The first time I honestly thought it was a mix up with a delivery.
It was a Tuesday in September, about half four in the afternoon, still light out. I was working from home and the bell went and there was a woman on the step. Fifty, sixty maybe, dressed like anybody's mum, quilted coat, sensible shoes, canvas shopping bag. Completely unremarkable apart from two things.
She had a dog lead in her hand. Red, worn, clip on the end, no dog on it.
And she had a little white card with my address written on it in biro. My full address, house number and everything, handwritten.
She said, "I've come about the dog."
I said I don't have a dog.
And she smiled at me. Not a nasty smile, a patient one, the smile of a woman who's heard a lot of nonsense from delivery drivers and council offices and isn't going to get cross about one more. And she said, "That's alright. I'll wait."
And she went and stood at the end of my path. Not on my property, on the pavement by the gate, with her bag and her lead, facing the house.
She stood there for two hours and eleven minutes. I know because I watched her out the landing window like a coward, and at twenty to seven she looked at a watch she wasn't wearing and walked off up the road.
Boring context first, because it's what I'd want.
I live on my own in a two up two down at the end of a terrace and I've been there four years. Never owned a dog in my life. The previous owner was an old man who died in the house. I knew that when I bought it, it was in the paperwork, it didn't bother me. And I did wonder that first night whether HE'd had a dog and whether this was some horrible delayed rehoming thing.
So the next day I asked my neighbour June, who's been there since 1979 and knows everything about everyone.
June said the old man never had a dog. Said he was allergic. Said it completely certain, and then she asked me why, and I told her, and she stopped putting her bin out and stood up straight and said, "What did she look like?"
I described her. Coat, bag, shoes, hair.
June went inside and shut her door and didn't speak to me for three weeks.
Second time was nine days later. Same time of day, same card, same lead.
"I've come about the dog."
I said, a bit firmer, that there's no dog, there's never been a dog, and asked who'd given her my address.
She turned the card round and showed me. My address in biro on one side. Nothing on the other.
I asked who wrote it.
She said, "You did."
Then she went and stood at the gate for two hours and eleven minutes and left.
I'm going to go quick through the middle because the pattern is just the pattern and I don't want to pad this out. Eleven visits between September and the March after. Always a weekday, always between four and half four, always the lead and the card and the same sentence, and always exactly two hours and eleven minutes at the gate afterwards.
I did everything you're thinking of.
Called the police twice. Both times they came out, both times she'd gone. Second time a really decent PC took a statement and told me straight that a woman standing on a public pavement not saying anything to anybody isn't in itself a crime, and asked if I had CCTV.
So I bought CCTV.
She's on it. Clear as day, in daylight, full face, four separate visits. I've still got the files. I gave them to the police and to a housing officer and eventually, because I was getting desperate, to the Facebook group for our area with the two kids in the background blurred out.
Four hundred comments. Not one person recognised her. Which in a neighbourhood group where people can identify a car off a wing mirror is its own sort of answer.
And I did the other thing you're thinking of. On the seventh visit I went out and talked to her.
She was perfectly pleasant. Answered every single question. That was the worst bit, that she answered.
I asked her name, she said Marjorie. I asked where she lived, she named a street about a mile away that does exist. I asked what breed the dog was and she said, "You'd know better than me." I asked who sent her and she said, "It's on the card."
I asked her, and I could hear my own voice going by this point, whether she understood that there was no dog in that house.
And Marjorie looked past me at my front door and said, "There's a bowl in the kitchen. Under the sink. Behind the bleach."
There was.
Blue plastic, cracked, with a rim of something dried and dark round the bottom. Right at the back of the cupboard under the sink behind the bleach and a bag of dusters. In a house I'd lived in for four years and cleaned like somebody who lives on their own and has too much time.
I'd never seen it before. And I'd had that cupboard out to fix the trap in my second year there. I want to be clear about that. I have had that cupboard completely empty.
I took it to the door to show her, I don't know why, some instinct to prove something, and she was already at the gate with her back to me and she said, without turning round, "Don't wash it."
The eleventh visit was in March and it was different in one way.
She had a dog.
Greyhound sort of thing, grey and thin and old, on the red lead, sat on my step next to her as calm as a coat over a chair. And Marjorie said, "I've brought him back."
And I said, and I've gone over this ten thousand times since, I've said it out loud in the shower, I've written it down and looked at it, I said, "That's not my dog."
And she said, "No. Not yet."
And she bent down and unclipped the lead.
The dog walked past my legs into my house. Didn't hesitate, didn't sniff anything, it walked the way a dog walks into its own house at the end of a long day. Down my hall and turned left into my kitchen.
I turned round to look at Marjorie and she was folding the lead into her bag and she said, "You'll want to keep the bowl."
Then she walked off up the road and she's never come back, not once, in fourteen months.
There was no dog in my kitchen.
There was no dog anywhere in my house. I looked for four hours. I went up in the loft. I've got CCTV covering my hall and it recorded that afternoon and it shows me at the open front door talking to a woman with a lead, and it shows the lead go slack, and it shows me turn and look down the hall at nothing at all.
The bowl's still under the sink. I haven't washed it.
I want to finish with the bit that made me finally write this down, because for about a year I told myself the whole thing was a very strange woman and a bowl I'd forgotten about, and I was honestly doing alright with that.
Three weeks ago June, my neighbour, who never did explain why she stopped talking to me, went into hospital, and I've been feeding her cat.
Her hall is the mirror of mine, same house flipped round. And on her wall by the stairs there's a row of photos going back decades, kids and grandkids and a wedding. And in the middle of it in a cheap gold frame there's a photo of the old man who died in my house, stood at my front gate, squinting, some summer in the eighties.
He's got a dog with him. Grey, thin, on a red lead.
And stood next to him in a quilted coat holding a canvas bag, not looking at the camera, looking at the house, is Marjorie.
Not a younger Marjorie.
The same one.