Chapter 39
Jess arrives soon after with Daisy and Callum, and I fold the piece of notepaper into my pocket.
My wife and I exchange the usual truncated updates about our respective working days and I move on quickly to tell her about the police visit instead.
Once the kids are tucking into an early evening tea of baked potatoes with tuna, I take a couple of zero-alcohol beers out of the fridge and offer one to her.
“Helena is still working upstairs,” I say. “She crept up on me earlier like some kind of ninja. I swear I didn’t even hear her until she was right behind me.”
Jess takes the beer from me, popping it open.
“But she seems nice, don’t you think? Bit of a godsend.” Seeing the skeptical look on my face, she adds: “What?”
“I’m just… I don’t know. Who even is she?
” I gesture toward the ceiling with my beer, where even now I imagine she might be rifling through our cupboards.
The coded note in my pocket is a new ingredient in the strange brew that has been bubbling ever since I discovered the hidden room at the top of the house.
“We don’t know her. She could be anyone. ”
It had only been a few days ago, I remind her, that Shaun had turned up on our doorstep completely out of the blue.
Jess takes out her phone and pulls up WhatsApp, selecting a group at the top of the list called Park West Residents.
Its membership, she tells me, is made up of homeowners on our road and half a dozen neighboring streets.
She scrolls through the latest messages, everything from missed deliveries and thoughtlessly parked cars to recommendations for a reliable painter and decorator.
Most of it looks pretty banal but I ask her to add me to the group anyway.
“I just asked about a cleaner when we were getting ready to move in,” Jess says, “and got chatting to some of our new neighbors. Helena was recommended—really good references too.”
“Can we even afford a cleaner?”
“It’s only a few hours a week, but it’ll really give us a head start on everything around the house.
And with what’s happened this week, I think we both need our wits about us to keep a proper eye on the kids—we can’t do that if we’re looking after this big house on our own, and both working full-time, both running around and redecorating and cutting down that jungle of a garden so the kids can enjoy it for the summer holidays. ”
“Her cousin’s here too?”
“Tobias,” Jess says, pointing out of the kitchen window. “There he is.”
I follow her finger across the expanse of lawn at the back of the house.
The hedges at the back are hugely overgrown, the grass shin-high and years’ worth of rotting leaves piled two feet deep.
Standing by the hedge is a small, unassuming man in jeans, work boots, and a tattered black sweatshirt bearing a faded JCB logo.
His dark hair is cut short all over and there is a wind-burned redness beneath the stubble on his cheeks.
In his gloved hands, he’s wielding a pair of long loppers with a curved scissor-blade, slicing overhanging branches from Mrs. Evans’s horse chestnut tree. Each one falls with a single clean slice of the crescent-shaped blades. Chop. Another severed branch drops to the ground at his feet.
“She offered Tobias as a kind of two-for-one deal. He works cheap, does a lot of the gardens around here, apparently. He prefers to be outside. Helena says he’s… he doesn’t really like being shut in. Enclosed.”
I stare through the window at the man working in my garden.
“But is it a good idea? Bringing strangers into the house, with what’s been happening this week?”
“They’re not strangers,” she says. “They were recommended. And it’s only for a trial period—we’ll see what they’re like for a couple of weeks and take it from there. OK?”
It’s only later, when the younger children are in bed, that I open up my laptop again and return to the strange piece of half-burned notepaper from the top room.
Jess finds me in the kitchen. I gesture for her to shut the door before I show her the coded note, then pull up the picture on my phone that Charlie had sent a few hours previously.
I still haven’t worked out a way to tell her about Maxine and her son without admitting that I suddenly have a lot of free time on my hands. Instead, I tell her it came from Dom.
She frowns as she studies the picture.
“It looks like…” Lines deepen on her forehead. “That’s horrible. Like it’s wrapped around someone’s wrists. Grim.”
“I know.”
“What if it’s the same scarf as you found? It could be important, couldn’t it?”
We discuss another approach to the police, even as I recount the number of times we’d been in touch with them already this week.
“They’ll think we’re time-wasters,” Jess says with a sigh. “Attention-seekers.”
“I think some of them already do.”
Leah wanders in with a grin, her phone in hand, to show us a video on TikTok. It’s titled “Weird Embarrassing Dads on Holiday Vol. 3” and features a middle-aged guy and all the ways he embarrasses his teenage children.
“This is so you, Dad.” She leans on my shoulder, giggling as I watch, her arm warm through my shirt.
In the video, a middle-aged man is making awkwardly self-conscious moves on the dance floor to “Stayin’ Alive” by the Bee Gees, watched by a pair of cringing teens.
As the clip finishes and rolls onto the next one, she points at the crumpled, half-burnt notepaper next to my laptop. “What’s that?”
“I think it’s some kind of coded message. Found it hidden upstairs.”
She wrinkles her nose. “A reflecting cipher’s not really much of a code though, is it?”
“A what?”
“We did them in computer science. Like, a few years ago.”
She pulls up a browser on my laptop and types reflecting cipher into the search bar, clicking on the first result. The page has a few lines of text about reflecting ciphers—also apparently called mirror codes, or Atbash ciphers—and a text box that says “Enter message here”…
My daughter types in the first entry on the notepaper.
xlmurin nvvgrmt becomes confirm meeting.
She points to a graphic on the screen, the alphabet laid out A to Z from left to right. Below it, the sequence of letters is reversed so it runs from right to left.
“See?” Leah says. “You pair each letter with its reverse in the sequence so A becomes Z, B is Y, C is X, and so on. Not really much of a code. Too easy.”
I type one word after another into the text box, writing the decrypted entries in pencil next to the originals.
location
access
traffic
call log
Decoded, the heading at the top of this column is barrow.
“What’s that?” Jess says. “A place, a person?”
“It’s a town not far from the Lake District. Cumbria, I think.”
“Or Barrow-on-Soar, near Loughborough? That’s a lot closer to us here.”
Leah studies the list over my shoulder. “Isn’t a barrow a Viking burial mound, or something?”
I type in the coded heading above the right-hand column and get parker.
The three of us study the scribbled column of decoded words.
I guess this list might have been written before Google existed.
Before unscrambling it was as easy as typing letters into a web page.
It wouldn’t have troubled any serious investigator for more than a minute, but it would have been enough to disguise what it was from a casual viewer, from someone who just stumbled upon it.
Someone else in the house who came across it by accident, perhaps.
“I don’t get it,” Jess says. “Was there anything else in the tin?”
“A lighter, some matches. The tin was on top of a little pile of ash, like paper had been burned there before.”
“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 heading parker on 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.