The doorbell was sitting on top of the skip outside number 14, still wrapped in its bubble wrap. That's the first thing I want to get straight, because everyone keeps asking why I'd take something out of a skip. It's what I do. I clear houses for a living, probate mostly, and half of what furnishes my flat has come out of other people's bins. This one was a brass push-button, the old servant's-bell type, the kind you'd find screwed to a doorframe in 1920 and never once since. No wiring. Just the button, cold, heavier than it looked, with a thread of green worked into the seam where someone had tried to polish it and given up.
I took it home on the Tuesday. Number 14 was being cleared because the old man who lived there, Mr Okonkwo-Bell — hyphenated, he insisted, though the neighbours never bothered with the second half — had died with no family anyone could trace. I wasn't clearing his house, mind, I was clearing his neighbour's, the woman who'd died the week before him, and the bell was just sitting on his skip, not hers. I didn't think about that at the time. I think about it constantly now.
I screwed it to my own doorframe, purely as decoration, wired to nothing, and I pressed it on the Thursday night because that's what you do with a doorbell. You press it. You don't think of it as an act with consequences. It made no sound at all. Not even a click. I was almost disappointed, the way you are when a firework turns out to be a dud. My nephew does the same thing with the ones on Bonfire Night, stands there waiting for a bang that never comes and won't admit it.
That night I heard footsteps come up my stairwell, stop on the landing, and stand there. Camden flats have thin doors. You know when someone's on the other side of one, breathing or not breathing. This wasn't breathing. It also wasn't nothing. I looked through the spyhole and saw the landing light, which is on a timer, go out early. It's set for ninety seconds. It had been on for maybe twenty, twenty-five at the outside.
I slept in patches. Each time I woke, the flat was colder near the door than anywhere else, cold that didn't spread, like someone had left a single window open in a room with no windows.
On the Friday I looked up the previous owner of number 14 properly, not just the surname. There'd been a son, decades back, who drowned in the reservoir out past Cheshunt at nineteen. The father had never once mentioned him to the neighbours, which is why nobody flagged it when the son's name turned up nowhere in the house clearance inventory. It turned up on the underside of the bell instead, scratched in, along with a date and three words I won't write out here. I've been asked not to, and frankly I don't want to write them again.
I gave the bell to your officer on the Saturday, in the evidence bag. I haven't been back to that stairwell since. I'm staying at my sister's, and she doesn't know why, and her dog won't go near the front door after eight in the evening. It used to sleep by that door. Now it sleeps in the kitchen, on the cold tile, which she says is new since I arrived and hasn't mentioned since.
The last thing I'll say, because I think it matters: when I unscrewed the bell from my doorframe, the screw holes underneath weren't clean. They were rusted through, decades of rust, as if the thing had been mounted there long before I ever touched it.