I look at my wife, at her beautiful face, eyes red-rimmed from crying. The one person in the world I was closest to, who knew me better than anyone, and I had kept things from her. I had not told her the whole truth. But she deserved more than this; she deserved to know all of it.
“Yes,” I say. “I think it is.”
49
I tell my wife everything.
Sitting opposite each other at the kitchen table, I tell her about Adrian Parish and Maxine, about my visit to her house in Kimberley. I tell her about Elizabeth Makepeace and Peter Flack, about the old Rolex watch and the money I’d made by selling it at the jeweler’s shop.
I tell her about losing my job.
She puts a hand over mine, gives it a gentle squeeze. A frown of concern creasing her brow. Sympathy winning the battle against anger—for now, at least—that I’ve kept such a big secret from her.
“I’m sorry, Adam,” she says. “That’s awful. Those miserable sods never appreciated you anyway.”
“True.”
“But you should have told me when it happened.”
“We were literally all packed to move, all the contracts were signed, the first payment was about to go out on the new mortgage and I didn’t want to stress you any more than you already were.” I take a sip of lukewarm tea. “Wish I’d never found that bloody phone number now.”
“It was me that found it,” she says quietly. “Me that called it first, remember? We thought it was just a bit of an old curiosity. A blast from the past.”
“Then I wish I’d just thrown the phone away as soon as I found it.”
“Do you think it’s someone trying to recover stolen goods, or something?”
“There’s got to be more to it than that. Apart from the watch, what could they possibly want with the rest of it?”
She shakes her head, angrily brushing away tears again. “I hate this, Adam. Ihateit. Feels like we’re being watched the whole time, like we’re living in a goldfish bowl. All of this for some stupid wristwatch. Why don’t we just leave for a few days?”
“And go where?”
“I don’t know. Dom’s house?”
“He’s only got one spare room.” I say it gently. “And my parents are two hours away.”
“A hotel, then? Somewhere cheap?”
A bubble of shame expands in my chest, the heat of frustration at my own failure. Most of all, at the danger I had unwittingly brought to our door—danger to the four people who meant more to me than anything else in the world. This had moved far beyond simple curiosity about my new house, far beyond anything that could justify further pursuit of answers about the hidden room. It was time to bring it to an end.
“I know what I have to do now,” I say. “I know what needs to be—”
“Or we could keep the kids off school for a few days, at least?” Jess says abruptly. “Until we know how things stand. I’ll take some leave, and we can all just stay here, safe together. In the meantime we change the locks, get the alarm fixed, and talk to the police about it when they come back to take a statementabout what happened tonight. Figure out what to do next. What do you think?”
“I can do better than that,” I say. “There must be a way to fix it. To make it all go away.”
I had set all of this—whateverthiswas—in motion. And it was down to me to stop it.
Because there was a way to put things right. Of course there was.
My brother-in-law comes over again first thing on Sunday morning and drives me to the A & E department at Queen’s Medical Centre. He barely speaks on the way there and I can tell he’s angry, his jaw set tight. Angry at me, at the intruder, at the danger to his nieces and nephew, to his sister—danger that I’ve been unable to stop.
A & E is busy, shadow-eyed staff still dealing with the overnight backlog of patients sprawled on chairs or laid out on the floor, the vast majority of which seem to stem from drinking, fighting, or falling over in the city center. An underlying smell of bleach in the waiting area is punctured here and there by the sharp tang of vomit.
Dom hands me a cup of machine-brewed tea and I tell him everything, too. All of it. He raises an eyebrow when I tell him what I plan to do next, but doesn’t try to dissuade me.
“The thing I don’t get,” he says, “is how they found you in the first place. How they found your house.”
