I text Jess at the pool to ask whether she’d had any private messages from “Sarah,” or actually spoken to her on the phone after she gave the recommendation.
She texts me straight back.
No and no.
You need to google those names from last night.
I just did.
I pull up a browser window on my phone and type inparker. There are hundreds of millions of results and I scroll down the page trying to find one with significance. But it’s too vague; too random. I try the same withbarrowand get a similar avalanche of results, lots of them about Barrow Football Club and the town itself in Cumbria—which is more than a hundred and eighty miles away. This was a needle in an electronic haystack. I type both words together into the search box,parker barrow, which yields a mere seven million results. The first dozen links are all about an American rock band from Nashville, Tennessee. Track listings, tour dates, a new album, YouTube videos, and other social media accounts. Below that, some corporate entries and more links to the rock band and sites streaming their music.
A single Wikipedia entry nestles among the rest, and I realize suddenly why the surnames had sounded vaguely familiar.
Although they had become much better known by their first names when they had carved a bloody path across Prohibition-era America almost a century ago.
Bonnie Elizabeth Parker and Clyde Chestnut Barrow.
Bonnie and Clyde.
41
I stare at the Wikipedia page describing the spree of robbery, kidnapping, and murder committed by Bonnie and Clyde until their violent deaths in a police ambush in 1934. Someone, at some point, had used them as pseudonyms on a dubious “to-do” list hidden in my house. That person had also used a rudimentary code to obscure the contents of the list, before someone tried to destroy it—without checking whether the flames had done their work.
I send Jess a text.
Bonnie and Clyde??? Seriously?
I know.What’s that about?
I’m about to call her when the phone starts ringing in my hand: not my usual ringtone but the high-pitched tinkling sound of a call on WhatsApp. The screen shows an unrecognized number. I offer a cautious greeting to the unknown caller and he responds in kind, his tone clipped.
“Jeremy said you wanted to speak to me about the house,” he says. Almost as an afterthought, he adds: “I’m Kevin Hopkins, by the way.”
“Right,” I say. “Yes, thanks for calling back. You’re the previous owner’s son, is that right?”
“Yup.”
He sounds like he’s in his forties. From what I could remember, this guy was an expat living somewhere in Spain. I imagine him in a beachfront café somewhere, sipping an espresso, looking at the ocean, a world away from all of this.
I remember what Shaun Rutherford had blurted out, under questioning from my brother-in-law and me.He said he lived abroad. Could the man on the other end of this phone line be the one who had hired him?
“Appreciate you getting back to me,” I say. “There was something I wanted to ask about the house, it might sound a bit—”
“It’s fine.” There is some kind of loud noise in the background. “Listen, what’s this all about? It’s actually not a great time, to be honest. And if you’ve got some sort of issue with the structural survey, I just want to stop you there and tell you to take it up with the surveyors. Reckon you got a very good deal on my dad’s house as it is.”
I reassure him that there’s no malice in my inquiry, trying to steer him around instead to the topic of when he moved in, and what kind of cosmetic changes might have been made on the second floor. But if he suspects I’m asking about the secret door in the top bedroom, he gives no indication of it.
“I made some changes for Dad,” he says breezily. “A few modernizations, but he didn’t like the idea of doing too much after Mum died. Like I said, if this is some kind of legal claim, if you’re thinking of pushing back on the survey or if there’s been any kind of bad faith issue, you can forget it.”
I get the sense he’s already close to hanging up.
“No, no,” I say quickly. “It’s not that. I’m thinking about some remodeling, but my wife wants to retain as much as possible and I’m trying to convince her that a lot of it is much more recent than it looks. Like, in one of the bedrooms there were some big, fitted wardrobes—did you put those in?”
The traffic noise is getting louder at his end, as if he’s right next to a main road.
“What?”
“The big fitted wardrobes in one of the top-floor rooms. Right over the top of a wood-paneled wall.”
