Page 16 of The Impossible Fortune (Thursday Murder Club Mysteries #5)

Elizabeth appears, crawling on all fours, from undergrowth. She stands and steps back onto the pavement. ‘No,’ she says, ‘it’s not that one.’

Joyce has caught glimpses of Hampton Road from the minibus window, but it’s fun to see it on foot.

The houses are private, and all set back from the road.

Every time you pass a security gate, you can peek over and see a thatched roof or a turret through the trees.

When the security gates are too high, Elizabeth scurries off into the bushes to find a better view.

They are looking for the house in the photographs Nick Silver sent to Elizabeth.

So far, no luck, but it is, nonetheless, a lot of fun.

Joanna has recently introduced Joyce to Rightmove.

It’s a website where you can see houses for sale.

You click on them and they let you look inside!

Thousands of strangers’ houses! Twenty, thirty, sometimes forty pictures.

You can see their sofas, their kitchen cabinets, where they’ve put their wooden LIVE, LAUGH, LOVE signs, what they’ve done with their gardens and so on.

And this site is free! Joyce doesn’t believe in all progress, self-service checkouts, for example, but she is certainly happy that somebody invented Rightmove.

Joyce can spend hours on it now. She was watching a detective drama set in Devon the other day, and she liked the look of the town that the grizzled, alcoholic detective lived in, and thought perhaps she might like to live there too.

So she Googled the programme and found out it was set in a place called Budleigh Salterton.

Bingo, put Budleigh Salterton into the Rightmove search box, and you have a good hour’s worth of entertainment – both imagining a new life for yourself and judging other people’s interior design choices.

A nice three-bed apartment on the front for ￡475,000.

You could certainly imagine sitting on the balcony with a glass of wine, but, really, ￡475,000 with that lino on the bathroom floor?

In the old days, when she was a Rightmove rookie, Joyce looked only at the properties she could hypothetically afford, but Joanna had put her right, and now that Joyce has no upper price limit the whole world has opened up to her.

They have houses on there for ten million if you look in the right place.

Those houses are all either estates with fifty acres of land and enormous marble-and-gold entrance halls or they are four-bed flats in the middle of London.

Rightmove teaches you an awful lot about the world, and also a lot about people’s taste in curtains.

And so it is that she is looking up houses on Hampton Road as they walk up the hill to find Nick Silver’s house.

‘The one with the turrets at Number 16 last sold for ￡2.75 million,’ says Joyce. ‘And it has a fountain.’

Up ahead of them a Daihatsu pulls up to the kerb, and Ron steps out, looking very much the worse for wear.

He gives Joyce a hug. ‘You reek of booze, Joycey. That’s just how I like my women.’

Elizabeth has crossed the road and is on tiptoe next to a pair of wooden gates. She calls, ‘Found it! Nick Silver’s house.’

Joyce and Ron walk over to join her.

‘How do we get in?’ Joyce asks.

Elizabeth climbs the gates and opens them from the inside.

‘Oh,’ says Joyce. ‘Like that.’

‘So you’re saying Nick Silver’s dead?’ says Ron, as they start the walk down Nick’s driveway.

‘No,’ says Joyce. ‘Only might be dead. Someone put a bomb under his car.’

‘Okay,’ says Ron. ‘Bomb, is it? And where’s his car?’

‘It’s at his house,’ says Joyce.

‘But this is his house,’ says Ron.

‘Yes,’ says Joyce.

‘So what are we doing here?’

‘Elizabeth just wants to take a look,’ says Joyce. ‘You know Elizabeth and bombs.’

‘Just want to borrow the thing and get it analysed,’ says Elizabeth. ‘Find out who planted it.’

‘We’re going to take the bomb with us?’ Ron asks.

‘That’s why you’re here, Ron,’ says Elizabeth. ‘We needed a car. An old friend of mine called Jasper has agreed to assess it, and it’ll be quite safe at Coopers Chase.’

‘But –’ says Ron.

‘Bombs are fairly robust, Ron,’ says Elizabeth. ‘So long as you don’t drive over any speed bumps, we’ll be fine.’

They round a bend, and the house from the photographs rises before them.

‘Done all right for himself, Nicky Silver,’ says Ron. ‘Nice gaff.’

In front of the house is Nick’s car. Again, just like in the photograph.

Except.

Elizabeth takes a long look. She gets into a crouch, and then rolls herself under the car.

‘Don’t blow up,’ says Joyce.

Pushing herself up again, Elizabeth looks at Joyce and Ron and shakes her head.

‘It’s definitely the right house?’ says Ron.

‘Yes, Ron, it’s the right house,’ says Elizabeth.

‘And it’s definitely the right car?’ says Joyce.

‘Yes, Joyce,’ says Elizabeth.

It is the right house, and it is the right car.

But the bomb is nowhere to be seen.