Midnight Fugue. Reginald Hill

stood in the doorway and tried to isolate it. But his mind, though building up to its old speeds, was not quite there yet. He moved from intuition to examination. By the time he’d checked everything off and found nothing missing, nothing moved, nothing open that had been shut, or shut that had been open, no muddy footprints on the carpet, no greasy fingerprints on the door handle, he had to admit that everything was exactly as he’d left it, which meant that his sense of something not right was a load of bollocks, just another example of the continuing fragility of his mental processes.

      ‘Oh well, Rome weren’t rebuilt in a fortnight,’ he reassured himself, and sat down next to the answer machine with the intention of listening to Mick Purdy’s message.

      But as his finger hovered over the playback button, it came to him.

      Yes, everything was exactly as he’d left it, but it shouldn’t have been!

      He’d heard the start of Purdy’s message as he made for the front door. When Purdy rang off, the presence of a new message on the machine should have been registered by a red light around the play button.

      There was no light, meaning someone had played the message.

      Or maybe the red bulb had simply failed.

      He pressed the button and found himself listening not to Purdy but to a message Cap had left six days ago, reminding him to eat a casserole she’d put in his fridge.