Jack said ruefully. “Easy mistake to make in the circumstances.”
“But wait,” I said, annoyed. “Hang on, that makes no sense. I only entered my pass code once. How can it lock me out for that?”
“It doesn’t,” Jack said. “You get three goes, and it warns you. But I suppose with all the noise—”
“I only entered it once,” I repeated, and then, when he didn’t reply, I said, more forcefully, “Once!”
“Okay, okay,” Jack said mildly, but he looked at me sideways beneath his fringe, something a little appraising in his eyes. “Let me try.” I handed him the tablet, feeling irrationally annoyed. It was clear that he didn’t believe me. So what had happened then? Had someone been trying to log in under my username?
As I watched, Jack switched users and entered his own PIN. The screen lit up briefly, and then he was inside the app.
His screen was laid out differently to mine, I saw. He had some permissions that I didn’t—access to the cameras in the garage, and outside—but not to those in the children’s bedroom and playroom, as I did. The icons for those rooms were grayed out and unavailable. But when he clicked on the kitchen, he was able to dim the lights by tapping on the controls on the app.
The realization was like a little shock.
“Hang on.” The words blurted out before I had thought through how to phrase it. “You can control the lights in here from the app?”
“Only if I’m here,” he said, clicking through to another screen. “If you’re a master user—that’s Sandra and Bill, basically—you can control everything remotely, but the rest of us can only control the rooms we’re in. It’s some sort of geolocation thing. If you’re close enough to the panel in the room, you get access to that system.”
It made sense, I supposed. If you were close enough to reach a light switch, why not give you access to the rest of the room’s controls. But on the other hand . . . how close was close? We were directly beneath Maddie and Ellie’s room here. Could he control the lights in there from his phone down here? What about outside in the yard?
But I caught myself. This was pointless. He didn’t need to access the controls from the yard. He had a set of keys.
Except . . . what better way to make someone think you weren’t involved . . . when really you were?
I shook my head. I had to stop this. It could have been Ellie, fiddling with the iPad in the middle of the night. Perhaps she had come down to play Candy Crush or watch a movie, and accidentally pressed something she shouldn’t have. It could have been some kind of preprogrammed setting that I’d switched on without realizing, the app version of a butt dial. It could have been Bill and Sandra, if it came to that. If I was going to be paranoid, I might as well go the whole hog, after all. Why stop at random handymen? Why not extend the suspicion to everyone? The fact that they had only just recruited me and had least reason of anyone to drive me away was neither here nor there. Or, for that matter, there were other users. Who knew what permissions Rhiannon might have?
I became suddenly aware that Jack was watching me, his arms folded across his very naked chest. I caught a glimpse of myself reflected in the glass wall of the kitchen—braless in my skimpy top, with my face still pillow-crumpled, and my hair like I’d been dragged through a bush backwards—so far from the neat, buttoned-up professional image I tried to project during the day that the contrast was laughable. I felt my cheeks grow hot.
“God, I’m so sorry Jack. You didn’t have to—” I ground to a halt.
He looked down at himself in turn, seeming to realize his own state of half dress, and gave an awkward laugh, a flush of red staining his cheekbones.
“I should have put something on. I thought you were all being murdered in your beds, so I didn’t really stop to dress . . . Listen, you get the girls to sleep, I’ll put a shirt on, settle the dogs, and then I’ll run some antivirus software on the app.”
“You don’t have to do that tonight,” I protested, but he shook his head.
“No, I want to. I can’t for the life of me see why it’s playing up, and I’ll not have