Chapter 115: A List of What He Didn’t Find II

At the lift she pressed the button and stood back.

"There’s one more and it isn’t a question." She had the keys in her hand. "That thing I told you in October. Nothing happens to you and it takes 5 years to notice."

"I remember."

"That was about a box on a form. This is not that." The doors opened and she held them with one hand. "You will be fine until the first time somebody with a reason looks at you properly. A bank, if you borrow. An insurer, if something burns. Police, if you are ever near something and they want to rule you out."

"And they can’t."

"And they can’t," Naomi said. "Which is when it stops being paperwork."

She got in the lift and let the doors go.

Ashwell Court is 400 metres from Pembury House, and he had ridden past the end of that road about 4,000 times in 11 years.

He got there at 10 past 10 and put the scooter on the pavement opposite and sat on it with the engine off.

Low block. Four storeys, brown brick, walkways on the front with washing out on 2 of them. A bin store at the near end with a bike chained to the railing. A car park with 9 cars in it and a van with a ladder on the roof.

Number 14 is on the second walkway, fourth along, and he counted it twice.

Satellite dish on the wall beside it. Two pots by the door with something dead in one and something alive in the other. And screwed to the door at about head height, a little wooden shape that from across the road looked like a name plate, and turned out through the phone camera to be a hedgehog.

September 2021 to October 2022.

That’s the year I did 6 days a week on the bags. That’s the year the boiler went in the February and Adaeze’s bloke came and looked at it and said he’d be back. That’s the year I did my back on the Balls Pond Road in the rain and lay on the floor for 2 days and told nobody.

And in an office in Croydon, I lived here.

Behind a hedgehog.

At 25 past, the door opened and a woman came out.

Seventies. Buttoned coat, a headscarf, one of those wheeled bags with a zip. She pulled the door to and tried the handle twice, the way people do, and went off along the walkway and down the stairs at the far end.

She came out at the bottom past the bin store and went up the road towards the shops without looking at him, because a man sat on a scooter is nothing.

Danny got the phone out.

whose flat is that

[ 14 Ashwell Court is a residential address. ]

there’s a woman in it

[ Yes. ]

did she say i lived there

Nine seconds.

[ She was not asked. ]

then who answered the letter

[ Halbrook Residential answered the letter. ]

is that a real company

[ It answered the letter, host. ]

that’s not what i asked

[ It is what the Concierge is able to answer. ]

He sat there with his hands on the bars.

It hasn’t lied. Not once. She wasn’t asked, which is true. Something answered, which is true. And it will not tell me what the something is.

And a woman in her seventies has gone up the road for a paper with no idea there’s a stranger in her address.

Which is what somebody did to Pembury in October, and nobody asked me either.

He was still sat there 20 minutes later when she came back down the road with the bag full.

And he watched her get to the bottom of those stairs, and stop, and take the handle in both hands, and start.

There are 14 steps up to that walkway and she did 4 of them and stopped on the half landing with the bag wedged against her knee.

Danny was off the scooter before he had decided anything.

"Here. Let me have that."

She looked up at him with her hand still on the bag.

"You’re all right, love."

"You’ve got 10 more and I’ve got nothing to do." He had his hand out and did not take it off her. "Go on."

She let him have it, which took her about 2 seconds to decide, and she went up in front of him holding the rail with both hands.

It weighed a ton. There was a 4 pint of milk in the top of it and something in a tin underneath and a paper folded down the side.

"Second one along," she said at the top. "With the pots."

"I know."

She stopped on the walkway and looked at him.

Say something.

"Saw your hedgehog," Danny said. "From down there."

"Ohh." She went off completely, whole face. "That’s my grandson. He done that at school and he was 8, and he’s 19 now and he’s in Leeds, and he says take it down every time he comes." She got her keys out. "I will not take it down."

"You’d be mad to take it down."

"That’s what I say." She had the door open. "Just inside, love, on the mat, I’ll do it from there."

He put it on the mat.

He did not look past it. He made himself not look past it, and he could see about 18 inches of a hallway carpet and the corner of a shoe rack and that was all he took and it was more than he had any right to.

"Thank you, darling." She was getting her coat off already. "You want to be careful on that scooter, it’s freezing."

"I will."

"You local?"

Danny stood on a walkway outside a door he has lived behind for 13 months in a database in Croydon.

"No," he said. "I used to be."

"Well." She had her hand on the door. "Thank you again."

And she shut it, and he heard the latch go, and then he heard her put the chain on, which people of that age do at 11 in the morning without thinking about it.

He went back down the 14 steps and got on the scooter and did not start it for a bit.

Then he rode 400 metres and put his feet down outside Pembury House.

Same laminated notice on the lift, the one about the engineer, dated 2019. Somebody had a new door on the ground floor. The bin area still had a trolley in it that had been there 3 years and was nobody’s.

His window is on the third floor, second from the end.

There was a light on in it at 20 to 11 on a Sunday morning, and a shape went past it and came back the other way, and then a boy of about 9 opened the window 4 inches and put a plastic cup on the sill and shut it again.

Danny sat and looked at that for a while.

It’s all still there.

The stairs are there and the smell in the stairwell’s there and the window opens 4 inches before it catches on the frame, and I never once got that fixed in 11 years.

And there’s a kid putting a cup on my sill.

He rang Adaeze and she picked up on the fourth ring sounding like a woman who had been up for 20 minutes.

"Danny Flynn. Twice in 2 days."

"Who’s in my flat?"

Nothing for a second.

"Where are you?"

"Outside it."

"Right." He heard her sit down. "A nurse and her boy. She came the week after you went. He’s 9 and he’s got a bike he is not allowed to keep in the stairwell and it lives in the stairwell."

"He’s just put a cup on the windowsill."

"That’ll be for the birds. She told me he does that." A pause. "Danny, why are you sat outside Pembury on a Sunday morning?"

And he sat on a scooter outside a building he lived in for 11 years, 400 metres from a flat he has never been inside with his name attached to it, with £1,216,412.87 in an account and 2 women in one morning having asked him a version of the same question.

"Because it’s the only place I’ve ever lived," he said, "and I wanted to look at it."

Adaeze did not say anything for a moment.

"Come and have your dinner," she said. "Not today. Next Sunday. And don’t tell me you’re all right, because that is not what I asked you."