“What’s that phrase?” she says quietly, almost to herself. “Burn after reading?”
“That’s what I was thinking.”
Our daughter wanders off, absorbed in her phone again. Jess points at the paper, the three coded words below the headingparkeron the right-hand side. Three coded entries, the rest presumably burned away.
“Do the words in the other column.”
I go through the same process again, decoding each entry and writing the plain text in pencil next to it.
When I’m finished, we both sit in silence, staring at the other half of the list.
cable ties
shoe covers
spades x2
There is a sick twisting in my stomach.
It wasn’t a message.
It was a to-do list.
40
SATURDAY
I sleep badly, unable to drift off and waking repeatedly through the night to every strange noise the house makes. Awake, I lie in the dark and try to decide what we should do about the strange note and the hints of darkness carried by a few coded words. Asleep, my dreams are a troubling mix of Adrian Parish and Shaun Rutherford—both speaking a language I can’t understand—of Leah and the car that had followed her home from school.
Helena and Tobias appear too.
There is something about the two of them that doesn’t sit quite right, doesn’t ring true. They had come to us via a recommendation on WhatsApp from someone we’d never even met, first appearing almost as soon as we moved in. Helena had told us she’d worked for the previous owner and we had taken her at face value. But what if there was more to it than that? What if there was something else going on with them?
My restless thoughts keep returning to the last item on the coded list, like a compass pointing to true north.
Spades x2
Not a single spade. Two.
Partners. Each with a different half of that to-do list.Parkerwith a simple note of things to buy from the local DIY shop;Barrowwith more cerebral tasks to do with watching, waiting,monitoring. There is something about the names that is familiar but I can’t remember where I’ve heard them before.
I make a strong brew in the cafetière to get my brain going but both younger children are up early and there’s no time to sit down and really think, in between getting them both fed and dressed, making sure Daisy has everything she needs for her swimming lesson and the birthday party for her little friend, Olive, which will follow straight after. I wrap the present while she eats her Cheerios. Callum has no football match this morning, so he settles down in the lounge to play Minecraft on the Xbox instead. Leah will sleep in until at least midday.
As soon as Jess has taken Daisy to her swimming lesson, I take my coffee into the lounge to sit with Callum, pulling up WhatsApp on my phone and diving into the Park West Residents group. The thread is a huge repository of messages ranging from the half useful to the mind-bogglingly trivial, everything from requests to recommend reliable tradesmen to queries about the local water pressure and passive-aggressive messages about inconsiderate parking, pleas for missing wheelie bins and offers of unwanted second-hand clothes, books, wooden hangers, plant pots, children’s fancy dress items, and anything else that people are trying to get rid of.
I find the “Search” option in the menu and enter “Parker.” The results appear as highlighted mentions of the nearby WollatonPark,ParkDrive, and requests for people to move cars that have beenparkedbadly. No matches on the actual word itself. “Barrow” produces a single solitary search result about a resident asking if anyone in the neighborhood has a wheelbarrow they could borrow.
I click out of the search function.
The group members use a mixture of usernames, all with first names, some with surnames too, many with a house number and street initials to signify their membership of one of the most exclusive WhatsApp groups in the city. I had muted notifications on the thread within a day of Jess getting me added to the group because of the constant pinging as each new message landed; there are dozens from the last few days alone.
But eventually, among the morass, I find what I’m looking for: a request from Jess, posted the day before we moved in, to ask if any of our new neighbors could recommend a cleaner and/or gardener. Within half an hour, there is a response from someone calling herself Sarah@84GT suggesting Helena and Tobias as “a very reliable pair, excellent work, good rates.”
A useful recommendation from a helpful neighbor. Unless it was something else.
Because I had no idea who Sarah@84GTactuallywas. Neither of us did. But she was the reason Helena and Tobias were at my house, claiming to have worked for the previous owner. “Sarah” was a blank, a mystery. An unknown quantity.
Or was I just being paranoid?
