble at all.

But he ducks beneath the low beam on the steep stair without ever looking up for it — the way you only do in a house you have known in the dark. He knows where the stopcock hides beneath the pantry floorboard. He knows the neighbour's name, though he has never crossed the lane. He speaks of Eleanor's mother in a way a stranger never could. And when Eleanor takes down the old biscuit tin of family photographs, she finds a face she has begun to recognise surfacing in pictures taken decades before the two of them ever met.

He knew her mother. He is lying about who he is. But the nurse won't listen, the woman across the lane insists she has never seen him come or go, and the pills on Eleanor's bedside table go untaken as the days fold into one another. The harder she fights to be believed, the less certain she becomes of what is real — and of whether the stairs her mother fell down were an accident at all.

Told in Eleanor's spare, haunting voice, threaded with her mother's cold little household rules, The Top of the House is a slow-burning descent into memory, doubt, and the secrets waiting at the bottom of the stairs. It is a novel about the terror of not being believed, and the greater terror of being right.

Someone under this roof intends to finish what they started. The most dangerous person in the house may have been here all along.

Turn the first page. Count the steps. See if they add up.