“So?”
“You never saw this room?”
The click of a closing door reaches me from his end of the call, and the background noise finally recedes. His voice, when he answers, is quieter too.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. All I can tell you is that it’s nothing to do with me, or my dad.”
When I ask about the cameras we found, his answer is the same: he denies all knowledge. There is a subtle shift in his tone, a bluntness that suggests his meager patience is now at an end. For some reason I find myself thinking of the various unsavory Brits who have washed up on the Costa Del Crime over the years. Was that still a thing, or had it all changed? Was it still a place where you could avoid extradition back to the UK?
Had he concealed the room deliberately, moved abroad to get as far away from it as he could?
The phone is suddenly hot against my ear.
“I don’t suppose the names Parker or Barrow mean anything to you?”
There is a moment’s hesitation on the line.
“Nope. Who’s that?”
“Do you know if anyone else lived there with that name, or nickname? Maybe a lodger, or a friend?”
“No one else lived there apart from me and Dad. And I left years ago; that’s why it was all down to me to sort out the house and everything else. If I’m being totally honest, you’re welcome to it. He’s well shot of that place. I never liked it anyway. It was too big for him to live there on his own.” He clears his throat. “Look, if there’s nothing else? I’ve really got to go.”
He ends the call and the line goes dead.
42
I leave Callum alone in the lounge and open my laptop on the kitchen table, flicking the kettle on as I go.
Kevin Hopkins was a strange character, helpful one minute and elusive the next, and I wasn’t quite sure what to make of him. But he had denied any knowledge of the hidden room and the secret door, and if he’d known it was there, it wouldn’t have made sense to simply block it off. Surely if the items in that dressermeantanything, if they had sentimental value or were some kind of evidence, he would have done something with them? Removed them, thrown them away, taken them with him to Spain. Perhaps even tried to sell them as I’d done with the watch?
So, either Kevin didn’t care what was in there, or he genuinely didn’t know about the room at all. Maybe the wooden paneling was too much trouble to take down, too well constructed, too solid, and so he just built over it instead. The passing of two decades had shrouded everything in a thick fog of uncertainty, the half-remembered years of people who had once called this place their home. People who had come and gone, taking their memories with them.
But Ididhave an idea how long the little room had lain untouched: at least twenty-two years, if Kevin was to be believed. The hidden door had been blocked off—either deliberately orby accident—soon after the Hopkins family had arrived in the summer of 2002.
I make another cup of coffee, mulling over what I’ve just heard from the family’s only son. Working backward, I try to remember what Eileen Evans had told me about her old neighbors too. It’s a mixture of old news, local gossip, and educated guesswork, but there were some cold hard facts too and I can feel the satisfaction in being able to put a few more of the puzzle pieces in place. Although what the finished picture might reveal, I still wasn’t sure.
I go back to the keyboard of my laptop. According to Google, the 2002 World Cup that year had been in Japan and South Korea and had been held from the end of May until the 30th of June, with the England–Brazil game on June 21st. And according to Kevin Hopkins, the new storage had been built upstairs fairly soon after they moved in. Finding a pen in the kitchen drawer, I flick to a clean page in the notebook we use to write the weekly shopping lists and begin to draw a timeline of everything I know so far.
Sep 2001—Adrian Parish goes missing
2001/02—death of Elizabeth Makepeace; grandson/nephew/godson goes to live where? Name? CONTACT DETAILS? Find them?
June 2002—Hopkins family moves in
Jul–Sep (?) 2002—access to hidden door blocked
2003—death of Janet Hopkins
January 2024—we buy 91 Regency Place
I sit back in the kitchen chair and study the timeline, trying to discern any kind of pattern in the dates. It makes forgrim reading to see those two deaths and a disappearance in the space of barely two years. Janet Hopkins had diedafterthe secret room had been blocked off and hidden, although I couldn’t work out if that was significant or not.
But the timing did suggest the wooden-paneled wall and its secret door had already been there when the Hopkins family arrived. Kevin had hired a joiner to put up the fitted wardrobes in that room, he told me, covering the door and most of the wall.
Ifhe was telling the truth.
The name of another previous owner of the house is a new piece of the puzzle; and it’s an uncommon name, which should help to narrow it down. But when I type “Elizabeth Makepeace” into Google and trawl through pages of results, none of them seem to fit. They all seem to be social media pages, LinkedIn profiles for people who are far too young and—more importantly—still alive. A handful of others are historical records going back to the nineteenth century. After fifteen minutes of fruitless searching, I finally admit defeat and acknowledge that an elderly widow who had died around the turn of the millennium was probably of an age, and a time, when she would not feature anywhere online. She was among the last generation that had slipped away before they could become entangled in the internet like the rest of us.
