“I don’t like it,” she says, her head flat against my chest. “Don’t like some weird guybeinghere, in our house, with all our things.”
“He won’t come back.” I say it with rather more confidence than I feel. “And if he does, we just call the police and let them handle it.”
We stand like that for a moment longer, the tension between us softening as the warmth of her body presses against mine. It feels like the first time we’ve been close in days, with all the rush and bustle of the move, of settling the children into a new house, all the planning and organizing and uprooting of our old life to come here. We’ve had almost no time for each other, just the two of us, and I’ve missed that. Missedher.
When my wife speaks again, her voice is almost a whisper. “Do you think he was dangerous?”
I think back to the confrontation on the stairs, the look in his eyes when I’d grabbed his rucksack. The threat.You want me to bang you out, mate?
“He was… hostile,” I say. “Rather than dangerous.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Well, he wasn’t happy, but I didn’t feel like he was going to take a swing at me.” I stroke her back. “He was pretty pissed off by the time I got rid of him, but I didn’t really think he’d do anything stupid. Felt like it was more for show than anything else, like he was just putting it on to make a point.”
She hugs me a little tighter, her small palms flat against my shoulder blades.
“Maybe you could bag up those things he wanted,” she says, her head still on my chest, “and put them somewhere, ready to hand over if he turns up at the house again? So we can get rid of him?”
I rub her back. “Good idea. I’m not going to let anything happen to you or the kids. I’ll look after our family. It’ll be OK, I promise.”
She looks up, right into my eyes.
“And who’s going to look after you?”
24
The house is silent by the time I take my laptop into the lounge. Jess has gone upstairs, most of the lights are off, the animals are fed, front and back doors locked, children in bed. Callum’s outfit for Futuristic Day at school tomorrow—a silver-foil-wrapped jacket and bike helmet, plus an old pair of trainers spray-painted metallic gray—is laid out in the dining room after two hours of my wife’s painstaking labor.
I pull up Google and type the name “Shaun Hopkins” into the search bar for the second time today, going through the results more carefully this time. But there is nothing that looks like it might relate to the man who’d turned up at my door this afternoon. Just a lengthy collection of LinkedIn pages, Facebook accounts, businesses, and a Wikipedia entry for a nineteenth-century American railroad executive. What was the connection between this stranger and a twenty-three-year-old missing persons case? Shaun Hopkins—or whatever his real name might be—was only mid-twenties himself, maybe a few years older. So he couldn’t have been involved in the disappearance of Adrian Parish.
A search using the four words “Shaun Hopkins Adrian Parish” yields nothing that might point to a connection. Nothing that ties them together. The next hour is lost going down various internet rabbit holes, trying without success to link SumnerStreet in Kimberley to an antique watch engraved with initials, to our address, or to any of the other finds in the little hidden room. It was even possible, I supposed, that Adrian had sent the text message: that he was the one who wanted his things returned to him.
I lean back into the sofa, staring at a patch of yellowing Artex that is peeling off the ceiling above the TV. It’s already half past eleven but I no longer feel tired.
Kevin Hopkins still hasn’t called me back even though Jeremy assures me he’s passed on my number. According to Mrs. Evans, Kevin had left the UK to work abroad, first to Dubai and then various other places around the world until he had ended up in Spain. She wasn’t sure where he was now or exactly what he did—something to do with computers, she thought.
“His overseas jobs were only supposed to be for a few months,” Eileen Evans had told me in hushed tones. “But the stays kept getting longer and longer until he hardly ever used to come back to visit. So poor Eric was all on his own in this big house for years.” The Google findings on Kevin Hopkins yield similarly slim pickings.
My thoughts return to Shaun. It seemed clear that I didn’t have his real name but Ididhave his picture: the quick snap I’d taken earlier. I pull it up on my phone and study the hard planes of his face, dark hair shaved short at the sides, the cobra tattoo emerging from his sleeve. The only problem was, I had no idea what to do with the picture.
I send it to Maxine in case she recognizes him—even though it seems like the longest of long shots—and asking if she still wants to meet tomorrow. Then to Jeremy in case he’s ever seen the guy hanging around the house while he was doing a viewing,or perhaps he’d even shown him around when it was still on the market, months ago before our offer had even been—
There is a creak from the stairs.
I freeze, thumbs hovering over the phone, staring at the door.
Silence.
I listen, barely breathing.
Quietly, carefully, I move the laptop onto the sofa beside me and stand up, moving to the door as noiselessly as I can.
I stand for a moment longer, ears straining in the silence, heart thudding in my chest. There are only a handful of lights still on and the big high-ceilinged room is deep in shadow.
The creak comes again.
Just the sound of an old wooden staircase, that’s all. The sigh of an old house as it cools down for the night.
