I got down on my hands and knees for a closer look. It was actually a sort of clean stain – the type you get when you’ve tried too hard to clean something and it ends up looking cleaner than the rest of the area.
‘Did anyone at all come into the house last week to do some cleaning?’
‘Only Mrs Godfrey,’ said Olivia. ‘Our next-door neighbour. But she only came in to water the plants every day, not to clean. She’s really nice; she keeps saying how much she likes my mum’s collection of sculptures.’ Olivia patted the metal dog beside the armchair.
‘And she doesn’t know what happened to Rupert?’
‘No, she hates fish. The same way some people hate spiders. She never even looked at the tank, all week. It was me who saw that Rupert had gone.’
‘This Mrs Godfrey didn’t need to feed the fish, then?’ I said.
‘No,’ said Olivia. ‘We leave them one of those food blocks you can get in pet shops. Lasts them for ages.’
But I had reached another conclusion. I KNEW that Mrs Godfrey had either not been into the house at all, OR hadn’t been doing what she said she was doing. How did I know that?
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