With Karen’s party, the Rec Centre is only a street away, so it’s not as if I can even claim to have no way of getting there.
‘Oh,’ I say. ‘I’ll be there then.’
Karen checks something on her phone and then takes a step towards her own flat at the end of the hallway.
‘You working tomorrow?’ she asks. ‘I was wondering if we might do another Parkrun. I could knock at eight…?’
It’s all a stream of words, touching on three different subjects in what is barely a sentence. It takes me a moment to de-spaghettify it all.
‘I am working,’ I say. ‘But I can do Parkrun before.’
She breaks into a smile. There’s nothing like struggling through a 5K run with company.
‘I’ve gotta get back,’ Karen says. ‘If I turn my back for two minutes, Quinn and Ty end up playing UFC with each other. They’re banned from watching it – but I think someone at school has it on their phone.’ She stops for breath and then adds: ‘Are you still okay to take the kids trick or treating on Sunday?’
‘You’ve sold them as such angels, how could I say no?’
The truth is, I’m not looking forward to it – but Karen and I do our best to help out one another. It’s not as if we have families on whom to rely. Not so long ago, I’d have been happy to go trick or treating. This time of year – Hallowe’en and Bonfire Night – used to be my favourite days of the year, even above Christmas. I’d love the sulphur in the air; the ever-increasing whizzes and bangs that would light up the sky leading up to the fifth of November itself. Now, I have too many bad memories of the week.
Karen smirks. ‘They’re not bad kids, really.’
‘I know.’ A pause. ‘Have you got some fella on the go…?’
I’m fishing, because Karen has been cagey about precisely what she’s doing on Sunday night. She does agency work but only during the day so that she’s home for Tyler and Quinn. This is the third Sunday in a row that I’ll have kept an eye on her boys. Not that I mind.
Karen glances away to the other end of the hall, suddenly unable to meet my eye. ‘Something like that,’ she squirms.
She doesn’t want to talk about it, so I leave it.
‘I’ll see you in the morning,’ she adds, before scurrying down the corridor to her flat. Boys’ screaming voices echo out momentarily as she opens the door and then there’s quiet.
I take a moment to eye the door across the hall. There’s a peephole in the centre and, for some reason, it feels as if there’s someone on the other side. I hug my arms across myself, feeling the stranger’s eyes scanning me. Billy takes that as a cue to poke his head into the hallway. He shifts his head in both directions and then turns to look up at me and he licks his chops.
‘Fat lot of good you are,’ I tell him as I usher him back inside.
I’ve almost closed the door when a solitary creak ekes ominously from across the hallway. From inside Jade’s old apartment. I stop to watch, but seconds pass without any other noise; without any hint of movement or acknowledgement. It’s an old building, after all.
It’s when I eventually click my door shut that I wonder if I heard anything at all.
Chapter Three
The money is stacked on my table again, all £3,640 of it. I leave it there, as if it’s an invited guest. It feels comforting to have it in front of me and I find myself slightly reordering the piles so that the cleaner, newer notes are all together. It’s only when Billy comes to lie at my feet that I notice I’ve spent almost twenty minutes simply looking at – and touching – the money.
In the end, I force myself to get my laptop from the drawer underneath the television. It was a Christmas deal on Amazon nearly two years ago, although cheap for the same reason most things are cheap: it’s barely useable. I flip the lid and turn it on and then put it down. Booting up takes a minimum of five minutes – and that’s if it loads at all. Using the computer is something like raising a toddler. Sometimes it does what it’s told and everything’s happiness and light; other times it’s uncooperative, even against threats of extreme violence.
Perhaps I shouldn’t be allowed to raise a toddler.
I wait for the laptop to go through its usual routine of deciding whether it’s going to actually do something today – bit like those workmen digging up the road – and then it finally reaches the main screen.
There is work for me to do and I load the Open University website, but, before I actually get on with anything, I find myself googling ‘missing money’ and the name of our town. I’m not sure what I’m expecting, but there’s nothing of note. I try ‘stolen money’, but that only brings up a few news stories about minor robberies going back over the past few years. There’s nothing recent, so I try searching for the exact amount.
Nothing.
The £3,640 could be part of a larger figure, of course. Some sort of robbery, or drug money? I don’t know. I’ve probably seen too many crime dramas. Drug money? I might be naïve but I don’t think my sleepy little corner of the world is up there with the South American cartels when it comes to laundering cash.
I pack the money into the envelope once more, but it’s like trying to cram toothpaste back into a tube. Each time I remove all the notes, the envelope seems to shrink slightly. Eventually I reseal the envelope and put it into the drawer, but it’s almost as if the money is calling to me. Whenever I look to my laptop hoping to do some university work, I find my attention drifting to the drawer.
It’s not long before I move the envelope to the cupboard underneath the kitchen sink. Because I still can’t focus, I then hide it underneath the mattress that’s part of the bed which folds down from the wall next to the sofa. My flat is so small that there isn’t anywhere better to conceal it, not without ripping up floorboards.
That doesn’t stop me from thinking about it. It’s hard to know where the money came from. I noticed it after getting off the bus – but the number 24 doesn’t seem the type of place that someone would be carrying around so much cash. That said, I’m not sure I frequent any places in which people would be carrying these sorts of amounts. The envelope wasn’t in my bag when I was looking for my bus pass, so it appeared either on my walk from the bus stop, or on the bus itself.
I’m lost in a daydream when my phone starts to ring. It’s an old, battered Android that I’ve dropped more times than I care to remember. If it wasn’t for the £1.99 case I bought from the market, my phone would have been a goner months ago. I pay £10 a month, which is one of my more extravagant outgoings. There is no landline phone in the flat and it’s hard to lead a life in these times without a mobile: I am texted my shift times and I have to call our building manager, Lauren, if there are any problems at the flat. Even my banking, for what it’s worth, is done through an app.
The phone’s screen is scratched and scuffed but the word ‘unknown’ beams bright. I wouldn’t usually answer – it’ll almost certainly be a life-sapping marketing call – but there’s a part of me that somehow believes it might be the money-owner calling.
‘Hello?’
There’s silence from whoever’s at the other end, not even one of those tell-tale clicks that happen when it’s a telemarketer. I check the phone, but it’s back to the home screen. Whoever called me rang off the moment I answered. The previous caller’s option reveals only ‘unknown’. I stare at it for a second to two, wondering if there’s anything I can do to trace the call and then deciding I’m not that bothered.