Chapter 25
Twenty-Five
ROMAN
The raised voices filter up through the floorboards like hot steam. His mum’s sharp, outraged tone, his dad’s low, simmering growl. The same angry voices they’ve used for years.
Usually, Roman can easily tune them out even without the help of his noise-cancelling headphones. But today, they’ve been banging on about whether to go to “that drinks thing” at the Sharpes’ house.
They were back on the trouble he’d caused over Oliver Sharpe’s table.
‘That lad is a bloody liability when he gets out into the real world. Spends far too much time shut away in his bedroom, gaming. When I was his age I was already bricklaying on building sites all weekend.’
Roman’s bedroom is his real world. It’s a place he’s built himself, one screen at a time. When the blinds are down and the LED lights set to dim, the blue glow of his monitor bathing the whole room in a calming light . . . that’s the only time Roman can relax and breathe out.
Plus, he has got a job. And it pays a lot more than poxy grunt work on a building site in the pissing rain.
Downstairs, it’s all Farrow and Ball and forced smiles. Up here, the rules are Roman’s own.
He looks around. To the uninitiated—like his clueless parents—this is just a cluttered teenager’s bedroom packed with gaming equipment. To Roman, though, it is mission control.
He slips his headphones on without music, just to soften the racket from downstairs.
He has been watching the Sharpes’ house for a couple of weeks now. It takes time to build up a picture of strangers; it’s not something that can be rushed. He’s not just some loser with a notebook and a zoom lens. Roman’s interest is far more targeted than that and it’s important he gets it right.
Half the time, even when he’s not at work, Oliver isn’t in his house. He’s slipping through the side gate to Vanessa’s place like it’s a revolving door.
Roman likes to pick up fragments and piece them together. Fragments so small most people wouldn’t even notice them. It all gets filed on his mental pinboard.
That invoice sticking out of the Sharpes’s recycling bin? Bingo. That gave him Oliver’s email address, in a nice bold font. Another time, he overheard Emily out on the street, spelling her own email out slowly as she gave it over the phone. Confirmation.
The other day, she’d looked straight up at his window like she’d caught him spying. He’d moved out of sight fast. The last thing he needs is the new neighbours deciding he’s the local creep.
People are sloppy. They think privacy means putting a couple of asterisks at the end of your date of birth and logging out of your online bank when you’ve finished a transaction.
But information leaks are everywhere: discarded envelopes, paperwork they can’t be bothered to shred, offhand comments shouted across the road.
Everybody leaves a trail if you know where to look.
If there is one thing Roman has learned since he’s been doing this, it’s that nobody’s life is airtight. Everyone has a skeleton hidden somewhere, just waiting to be discovered. Especially the ones who smile their perfect smiles and drink mid-afternoon wine with their rich neighbours.
He leans back in his chair and cracks his knuckles. Today feels promising because he’s got the jigsaw pieces he needs. He’s not trying to break into Oliver’s private accounts yet—he’s starting with public traces and weak links.
He opens the toolkit and starts with the boring basics.
Nothing fancy; he’ll work up to flexing his full investigative muscles.
He’ll start with stuff like Companies House, the electoral roll and old addresses.
Then he’ll move on to the lazy security stuff—password resets and recycled security questions.
If GRN_DoR is serious about hiring them, Roman needs to be sure he’s not missing anything obvious.
It excites Roman in the same way it did when he and Sanj pulled off that first council job so easily.
Small fry, really—just nudging his way into a database that was woefully under-protected.
But the next morning, another wodge of cash landed in his bank account, just like magic.
Earned not from pocket money or neighbourhood chores—this was money he’d earned because he was capable.
And it showed that his skills were in demand.
He’d stared at his online banking app for ages, grinning like an idiot when Sanj had transferred his half.
The best part about it all was that nobody had a clue.
His parents had been downstairs debating who had used the last of the milk while, upstairs, Roman was running circles around a local council server.
His skills made the walls of this stupid, boring house feel paper thin.
Like he could push through them any time he wanted and be somewhere else entirely.
And now there’s this new contact; an anonymous, careful expert who seems to know more than him and Sanj put together. And the last message mentioned an ‘ongoing interest in Orchard Lane’. That’s what really got under his skin.
Who might they be interested in?
The thrill of it buzzes through Roman’s veins every time he thinks about it.
His mind flicks back to the Sharpes. Oliver, with his slick hair and fake smile.
Emily with her blonde bob and puffed sleeves.
They look like a regular Orchard Lane couple.
Polite nods out on the pavement, admiring his mum’s door wreaths, promises about ‘popping over’ for drinks.
Oliver playing the charming neighbour while he sneaks off to Vanessa’s in his suede loafers with his ‘just helping with the garden’ excuses to his wife.
But if there’s one thing Roman has discovered, it’s that the regular masks people wear are the most effective ones.
Through the floorboards, he can hear his mum’s voice, a little calmer now.
‘I don’t want to miss out on the party, Russ. What happened is behind us now and we’re not going to be the ones on the street that get left out of future invitations.’
Oliver Sharpe is already dividing his parents, and he’s only just arrived.
Passwords. That’s where most people trip up, so he tries a couple of simple combinations. Birthdays scraped from a Facebook post. People recycle the same important security information everywhere, never realizing how flimsy it is.
Roman leans back in his chair, staring at the screen, the house quiet around him.
He scrolls through the basics again; account details, recovery options, the kind of dull admin screens most people never think about until something goes wrong. Everything is locked down tighter than he’d hoped. No easy openings. No sloppy shortcuts.
He cracks his knuckles, feeling the first flicker of irritation.
So Oliver Sharpe is careful.
Roman knows what that means: whatever Oliver’s hiding, he’s hiding it on purpose.
And that makes this a lot more interesting.
Downstairs, a door slams. His mum’s yells are muffled by his headphones. It’s all background noise like traffic because the only thing that matters here is right in front of him onscreen.
Step by step, he follows Oliver Sharpe’s trail. He highlights a name. Copies it and pastes it into a search bar. A list loads and he scrolls.
The glow of information builds like a torch beam in a dark cave as Roman decides which stones to lift and watch what crawls out.
Public records, the kind people forget exist. Probate notices and obituaries . . . there’s so much stuff available without the protection of a paywall if you know exactly where to look.
Sanj calls it ‘triangulating’. If the same thing shows up in three different places, you know you’re close to the truth.
He scrolls through screen after screen, his pulse starting to race as names begin to line up and dates click into place.
Oliver Sharpe. Birth year. Current address: The Coach House, Orchard Lane. Age: forty.
So far, so normal.
Then his eye snags on something that makes him go cold.
Former name: Oliver Sutton.
Name change recorded: 2021.
Roman sits back, blows out a breath, reads it again. Formal. Logged. Real.
And then he sees the line beneath it.
Probate: Oliver Sutton—deceased, 2021.
Roman’s mouth goes dry.
Deceased.
He leans in, squinting as if that might fix it. Same date of birth. Same first name. Same everything, apart from the surname, of course. According to this, the man who moved into the Coach House shouldn’t exist.
Except Roman’s seen him with his own eyes. Slick hair, smug smile, letting himself into Vanessa Lambert’s place like he belongs there.
Roman opens a new tab and starts cross-checking. Archive search. Then a second database that drags up old addresses and utility traces.
Three sources. One conclusion.
Five years ago, he took a dead man’s name.
Roman’s stomach flips—and then flips again when he notices another entry, tucked underneath like it’s nothing.
Name change recorded: 2025.
From Oliver Sutton to Oliver Sharpe.
Roman just stares.
So first he becomes Sutton . . . the same year as a man called Sutton dies.
And then, four years later, he drops it and becomes Sharpe, right before turning up on Orchard Lane with his wife.
Why do that?
Why steal a dead man’s surname only to shed it again?
Downstairs, cups clink as his parents make coffee, oblivious. Roman doesn’t move. He looks out through the blind at the Coach House—brick and glass and neat little solar lights—perfectly ordinary from the outside.
But inside is a man who’s been someone else . . . and then someone else again.
Five years ago, it feels like he might have been hiding.
One year ago, it feels like he was planning a clean slate.
Or maybe, he needed a better disguise.