"people are strange when you're a stranger."

Johnny is on medical leave due to a tibia fracture. And he's bored to death.
Until his new neighbor moves in and seems very suspicious to him.
Johnny becomes a detective! Well... sort of.

It's entirely up to you what you did in your garden and whether Johnny's assumptions are correct or way off the mark.

Medical leave... it felt more like a prison than any sort of actual break to let his busted shin heal. The damn thing had him out for at least six to eight weeks. No training, a heavy cast weighing him down like a bloody anchor, stuck with a wheelchair and a pair of crutches he already hated.
Week one, he’d kept himself busy enough; bingeing one show after another, easy. But by week two? He was climbing the walls. Cleaning the place up wasn’t exactly doable on crutches or in a chair. Not that it stopped him from trying... and yeah, he had ended up on the kitchen floor.

By the end of week two, though, something at least mildly exciting happened: someone new moved in next door. Late in the evening, a moving truck pulled up, and a shadow kept darting back and forth from the truck to the old house; the one that’d been empty for ages. Johnny had never understood why, because it was a nice little place, with its own garden too.
He watched from his living room window, curious. Harmless curiosity, he told himself. Totally innocent. And, sure, by week three he’d set up a half-baked surveillance post at the window—binoculars, night vision goggles, water bottles in reach, snacks within arm’s length. The new neighbor quickly replaced Netflix.

Why?

Because they were odd. Lived alone, supposedly, yet Johnny sometimes heard a second voice. Or caught two shadows moving past the curtains. Curtains that almost never opened. They rarely left the house, and when they did, it was usually after dark. Home office? Maybe. Hermit? Probably.

But then there was the night with the bag.

Large, heavy-looking, slung over their shoulder as they slipped out the side door, not the front. Johnny followed them with the night vision, heart thumping in a way it hadn’t since the last mission. They crossed the garden, disappeared behind the shed, and didn’t come back out for a good twenty minutes. When they finally reappeared, their hands were empty.

Johnny lowered the goggles slowly. A shovel leaned against the shed. He sat back, cast itching like hell, and muttered under his breath. "Aye... either that’s the most committed gardener in bloody history, or I’ve got a murderer livin’ next door."

By the next evening, Johnny had worked himself into a full-blown detective state. Notepad on his lap, tea gone cold, binoculars practically glued to his face.
The neighbor was out in the garden again. No bag this time, but pacing—back and forth, back and forth—like they were guarding something. Johnny could swear there was a mound of fresh earth near the shed that hadn’t been there two days ago.
He lasted another ten minutes before impatience won. He grabbed his crutches, wriggled into a hoodie, and limped to the back door. His cast knocked against the frame as he stepped outside, swearing under his breath.

The plan—if you could call it that—was simple: pop his head over the fence, maybe ask a casual neighbourly question, and see if they flinched. But halfway across the lawn, his crutch sank into a soft patch of soil, and in a glorious display of physics and bad balance, Johnny pitched sideways straight into the grass... on their side of the fence.

"Bloody hell," he groaned, trying to twist himself upright without snapping his other leg. The neighbor appeared almost instantly, their silhouette framed by the porch light.

"You okay?" they asked, tone polite but eyes unreadable.

Johnny forced a grin. "Aye, just... inspectin’ the turf. Fine quality, by the way. Very diggable." They blinked at him, and Johnny swore the corner of their mouth twitched—amused? Nervous? Hard to tell.
He let them help him up, brushing dirt from his hoodie, heart still pounding from the fall. As they handed back his crutch, Johnny caught a faint smell on the wind... something metallic, sharp, and completely out of place in a garden.