The Heights

by Louise Candlish

  Alex James and his artisan cheese business had cropped up several times in meetings like this one, but it was the first time Vic felt like ordering a great wheel of the stuff and crushing someone’s face in it.

  ‘Thank you for your time,’ he told the whippersnapper, and closed his laptop with a defeated little click.

  Vic

  Now

  He hardly ever comes to Beckenham Place Park these days.

  They used to come all the time, Lucas and him, when he lived in the flat on Shannon Way and saw his son most weekends. They’d ride their bikes or hurdle fallen trees, fence with sticks and roar and yell together till their throats were sore. And, sometimes, they’d get on the bus to the Bowie Bandstand and caterwaul ‘Life on Mars’ with the other pilgrims.

  Vic supposes it was because of Ellen’s caution that his own parenting stye was so committed to chaos and noise, but, God, did he really use to have all that energy? Of course, it wasn’t a constant riot. Sometimes, he and Lucas would just sit on a log and eat apples and crisps and look for mini beasts, as the schools had taken to calling insects. Lucas particularly liked finding something stuck and setting it free.

  He was the best, their boy. Not a mean bone in his body. How is it going to feel, Vic wonders (well, fears), when his second child arrives? What if he and India have a boy who looks just like Lucas? Might Vic’s life turn sadder, not happier? Did he have the skills, the stamina, to put on the required brave face?

  ‘Vic!’

  He breaks from his reverie and sees Ellen, already at the meeting point by the mansion, waving at him. One look at her striding down the path to intercept him and he sees he was on the money.

  She knows.

  Her forehead is puckered with outrage and her eyes burn. She is a woman who finds it hard to conceal her feelings, which worried him a lot when they hatched their plan to kill Kieran. It was obvious to Vic that the police would come calling – Jesus, a rookie on his first day in the job would’ve put their names near the top of any list of people with an axe to grind against the kid – and he wasn’t at all confident she’d be able to mask her guilt.

  What he hadn’t appreciated was that she felt no guilt.

  ‘Hi, Ellen.’ They go through the motions of hugging and cheek-kissing. ‘Are you all right?’ He doesn’t leave time for her to answer, before saying, ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t be there on Thursday. I went yesterday when I got back. Nice to see all the flowers.’

  She waves off the apology. ‘That isn’t why I wanted to talk.’

  Oh, God. They begin to follow the path towards the new swimming lake, its waters undisturbed, of course, on this sharp November afternoon. Her furious energy makes her march so fast she’s almost shaking him off.

  ‘Ellen, slow down. Talk to me.’

  With an air of concession, she slackens her stride to match his steadier one, and then she begins. ‘I rang the police about Kieran resurfacing and guess what they said?’

  I don’t need to guess.

  ‘They said you already knew.’ Her tone hardens. ‘You’ve known for two years.’

  ‘That’s nonsense.’ It seems to Vic that it’s only sensible to at least go through the motions of denial – just in case she doesn’t have the appetite for full discovery, might be willing to hear what she wants to hear. That’s always been her way, after all. Decide your own truth.

  But not this time.

  ‘They said they told you as a courtesy, to let us know he’d turned up again and was no longer living in the area. I checked the date and we were on holiday in New York. We didn’t take our phones, so fair enough that they might not’ve been able to get hold of me. But they got hold of you.’

  Vic protests, but she cuts him off. ‘Don’t do this, Vic. It’s bad enough you lied to me then, but don’t do it now.’ She grasps his arm with sharp fingers and they come to a standstill. ‘I’ve spoken to Prisca and she obviously found out at the same sort of time. I appreciate she would have her reasons for keeping the news from me, but it’s hard to see what yours were.’ Her voice lowers. ‘Given what we’d done. Thought we’d done?’

  ‘Give me a chance to explain. That’s hurting, Ellen.’ He gently removes her fingers from his arm. ‘I did get the message that he was alive and well, yes. I was told he had settled somewhere else. But I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to turn your life upside down.’ How grave he suddenly sounds, suddenly feels. ‘I thought if you carried on believing he was dead, you’d have a better chance of moving on and being happy again.’

  ‘Oh, come on!’ Disbelief drips from her voice. Her glare is pure outrage. ‘I didn’t just believe he was dead, Vic! We arranged it, remember?’

  He swallows his impatience. How could he possibly not remember?

  ‘Weren’t you desperate to know what went wrong?’ she demands. ‘That conversation we had the other night, why weren’t we having it back then? Why weren’t you shocked and confused and terrified there might be repercussions? I would have been.’

  ‘I was. Obviously, I was. And had you been around I’d probably have told you straight away. But I had time to get over my shock and come to the conclusion that it was best to keep the news to myself.’

  She snorts. ‘I don’t believe you. I don’t think you were shocked at all. You were probably expecting the call. Praying it would come to you and not me. Or maybe you phoned them, is that it? I know you’d already told them you were the primary contact, not me. You were covering your tracks, Vic, admit it. You did a damn good job of it, as well.’

  He stares at her, horrified. ‘What are you talking about? This is madness.’

  ‘Don’t you dare.’ She is almost snarling now. ‘Don’t you dare gaslight me. As I tried to tell you on the phone before you swore at me, I met that investor guy, James Ratcliffe. He told me Kieran had to disappear because he was tipped off that someone was planning to kill him.’

  Though the sun now emerges from cloud, turning the path a dazzling white, there is a chill on Vic’s skin.

  ‘And you know who I think tipped him off, Vic? You.’

  ‘Fuck off!’ Fear makes him coarse. ‘Why the hell would I do that?’

  ‘You tell me! But if I had to guess, I’d say you lost your nerve. I think right at the last minute you got cold feet and it was too late to call it off and so you somehow sent word to him. Please, just tell me the truth. It’s despicable to treat me like this.’

  To his disgust, he feels tears rising, as if he is a child getting a dressing down from a teacher. Because she is so terribly, profoundly disappointed in him. ‘Can we sit down?’ he says, blinking, and Ellen gestures to an unoccupied bench on the hill above the lake.

  They climb up in silence and sit far enough apart that a third person could fit between them. Who is the third person, he thinks? Lucas? Or Kieran?

  Below, the reflection of the treeline in the still, silvery water is looking-glass-perfect.

  ‘Why did you change your mind?’ she says at last, very quietly, and he exhales a long stream of fear and regret, guilt and relief.

  ‘Because I couldn’t live with it. I couldn’t eat or sleep or work. I talked to Danny and—’

  She interrupts: ‘Hang on, you said we couldn’t speak to Danny about it. You said once it was in motion, we had to act like it had never happened, even with each other. You made me swear!’

  She’s right, he remembers it clearly. Her face wrung with passion as he extracted her vow. ‘I know. But I had to talk to him, I was having a massive fucking crisis, Ellen. I needed to see if it was too late to back out.’

  ‘And it was, I assume.’

  ‘Yes, so I tipped Kieran off instead. I told him there was some crazy person who wanted him dead.’ Vic groans. ‘He was supposed to leave London. He was supposed to fuck off to Scotland or somewhere – for good. Anywhere but here.’

  Only as he watches her absorb this – the idea that if Kieran had settled somewhere far flung, she might have lived a lie to the end – does he rec
ognize the immensity of his actions. The full extent of his fraud. Ignorance is bliss: people trot out that maxim all the time, but that doesn’t make it true. Sometimes, keeping someone in the dark is plain wicked.

  ‘He did go to Scotland,’ Ellen says. ‘Glasgow. But only for a while. Then he got in touch with this Ratcliffe guy and came back. I got the impression they don’t suspect us of having anything to do with the death threat, but maybe you know differently?’

  ‘I have no way of knowing,’ Vic says, ‘but I would doubt it.’

  ‘So who did he think was after him? What did you say to him, exactly? What crazy person did he think you were talking about?’

  Vic shrugs. ‘Take your pick, just one of those weirdos who came out of the woodwork during the campaign and then got obsessed. All that “bring back hanging” stuff. I made it clear there was no personal connection to us, obviously. To be honest, I was lucky he believed me. I really wasn’t sure he would.’

  ‘Lucky?’

  The word is hissed and scornful, stirring indignation beneath his guilt. Though her fury is predictable, it confounds him that she can’t see the fundamental reality of the situation: plotting to kill a man is the crime here, not calling it off! He wants to shake her and make her listen, listen properly, but how would that look to the woman with the retriever who’s just drifted into range? A man abusing his wife? She’d pocket that tennis ball and call 999.

  He sits on his hands and addresses her in a level tone. ‘Yes, Ellen, lucky. You need to see this as good news for you. It means you didn’t commit a horrific crime, you’re not a monster. Now you can get on with your life with your lovely family and be grateful you’re the decent, law-abiding person they always thought you were.’

  It’s too much to expect the miracle of agreement and he braces himself for the lashing he deserves for applying the word ‘monster’ to anyone except Kieran Watts. But that isn’t what happens. Instead, she is silent, seeming to harness her emotions, intensify her focus.

  ‘The contract is still live then,’ she says, finally.

  He is taken aback. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, all my theories about them botching the job were wrong. He disappeared before they could do it, and they would probably still honour it if we told them where to find him.’ There is a flush of colour on her exposed collarbone as inspiration strikes. ‘Think how easy it would be, much easier than before. They’d just need to trick their way into his building and he’d be right there, a sitting duck.’

  Vic gapes at her, appalled.

  ‘I take it you didn’t get onto Danny when I asked you to?’ she continues, suddenly all business. ‘About the money?’

  He finds his tongue again. ‘No. I told you, we’re not going to be able to get hold of them now. It’s been way too long.’

  ‘Two and a half years isn’t that long.’

  ‘Of course it is! People like that change their phone numbers constantly, probably even their centre of operations, as well. We thought they were Albanian, didn’t we? I bet they’ve upped sticks and gone home, what with Brexit and everything.’

  ‘Albania isn’t in the EU,’ she says and sighs as if he’s being deliberately obstructive over petty details. As if this isn’t murder they’re talking about. Seriously, he’s in awe of his previous self, the Vic who humoured this lunacy. And yet… And yet, he understands. Lucas was the love of her life. The love of his. He knows that what she wants is not for Kieran to be dead but for Lucas to be alive.

  ‘I don’t know what else to say,’ he says, truthfully.

  ‘Fine, it doesn’t matter. If you don’t want to be involved, I would never force you. I’ll ask Danny myself.’ She springs to her feet, her bag slapping against her hip. ‘It goes without saying that if you tell anyone about this conversation, or anything to do with this, I’ll deny it. I’ll deny everything, just like we always agreed.’

  ‘Of course.’ Determined not to call after her as she hurries away, Vic concentrates on a pair of spaniels circling an ancient oak in the distance, heads raised to whatever they’ve detected above. A squirrel, probably.

  Lucas could never spell ‘squirrel’, he remembers.

  When the dogs and their owner have moved on, he continues to sit there, scratching his neck, kicking the toe of one boot against the heel of the other. Trying to figure out what just happened and what might happen next. What did she say? He’d be right there, a sitting duck… If he has been in any doubt before that her passion for vengeance has been reignited, he isn’t now. There was some crazy person who wanted him dead. It pains him to say it, but there still is.

  He digs in his pocket for his phone. He needs to get to Danny before she does.

  Vic

  Then

  It wasn’t until Lucas started in the sixth form and Kieran Watts announced himself on the scene that Vic found himself implicated in the micro-parenting approach that Ellen had long subscribed to. Though he said so himself, he thought he’d done a pretty good job of managing her since their split, honing a strategy that had come to work so well he was tempted to put it in a document and email it to Justin.

  Then again, it was a lot easier to humour someone’s neuroses from afar than it was from the same room.

  The basic premise was this: collude to win. Whatever Lucas’s or anyone else’s failing, however spurious it struck you, you had to be sure to agree with her – and agree with heart. Never challenge when the outrage was at its hottest. Meanwhile, offer a safe place for Lucas to let off steam and wait for her to be the one to make the compromise or the concession you’d had in mind from the start.

  Because she always did. Ellen was, fundamentally, a good person. A fine one, even. Only when it came to Kieran did she have the ability to disengage from mercy, from the humane and enlightened part of her that most people were more accustomed to. Which meant, when she began phoning Vic every other day to consult, update, complain – mainly complain – he needed to pay more attention.

  ‘He was supposed to be finishing his history essay, but he went out with that Kieran…’

  ‘He came back from the party with that Kieran and I could tell he’d been smoking weed…’

  Somewhere along the line, ‘that Kieran’ became ‘that druggie’, ‘that wastrel’, ‘that delinquent’ and, eventually, ‘that monster’. (She was a one-woman thesaurus, Ellen.) But what set this challenge apart from others involving undesirable influence on her firstborn was how quickly the focus widened to include Ellen herself:

  ‘The way he looks at me, it’s unsettling…’

  ‘I really think if we were on our own, just me and him, he could turn violent…’

  ‘Don’t say anything to Lucas, but I’m going to have a word with…’

  There were dozens of people she hoped to appeal to: the staff at Foxwell, the police, the social services, the foster mum (‘She’s very nice, Prisca, but she obviously doesn’t have a clue what a monster he is’), even a friend of a friend whose son was hopelessly addicted to skunk and now languished in a room above the garage, his brain wrecked and useless.

  What Justin made of it, Vic could only guess, but Vic’s girlfriend at the time, Yazmin, was unambiguous in her view. ‘If you’re going to spend the whole night on the phone to her about Kierangate, I might as well just fuck off home,’ she told him, scowling.

  * * *

  For what it was worth, Vic didn’t share Ellen’s view that the boy had been born evil, only that his life circumstances had produced a uniquely careless individual. Kieran was as impressionable as he was influential, in Vic’s opinion. For instance, he had a stupid gangster way of speaking that you’d expect from a much younger kid – roadman, they called it. ‘Thought they wuz gunna G-check me, I was shook,’ he would say, as if arriving from some notorious sink estate and not the cosy semi provided for him by the caring and sensible Prisca.

  But it didn’t matter how juvenile Vic judged his act to be, Lucas still thought this particular ‘homie’ in his ‘mande
m’ was wonderful. A policy to ban him from both homes was soon instituted.

  ‘Fine with me,’ Vic said to Ellen. ‘Good call.’ Collude to win.

  Sure enough, following discussions about the dangers of driving Lucas deeper into Kieran’s orbit, Vic was once again free to welcome the devil to Shannon Way. Lucas’s girlfriend Jade would be there too and the three of them would sit on the sofa with the rolling heads and stupid eyes of kids newly committed to drinking and smoking. Vic would make them something to eat, tell them to keep it real (that dated him) and then go and meet Danny or a mate in the pub. Give them space, basically.

  ‘Thank you so much, Vic,’ Jade would say, as he bade them goodbye. Her voice was rough-grained, as if she had a permanent sore throat (Kieran had an unexpected voice too, a rumbling baritone. By contrast, Lucas’s was as sweet and clear as a choirboy’s).

  Meanwhile, Ellen tried hard to pitch the two friends against each other, and none too subtly at that. Where Jade got invited on the Saints’ three-week holiday to Crete, it went without saying that Ellen would sooner lie naked on the runway than take Kieran. It rained relentlessly in England while they were away and Vic imagined the kid with Prisca in a rain-lashed caravan park in Margate – if that – and felt bad for him.

  As the dynamic ripened, Vic’s impression was less of Jade and Kieran competing for Lucas as of Lucas and Kieran competing for Jade. There was one night he remembered particularly. It was after the holiday and they were back at school – that was right, it was around the time Lucas was doing his uni applications. The Oxbridge deadline had come and gone and though Ellen claimed it was for the best, Vic knew she was crushed. Not only was Lucas naturally academic, but he also had the pretty-boy looks that photographed so well in an ancient quad or on the emerald-green banks of the River Cam.

  When Vic had left the flat that night, it had just been Lucas and Jade, sitting in front of the TV with beers, laughing and taking the piss, but when he returned the tableau had altered. R&B pulsed through the rooms, its lyrics egotistical and, frankly, illegal. Lucas was nowhere to be seen (it transpired he had passed out in the bedroom), and Kieran and Jade were on the floor by the sofa. At first, Vic thought they were just mucking around, but one glimpse of Kieran’s body grinding away on top of Jade’s and he quickly upgraded the observation to their having sex – entirely consensual, judging by the female groans he now identified as being distinct from those layered into the music. Unsure of the right course of action, he hung back, feeling like some sordid voyeur. Then he remembered that trick of re-opening and closing the front door, which he duly did, as noisily as he could, before heading straight into the kitchen and swinging open the fridge violently enough to make all the lager bottles chink together. Such stage antics must have broken the pair’s illicit rapture, because when he went back into the living room, the music had been cut and they were in their coats, saying a mini cab was waiting outside.