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.

She said he did not move. She said she went into the room, picked up the baby monitor, walked back out past him — past him, which I think is the bravest thing anybody has ever done in my house — and went downstairs and sat by the front door with her coat on until we came home.

She said she did not run because "if I ran, he might go in".

We had the house blessed, which did nothing, and we had the wiring checked, which did nothing, and we moved eighteen months later for reasons that we told everybody were about schools.

Our daughter, who was four then, is eleven now. She has never mentioned a man in a hat.

Last year, out of nowhere, at a service station, she said: "Do you remember the house with the long landing?"

I said yes.

She said, "I didn't like the end of it."

And then she asked for a doughnut.