The Perfect Tenant

Fourteen months after her husband Kit died on the river road, Isla Ashby, a piano tuner with a mortgage she can't pay, lets the attic room of their narrow Totterdown terrace to Hannah Pryce, a gentle night-shift nurse who pays six months in advance. Hannah is the perfect tenant. On her first night she steps over the ninth stair, the one that sings F sharp, which only Isla and Kit ever knew to avoid. Then she calls the cat by Kit's secret name for him, says his exact words when she comes home, and at three in the morning Kit's tune, which he never recorded, drifts down through the ceiling. With her sharp-eyed neighbour Saroj, a retired court stenographer who writes down everything that happens on the street, and Kit's angry younger brother Jamie, Isla has to work out who is living upstairs, how she knows what she knows, and what she wants from the house. This is a work of fiction; all people, practices and businesses are invented. It depicts stalking, covert recording and psychological manipulation as harm, never as romance, and includes grief after a road accident. (16+)