The Babysitter Left A Note That Said "The Man In The Hat Is Not Yours, Is He?"

She was seventeen, sensible, the daughter of a colleague. She had sat for us four times.

We got home at midnight and she was standing on the doorstep. Coat on. Bag on her shoulder. She had locked the front door and she was standing outside it, in November, and our two children were asleep upstairs.

I want to say, first, that she did the right thing, and that we have never suggested otherwise, and that she is at university now and I would give her a reference tomorrow.

She would not come back in. She would not take the money. She said, "They're fine. They're both asleep. I checked at ten and they're fine."

My wife went up. They were fine.

The note was on the kitchen table. It said, in a girl's neat handwriting:

"Sorry. Everything is fine and the kids are asleep. The man in the hat is not yours, is he? I'll explain if you want but I'd rather not."

We did want. We rang her mother. There was a conversation that I would not want to have again.

What she told us, eventually, and only once, was this: at about half nine she went up to check on the little one and there was a man standing at the end of the landing, in a hat with a brim, facing the children's door.