Someone kept painting my garage door black every night — I assumed it was some kid's stupid prank until I installed security cameras
Someone kept painting my garage door black every night — I assumed it was some kid's stupid prank until I installed security cameras, and the person I saw doing it was the last one I expected to find outside my house.
The first time, I saw it taking the bins out before work.
Somebody had covered the bottom half of our white garage door in black paint.
And I just stood there looking at it.
Gethin came out and shook his head. "Kids."
There is a secondary school four streets over, so that made sense.
And we spent the Saturday cleaning it and painting it back.
And our next-door neighbour came over while we were at it.
"That's dreadful," Loveday said. "Who'd keep doing a thing like that?"
Sunday morning the black was back.
Same door. Same thick messy strokes.
And now I was angry.
We asked up and down Pelham Row and nobody had seen anything.
Loveday said she had not heard a thing in the night.
So the two of us painted it again.
And the next morning somebody had done it a third time.
And that is when it stopped feeling like a prank.
Whoever it was, they were coming back every night, waiting until we were asleep, and doing only our house.
I ordered two small cameras that afternoon.
We put them up after dark and made them almost impossible to see. One under the roofline facing the garage, one by the front porch covering the yard and the road.
We did not tell any of the neighbours.
From the pavement you could not tell they were there at all.
And Gethin said: "Tomorrow morning we finally meet our little artist."
And at about half two in the morning my phone went.
***Motion detected.***
And I opened it.
Somebody in a dark hood was standing in front of our garage with a roller in one hand and a tin at their feet.
And I was about to wake him up when the person turned towards the camera.
And pulled the hood back.
And my heart stopped.
"No. No way."
And I got out of that bed and went down those stairs as fast as I could.
Who it was.
Loveday Trask. Fifty-two. Next door. The woman who had stood in my drive on the Saturday with a cup of tea in her hand asking who would keep doing a thing like that.
And when I got that door open she was still standing there with the roller in her hand.
And she did not run and she did not make anything up.
She said: "Oh, love. I'm sorry. I was hoping to be gone before you were up."
What was underneath.
She was not painting our door.
She was covering something.
Every night since the Sunday before, somebody had been spraying something on that door, and Loveday Trask had been coming out at about two in the morning with a roller and a tin of black masonry paint and going over it before we woke up.
Three nights. Three times.
And what was underneath — what I saw at about three o'clock that morning when the two of us got the hose and a wire brush on it, because she said I had to see it or I would never believe her — was a name.
Immy.
Four letters, in white, about a foot high, in the same place every time.
Who Immy was.
Her daughter.
Imogen Trask, nineteen, who died on the second of March, 2023, about eleven miles outside Westerbeck.
And the man who was driving the other car lived in my house.
Dale Hennick. He lived at number eleven Pelham Row from 2009 until he went to prison in the November of 2023.
He is out now. He is not in this county and the probation arrangements are what they are and I am not going to write anything else about that man.
But a certain number of people in Westerbeck do not know he has gone, and some of them are nineteen and twenty and twenty-one years old and were at school with Imogen Trask, and one of them in particular has been coming to Pelham Row at about one in the morning with a can of white spray paint and writing her name on what he still thinks is Dale Hennick's garage door.
His name is Ro. He was her boyfriend. He is twenty-one.
What Loveday had been doing.
Going out and covering her own daughter's name with black paint so that the new people would not see it and ask.
At two in the morning. On her own. Three nights running.
And on the Saturday, standing in our drive with a cup of tea, saying who'd keep doing a thing like that.
I have thought about that sentence more than anything else in the whole of it.
She was not laughing at us. She was asking me a real question in the only form she could get it out in, and I answered her with something about the school four streets over, and she said mm, and she took our empty mugs in and washed them up.
What I knew.
And here it is, and it is the reason this is not a story about a neighbour.
I knew about Dale Hennick before we bought that house.
Harrow & Vale told me. They have to. It was in an email on the eleventh of January, 2025, two paragraphs, and I have still got it.
It does not name Imogen. It says that the previous occupant had been convicted of an offence arising from a road traffic collision, that there had been local interest, and that we should be aware.
And the house was on at thirty-one thousand under anything else on that street.
And I did not tell Gethin.
Why I did not tell him.
Because he would have said no.
That is the whole of it and it took until about the June to say it in that order.
He is not superstitious and he is not squeamish. He would have said no because he would have wanted to know whose family lived nearby, and whether they would have to look at us moving our furniture in, and whether a thirty-one thousand pound discount was somebody's daughter.
He would have asked those questions in about four minutes, standing in a kitchen, and we would not have bought that house.
And I wanted that house. We had been looking for two years and we had been outbid twice and I was thirty-three and I was tired.
So I read two paragraphs on a Saturday morning in the January and I did not forward the email, and when he asked me why it was so cheap I said the kitchen needed doing.
The kitchen did need doing.
The eleventh of January, 2025, which took about four minutes and which I have gone over more than any morning of my life.
It came in at twenty past nine on a Saturday. Harrow & Vale, two paragraphs, subject line 11 Pelham Row — disclosure.
Gethin was in the shower. I can hear the shower in my head when I think about it, which is a thing Halla says happens.
And I read it twice and I sat at that table and I did four things in about four minutes.
I checked the price again. I checked what else was on that street — there were two, both thirty and thirty-two thousand higher.
I opened a new tab and typed Dale Hennick into it, and I got as far as the first line of a result from a local paper, and I closed it.
That is the one. Not the email. I had the name and I had a search box and I had the whole thing in front of me, and I closed the tab.
And then I marked that email as read and moved it to a folder called House.
It is still in there. It has been in there for twenty-two months, filed between a mortgage illustration and a survey, which is exactly where you would put a thing you intended to deal with.
And when he came down with wet hair I said: "I've been looking at the kitchen."
What I did for seven months.
Nothing. Which is the point.
We moved in on the fourteenth of March, 2025.
And Loveday came round on the second day with a plant.
And I knew. Standing in my own hall, taking a plant off a woman of fifty-two, I knew that the man who had been in that house had done what he had done, and I did not know whose daughter it had been, and I did not ask anybody, ever, in seven months.
I could have found it in about four minutes. It was in the local paper in the November of 2023 and it is still there.
I did not look, for seven months, because the version in which it was a road traffic collision and local interest was liveable in and any version with a name in it was not.
And that woman brought me a plant and did my bins twice when I was away and told me which bakery to use.
And in the August she asked me, in her own garden, in a completely ordinary voice, whether we were settling in all right.
And I said we loved it.
The three nights.
And here is the arithmetic that I did at about four in the morning on the ninth of October, sitting on my own stairs after she had gone home.
Ro sprayed that door on the Sunday night, the Monday night and the Tuesday night.
Loveday covered it on the Sunday night, the Monday night and the Tuesday night.
Which means that on the Monday, when I was standing in a drive being angry about teenagers, and on the Tuesday, when Gethin and I were painting a garage door white for the second time and laughing about CCTV —
— that woman had been out of her bed at two in the morning twice already, and had watched us repaint over her work, and had come over and helped, and had said that's dreadful.
And then on the Wednesday we put up two cameras, in the dark, so that nobody would see them.
And she came out at half two with a roller because she did not know they were there, because we had deliberately not told the neighbours, because we had decided the neighbours were the problem.
I put a camera up to catch a woman who was protecting me.
And the plant, which is on my windowsill and which I cannot look at properly.
She brought it on the second day. The sixteenth of March, 2025. A little spider plant in a cream pot.
And she stood in my hall and said she would not stop, and I said come in, and she said no, she would not stop, and she went.
I remember thinking she was shy.
She was not shy. That woman had got herself to the front door of the house Dale Hennick lived in, with a plant, on the second day, because two strangers had moved in and she had decided it was better to do it immediately than to have it hanging over her.
And then she could not come in.
She has told me since that she has not been past my hall since 2022. Not into that kitchen, not into that front room, not once in three and a half years.
She came into it for the first time at quarter to four in the morning on the ninth of October, 2025, because I had the kettle on and she had a roller in her hand and there was nothing else to do.
I watched her look round that kitchen. I did not know what I was looking at, at the time. I thought she was being polite about the units.
She was in a room she had been in when Imogen was alive.
And the masonry paint, which I did not think about for about three months and which finished me when I did.
It is five litres and it is matt black and it costs about twenty-six pounds.
She bought it on the Sunday. The fifth of October. I know because she told me in the February when I finally asked her a direct question about the logistics of it.
She went to the trade place on the bypass on a Sunday morning, bought a tin of black masonry paint and a roller and a tray, and put them in the boot of her car.
And then she went home and waited until two o'clock in the morning.
And the detail is this: she went back on the Tuesday for a second tin.
Because she had used most of the first one doing a garage door twice, and because she had looked at the amount left in it on the Monday night and done the arithmetic and worked out that it would not cover a third.
So on the Tuesday afternoon — while Gethin and I were repainting that door white and making jokes — a woman of fifty-two drove to a trade counter on the bypass and bought another five litres of black paint, because she had decided she was going to keep doing this for as long as it kept happening.
She had no end point. I asked her that too. She had not thought about an end point at all.
She was just going to keep going out at two in the morning, indefinitely, until he stopped.
What she said on my stairs.
She came in. I made tea at about quarter to four in the morning and we sat in my kitchen, which was Dale Hennick's kitchen, which she has been in before.
And I asked her why she had not just told us.
And she said: "And say what, love?"
And I said that we would have understood.
And she said: "You'd have moved."
That is what she thought. That if we found out in the first fortnight what had happened to the man in our house, we would have put it back on the market, and then there would have been a For Sale board outside number eleven again, and then viewings, and then another couple at her fence asking why it was cheap.
She has had that twice already. The family sold it in the January of 2025 and there was a buyer before us who pulled out in the December of 2024 after somebody told them.
And then she said the thing I have not been able to put down.
She said: "I like you. I didn't want to have to start again."
A woman whose daughter died in 2023 has been managing the sale and resale of the house next door for two years so that she does not have to keep meeting new people.
And the second of March, which I did not look up until the December and which I am going to put down because I think I owe it a sentence.
She was nineteen. She was coming back from a shift. It was about twenty past ten at night and it was raining and it was eleven miles outside Westerbeck on a road I have driven about forty times since we moved in.
I have driven past it. Repeatedly. There is a tree with a bracket on it and there have been flowers on that bracket every time I have been past, and I had noticed them in the way you notice a thing like that, which is for about a second and a half.
I used to think, without ever finishing the thought, that somebody must keep them up.
Somebody does. She goes on the second of every month and she has done since 2023.
And for seven months I drove past my next-door neighbour's work twice a week on the way to the retail park.
I have stopped once, in the December, on my own, and I did not get out of the car, and I did not leave anything, because I had worked out on the way that anything I left would be for me.
I sat there for about four minutes and then I drove home.
I have not mentioned it to her and I am not going to.
What happened with Ro.
He came back on the Thursday.
I was awake and I went out, and that is the single most frightening thing I have done, and it turned out to be a boy of twenty-one with a can in his hand who nearly went over the wall.
And I said: "He doesn't live here."
And he said: "What?"
And I said it again and told him when the man had gone, and that we had bought it in the February, and that we had no idea.
And he stood in my drive and cried, which I was not ready for.
He had been doing it since the Sunday because somebody had told him Hennick was back in Westerbeck, which he is not and was not.
One sentence, from a lad at his work, in a pub, on the Saturday.
He has not been back. He wrote to me in the November, properly, on paper, which somebody must have told him to do, and he offered to pay for the door, and I said no.
And he and Loveday had never spoken. Not once. He was Imogen's boyfriend for two years and after the funeral they did not speak again, which I am told is extremely common and which I did not know.
They have since. That was in the January and it was his idea and it had nothing to do with me.
And the cameras, which I ordered at about four o'clock on the Tuesday afternoon and which I was pleased with myself about.
Two of them. Eighty-one pounds. Next-day delivery.
And we put them up in the dark, deliberately, and we laughed about it, and Gethin went down to the pavement twice to check you could not see them from the road.
And we did not tell the neighbours, and the reason we did not tell the neighbours is in a message I sent my sister on the Tuesday evening, which I have read since and which says: not telling anyone, it's definitely someone local.
Someone local.
I had been on that street for seven months. I knew about nine names. And by the Tuesday of the second week I had privately decided that one of my neighbours was doing it, and I had set up surveillance of the street to find out which.
And I was right. It was a neighbour. It was the one on the other side of the fence, and she was fifty-two, and she was out there at two in the morning with a tin of masonry paint doing the only thing she could think of to be kind to me.
And the camera that caught her is still up, under the roofline, because taking it down felt like a bigger statement than leaving it.
It has her on it. Eleven seconds, from behind and above, in a hood.
I have not deleted that clip and I have watched it four times and I could not tell you what I am looking for.
And the thirty-one thousand, which is the number at the bottom of all of it and which I have had to decide what to do with.
We did not get a bargain. That is what I told myself for seven months and it is not true either.
The house needed about nine thousand doing to it. I have the quotes. So call it twenty-two thousand that we are up on anything else on Pelham Row.
Twenty-two thousand pounds, which is a kitchen and a bathroom and the first two years of a child's nursery fees if we ever get there.
And in the February I sat down and worked out what the honest thing to do with it was, and I got nowhere, and I have been nowhere ever since.
You cannot give it to anybody. Loveday Trask does not want twenty-two thousand pounds from the woman who bought Dale Hennick's house and she would be insulted and she would be right.
There is a thing in Imogen's name — a small fund, road safety, run by two of her friends. I have given to it twice and both times I gave fifty pounds, and both times I felt sick for about an hour afterwards, because fifty pounds is what you give so that you have given.
I have not given twenty-two thousand and I am not going to, and I have stopped pretending the reason is that it would be inappropriate.
The reason is that it is twenty-two thousand pounds and I want it.
Gethin.
I told him everything on the ninth of October, at about six in the morning, sitting on the bottom stair.
Including the email.
It is the only thing in eleven years that he has not been able to be reasonable about within a week.
He did not shout. He asked me four questions and then he got in the car and drove somewhere for about three hours.
And what he said when he came back, standing in that kitchen, is the thing I think about at four in the morning.
He said: "I've been living next door to that woman for seven months, Cerys. I've been talking to her about her garden."
That is what I actually did. Not to him — to his version of himself.
I let my husband be warm and ordinary and useless with a woman for seven months without knowing what he was standing next to.
He has forgiven me. It took until about the March and it took him going to see Loveday on his own, twice, which he did not tell me about until afterwards.
And the bakery, which she told me about in the first fortnight and which I have been going to every Saturday since.
It is on Marrow Street and it is nothing special and the woman behind the counter is called Berta.
And in the November, after everything, I was in there and Berta said something to me across the counter about how nice it was that the Pelham Row houses were getting young families again.
And I said yes.
And she said: "That poor woman at thirteen, though."
And then she served the next person.
Six words. From a woman in an apron, in a bakery, in about four seconds, with no particular weight on it.
That is how long it would have taken.
At any point between the fourteenth of March and the eighth of October, 2025, I could have stood in that shop on a Saturday morning with a loaf in my hand and said: who lived in our house before us?
And Berta would have told me, kindly, in about ninety seconds, the way people in bakeries do.
Seven months of Saturdays. Thirty-odd visits. I had whole conversations in there about the weather and about her son's van.
And I never asked one question about Pelham Row, and I knew exactly why I was not asking, and I went every single week.
And the last thing.
We did not paint the door white again.
That took until the January to decide and it was not my idea and it was not his.
It is black now. Properly done, by a man who does it for a living, in a dark grey-black that is apparently called something ridiculous.
And that is the colour it is going to stay, because in the November Loveday came round and asked us, and because she had clearly been working up to it for a fortnight.
And her reason took her about four goes to get out, and when it came it was this.
That for three nights in October she went out at two in the morning and covered her daughter's name, and that she had done it to protect two people she had only known for seven months, and that she had been going over it in her head ever since.
And that a white door on that house means somebody has repainted it.
And a black one means somebody has covered something.
And she would rather look out of her front window at a door that has been covered, every day, than at a white one that looks like nothing ever happened there at all.
So it is black.
May you like
And every single person who comes down Pelham Row sees a black garage door on a white house and thinks somebody made an odd choice.
And three of us know that it is the only thing on that street that is telling the truth.
