The Nanny Cam I Wasn't Told About Caught the Host

After a previous bad experience I won't get into, I travel with my own small camera — a legal one, disclosed on the listing's terms as a personal security device, positioned to watch the main living space of wherever I'm staying, pointed at the door, never at a bathroom or a bed. I set it up in every rental now as a matter of grim routine. For a dozen stays it caught nothing but us being boring. This time it caught the host.

We were out most days, sightseeing. The camera, motion-triggered, sent clips to my phone, which I mostly ignored — it's usually just a curtain moving or the cleaner. On the third day, killing time in a café, I actually watched the day's clips, and my coffee went cold in my hand.

The host — who had assured us, keys in hand, that he would 'never enter during your stay, total privacy, that's my promise' — let himself in with his own key at 2:14 p.m. Alone. On camera. He moved through the living space with the ease of a man who does this routinely, not searching, not stealing, nothing so simple. He went to the kitchen. And he did something to the coffee.

I've watched the clip more times than is healthy. He opened our cafetière — our used, half-full-of-yesterday's-grounds cafetière — and he added something to it from a small container he took from his own pocket. A powder or granules; the resolution isn't good enough to be sure, and I've handed the original to the police so it's theirs to analyse now. He stirred it in with a spoon, wiped the spoon, returned everything to exactly where it had been, looked around once with an expression I never want to see again, and let himself out at 2:19. Five minutes. Every day, the clips showed, going back to our arrival — always the coffee, always mid-afternoon, always while we were out.

We had been drinking that coffee every morning.

I cannot describe the specific horror of realising, in a café, that the pleasant tired-but-fine feeling you've attributed to holiday and travel might not be either. We did not go back to the rental. We went to a hospital, told them everything, and got tested — I'll spare the details, but the tests were not clean, and the doctors were concerned, and the police were extremely interested in a small container a man kept in his pocket for his guests' cafetière.

There's a prosecution now, so that's where the details stop. What I'll leave you with is only this: I bring my own camera, disclosed and legal and pointed only at shared living space, to every single rental, and it is the best money I have ever spent, and the one time it caught something, it was not a ghost, and it was not a thief, and I would have drunk the coffee again the next morning and the next, and never known, if I hadn't been bored in a café and finally watched the clips.