Chapter 12
My wife waits until Callum and Daisy are tucking into their tea—rice and peas with chopped fish fingers mixed in—before holding out her phone to me, the screen unlocked. There are two text messages from the same number.
Thx for message. Pls return phone and all other personal items found in house asap.
Below it, a second text gives the details of a PO box address in Nottingham.
“That’s the number I called last night,” Jess says. “The number in the memory of that old phone. Weird, isn’t it? And presumptuous, sort of half-polite but rude at the same time.”
The message has no name or sign-off, not even a first name. Had it been sent by Kevin Hopkins? There is a twinge of unease in my gut as I think of the watch, the only thing of any real value I’d found in the house, already sold and out of my reach.
“You’re right,” I say. “It is rude.”
“Classic passive-aggressive.”
I hand the phone back to her. “Can’t understand why they didn’t just return your call, rather than sending a weird text message.”
“I don’t like it.” Her face is pinched with worry. “And what does it even mean anyway, ‘all other personal items’? It’s like we’ve been dishonest, trying to get one over on them when actually we were trying to do the right thing.”
“It’s not as if they didn’t have plenty of time to clear the house before we moved in.”
“I thought it was just junk, what you found with the phone in that top room?”
I swallow. “Yeah. Nothing really worth anything.”
“Who even is this person? Could we call Jeremy to find out?”
“Already done it. He’s going to pass on my details.”
“Really wish they didn’t have my number now, wish I hadn’t made that stupid call. The last thing I need is some random angry stranger messaging me.” She stares at the screen. “What shall I say?”
The twinge of guilt in my stomach pulses again.
“Listen,” I say. “You don’t need to reply. I’ll deal with it. You can just block this number so he can’t message you again, OK? Leave it to me.”
She gives a nod of relief. “What are you going to say?”
“Let me worry about that,” I say. “I’ll think of something.”
It’s eight o’clock by the time the two younger kids have had their baths and been put to bed with a story.
Leah is on the sofa on her phone, while Jess swipes through a home furnishings website on her iPad, looking at beds and coffee tables and picture frames.
Some reality show is on the TV but neither of them are really watching.
I’ve sent a reply a couple of hours ago to the unknown number.
Please clarify re: personal items left at 91 Regency Place mentioned in your last text.
So far, there’s been no reply.
I head upstairs to unpack a few more boxes and eventually find myself drawn back to the annex room on the top floor, with its creaking armchair and bare bulb swinging gently above me.
Perhaps it had been some kind of hideaway, just like Jess said.
There were times when Jess or I would have paid good money for just fifteen quiet, uninterrupted minutes away from the daily chaos of family life with three children, a dog, a cat, assorted fish, and a rotating cast of hamsters, gerbils, and guinea pigs that occupied cages in the various kids’ bedrooms and made periodic bids for freedom.
But why had the room never been cleared out? And why was someone so keen to recover a few old odds and ends that had been left behind?
The level of secrecy, the effort that must have gone into creating this little space, and making it so hard to find, suggested it was more than just a study, a den, a retreat.
There was something much more deliberate about it, much more long-term.
Not just plasterboard, but bricks with that master-crafted wooden paneling on top, so the wall would feel as solid as an external wall to the casual observer.
So well hidden, in fact, that someone had subsequently put fitted wardrobes in front of the door and forgotten all about it.
Perhaps it was a panic room, a place of last resort in case your house was broken into and you had to flee upstairs rather than down. It would certainly do that job pretty well if you could lock it from the inside.
I pull the door shut until I hear the soft click of the latch. Then reach up and pull the light cord, the darkness instant and absolute.
Even after my eyes have adjusted, it’s a perfect blackness of a kind that’s almost impossible to find in everyday life.
Elsewhere in the house—even in the middle of the night—there’s always a whisper of light reaching you through the edge of a curtain, the red glow of numbers on a digital clock, the muted pulse of a device plugged in to charge overnight.
Outside we try to keep the dark at bay with street lights, with security lights and headlights and permanently lit shopfronts, with our incessant need to have illumination at all times.
Even when you close your eyes, you can still see the light leaking through your eyelids.
We’ve evolved that way, to wake with the sunrise.
But the hidden room at the top of my house is perfectly dark.
Totally, fully black, like being at the bottom of the ocean. Nothing leaks through, not even the slightest gray hint of anything outside.
To complement the darkness, the hidden room is also silent in a way that is so rare I’d almost forgotten what it’s like.
A stillness that is complete and undisturbed, all sounds from outside deadened by the bricks surrounding me, the thick rugs fixed to the walls and floor.
I can’t hear traffic noise, or dogs barking, or the music Leah has left on in her room, or anything.
This small space is like a separate, silent world that exists in parallel to the daylight world outside.
Whatever else it may be, it’s very well constructed.
The darkness is so thick I can almost feel it pressing against my skin, so complete that I can’t even see the fingers in front of my face when they are only inches away. No light penetrates the ceiling either.
It feels like being blind.
Being buried.