The Board

At the stationery shop on the corner, the woman behind the till asked what I needed a corkboard for, and, without so much as a blink, I said: "Recipes." She nodded, satisfied, as though this were the most ordinary request in the world — though, thinking about it, a thirty-four-year-old man whose entire home-cooking repertoire tops out at an omelette, buying a metre-square board "for recipes," ought to raise at least a mild eyebrow. But no. Nobody ever suspects me of anything. Which, I'll admit honestly, stings a little, given how much effort I put into suspecting everyone else.

The board took up the entire free wall in my office, which is technically a cupboard with a window, but sounds far more respectable as "the office." I hung it crooked, straightened it on the third attempt, and pinned up my first clipping — a printout of the "umbrella vigilante" article from the High Street — dead centre.

That was the exact moment Poppy knocked on my door.

A brief aside about Poppy Sinclair is in order here, since she's about to feature far too often for "colleague" to keep cutting it. We work on the same floor at a company that calls itself a "digital logistics solutions provider," though in practice we mostly work out why the latest batch of orders is stuck in customs at Dover. Poppy sits two desks over from me, has an irritatingly level head on her shoulders, and is the only person in the office who can use a stapler without it jamming.

It was, in fact, the stapler she'd come for — I'd borrowed it the previous week under the pretext of an "urgent report" and, as it turned out, forgotten to give it back — and she caught me mid-way through pinning up my fourth clipping.

"Dave," she said, in the tone people usually reserve for "fire" or "your shirt's undone." "What is this?"

"Nothing," I said, standing in front of the board with my arms spread, which, in hindsight, only made the board more noticeable.

"This is a serial killer's evidence wall from a detective show."

"It's a recipe wall."

"Dave, I can see a printout of an article titled 'Who Is the Grey Umbrella?' right next to your cancellation calendar," she tilted her head, "written in red pen. With exclamation marks."

There was no point denying it. Red exclamation marks are my weakness, I admit it — they appear entirely on their own whenever I get worked up, the way other people break out in hives.

I gave up and told her everything: the seven cancellations, the news coincidences, the graze on the cheekbone, the mud on the mat, the scratched stepladder, which, frankly, I still keep in the cupboard as Exhibit A.

Poppy listened in silence, arms crossed, wearing the expression of someone weighing up two options: calling me an ambulance, or making herself a cup of tea. She chose tea — her preferred compromise between politeness and judgement.

"Fine," she said, back from the kitchen with two mugs. "Let's say, purely hypothetically, theoretically, just so we can close the subject and never bring it up again. Your neighbour is a secret superhero."

"Thank you for humouring me."

"I'm not humouring you. I'm running a thought experiment, after which we both go home and live normal lives. So. Why would an insurance agent be a superhero?"

I thought about it. A fair question, I admit. I had nothing better than "why not?", which sounded a great deal less convincing out loud than it had in my head.

"Maybe childhood trauma," I suggested. "Maybe a relative got robbed. Maybe he's just bored of underwriting flood policies."

"Or," said Poppy, sipping her tea with the air of someone about to say something sensible, "he's simply an awful person who keeps lying about work because he's got a mistress, or a second job at a bar, or a gambling habit, all of which are statistically far more likely than a coat and an umbrella."

This was a reasonable point. I refused to admit it.

"Then explain the mud on the mat."

"He was walking someone else's dog."

"At nine in the evening? On a weeknight?"

"Dave," she said, with a sigh I'd already learned to recognise as "I'm about to say something I'll regret," "show me the cancellation list again."

I showed her. She studied it longer than a simple "no, you're insane" would have required, which — I won't hide it — encouraged me enormously.

"Right," she said finally. "Five out of seven evenings line up with news segments. That's… statistically inconvenient."

"Thank you!"

"I didn't say you were right. I said it was inconvenient. There's a difference."

We sat another hour, building a coincidence calendar on the back of an old office-party poster, and when Poppy finally left — taking her stapler with her, for the record — she turned back at the door and said the line I'd later write on the board on its own card, because it captured, with unsettling precision, exactly what we'd be doing from that day forward:

"I am not accusing your neighbour of secretly fighting crime, Dave. I am simply saying I'm prepared to ask a great many pointed questions with you about his laundry schedule."

I smiled so wide it embarrassed me.

"Then it's settled," I said. "Monday — the launderette."

She groaned, but didn't say no. In the whole history of our friendship, that had always been the most reliable sign that a plan was already in motion.

Once the door closed behind Poppy, I stood alone in front of the board a while longer, admiring my handiwork. Three clippings, a cancellation timetable, a list of inconsistencies, and one crooked arrow I'd drawn in marker from the word "stepladder" to the word "claws" — an arrow so unconvincing I nearly rubbed it out of sheer embarrassment at my own amateur-criminologist handwriting.

I wondered if I was taking this too far. Then I decided that anyone seriously asking themselves "am I taking this too far" has long since crossed the line where the answer is always yes, and that stops no one.

At ten that evening, the familiar sound drifted up from below: the creak of Nigel's hallway floorboard. I lay in bed listening to it — more closely than ever before — trying to work out whether there was something different about it this time. Something more careful. More… trained.

It sounded exactly the same as always. An ordinary old floorboard in an ordinary old building.

And yet I got up anyway, went to the board in the dark, switched on the little desk lamp, and added a line at the bottom, in deliberately small handwriting, as though that might make it sound less mad: "Monday. Launderette. 7pm."

Then I did finally go to sleep, and dreamed that Nigel, in a mask, handed me an umbrella and said, "welcome to the team," and I replied, "thanks, but I've already got a job," and we both felt awkward about it. In the morning I decided this was probably the clearest sign yet that I needed less caffeine after eight p.m. — but I didn't add it to the board. Even I know where to draw the line between "evidence" and "the contents of a dream."

Somewhere, at least.

The next morning, on my way to work, I walked past Nigel's door again. It was ajar — he was just taking out the bins, in tracksuit bottoms, mug of tea in hand, looking about as far from a secret vigilante as it's possible to look, and much more like a man who's run out of milk and is more upset about that than about the entirety of global crime combined.

"Morning," he said, with his usual politeness. "Sorry again about last night. Next week for definite."

"No worries," I said, scanning his face for bruises, grazes, or any other sign of nocturnal heroics, and finding nothing but faint circles under his eyes, which could just as easily be explained by poor sleep, a late-night box set, or, purely hypothetically, a foiled jewellery robbery.

"How was your evening?" I asked, trying to make the question sound offhand rather than like the opening line of an interrogation.

He paused a beat too long for such a simple question, then said:

"Quiet. Nothing much."

Behind him, by the bins, I spotted the edge of a grey coat sticking out of a black bin bag. Torn at the elbow.

"Right then," I said, and we went our separate ways for the morning — him to the bins, me to the bus stop — each carrying off exactly the version of that conversation he needed.