Denny found it wrapped in a tea towel, in the freezer drawer where the ice trays go, still blinking its little green light once every four seconds. That was the thing he kept coming back to when he told me the story at the Anchor, over two pints of Guinness he barely touched. He kept turning his glass instead of drinking it, a quarter turn at a time, like he was trying to line the handle up with something.
He'd been called out to a house on Attleborough Road, semi-detached, pebble-dashed, the kind with a Rover up on bricks in the drive. The client was a man called Graham Voss, sixty-odd, widower, who said the hallway smoke alarm had started ticking. Not chirping like a low battery. Ticking, evenly, like a clock with no numbers on it.
Denny checked it properly. New battery, tested the sounder, ran the self-test twice. Nothing wrong with it. He told Voss that. Voss stood in the hall in his socks and said, "You're not hearing it because it's not for you."
Denny left it at that. Householders say all sorts. He'd had a woman in Bedworth swear her boiler was breathing, and a man in Nuneaton who wanted his fuse box blessed by a priest, so a talking smoke alarm wasn't going to keep him up.
He went back three weeks later because Voss rang again, said the alarm needed replacing, that this one was faulty in a way meters couldn't catch. Denny fitted a new unit anyway, out of the box, sealed. Charged him for the callout and the part. Voss paid in cash, counted out in fivers from a mug on the windowsill that had World's Best Grandad on the side, though Denny never saw a photo of any grandkids in that house.
Fourth visit, Voss met him at the door holding the new alarm in both hands, the way you'd hold something that might still be alive. He said he'd taken it down himself and put it in the freezer overnight to stop the noise. Denny asked him why the freezer. Voss said cold slows things down. He'd read that somewhere, or thought he had.
Denny took it out for him and wiped the frost off with his sleeve. It was still ticking, he said. When he held it to his own ear, though, he heard nothing at all, and he only knew it was still going because of what Voss's face did watching him listen. Some slackening around the mouth.
That was the last real job. After that Voss stopped answering the door for work and started ringing Denny direct, at odd hours, just to talk. Denny didn't like to say no to him. Man lived alone. Nine, ten at night, Voss on the phone describing the ticking getting louder, describing it moving, he said, into the walls, into the decking out back that he'd laid himself two summers before, right over where Terry Ashworth from number 14 had come round about the mower he'd borrowed and never given back.
Voss told Denny that part almost gently, like a man reading out a shopping list. Said Terry had gone quiet after the fall, hadn't got up, and the ground had been soft enough that October for digging.
The police found what they found under the decking eleven days later. Denny wasn't there for that part. He read it in the paper, same as anyone, standing up at his own kitchen counter with his coat still on.
What he wanted me to know, at the end, sliding his glass round and round on the beer mat, was that he still had the alarm. Kept it in his own kitchen drawer, unwired, no battery in it at all.
He reached into his jacket pocket and set it on the table between our glasses. The green light blinked once, and then, four seconds later, blinked again.
"First Alert Smoke Detector Alarm, Pics by Mike Mozart!" by JeepersMedia is licensed under CC BY 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/.