Chapter 41
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.”
There is a long pause on the line, a crackle of static as if he’s transferring the phone from one ear to the other.
“No,” he says finally. “I didn’t put those wardrobes in.”
I can’t help but feel a little deflated. If I could find out when the work had been done, when the hidden door had been blocked off and forgotten about, it would at least give me a starting point to work back from.
“So, they were already there?” I say. “When you and your parents moved in?”
“That’s not what I said. I said I didn’t do it—I had them done by a guy, a specialist, a joiner or whatever.”
I take a breath. It’s a fraction of progress at least, an inch forward.
“Who was the joiner?”
“Seriously, mate? Not a scooby. This was donkey’s years ago.”
“Fair enough.” I keep my voice light. “So, what year would it have been?”
“God, feels like forever.” He sighs with irritation.
“Mum and Dad bought the house in… summer 2002? Yeah, it was the World Cup, I remember trying to get the TV working in time to watch us get knocked out by Brazil in the quarter-finals, all of us perched on camping chairs in the lounge. Bloody David Seaman cost us that game, he was absolute garbage. Brazil were down to ten men and we still couldn’t beat them. ”
I can’t remember the game at all but it’s clearly stuck in his memory.
“So… the joiner?”
“Yeah, so, he must have come in pretty soon after that because Mum wanted loads of storage for all her old clothes, all her old costumes from when she was doing am-dram. The old lady they bought the house off was a widow and she’d died suddenly; the place was in a right state when we moved in.”
“Don’t suppose you remember her name, do you?”
“What?”
“The owner of the house before your family?”
He blows out a breath. “Blimey. This is like bloody Columbo.”
“Sorry, I’m just trying to fill in some blanks in the history of the place.”
There is more silence on the line, punctuated by the sound of hard footsteps on an echoing floor.
“You know what?” he says. “I do remember. It was one of those weird things but she had the same name as in that TV show. Makepeace. Like, from Dempsey 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.