What I Saw From the Window

Number 14 had been empty for two years. It had belonged, before that, to old Mrs Vogel, who had died in her sleep in November of 2042. Mrs Vogel had had no children. Her will had been — Pim had heard, vaguely — *complicated*. The house had become tied up in something to do with cousins in another country. The cousins had not, in two years, come to the village. The house had stood, dark and shut, with a *for sale (estate)* sign in the front garden that nobody had taken seriously because nobody could buy a house that nobody knew the right cousin to talk to. The village had, in those two years, simply got used to the dark windows. Pim was thirteen. His bedroom window looked, across the narrow lane, at the upstairs of number 14. He had had this view his whole life. He had looked at Mrs Vogel's curtains, every morning, for as long as he could remember. The curtains had stayed, after she died, in their last position — half-drawn, faded, with a small ornament of three china birds on the windowsill behind them. In early November, Pim noticed something. A light was on in number 14's upstairs front bedroom. It was, when he first noticed it, just past nine on a Sunday evening. He had been doing his maths homework. He had glanced up. The window across the lane — Mrs Vogel's old window, with the half-drawn curtains and the three china birds — had a soft yellow light behind it. The