A recap of No Easy Deeds and The Fourth Clause before No Onward Chain is released in September 2026. Spoilers for both books from the first line so if you haven’t read either, now’s your last chance to bail…
Book 1: No Easy Deeds
September 1990. Danny Monk is 28, single, and sinking. The flat he bought with his fiancée, Zoe, a little over a year ago is now worth around £20,000 less than the mortgage, and the monthly payment has jumped from £560 to £794. Zoe cheated on him in the spring and moved out. The supermarket where he worked as assistant manager then closed, and the building society is threatening repossession.
When he calls in estate agents Gibley Smith to value the flat, branch manager Lee Ross, a blunt Yorkshireman, delivers the bad news and then offers him a job: trainee negotiator, seven grand a year plus commission. Danny joins senior negotiator Gavin Flint and office administrator Tina, and spends his first days attending the repossession of other people’s homes.
Then a Mrs Weller rings the office, insisting that Danny, and only Danny, values her house at 1 Echo Lane. From the outside it is derelict. Inside, it is immaculate. Mrs Weller, a silver-haired woman who says she cannot leave the house, has no intention of selling. She offers a deal instead. If Danny breaks up a 26-year-old travel agent, Kim Dolan, and her boyfriend, Neil Harrison, the deeds to the house and its five acres are his. There is one rule: he must not sleep with Kim. There is also a deadline: Sunday 23 September, when Harrison intends to propose. Money is no object. Two thousand pounds from a safe in her kitchen clears Danny’s arrears, and he signs her contract.
Danny gets to know Kim, first at the travel agency where she works and then at a country music night with Gavin in tow, and soon meets Harrison: an arrogant former City stockbroker who now sells mobile phones and, according to Kim’s best friend Donna, controls her. Zoe, meanwhile, offers to move back in and pay off the debt. Danny finally tells her it is over for good.
His solution to the Harrison problem is a honey trap. Through Tina he hires an escort called Candy, lures Harrison to a hotel with a fake business deal, and photographs him kissing her in the car park. Mrs Weller insists he hand the photos to Kim in person. Danny, who knows exactly how that betrayal feels, cannot do it. He confronts Harrison instead and threatens to circulate the photos unless he ends things gently. Harrison throws a punch. Danny puts him on the floor.
That evening the inside of 1 Echo Lane is as derelict as the outside, and Mrs Weller has gone. The safe holds cash and a letter. Harrison has ended the relationship, it says, but by sparing Kim the truth Danny has left the door open for him to return, and under clause four of the contract the house is forfeit. The letter also describes the future Danny prevented: a marriage in 1991, Kim cut off from family and friends, and an assault in 1993 that broke her back. It is signed Kim/Mrs Weller.
Following the letter’s instructions, Danny keys 2-0-2-4 into the safe and wakes in the same kitchen in the year 2024. The older Kim is waiting. He cannot leave the house in her time any more than she could in his. She shows him a pair of cufflinks from the safe, engraved DTM, in a box inscribed To my darling husband on our 30th wedding anniversary. They are his, she says, or they will be if the two of them can undo what went wrong.
Book 2: The Fourth Clause
Three days later, back in 1990 with around £7,000 from the safe, Danny has decided it was all an elaborate prank. Then his tyres are slashed. An anonymous letter to Lee recommends his dismissal. A funeral plan brochure and a headstone catalogue arrive in the post, and a synthetic voice on his answerphone says two words: Expecto vindicta. Expect revenge. Harrison does not like losing.
Danny returns to the safe and to 2024. Mrs Weller explains what she knows. The device only runs between 1990 and 2024, like a railway line with two stations, and she has no idea who built it or why. The fourth clause was never a legal matter. It is, she says, a path dependency clause. It is imperative that Danny owns the house, and by showing the photos to Harrison rather than Kim he changed his own future as well as hers. As things stand, he will not marry the woman who gave him those cufflinks. The only fix is to show Kim the photos.
He does, after making her promise to tell no one. Three bottles of Chardonnay later, Kim rings Harrison and calls him a cheat. Harrison books a flat viewing with Danny under a false name, then tells the police Danny punched him. Danny is arrested on suspicion of actual bodily harm and, after a call from Harrison to head office, suspended from work. At Echo Lane the safe no longer responds. Inside is a single letter, written as an insurance policy, warning that Harrison will not stop until he has destroyed Danny’s life.
The break comes through Gavin’s new girlfriend, Irene. Her ex, Clive, was a courier who discovered that Harrison’s shipments of mobile phones from Harwich concealed illegally imported adult videos. Danny traces a mail-order operation, New Horizon Trading, to the back of Harrison’s unit. With Gavin and a locksmith friend of Gavin’s, he breaks in to photograph the stock, and Harrison walks in. The break-in is on CCTV, Harrison has a friend in Frimpton CID, and the room will be empty within hours.
Danny packs to run to his brother Robbie in Brighton. Gavin stops him. He was hiding in the corridor, heard most of what was said, and left with three videos. With Lee and Tina’s help, each goes with an anonymous letter to the Chief Constable, the local MP and the editor of the Hampshire Chronicle. On 10 October police raid the premises and seize more than 1,400 videos. Harrison is remanded in custody, also facing charges of money laundering and false accounting. The assault investigation is dropped. Lee apologises and promotes Danny to negotiator, with a pay rise and a company Fiesta.
Then Tina takes a call from a Mrs Weller. At Echo Lane the house is pristine again, and she looks rejuvenated. Harrison will get 24 months and move abroad. The timeline is restored and she has a life worth living. She hands Danny the deeds, and with them three revelations. She does not know who installed the safe. In the future, she bought the house from Danny. And the whole scheme was Danny’s own idea: that is how she knew so much about him, and it was Danny who gave her the cufflinks.
Her parting advice is to board up the safe and forget it ever existed. “Goodbye … for now.”
Danny drives away, the deeds still on her kitchen table, wondering whether to sell the house and clear his mortgage, perhaps to someone other than her. Who installed the safe? Who does Danny marry? And what happens to the future if he sells?