Our House

by Louise Candlish

  I reminded myself that I was a free man, like I’d told Rog.

  Free so long as I didn’t think about the thing (still the ‘thing’; it hadn’t reverted to the ‘horror’). As I perched there at the kitchen counter next to Wendy, it struck me as so simple I didn’t know how it hadn’t occurred before: just don’t think about it. Not so much denial as rejection. Selective amnesia.

  ‘You look very happy about something all of a sudden,’ Wendy said, amused. Placing the used mug in the sink, she added, very casually: ‘You have no idea, do you?’

  ‘No idea about what?’ I said.

  ‘That I saw you.’

  ‘What, at the farmers’ market? Of course I know. We discussed it last night, don’t you remember? How our eyes met over the artisanal scotch eggs.’ I marvelled at my own jocularity.

  ‘Not there,’ she said, watching me. ‘Silver Road.’

  I went completely cold, as if I’d been shoved overboard into the Atlantic in December. ‘What did you just say?’

  ‘I said Silver Road.’ Her gaze over the top of her coffee mug was sly, nerveless. ‘I saw the crash, Bram.’

  ‘What crash?’ It was miraculous that I was still intelligible, when my internal organs were in seizure.

  ‘Come on, don’t give me that. They’re still in intensive care, I’m sure you’ve followed the news and heard about the police investigation.’ Then, in the same light tone, so light as to be sinister: ‘Actually, there was a detective there when I dropped by the hospital, but I don’t think they were in any state to be interviewed. Both on ventilators,’ she added, and the insincerity in her frown was unmissable. It bordered on glee.

  Slow to recover, I sounded foolish when I asked, ‘I thought you said you lived in Beckenham?’

  ‘I do. I was at my cousin’s place. She lives about halfway down Silver Road. Her living room window is right on the street, so I had a front-row seat.’

  There was the sensation of piranhas fighting in my Atlantic depths: it was all I could do not to double over. ‘And you thought you saw some sort of an incident, did you?’

  She chuckled. ‘Nice phrasing. All right, I “thought” I heard crazy-loud accelerating and I looked out of the window and “thought” I saw two cars racing and then a Fiat plough into a parked car and smash into a house. Then I “thought” I saw you driving away in an Audi. A black A3. I didn’t catch the full registration but I got the first few letters.’ She moved to observe me from a side angle. ‘You’re a great-looking guy, Bram. I’m pretty sure I’d be able to recognize your profile in a line up.’

  There was silence between us as I struggled to hear my own thoughts over the banging of my heart. ‘There’s no way you’d be able to recognize someone from the distance you’re describing,’ I said, finally, but I’d been well and truly trapped. Had she followed me home that evening? Studied my face as I exited the car and scurried to my front door? Taken photos of me like some sort of stalker? Clearly, our encounter in the pub had been no coincidence. The friend on Engleby Close she’d been with, did she even exist? ‘This cousin of yours on Silver Road, did she see this as well?’

  ‘No, she was in another room. Don’t worry, I didn’t tell her I’d seen you.’

  Don’t worry? ‘Why were you at the hospital?’

  ‘Just interested. You know how it is, you’re just drawn there.’

  As I had been. ‘Did you . . . did you speak to the detective you saw?’

  If she had, then there’d been a delay, possibly, in my having been apprehended because the car was registered to Trinity Avenue. The police had called there, perhaps, when no one was home. I had a very clear picture of myself fleeing, of leaving the flat right now and making my way to Heathrow.

  When she shook her head, I relaxed a fraction, summoned the old Bram bravado. ‘Well, Wendy, then it sounds like we’re guilty of the same thing. Neither of us reported something we know we probably ought to have.’

  There was a sudden sharpening of her features. ‘Oh, I don’t think we’re guilty of the same thing at all, Bram. It wasn’t my dangerous driving that put two people on life support.’

  Her words rained on me as brutal as a rockfall and yet she was very cool, unnaturally so. If she really thought I was capable of a violent rampage like that, why wasn’t she frightened I’d attack her here? She must have texted someone the address, I thought.

  I became aware of a wild, accelerating rage displacing the fear, a perilous leap in body temperature. ‘Since you seem so clear about what happened, why don’t you go after the other driver, the bastard who really caused the crash?’

  ‘Oh, come off it,’ she said, ‘you were the one in the wrong lane.’

  ‘Only because he wouldn’t let me back in the right one! If the Fiat hadn’t swerved, we’d have smashed headlong and we’d all be dead.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have been overtaking him. You were speeding when you tried to get around him, you can’t deny that.’

  I said nothing.

  ‘So you did cause the crash? Come on, Bram, I was there.’

  ‘Of course I fucking did. I told you I had no choice! Because of him!’

  It was an admission of guilt and I hastened to smother it with a show of aggression: ‘I’d like to know why you don’t find him and spring this shit on him ten minutes after getting out of his bed?’

  ‘Maybe I will,’ she said, agreeably, and put down her coffee mug.

  Will, she said, not already have. It was all very well arguing that Toyota Man and I were equally at fault, but I was the one whose car had been semi-identified in the news reports.

  It was clear she was preparing me for some sort of blackmail demand.

  She stepped around me and reached for her jacket, a cheap denim thing she’d flung onto an armchair last night. I remembered the painful suction of her mouth on mine. ‘So I thought we might do business,’ she said.

  As I’d suspected. ‘Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you, Wendy, but I don’t have any money to do business with. Seriously, I’m broke. I can show you my latest bank statement if you like?’

  She shook her head, a grim smile on her lips. ‘Come on, you’ve got that big house on Trinity Avenue.’

  I recalled the way she’d pulled me in its direction the previous night. She must have followed me on the evening of the crash. I hadn’t questioned it; I’d been thinking about getting her into bed. Thinking she was exactly the simple, no-strings partner I needed for the night.

  She continued undaunted: ‘You can afford this place as well. That’s two properties in this posh area. You’ve obviously got cash.’

  ‘I don’t, I’m telling you. I’m going through a divorce.’ Not technically true – yet – but what did that matter?

  ‘Even so.’ In a sudden move, she placed warm fingers on my wrist and I recoiled.

  ‘Don’t touch me!’

  ‘Hey, don’t be like that.’ She withdrew the hand, used it to smooth her hair, touch her mouth, as if she had all the time in the world to indulge me my foibles. ‘Since we’re going to be involved for a while, we might as well get some pleasure out of it. I really enjoyed last night. I thought you did too.’

  I was at a loss as to how to respond. If her aim from the start had been to extort money, I could not see why she had needed to sleep with me. There had been no need for a honeytrap, she could have delivered her cowardly message in the pub. ‘I want you to leave, Wendy. Is that even your real name?’

  ‘Wow, you are paranoid.’

  ‘What’s the name of the company you work for? You said it was commercial cleaning services? Which department are you?’

  ‘Why?’ She laughed. ‘You going to complain to my manager?’

  She knew full well I couldn’t complain to anyone. I couldn’t breathe a word to a soul about this squalid little episode.

  ‘You going to tell him I didn’t report a crime?’ she taunted. ‘Maybe I didn’t realize it was serious until I read about it in the paper? Maybe it was only when I sa
w you in the pub last night that it triggered my memory of a hit and run?’

  ‘It wasn’t a hit and run,’ I snapped.

  ‘As good as. As bad as.’

  ‘No, it was an accident, that’s all.’

  That’s all. The words startled us both and there was a pause, a moment of shared honesty, maybe even disgrace.

  ‘Whoever you are,’ I said, ‘and whatever you mistakenly think you’ve seen, you’ve got the wrong man. Please don’t contact me ever again.’

  Any confidence gained or expressed by this punchy little display was short-lived, for the look she gave me as she left was full of exaggerated regret. ‘Sorry, Bram, you don’t get out of it that easily.’

  19

  ‘Fi’s Story’ > 01:20:33

  Did hearing about his liaison with someone new make me nostalgic for how it was between us in the beginning?

  You’ll have to forgive me, but I prefer not to think about that now, the ‘before’. Before the boys, before the house, before our life in Alder Rise. The bit they call falling in love, though no one ever really falls, do they? In reality, half of us seek, reach, climb; the other half simply stand still in surrender.

  I say that, realist that I am, but then an image will surface before I can stop it, an image that defies cynicism and persuades me we were the exceptions: the two of us in a crowded West End bar – our first date – eyes too fascinated by each other to stray to the hundreds of other faces; or an aerial view of a car speeding through the emerald English countryside – our first holiday together – too fast and yet never fast enough.

  You don’t need to point out the irony of that. The fact that it was the speed, the rush of the headlong, that got me addicted. The sense of lives colliding.

  There’s another image from the beginning, a more painful one: a female figure cartwheeling on a California beach, her long hair touching the sand. A new wife, married after less than a year of knowing him, coming upright to find her husband unbuttoning his shirt, staring out to sea, as if he intends to swim and swim, leaving his vows on the shore with his clothes.

  Crazy, really, to have ever imagined that a wife and children could be anything but shackles to a man like Bram.

  Bram, Word document

  This afternoon I got close. I almost did it, even though I’ve hardly started my story and I’ve committed myself to telling it in full before I act. But you forget how you get ambushed by music here, because the radio stations love their nostalgia and there’s always the potential for an old song that stirs memories you don’t want stirred. ‘Our’ songs when there isn’t any ‘our’ any more. And they were playing that song ‘Big Sur’, a hit when Fi and I started going out. Maybe it was played at our wedding, I don’t remember, but we had our honeymoon in California and drove to Big Sur to see the famous coastline for ourselves. Listening to the song, I could picture myself so clearly on the cliff’s edge, the Pacific monstrous and baying below, ready to smother a million times over the pain of my past. And I thought, since it was all utterly meaningless, why bother leaving my statement behind? Why not go back to my miserable little room and end my life right now, let my version of events die with me? Sitting there, I could feel my toes twitching in my shoes; I could feel the balls of my feet rocking forwards.

  Jump, Bram.

  20

  Friday, 13 January 2017

  London, 2 p.m.

  Lucy Vaughan’s husband David is a solid, fair-skinned man of about forty, his powers of leadership evident the moment he enters the house, his air of ownership. No sooner has he dissuaded Merle from phoning the police than he is making the calls he clearly thinks Lucy should have made the moment it became clear that allegations of a legal – and possibly financial – catastrophe have been made. If it angers him that neither his solicitor nor estate agent is immediately available, he does not show it. Colleagues of both proffer the ‘strange misunderstanding’ theory, he reports, and promise urgent returns of call.

  ‘Well, these are odd circumstances in which to meet,’ he says to Fi. Though his speech is self-assured, he regards her with perplexity, even caution.

  ‘They are,’ she says, unsmiling. It is remarkable how Merle’s presence has fortified her.

  ‘Mrs Lawson is a bit calmer now,’ Lucy tells him, as if to excuse Fi’s poor manners. ‘There was a scare about the whereabouts of her sons, but we’ve just found out they’re fine.’

  That’s the working hypothesis then: it is Fi’s interpretation of events that is at fault and not the events themselves. She isn’t on top of arrangements, she gets confused. As it has been proven with the boys, so it will with the house – and Bram is not here to support her.

  Merle, however, is. ‘Bram should have told Fi he was letting the boys miss school,’ she says. ‘Any mother would’ve had a nervous breakdown to discover that.’ She eyes Lucy sternly, as if she should be thoroughly ashamed of herself. ‘I’m guessing you don’t have children?’

  ‘Not yet,’ Lucy says.

  ‘Then you’ll have to take my word for it that there is no more terrifying a thought than their going missing. Now, I’m sure Fi is very grateful for the help you’ve given her in tracking them down, but we seem to have another mystery on our hands, don’t we?’ She blazes with intensity, never more charismatic than now, and Lucy gazes at her, spellbound. ‘You obviously understand that Fi disputes this claim about the house and would like you to leave. My suggestion is you do that while we locate Bram and all the paperwork that proves he and Fi are the owners, and then we can arrange a meeting to discuss this formally, perhaps on Monday at your solicitor’s office? In terms of your—’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ David interrupts sharply, breaking Merle’s hold. ‘We’re not going anywhere. This house was sold to us fair and square.’

  ‘I think you’ll find it wasn’t,’ Merle says.

  ‘And yet we’ve had all the verifications that completion took place this morning.’ He brandishes his phone and begins scrolling for the relevant emails, just as Lucy did earlier.

  ‘They must be fake,’ Merle says, just as Fi did. ‘Don’t click on any links, will you? They could trigger Trojan malware.’

  ‘Trojan malware? What on earth are you talking about? Look . . .’ As David hands her his phone, Merle scrutinizes the screen with scepticism before passing it to Fi. Though two of the messages are those from Bennett, Stafford & Co that Lucy has already shared, a third is from another conveyancing solicitor, Graham Jenson at Dixon Boyle & Co in Crystal Palace, who confirms receipt of the funds from Emma Gilchrist’s client account. It is dated 13 January and was sent just before 11 a.m.

  ‘Dixon Boyle are the Lawsons’ solicitors,’ David tells Merle, and a burning sensation starts to spread across Fi’s chest.

  Merle, however, remains cool. ‘The Lawsons in quotation marks,’ she corrects him. ‘And I don’t see any proof of the transfer of deeds.’ Her manner is professional, as if the meeting is being monitored for official purposes and any time she fails to dispute an assertion of David’s, it will be entered into the record as fact.

  ‘That’s all done electronically,’ David says. ‘Perhaps it might be helpful if you check your bank account?’ he suggests to Fi.

  ‘If she doesn’t know anything about the sale, she’s hardly likely to have received the money,’ Merle points out, just short of scorn.

  ‘Sure, but just in case. We’d know the transaction definitely took place, even if she’s . . .’ He falters.

  Forgotten, he means. That chronic attack of amnesia she’s suffering from. But when she sees an unusually colossal deposit among the debits for train tickets and groceries and school shoes she’ll think, Oh yes, I did sell my children’s home.

  An iPad is produced, her bank’s website found, and it is all she can do to remember her customer ID and pin. At last, with David bearing down on her, she clears security.

  ‘Is it there?’

  ‘No.’ Both her own account and her joint account with Bram are untouched.


  ‘He has an individual account as well, does he?’ David persists.

  ‘Yes, but I don’t know the password for that. And his phone is out of service.’

  Merle makes a fresh bid for command. ‘As I’ve been saying since I arrived, we need to get the police over here. If Bram’s phone’s out of action, there must be something wrong.’

  ‘A phone could be off for all sorts of reasons,’ David says.

  ‘Yes.’ Merle’s attention moves between the Vaughans and Fi. ‘But since Mrs Lawson knows nothing about this, don’t you think it’s possible that Mr Lawson doesn’t either? Maybe his identity has been stolen by mobsters, Fi. Maybe he was on to them in some way and they, I don’t know, retaliated.’

  ‘Mobsters?’ Fi echoes, a deeper new shock seizing her. ‘Retaliated?’

  ‘Yes, he could have been abducted or something. Perhaps he knew he was in danger and that’s why he arranged to keep the boys at his mother’s while you were away? Maybe he’s already involved the police and you’re under their protection without realizing it?’

  ‘That all sounds a bit melodramatic,’ David says. ‘You can’t just go around passing yourself off as other people in order to sell their property. You need passports, birth certificates, proper proof of ownership. Funds of this size are checked for money laundering – there are all sorts of hoops to jump through. I know because we’ve just done it.’

  ‘Even so, I can’t think of any better explanation,’ Merle says. ‘Can you?’

  There is silence in the room, a collective sense of held breath. David glances at his wife, not yet ready to say the unsayable. Fi feels her face clenching as she struggles to keep from crying.

  ‘If you’re right, then this is horrific,’ Lucy says, finally.

  ‘It is horrific,’ Merle agrees. She turns to Fi with the air that while the Vaughans may have an interesting contribution to make, it is only Fi’s that matters. ‘If you want my opinion, Fi, we need to report an identity theft.’