Our House

by Louise Candlish

  Wendy was slower to stand, taking a moment to scope the room. Her gaze came to rest on the bed and, noticing this, Mike said, ‘Shall I go on ahead, give you two some time on your own?’

  A flash of memory of bare skin and groaning, the names she’d urged me to mutter in her ear. The thighs splaying and then gripping.

  ‘No thanks,’ I said.

  ‘Shame.’ She was right next to me, letting her fingertips touch my arm, before following Mike from the flat.

  ‘Don’t forget about the twenty K, Bram,’ Mike called.

  I watched them leave in the same way I’d watched them arrive. Judging by the easiness between them, I felt sure they’d known each other for years. Was I one in a line of victims or were they first-time grifters? Certainly, this could only be a crime of opportunity: first, at the scene, Mike had taken the photo to protect himself, and then, once establishing both my assets and liabilities, had despatched Wendy to the Two Brewers to collect any admissions of guilt I was foolish enough to make. If she fancied sleeping with me in the process, then that was her call. To them, sex was cheap, easy to give and easy to take. What was worth something was property. A house on Trinity Avenue. A once-in-a-lifetime scam.

  But it was a reckless plan by any standards. What did they know about counterfeit passports and bank accounts in Dubai? How had they intended meeting their expenses before I’d blundered in yet again with an offer of cash? They were amateurs. Clowns.

  The fact that they seemed able to run rings around me only meant I was even less intelligent than they were.

  Seriously, I should have just hurled myself off the balcony then and there.

  27

  Friday, 13 January 2017

  London, 2.30 p.m.

  ‘The police are on their way,’ Merle announces, and Fi falls silent, concentrating her energy on not trembling. The kitchen where she has cooked and eaten thousands of meals with her family and friends is no longer hers to command, but she prefers Merle over either of the Vaughans as its new ruler.

  The prospect of the arrival of the authorities has not stopped David Vaughan from continuing with his private investigations and he now ends a call to the Lawsons’ solicitors shaking his head in disbelief. ‘The guy we need to speak to has got his phone turned off while he’s at a hospital appointment. He’ll be back this afternoon.’

  Merle raises an eyebrow. ‘Let’s hope he’s getting his vision fixed. No, his whole brain.’

  The absent lawyers are becoming not only the missing links, but also the group’s scapegoats.

  ‘Well, it certainly looks like we’ve got a fraud on our hands,’ Merle goes on. ‘This will kill Bram. He’s not as strong as you, Fi.’

  ‘Hang on a minute,’ David says. He is not having this, this tendency of Merle’s to speak as if Fi’s position is the rightful default. He addresses Fi directly: ‘If you’re so sure your husband knows nothing about this, then who was the guy we met? The one who was here with the agent? I’m sure he was introduced to us as the owner. If he was some sort of impostor, then where was the real Mr Lawson? Tied up in the playhouse?’

  ‘What?’ Fi says, startled.

  ‘What does he look like, your husband? I’m serious, have you got a photo on your phone?’

  ‘Wait a minute!’ Merle pre-empts any heedless co-operation on Fi’s part: ‘You tell us what the man you met looked like.’ There is little trust in this room; all they have in common is the object of their claim.

  ‘He was good-looking, mid- to late-forties, about six foot two, dark curly hair starting to go grey,’ Lucy says. ‘He was quite restless, I thought – you know, pacing about a bit. He went to have a cigarette, didn’t he, David? He had quite an intense way of looking at you.’

  Fi stares at her, utterly chilled. Her impression is astute (women tend to notice the details of Bram), but how on earth has she come to form it?

  ‘That does sound like him,’ Merle concedes.

  Prickling with fresh dread, Fi fiddles with her phone to find a picture; she still has a couple of Bram with the boys.

  ‘Definitely him,’ the Vaughans agree.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Lucy says to David, semi-privately. ‘You think her husband cheated her?’

  ‘Bram wouldn’t do anything as evil as that,’ Merle says, with profound certainty. ‘Would he, Fi?’

  But shock has swept her in a fresh tide, making it impossible for her to follow the exchange with a rational mind.

  ‘When exactly did you meet him?’ Merle asks the Vaughans.

  ‘At one of the viewings. He was only here that once, though,’ David says. ‘The next two times it was the agent on his own. So yes, just at the open house.’

  ‘Open house?’ These two words cause the hairs on Fi’s arms to stand on end. A memory; a connection on her part, in her experience, between blameless past and treacherous present.

  Lucy turns to her, her memory jogged. ‘That’s right! You were out of town, he said. I remember now. The way he said it, I assumed you were still married.’

  We are, Fi thinks. However deep Bram’s ship has sunk, legally, financially, she goes down with it.

  Merle, however, is still clinging to the prow. ‘I’m sorry, but there’s no way there could have been an open house here without my noticing. I live two doors down.’

  ‘Well, there was,’ David says, exasperated. ‘It was a Saturday in October.’

  ‘Saturday the twenty-ninth,’ Lucy adds. It has sentimental value to her, Fi can tell. The day she first saw her dream house, her for ever home.

  As her eye meets Merle’s, she sees the beginnings of doubt in her friend’s response. ‘Kent,’ she says. ‘Half term.’ She turns to David, his features blurring through the gathering of fresh tears. ‘So you’re saying Bram was a part of this? He actively tried to sell my home?’

  ‘I’m saying he did sell it,’ David says. ‘In which case, he’s not likely to have been abducted, is he? He’s probably gone of his own accord.’

  As Fi covers her sobbing face with her hands and Merle strokes her slumped shoulders, the doorbell rings.

  ‘Let’s see what the police think,’ Merle says.

  Geneva, 3.30 p.m.

  In the hotel bathroom, he plays Nick Cave on his phone and sets about cutting his hair. The curls fall in chunks, only the dark visible on the white porcelain, the grey imperceptible. The lighting, the music, his anxiety: together they create an artificial mood, almost ceremonial, as if he’s an actor playing an outlaw and this is the scene in which he must alter his appearance, become someone else. He’s a great train robber, perhaps, or Jesse James.

  No, Samson, he thinks. He’s a more edifying point of reference. A man blessed with superhuman strength. The boys loved the children’s Bible stories gifted by Grandma Tina. Harry, in particular, relished the violence of Samson’s story: the tearing apart of a lion, the ripping of gates from their hinges with his bare hands, the slaying of a whole army (Bram remembers explaining what ‘slay’ means, following initial confusion with Santa’s sleigh).

  Having given it brief, desperate thought, he gave no clue to his mother that he was leaving. He may have no faith of his own, but he does have faith that hers will sustain her. And Fi won’t cut off contact, she is scrupulous about grandparental rights. If anything, they will close ranks, once the police reveal the extent of his crimes; they’ll prepare their assault on a shared enemy.

  All he can pray for is that they’ll temper their denunciations around Leo and Harry, that they’ll let them remember him at his best – whatever that was.

  He rakes up the shorn hair with his fingers and transfers it to the toilet for flushing. When he stands back and looks in the mirror, he is alarmed. Though he is altered, it is in an undesirable way: he looks younger, more striking, the fear in his eyes more candid and memorable. He remembers again the man by the lifts at the restaurant and he knows now that he must trust his instinct, that it is the only thing left to trust. Someone – if not that man, then anoth
er – is in Geneva, watching him, biding his time before . . . what? Forcing him back to Mike? Arresting him? Killing him?

  At once, the compulsion to be on the move overcomes him and he repacks the few items removed from his rucksack and leaves the room.

  The receptionist, at the start of her shift, has no way of knowing that his appearance has changed and makes no comment about his premature departure, his room having been paid for in cash on check-in.

  As he exits, he tries not to think of Samson’s end, how he brought down the temple, killing not only himself but everyone in it.

  28

  Bram, Word document

  Are you beginning to see how appalling it looked on paper? How trapped I felt, how terrorized? The confessed – and recorded – guilt to the Silver Road crash, the driving ban, the suspended sentence for assault, not to mention a conviction for possession . . . the last was ancient history, but what did that matter? As Mike said, it all counts when the time comes.

  Counts against me.

  I can only defend myself by saying these have been my only crimes in forty-eight years and I believe that there are very few people who haven’t committed some variation of at least one of them, even police officers themselves. Seriously, have you never gone over the speed limit? Have you never tried drugs or got a bit lairy outside a pub? I didn’t say did you get caught doing one of these; I just asked, did you do it?

  Well, I got caught for all of them. Which meant that there could be no barrister in the land convincing enough to argue that Silver Road was a one-time mistake. Not when the record showed that I was someone who was always in the wrong place at the wrong time. Doing the wrong thing.

  Okay, so the fight at the pub was pretty damn serious. I didn’t start it, but I certainly finished it: the guy was hospitalized, off work for weeks. I was lucky the sentence was suspended and that, miraculously, I managed to hide the prosecution process from Fi. I won’t go into the labyrinthine logistics of that (it helped that there were renovations going on at the house and, the boys not having started school yet, she had based herself with them at her parents’ place, leaving me to my own devices). Nor will I explain what I imagined would happen if my remorse had not convinced the court and I’d been sent down (‘Fi? I’m calling from a prison payphone. I need to tell you something . . .’)

  ‘In return for a guilty plea, was it?’ Mike said that night at the flat, his gaze voyeuristic, as if he was able to see into my soul and measure my pain. And his instinct was sharp, I’ll give him that. I would have pleaded guilty to far worse if it meant avoiding jail time. I won’t say prison is a phobia of mine, because that would make it irrational, all in the mind.

  Whereas it is rational, real. So real that I would have done anything, sacrificed anyone, to avoid it.

  ‘Fi’s Story’ > 01:37:11

  I really hope I’m not giving the impression that I allowed a new relationship to distract me from what was, in retrospect, taking place right under my nose, but I’m sure you’ll understand that it was an exciting time. We all know the beginning is the best bit – who would begrudge a woman that? Especially one whose marital breakdown had left her with no heart for anything more than beginnings.

  Even beginnings came with a level of weirdness. It was maybe our third weekend of seeing each other, the first time Toby had stayed the night at the flat, when I had a completely unexpected fight or flight reaction. Waking to find him in bed next to me, I got trapped in the delay of recognizing him, of recognizing the bed itself, the four walls around us. Why am I not in my home with my family? I thought. What is this sordid set-up? Even when my brain caught up, I was convinced I couldn’t sleep with Toby again. Not here, with Bram’s clothes in the wardrobe, his shaving gel in the bathroom, the air still fresh with the breath from his lungs. It was almost as if he were in the room with us, watching us.

  Toby stirred then, and I slipped from the bed to make coffee.

  Of course, by the time we were up and I was walking him back through the park to the station, I was myself again and he was oblivious to the episode.

  ‘So do kids not play with conkers any more?’ he said. ‘Or are they all too busy indoors bullying one another on social media and self-harming?’

  ‘Not all of them,’ I said, laughing. ‘Some still venture into the real world now and then.’ But as the spiky fruits rolled in our path, no children scampered forwards to claim them. It was possibly the most beautiful day of the month too, when the fire of autumn had not yet faded to ash. Leo and Harry should be here, I thought. ‘Maybe there’s some mass maths tutoring event I don’t know about. I’m going to get my two out here this afternoon. Enforced outdoor fun.’

  ‘Quite right.’ Toby had two almost grown-up children, Charlie and Jess, who he saw every few weeks; relations with the ex were fraught and she’d moved to the Midlands to be close to her parents.

  ‘You mustn’t have been much older than a teenager yourself when you had your kids,’ I said to him. He was in his late thirties, almost a decade younger than Bram. ‘I can’t imagine not talking about Leo and Harry the way you don’t talk about your two.’ Hearing myself, I laughed my apologies. ‘That sounds bad. What I mean is I’m impressed how you’ve let go.’

  Toby examined the path ahead. ‘Just because I don’t talk about them doesn’t mean I don’t think about them,’ he said mildly.

  ‘I know, of course. I didn’t mean you aren’t a fantastic dad.’

  ‘I’m not sure about that,’ he said, smiling. ‘You just do the best you can, don’t you?’

  ‘You do.’

  I remember thinking, Bram would fight harder than this to be in his kids’ lives. Then, Stop comparing!

  (Comparison is the thief of joy: that’s one of Merle’s favourite sayings. So true.)

  Anyway, that was when I saw them, Bram and the boys. Under a big old horse chestnut by the gates to Alder Rise Road. The boys’ hair was damp from swimming – Bram tended to forget hats – and their cheeks flushed. The wind was up and there was a sudden shower of green missiles, causing Harry to shout with excitement and throw up his hands to try to catch one. Leo, ever cautious, stepped away, but Bram pulled him back into the firing line and though he yelled in protest his face shone with excitement.

  They didn’t see me and I didn’t point them out to Toby – who was in any case easing slightly ahead of me, checking his phone – but kept the sighting to myself.

  I still think about it now sometimes, the three of them together and the way it made me feel to be watching them from across the park. It left me with an odd melancholy I didn’t know how to explain at the time, though now I think it was directly connected to that feeling I’d had in bed earlier. It was the day I let go of some last secret subconscious instinct that Bram and I might be reconcilable.

  VictimFi

  @SarahTMellor This woman is still in love with her ex #BlindinglyObvious

  @ash_buckley @SarahTMellor Don’t forget she said at the start she wanted to kill him.

  Bram, Word document

  There was a Saturday morning in October when I took the boys to the park that I think about a lot now. It was probably the last time, pre-medication, that I had the facility to clear my mind temporarily and be in the moment. I used to hate that phrase, in the moment, a bit too mindful for me, but it does describe it pretty well. As if I had no past and no future but had been transplanted to that corner of Alder Rise with two hilarious little boys purely to catch the conkers as they came flying down. I told them about the sign someone put on a tree a couple of years ago saying ‘Falling Conkers’ and Leo said, ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if the person putting up the sign had been hit on the head by one?’ and Harry added, ‘Yes, and he died.’

  Oh, it was all fun and games until we got home and they strung their favourites and within seconds Harry had hit Leo in the eye and Leo had to sit with a bag of frozen peas on his face and I swore the two of them to secrecy because Fi was exactly the kind of person who’d have thought that
a warning sign about conkers was a good idea.

  I kept apologizing to them, I remember that, and they kept saying ‘It’s not your fault, Dad’, partly because they always blamed each other, it was their default setting, and partly because they didn’t know what it was I was really apologizing for.

  Perhaps I didn’t either, not truly. Not until the next morning.

  *

  I can record exactly the moment my final finger-hold slipped from the rock face, causing a loss of altitude so extreme I came close to fainting: 10.30 a.m. on Sunday 16 October, as I sat at the kitchen table playing Pokémon Monopoly with the boys while browsing the local news on the pay-as-you-go.

  Police hunt killer in mother-and-daughter horror crash

  The young victim of a suspected road rage incident in Thornton Heath last month has died in hospital from her injuries. Ten-year-old Ellie Rutherford, in the passenger seat of her mother’s Fiat 500 at the time of the crash on the evening of 16 September, lost her fight yesterday following multiple surgeries.

  Karen Rutherford remains in Croydon Hospital recovering from her own injuries. Neither she nor her husband were available for comment.

  A police spokesperson said: ‘This is incredibly sad news and we would like to assure Ellie’s family that we are committed to bringing the offender to justice. We are particularly interested in hearing from a woman who phoned Croydon Hospital to say that she had witnessed the incident. We would like to emphasize that any information she shares will be treated with the utmost confidentiality.’

  Flowers have been left in tribute at both the family’s home and the collision site on Silver Road.

  The words will be scored on my soul for as long as I continue to draw breath. A child was no longer critically injured, but dead. A child was dead . . .

  ‘Put the phone down, Dad,’ Leo said in Fi’s voice. ‘You have to concentrate on the game.’

  A child was dead!

  ‘Daddy? Are we going to buy Nidoqueen?’ Harry asked.

  ‘You decide,’ I told him, sounding ghostly even to myself. ‘Do we have enough cash?’