Chapter 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 dresser meant anything, 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.
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 for grim reading to see those two deaths and a disappearance in the space of barely two years.
Janet Hopkins had died after the 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.
If he 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.
In terms of an online footprint, that twenty-first-century measure of a person’s impact on the world, she had barely existed at all.
Eventually, I find myself on the homepage of a website called Deceased Database UK, which announces itself as a central resource of burials and cremations, offered primarily to amateur genealogists researching the family tree.
A rudimentary search box asks for first and last name, plus start and finish dates as search parameters.
I fill in what I know and hit “enter,” a sand-timer icon rotating on the screen for a moment before it spits out a single result.
Five lines of text at the top of the results box.
I read the text and feel a rush of certainty that this is the same person: the former owner of this house had not quite escaped the reach of the internet. It had found her—in death.
Last name: Makepeace
First names: Elizabeth Irene
Buried on: 16 January 2002
Recorded in: Nottingham
Date of death: 27 December 2001
The information is tantalizingly sparse and doesn’t give any indication of age, next of kin, or last known address.
I bookmark the page and amend my timeline, then photograph the details and send it to Maxine with a message asking if she’s heard the name before in connection with this house or her husband. It doesn’t take her long to reply.
Will check but doesn’t ring any bells.
I send another message.
Can Charlie find out how long she lived here or when she moved in? Any surviving family?
He will do some digging through RBDM. Will get back to you.
I frown.
RBDM?
Register of Births, Deaths, and Marriages.
I stare at the timeline for a moment longer then slide the paper into my back pocket, close the laptop, and go to check on Callum.
Jeremy calls before lunch to ask about the snagging list of small issues that he’d arranged to be sorted out before we moved in—some missing roof tiles, a couple of leaking taps, a boiler service—to make sure they’ve all been completed to our satisfaction.
He’s nothing if not thorough and I’m not surprised he’s become the most sought-after agent in the city for high-end period properties.
Before he rings off, I ask him if he’s ever come across the name Elizabeth Makepeace, but the name isn’t familiar.
I finally get started on today’s decorating tasks.
After a while I find a rhythm with the wallpaper stripping in the dining room, peeling off long sections of the old floral paper in long, satisfying rips.
As each thick piece detaches from the wall, the fusty air that emerges from beneath is almost like an exhalation, this room finally breathing out after decades contained behind paper.
I’m starting on the third wall when my phone buzzes again in my pocket. A text from Maxine.
You free to meet today?
It’s not quite 11 a.m.; Jess should be back with Daisy before noon. Dom is also due to come over for some uncle-time with the kids, and I won’t leave until he’s here.
Yes can do when my wife is back. Lunchtime?
12:30 p.m. @NGC. Go to NG1 5JD, section 12 down the hill on the left.
I plug the postcode into Google Maps and it zooms down to a location less than a mile from my house.
Somewhere I’ve driven past a thousand times but never actually been inside.