Our House

by Louise Candlish

  ‘Please, Fi, give me one more chance. At least until the end of the trial period we agreed back in the summer? Please.’

  I waited for his tears to subside, forbidding myself to see Leo in him, but it was too late. He was the boys’ father; they were in his face, his voice, his frailties. I couldn’t banish him without banishing them.

  ‘One last chance, Bram. I just . . . I can’t have you making a fool of me.’ Again. Again and again.

  ‘I promise,’ he said.

  Which we now know was not worth the soundwaves the words travelled on.

  Bram, Word document

  I honestly think if Fi had pushed a bit harder I would have broken. If she had demanded to know why I’d reacted to her new man the way I did, I might have split open and let the secrets ooze from me, foul and unpalatable as they were.

  But where once she’d been fixated on the adultery and missed the driving, now she was fixated on the driving and missed the fraud. A letter had come from the DVLA laying bare the details of my ban and there was the predictable confrontation. I can picture her face now, its saintly horror as she told me off: If you’d been involved in an accident these last few months you’d have got in serious trouble . . .

  I think I know that!

  ‘Why?’ I asked Mike, when I’d calmed sufficiently to phone him. ‘Why are you seeing her? Is it just to show me you can?’

  ‘Bram,’ he said, making a sigh of my name. ‘You seem to think I have limitless time in which to amuse myself. There’s a deadline here, remember? The police might be a bit slow, but they’re not complete fuckwits. They’ll get around to you eventually.’

  ‘They already have,’ I admitted. ‘A guy came to question me on Tuesday.’

  ‘Really? He asked you about the crash?’

  ‘No, not directly. Just who saw the car last, the same ground they covered with Fi weeks ago, so I’m thinking they must have something new to need to look me up.’

  ‘Did he ask where you were on the sixteenth of September?’

  ‘Yes. I had to use the alibi. I said I was in the pub at Clapham Junction, like we agreed.’

  ‘Good. That’ll work out fine, don’t worry about it. Even if they check the cameras, it’s mental there on a Friday, easy to get lost in the crowd. You need to hold your nerve, Bram. As for your missus, rest assured I have no intention of getting down on one knee. But someone has to get her out of the way when the time comes, don’t they? It’s not going to be you taking her on a romantic getaway.’

  They were definitely sleeping together then (like it was ever in doubt. Sex was important to Fi).

  ‘I know it’s a blow to your male ego, but it’s nothing personal, so don’t go plunging into a gloom about it, all right? You need to stop drawing attention to yourself with these petulant outbursts.’

  Petulant? As if I were an infant frustrated by the word ‘no’.

  ‘Just keep away from my kids,’ I said. ‘Promise me that.’

  ‘Pinky promise,’ he mocked. ‘Can we get down to business now, please? There must have been some offers after those second viewings? I thought they’d be biting your arm off at this price.’

  I exhaled, a sound humiliatingly close to a whimper.

  ‘Don’t even think about holding out on me, Bram. One word from me and Mrs Lawson will call the agent herself.’

  ‘She’s not Mrs Lawson.’

  ‘Just give me the fucking update, will you?’

  I swear, it was like he pulled a string from my back and when he let go the words came out. ‘There’ve been two offers. The highest is from a couple who are still waiting to sell their current house. The lower one is from a couple who’ve already sold their place, so there’s no chain, they’re ready to go.’

  I’d met them at the open day, Rav said, though I couldn’t place their faces among the genteel collection of identikit couples. David and Lucy Vaughan, upgrading from an East Dulwich townhouse and recipients of a windfall following a wealthy grandparent’s death. Younger than Fi and me and ready to start a family.

  ‘How much?’ Mike demanded.

  ‘Two million. That’s the best they can do, they can’t get any more from their lender. Rav recommends we accept the higher one, give them a reasonable period to agree a sale on their place.’

  ‘There’s no time for that,’ Mike said. ‘Two mil will have to do.’

  Like it was pin money, like beggars couldn’t be choosers.

  ‘So you want me to accept?’ I said.

  ‘I want you to accept.’

  *

  I couldn’t have designed weather more minutely matched to my psychological state as I walked through Alder Rise to the GP’s surgery on the north side of the Parade. The skies drooped so smotheringly low they almost touched the rooftops, while, underfoot, the leaves disintegrated to dust.

  I’d booked a session with the head of mental health services, Dr Pearson.

  ‘I can’t go on,’ I told him, truthfully.

  To his credit, he did his best to uncover the issues, but I stuck to broad strokes: I can’t cope, I constantly feel like I’m about to have a panic attack, everything’s falling apart, I want to cry all the time.

  ‘I’m going to write you a prescription for an antidepressant,’ he said. ‘We’ll start with a month and, if you’re happy with it, we’ll extend the prescription in the New Year. But medication is only a part of treatment and I strongly recommend that you talk to a therapist as well.’

  I made some indecipherable response, non-committal, already adding him to my list of people I would never see again.

  ‘I can refer you through the NHS or, if you’d like to get started sooner, you can use a private therapist?’

  ‘I’ll use a private one,’ I said to get him off my back, and he gave me a link to a website that listed the local options. I imagined being probed about poor lifestyle choices and stress management by some earnest biddy the wrong side of fifty. ‘Listen, you stupid cow,’ I’d say, ‘I’ve caused a child’s death. I’ve killed someone and now I’m being blackmailed into taking part in criminal fraud and if I don’t co-operate I’ll be jailed for ten years. The blackmailer is fucking my wife and threatening my children and I fantasize all the time about killing him, but if I do I’ll have to kill his accomplice as well, who, by the way, I’ve slept with, and even then the police might still get to me because there could be other witnesses out there, not to mention the surviving party herself, who for all I know might have PTSD that’s preventing her from remembering the incident properly but that might lift at any time . . .’

  No, better to keep my troubles to myself.

  39

  Bram, Word document

  Since the collision, I had seen nothing of the story on the television news, either national or local; whoever the arbiters of death were, they had not judged Ellie Rutherford’s worthy of so high-profile a medium. I continued to watch, however, night after night (when I wasn’t in the pub), for the single despicable reason that bad news made me feel better. A war atrocity, a serial killer’s spree, a gangland knifing: each succeeded in convincing me that my crime wasn’t so bad.

  Sick, I know.

  Then one night in late November, when I was consoling myself with a bottle of wine and the tragic imagery of an Indian train wreck, thinking what did it matter that I made a terrible mistake two and a half months ago when there were seven billion other people who were just as fucked as I was, the local news headlines came on and turned me cold with horror:

  ‘Tonight, we speak to the mayor about safety concerns for construction workers on a new building on the South Bank that will dwarf its neighbours . . . Also this evening: following the government’s announcement of sterner sentences for dangerous driving offences, we ask why it is that over two months after the road rage incident in South London that killed ten-year-old Ellie Rutherford there have still been no arrests. Ellie’s father talks to Meera Powell in an exclusive interview . . .’

  I waited in breathless
agony for the segment about the skyscraper – excruciatingly in-depth – to end. Then, after ten seconds of a studio talking head, a long shot of Silver Road filled the screen and a voiceover began recapping the known facts about the collision over archive footage of Thornton Heath traffic and the entrance to Croydon Hospital. Next came a sequence of images from the funeral – children in yellow clothing, flowers arranged in the shape of a butterfly – followed by video of the Rutherford family gathered in a well-appointed living room, a large fern in the window and shelves crammed with books. Ellie’s teenage brother was helping his mother up from her seat and supporting her as she moved painfully to the mantelpiece to look at a framed school photograph of Ellie. Then the camera picked out a fold-up wheelchair in the corner and a small pile of wrapped presents on a side table. ‘It’s Ellie’s birthday this week. She’d be turning eleven,’ the voiceover explained.

  Finally, there was an appeal by Tim Rutherford, admirably, miraculously composed:

  ‘We’re not saying the police aren’t working hard on this, because we know they are. We’re just asking that everyone watching this goes over that evening one last time. Look back at your diary and see where you were after work that day. It was a Friday, mid-September, so still light; you might have been coming home from the office or heading out for a drink. You may not have witnessed the collision itself, but you may have seen a black hatchback Audi or VW leaving the area at speed. You might have noticed if it was a man or a woman at the wheel, what sort of age they were, how they were dressed. A little detail like that might be the breakthrough the police need.’

  And that was it. Though shocking enough to cause me to shake, the interview nonetheless confirmed my instinct that the police didn’t know enough – if much at all – to build a case against me, and I could only assume that any case they were putting together was against either the suspected thief of our car or someone associated with a different vehicle altogether.

  No one was going to remember anything new about a routine evening two and a half months ago, were they? Was it really possible I was going to get to the finish line undetected? Or was the human mind the erratic weapon the Rutherfords prayed it was? (‘Wait, there was a car, I thought it was going to hit my wing mirror. Definitely an Audi. The guy had curly hair . . .’)

  Turning off the television, I found that opening a second bottle of wine helped me err on the side of optimism (the fact that mixing alcohol with my new medication was strictly forbidden gave me no pause whatsoever).

  Waking the next morning, however, I couldn’t get the image of little Ellie from my mind, that photo of her in her bottle-green school jumper. She was like the girls in Leo’s class, maybe not the golden one, the popular one, but smart, good-natured, probably a little shy until she was with her friends and then she was bolder, more confident.

  Just a sweet kid like yours or mine.

  ‘Fi’s Story’ > 02:30:15

  No, I’m ashamed to say I didn’t give the Silver Road accident a second thought. In my defence, the police officer who’d come to question me about the car had never contacted me again and I’d probably read of countless other accidents since, countless other misfortunes. They weren’t exactly in short supply last year, were they?

  Not once did Bram mention the Rutherfords to me, no. It was only after everything came to a head in the New Year that I heard their name at all.

  40

  Bram, Word document

  It was mind-boggling how far the conveyancing process could progress without the need for face-to-face contact with a lawyer. Graham Jenson of Dixon Boyle & Co in Crystal Palace was selected by Mike, of course, presumably for his lack of reputation for excellence (indeed, on the legal ratings website I looked at, Jenson did not score spectacularly in client satisfaction). Like Rav, he was not part of our conspiracy and so once again I was simply to proceed as if the sale were happening normally. I set up a new email address in the name of A and F Lawson, shared the password with my overlords, and gave my pay-as-you-go number to Jenson and his trainee.

  By early December, I’d collated the required paperwork and proofs of ID, filled in all the questionnaires, and supplied a mortgage redemption figure, which would be paid automatically on completion. Documents were shuttled in and out of the Trinity Avenue filing cabinet as I came and went according to the bird’s nest schedule. (In the unlikely event that Fi would want to look up something I’d removed, I knew she would simply assume it had been misfiled.) To avoid having packages arrive at Trinity Avenue in the post – I already knew to my cost that Fi had no qualms about opening mail addressed to me; well, these were addressed to her too – we agreed that Wendy should pick them up from the solicitor’s receptionist in person, using her practised Fiona Lawson signature whenever called for. She would then hand-deliver them to me at the flat and wait for me to add the requisite information or co-authorization before returning them to the solicitor at the next opportunity. The few documents that required witnesses to our signatures were rerouted to Mike to add whichever fabricated names and professions he saw fit. In the meantime, Wendy supplied Jenson with details of the holding account that would feed the closing payment to whatever offshore alternative Mike had opened using his fabled dark web contacts.

  All of which was both insanely risky and insanely easy – considerably easier than it would have been had none of the conspirators owned fifty per cent of the property. That was the genius of the scheme, I have to hand it to Mike.

  Though the buyers’ queries were minimal, their mortgage company required an on-site valuation, a non-negotiable element that could be scheduled only for a weekday. Though not without its stresses, this was child’s play compared to the open house: I arranged to work from home and requested that the surveyor come at noon, so he’d be gone well before Fi or her mother could return with the boys after school. The street was quiet, but I had prepared an excuse about roof repairs should anyone approach me with questions.

  By mid-December, draft contracts had been drawn up and sent to the buyers’ solicitor.

  Good work, amigo, Mike texted me, and there was a disorientating moment when I completely forgot myself and experienced pleasure in his rare praise. Then the horror returned, more oppressive, more sanity-eroding than ever.

  The drugs weren’t working yet, evidently.

  ‘Fi’s Story’ > 02:30:45

  I know it’s going to sound like I was making concession after concession, but you have to remember I was engaged in real-politik here. I was not in a position to take a strictly ethical stance. What I took was a strictly maternal one and on that score I have no regrets.

  Because Bram was right about Leo and Harry being happy. They were really happy. I even saw them being nice to each other, like proper brothers in a book – I mean, not quite Swallows and Amazons, but nice by their standards.

  There was a cold snap in early December and Trinity Avenue was a picture of iced shrubbery and shimmering mists. Christmas was in the air, always my favourite time of year. Once home from school, the boys preferred to stay there, abandoning the garden for the living room, with its wood burner and burrows of fur throws. Seeing them snuggled up together, pink-cheeked and sleepy-eyed, I was convinced anew of the beauty of our bird’s nest. That half-witnessed skirmish with Toby was likely nothing compared to the conflict Bram and I would be exposing them to if we’d remained together.

  At parents’ evening, for which Bram and I both cleared our diaries, neither Leo’s nor Harry’s teachers reported any evidence of the kind of anxiety or disruptive behaviour often noticed when a child’s parents have recently separated.

  ‘Whatever you’re doing at home, carry on doing it,’ Harry’s teacher Mrs Carver said. ‘He’s a real bright spark.’

  Buoyed, Bram and I arranged to go to the end-of-term Christmas carol concert together.

  Bram, Word document

  Even as I plotted to steal their future from them, I prioritized the boys. For the first time in their lives, I attended every
last school event of the festive season, even Harry’s drop-in Christmas decorations session, from which every parent departed for his day’s meetings with glitter in his ears. Work was no longer relevant – I’d be gone soon – and wherever possible I delegated or cancelled or passed the buck. Three times in December I called in sick or left early unwell (not entirely dishonest, since nausea was never far away).

  ‘I think there’s something wrong with me,’ I told Neil (again, not entirely dishonest). ‘It’s maybe some sort of virus.’

  ‘So long as that’s really what it is and you’re not just taking the piss,’ he said, which was his equivalent of a first warning. The situation was not helped by my decision to skip work Christmas drinks in favour of the boys’ carol concert in the last week of term.

  ‘Quitter,’ Neil said, which we both knew was how Keith Richards baited Ronnie Woods when he checked himself into rehab.

  If only addiction were my greatest problem, I thought, woefully. The effects of rock ’n’ roll excess.

  The carol concert almost undid me. ‘It Came Upon the Midnight Clear’ was Fi’s favourite and, by chance, the children sang it as their finale, their sweet, hopeful little voices almost too much to bear. It was the closest I came to breaking down in public.

  ‘Absolutely gorgeous,’ Fi said, as the classes filed down the aisle afterwards. ‘Were you filming that, Bram?’

  ‘Just the last song,’ I said. ‘It was allowed, wasn’t it? All the other dads were doing it.’

  ‘Yes, I think so. Anyway, I’m not a security guard.’

  There was a message there, I thought, or at least chose to think. She was saying she’d finished threatening war and now she wanted a return to the peace process.

  We waited for the pew to clear before we shuffled out. To my right, there was a fresco showing the trial of some martyr or other and in all my years as the son of a god-fearing mother, I had never felt such a sense of connection in a church as I did then.

  ‘In the spirit of goodwill to all men,’ I said to Fi, ‘can I ask you a favour?’ Only a man who no longer has anything to lose makes a wish that he has never been less likely to be granted. ‘It’s the last one I’ll ever ask you,’ I added.