I shrug. “Bedrooms, reception rooms, dining room, kitchen. Curious about all of it, really.”
“As far as I know he didn’t touch the house after Janet passed on, God rest her. Never wanted to change anything.”
“This is going to sound a bit random, but I don’t suppose he ever mentioned someone called Adrian Parish? A friend, perhaps? Colleague?”
Something passes quickly across her face but it’s gone before I can identify it.
“He didn’t talk about his friends to me,” she says, turning away. “He was always a very private man. I should probably be getting on with things now.”
She turns both taps on full blast over the mop bucket, filling the air between us with the noise of rushing water before I can ask anything else.
39
Jess arrives soon after with Daisy and Callum, and I fold the piece of notepaper into my pocket. My wife and I exchange the usual truncated updates about our respective working days and I move on quickly to tell her about the police visit instead. Once the kids are tucking into an early evening tea of baked potatoes with tuna, I take a couple of zero-alcohol beers out of the fridge and offer one to her.
“Helena is still working upstairs,” I say. “She crept up on me earlier like some kind of ninja. I swear I didn’t even hear her until she was right behind me.”
Jess takes the beer from me, popping it open.
“But she seems nice, don’t you think? Bit of a godsend.” Seeing the skeptical look on my face, she adds: “What?”
“I’m just… I don’t know. Who evenisshe?” I gesture toward the ceiling with my beer, where even now I imagine she might be rifling through our cupboards. The coded note in my pocket is a new ingredient in the strange brew that has been bubbling ever since I discovered the hidden room at the top of the house. “We don’t know her. She could be anyone.”
It had only been a few days ago, I remind her, that Shaun had turned up on our doorstep completely out of the blue.
Jess takes out her phone and pulls up WhatsApp, selecting a group at the top of the list called Park West Residents.Its membership, she tells me, is made up of homeowners on our road and half a dozen neighboring streets. She scrolls through the latest messages, everything from missed deliveries and thoughtlessly parked cars to recommendations for a reliable painter and decorator. Most of it looks pretty banal but I ask her to add me to the group anyway.
“I just asked about a cleaner when we were getting ready to move in,” Jess says, “and got chatting to some of our new neighbors. Helena was recommended—really good references too.”
“Can we even afford a cleaner?”
“It’s only a few hours a week, but it’ll really give us a head start on everything around the house. And with what’s happened this week, I think we both need our wits about us to keep a proper eye on the kids—we can’t do that if we’re looking after this big house on our own, and both working full-time, both running around and redecorating and cutting down that jungle of a garden so the kids can enjoy it for the summer holidays.”
“Her cousin’s here too?”
“Tobias,” Jess says, pointing out of the kitchen window. “There he is.”
I follow her finger across the expanse of lawn at the back of the house. The hedges at the back are hugely overgrown, the grass shin-high and years’ worth of rotting leaves piled two feet deep. Standing by the hedge is a small, unassuming man in jeans, work boots, and a tattered black sweatshirt bearing a fadedJCBlogo. His dark hair is cut short all over and there is a wind-burned redness beneath the stubble on his cheeks.
In his gloved hands, he’s wielding a pair of long loppers with a curved scissor-blade, slicing overhanging branches from Mrs. Evans’s horse chestnut tree. Each one falls with a single cleanslice of the crescent-shaped blades.Chop. Another severed branch drops to the ground at his feet.
“She offered Tobias as a kind of two-for-one deal. He works cheap, does a lot of the gardens around here, apparently. He prefers to be outside. Helena says he’s… he doesn’t really like being shut in. Enclosed.”
I stare through the window at the man working in my garden.
“But is it a good idea? Bringing strangers into the house, with what’s been happening this week?”
“They’re not strangers,” she says. “They were recommended. And it’s only for a trial period—we’ll see what they’re like for a couple of weeks and take it from there. OK?”
It’s only later, when the younger children are in bed, that I open up my laptop again and return to the strange piece of half-burned notepaper from the top room.
Jess finds me in the kitchen. I gesture for her to shut the door before I show her the coded note, then pull up the picture on my phone that Charlie had sent a few hours previously. I still haven’t worked out a way to tell her about Maxine and her son without admitting that I suddenly have a lot of free time on my hands. Instead, I tell her it came from Dom.
She frowns as she studies the picture.
“It looks like…” Lines deepen on her forehead. “That’s horrible. Like it’s wrapped around someone’s wrists. Grim.”
“I know.”
