The Heights

by Louise Candlish

‘I meant I’ll tell her,’ Kieran says. ‘I’ll tell her and then she has to go. Go for good.’

  ‘Tell her…?’ Vic thinks straight away of Jade, what she confided that day outside his flat on Shannon Way, her hair a rippling pink river, her eyes swollen with sorrow. ‘You mean about Jade?’

  Kieran’s pale face darkens. ‘I mean what happened the night of the accident. There’s something important you don’t know.’

  ‘You mean you remember?’ Ellen’s voice shatters over them and, as they turn together, she pulls the gun upwards, pointing somewhere between the two men at about hip height. ‘Then fucking spit it out, you freak! What is this important thing we don’t know?’

  And, for the first time since Vic arrived, Kieran acknowledges her directly. He lowers his shoulders, grips his hands together, and looks right at her.

  ‘I wasn’t the one driving that night,’ he says. ‘Lucas was.’

  Vic

  19 December 2019

  What? Vic stares at Kieran, stunned, his heart backfiring. That wasn’t what Jade told him. Aware of Ellen groaning heavily behind him, he turns to check she isn’t about to collapse. Even in the dimness, she is hard to look at, emotions crossing her face like creatures in flight: bewilderment, indignation, blackest rage.

  ‘Liar!’ Her voice comes at them in a violent shriek, and it seems to Vic she has forgotten what she has in her hand and wants to run at Kieran and attack him with her own body. But she is visibly battling her fear of the edge.

  ‘Stay there,’ he tells her as calmly as he can, and then, to Kieran, ‘Don’t talk rubbish. Lucas couldn’t drive. He’d only had a couple of lessons, he was nowhere near taking his test.’

  ‘That didn’t bother him,’ Kieran says. ‘He knew enough. He drove my car loads of times.’

  ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Ellen cries and both men recoil as she gestures again with the gun.

  Vic moves smoothly towards her. ‘Let me handle this. Put that in your bag while we talk, yeah?’ He reaches for her arm, steers it back towards the gaping bag at her side. He doesn’t dare attempt to wrest it from her, he can’t risk her discharging it in panic or incompetence. Meanwhile, he tries to digest this claim of Kieran’s, to think it through for Ellen as well as for himself.

  ‘He couldn’t have been driving,’ he says flatly. ‘He was in the passenger seat when he was found, not the driver’s seat.’

  Kieran nods. ‘He was in the passenger seat, yeah, that’s right, because I pulled him into it. The car was blocked on the driver’s side and the only way out was through my window, on the passenger side.’

  Nausea rises in Vic’s gullet as Ellen reacts with furious disbelief. ‘Interesting how you only remember you weren’t the one driving now, right when it’s time to plead for your life.’

  ‘She’s right, it makes no sense,’ Vic tells Kieran. ‘Why would you say it was you if it wasn’t? No one in their right mind would want to be put away for a crime they hadn’t committed.’

  ‘Because I couldn’t remember. Not then, not for ages. I couldn’t remember anything from the time we left the flat.’ Kieran is becoming distressed. A vein pulses by his left eye, a living thing under the skin, and he paws at his hair. ‘When I was told he was in the passenger seat and I was driving, I thought it must be right. It was my car.’

  ‘But you remembered differently – when?’ Vic prompts.

  ‘I learned about all these different therapies at Danstone, stuff that can retrieve memories, so when I was out and had some money, I had hypnotherapy. I remembered that Lucas was the one driving.’

  ‘Total crap,’ Ellen says. ‘The police checked CCTV footage, I remember it clearly. You were seen driving down Portland Road. You at the wheel. Don’t listen to this bullshit, Vic.’

  ‘I was driving when we left, that’s true,’ Kieran says. ‘We switched when we got out of town. He was begging me to let him take over. Like I say, he’d done it before. No cameras, no other traffic, at least not much. It was just supposed to be a laugh.’

  ‘Then what happened?’ Vic demands. ‘He was driving and then what?’

  ‘We started arguing. I told him something I shouldn’t have, not then, not when he was driving. He took it badly.’

  ‘You told him what?’ But this is the one question Vic can answer himself. ‘That you and Jade were together, right? That’s why she finished with Lucas, wasn’t it? You’d gone up to Durham to see her and you decided you wanted to be together.’

  ‘I don’t believe that for a second,’ Ellen says.

  ‘It’s true, Ellen. Jade told me that much herself.’ She’d wept when she told Vic, the secret she’d been keeping for years.

  ‘There’s no way Jade would choose him over Lucas,’ Ellen snaps. She returns her glare to Kieran. ‘I suppose you’ve poisoned Freya with these lies as well, have you?’

  Kieran’s manner grows more combative. ‘If anyone’s lying here it’s you. You don’t even know it. You only want the memory that suits you. You don’t want to know your precious boy was off his head the whole time. You don’t want to know Jade couldn’t cope with him and wanted to be with me. That time you came screaming at me in that car park, I was there because he was meeting some dealer to get ket! He asked me to pick him up so he wouldn’t have to get public transport with the stuff on him.’

  ‘Lucas wasn’t even there, you—’

  ‘He was fucking five minutes away! But you don’t want to hear it, do you? You don’t want to hear he was a nutcase who drove a car off the road and killed himself. Almost killed me while he was at it! He rang her, you know.’ Kieran says this with a bitter triumph. ‘He rang her from the car. He didn’t believe me when I told him. That’s why he drove off the road, he was on the phone to her, to my girlfriend.’

  There is an appalled silence. Vic is speechless: Jade had told him there’d been a phone call during which the boys had been arguing, but not that it was actually in progress when the car went off the road. Perhaps she hadn’t understood what was happening. She’d imagined a drama, not a tragedy. Not, as Kieran called it, a laugh.

  ‘If all of this is true, then it makes what you did even worse,’ he tells Kieran. ‘You took your friend’s girlfriend and chose the worst possible time to tell him – after he’d taken drugs and was driving a car he wasn’t qualified to operate. He must have been completely out of control and yet you watched him make a phone call, you argued while he was speaking, you allowed it to happen.’

  For the first time, Ellen takes a step onto the terrace. ‘I want to know what happened underwater, Kieran. You just said you pulled Lucas into the passenger side. How was there room for you both, I don’t understand. Tell me. I need to know.’

  Kieran’s fingers are in his hair again, a ceaseless simian fiddling. He speaks in a gush, as if channelling the memory for the first time: ‘The only window that was open was mine, because I’d been smoking while he was on the phone, and I knew that was the only way we could get out. I undid his seatbelt and tried to pull him with me, but there was hardly any space and I worked out I had to squeeze out first and then reach back in. I got him over the gear stick and into the passenger side, but he was unconscious and he couldn’t do anything to help. The water was pouring in and I couldn’t keep going, it was so cold and my clothes were weighing me down. My shoulder wasn’t moving properly. I had to get to the surface, I didn’t know how deep we were, how far I’d have to swim.’

  Though Vic can hardly bear to hear it, Ellen remains rapt. ‘The police said Lucas survived for almost thirty minutes, he could still have been pulled out of there if you’d got help.’

  ‘I did help!’ Kieran protests. ‘I just said, I—’

  She cuts him off. ‘Not in the car, that was instinct, you’ve just explained. I mean when you were out. Why didn’t you call for help? Did that come back to you in your hypnotherapy?’

  Kieran flinches. ‘I didn’t have my phone. It came out of my pocket when I was swimming, probably. It wa
sn’t ever found.’

  It seems to Vic that there is an unnatural dip to these last words, a false note. ‘The police dragged that whole section of the water,’ he says. ‘They’d have found it if it’d just got pulled out of your pocket. Lucas’s was in the car. Where was yours, Kieran?’

  How can you describe the flicker of recognition when a truth is exposed, that split second before its owner smothers it? Vic can’t, but he knows he is seeing it now in Kieran’s face. ‘Oh, God, that phone call between Lucas and Jade. Whatever they were saying, you didn’t like it, did you? I bet he was asking her to change her mind, go back to him. It didn’t sound like good news for you, did it? That’s why you didn’t help. You started to think it through; you were thinking, as long as he was still around, there was a chance you’d lose Jade. And all the time, he was down there, alive, completely at your mercy.’

  Vic falters then, his brain snagging on something he’s missed. Something crucial, not to do with phones or calls for help, but the seatbelt. Both seatbelts had been disengaged, this has been undisputed information all along. But before this new account of Kieran’s, the theory has always been that Lucas, restrained in the passenger seat, had regained consciousness and unbuckled his own seatbelt. It has been the sole reason to believe he did regain consciousness. Does Kieran’s revelation mean Lucas was unconscious the whole time? That the terror Vic and Ellen imagined him experiencing in his final minutes, that primitive horror of being aware of your own death… it didn’t ever happen?

  He hears himself cry out, feels his blood speeding faster through his veins. ‘You still had your phone, didn’t you, when you got out? They still work, if they’ve been in the water a few minutes. What did you do with it? Tell me right now or I swear I’ll take that gun from her and shoot you myself.’

  Something dissolves in Kieran’s eyes then; something fractures in his mind and releases a final spurt of defiance. ‘You really want to know? All of that, yeah. Everything you just said. I had my phone and I could see it was still working. I knew I was too injured to go back down and I had to phone for help instead. And I thought, no, fuck him. He’s bad news. Jade and me, we don’t need him. So I threw it as far as I could, out into the middle of the water. That’s why they didn’t find it.’

  As Ellen lets out a roar – a truly awful sound of agony, goading, exhortation – Vic feels the energy of it power his body. He puts his face right up to Kieran’s and snarls like an animal. ‘You useless cunt. You evil bastard.’

  Kieran starts to sob, pleading through the tears and phlegm. ‘I was wrong, I shouldn’t have done it. I’m sorry, I’m really sorry.’

  ‘No, you’re not. But you will be.’ And Vic drags him back to the balustrade, takes his writhing body with its kicking legs and punching fists and heaves him over the top.

  For one sublime moment, it feels illusory, the act of a magician: one second there is a groaning, resisting human being in his grip, the next there is absence, silence. Until, one long beat later, there comes the sound of something very heavy hitting the walkway.

  Not so much a smack as a clang. A hammer hitting a bell.

  Vic

  19 December 2019

  ‘Vic!’ Ellen’s cry reaches him at a delay, as if she is on the other end of a long-distance call, thousands of miles away. Then, as her voice fades, something new advances: a change of energy in the building, a collective horror. All those people crammed by the open window five floors below, someone must have seen the falling man. Some will have heard the smack of his impact on the walkway, felt its vibrations. They’ll be crowding to the window to peer down, right now they’ll be doing this, as he and Ellen stand on the roof, magnetized by each other’s shock.

  What has he done?

  ‘Vic, come back in.’ She’s retreated back inside the doorway and gestures frantically for him to join her.

  ‘Go,’ he hisses at her. ‘And for fuck’s sake, get rid of that gun. Chuck it in the river or something. Make sure no one sees you.’

  ‘No, you go, Vic.’

  ‘What? Don’t be crazy. This is on me. You saw what I did. Go, Ellen. You weren’t ever here!’

  ‘No, I said you, Vic.’ She is behind him now and there is something small and very painful boring into his back, pushing him across the mezzanine towards the spiral. ‘Take the stairs, then go out through the fire door to the street. Everyone will be on the other side, by the water.’

  ‘Don’t be crazy—’

  ‘I’m serious, Vic. You’ve got the baby coming. Get India to say you’ve been at home all night. Will she do that? Or get Danny to. He’ll cover for you.’

  ‘I can’t let you,’ he protests, but they’re at the top of the spiral now and she’s forcing him down. The thing in his back is the gun.

  ‘You can let me,’ she says. ‘I’ll be treated differently. I’m the one with the doctors’ notes, the medical history. I’m the one who wanted this, not you.’

  ‘But what about Freya…?’

  ‘She has Justin. Go, Vic, you have about ten seconds before it’s too late.’

  He’s at the foot of the spiral now. He turns and takes a last look at her face, the face that in the nineteen years of Lucas’s life never once resembled his and yet somehow, just this one time, in this crucial moment, does.

  And then he puts one foot in front of the other and he runs.

  Acknowledgements

  The Heights was written in a year of lockdowns owing to the Covid-19 pandemic, and, reading it again, I detect a particular kind of determination in Ellen’s attempt to control her narrative, a control that none of us have had during this period. Publishing it has involved a superlative WFH effort from the team at S&S UK – Ian, Sara-Jade, Jess, Alice, Hayley, Gill, Maddie, Dom, Rich, Joe and Rachel – and I’d like to say a huge and heartfelt thank you to you all. Special thanks go to my brilliant, creative and always so kind editor, Suzanne Baboneau – our lunch in September 2020 was a true lockdown highlight!

  Thank you to Pip Watkins for another beautiful cover and to Susan Opie and Madeleine Hamey-Thomas for a brilliant copyedit and proofread respectively.

  Thank you also to Loan Le, Libby McGuire and all the team at S&S US, who will publish the book a little later.

  Sheila Crowley and team Curtis Brown have been incredible in WFH mode; ‘beyond the call of duty’ doesn’t do it justice. Thank you so much, Sheila, Sabhbh, Emily, Luke, Anna, Kate, Callum and all the gang.

  Thank you also to all the booksellers, librarians, bloggers and reviewers who have somehow triumphed in adversity. Not to mention readers – the point of it all.

  Thank you to Andrew at Into the Breach for invaluable research.

  The character of Prisca was named following an auction by the 2020 Good Books campaign at CLIC Sargent (her surname, Evans, is fictitious). The real Prisca bears no physical resemblance to her namesake (so I hope she doesn’t think I think she looks like a grandma in knock-off UGGs!) but I wanted to give her a substantial character in the story – not to mention the accolade of being one of my rare unambiguous good guys.

  A note about inspiration for this book. As usual, I began with the themes I wanted to explore – revenge; the (un)reliability of crime memoir; the condition high place phenomenon; and the particular horror of a Chappaquiddick form of accidental death. As I plotted, I also found myself thinking about the 2001 movie In the Bedroom. Directed by Todd Field and starring Sissy Spacek and Tom Wilkinson as grieving parents, it’s a wonderful film, both understated and devastating, and must have stayed with me across the years. If you know it, you might hear its echoes in The Heights. If you haven’t ever seen it, I recommend it.

  More from the Author

  The Skylight

  The Other Passenger

  Those People

  Our House

  Also by Louise Candlish

  The Other Passenger

  Those People

  Our House

  The Swimming Pool

  The Sudden Dep
arture of the Frasers

  The Disappearance of Emily Marr

  The Island Hideaway

  The Day You Saved My Life

  Other People’s Secrets

  Before We Say Goodbye

  I’ll Be There For You

  The Second Husband

  Since I Don’t Have You

  The Double Life of Anna Day

  Novellas

  The Skylight

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  First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2021

  Copyright © Louise Candlish, 2021

  The right of Louise Candlish to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library

  Hardback ISBN: 978-1-4711-8348-5

  Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4711-8349-2

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-3985-1028-9

  Audio ISBN: 978-1-4711-8454-3

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.