Our House

by Louise Candlish

  What they suspect happened is that he ran the victims’ car off the road in some sort of road rage incident, then secretly put our house on the market to fund his escape. The fact that he had been driving while disqualified only confirmed his bad character.

  It shames me that while a family was grieving, I was more concerned that our insurance claim had been rejected, about the impact this would have on our finances. The parents of that little girl would swap a thousand new cars, a thousand million-pound houses, to get her back! As would I in their situation. In the end, establishing the facts about how Ellie died is the only thing worth pursuing, the only thing worth crying over.

  Easier said than done, of course, when your own life is in tatters.

  How much do the boys know? At this point, very little. I’ve told them Bram has gone to work overseas and that if anyone says differently they should walk away and think about something else. They’re still at Alder Rise Primary, but we’re living at my parents’ place in Kingston and the long commute isn’t really sustainable. By the time this is aired, they will have moved schools. Everyone in Alder Rise will be talking about Bram then – and perhaps people in their new neighbourhood too. Basically, a loss of privacy is the price I’ve paid for getting this story out there, for helping other innocent homeowners avoid falling victim to fraud on this scale.

  I gave notice on the Baby Deco flat as soon as the contract allowed and the landlord was very understanding about it. I’ve been asked by the police not to comment on what happened there the day after the house sale. Nothing will persuade me to say any more – Lord knows I’ve probably already revealed details the police would have preferred to keep confidential at this stage. I don’t want to be charged with perverting the course of justice. But I also feel strongly that we have to trust them to investigate.

  Your guess is as good as mine as to whether this will ever go to trial, if they ever find this other me, this second Fiona Lawson. Neither the estate agent nor the solicitor had a phone number for her, only for Bram, and the address and date of birth she gave were mine. We know she used my passport as her proof of ID and that she and Bram attended a meeting together, posing as us. Both her appearance and signature were credible enough, evidently. No, it’s hard to imagine she will come forward any time soon and get herself slapped with some sort of conspiracy to commit fraud charge. I mean, would you?

  As for where the money is, that remains a tangle. Graham Jenson and his colleagues at Dixon Boyle still deny any misconduct and they have emails and phone logs to prove that the details for the receiving account were supplied by Bram himself. The sale proceeds duly landed in a legitimate UK high street account in our joint names: so far so simple (if you overlook the fact that I knew nothing about the opening of said account). But, within hours, the same sum was transferred offshore. Not so simple. There’s talk of anonymous accounts in the Middle East and God knows where else – banking nations with no reciprocity agreement with the UK.

  You know what upsets me the most about that? He didn’t need to hide it offshore for tax evasion reasons – there’s no tax owed to the government on this sale. It was purely to hide it from me.

  Anyway, the police say they are hopeful of recovering something for me, but my solicitor is more guarded. She says the Serious Fraud Office have bigger fish to fry. Far bigger.

  David and Lucy Vaughan are still in the house. It’s legally theirs, after all. Everyone uses that term, they’re the ‘legal’ owners, as if we all agree that I remain the moral one, the spiritual one. They won’t mind my telling you they’ve said that as soon as I am in a position to do so, I can buy it back for market rate, even if we all know I’ll never be in a position to do that. With all of this going on, I’ve been lucky to keep hold of my job.

  Toby? No, I’m not seeing him any more, let alone planning to set up house together. I’m glad your listeners can’t see me blushing, because it will come as no surprise to hear that I haven’t laid eyes on him since the day of the theft. I guess I was less attractive to him once it became clear I’d lost my big house on Trinity Avenue.

  What can I say? Gentlemen prefer homeowners!

  Obviously, I’m making light of this. A coping mechanism, no doubt. I’ve already told you I was starting to trust him, to believe I could love him. All I know for sure is that we parted that Friday with him promising to phone me at the weekend, but there was never any call. His phone, like Bram’s, has been out of service ever since. At least his vanishing is explicable in a way Bram’s never will be – imagine if I’d had to make a missing persons report on him as well! They’d think I was some sort of black widow.

  ‘He’s probably spending a bit of quality time with his wife,’ Polly said, when I told her. ‘Have you tried putting his picture into Google to see what comes up?’

  I had to admit I had no photo to try.

  ‘He wouldn’t let you take one, would he? Oh, Fi, how could you have missed all these obvious signs? You know what I think? I think the wife was pregnant and you were his maternity cover fling. And I bet he didn’t work for any Department of Transport think tank. I bet he was a car salesman. No, a traffic warden.’

  At least she didn’t say ‘I told you so’, not in those exact words, though if she had, it would have been as good a line as any to end my story.

  Because this is the end. There is nothing more.

  VictimFi

  @deadheadmel No way, that’s it?

  @IngridF2015 @deadheadmel Like she says, it’s still a live investigation.

  @richieschambers @deadheadmel @IngridF2015 I think we’re looking at a part deux, people.

  @deadheadmel @IngridF2015 Where is he, then? Come on, join the chat @BramLawson!!

  @pseudobram @deadheadmel @IngridF2015 I’m right here, ladies! Just cracking open my third bottle of red.

  @deadheadmel @pseudobram @IngridF2015 Ha, a parody account already. Love it!

  Bram, Word document

  I’ll be signing off today with digits, not letters; with the confirmation that I’ve returned the money. You’ll find it in the same account the solicitors paid it into in the first place, just a regular UK high street savings account, opened online with the requisite forms of ID easily ‘borrowed’ from Fi’s files at Trinity Avenue. It’s accessible to either account holder individually, which I hope will help.

  You don’t need to know where it’s been these last weeks, only that I transferred it to somewhere untraceable by him. Him and his contacts. But with this confession, this warning, I trust you to keep it safe now for Fi and the boys.

  You will have deduced by now that I defrauded the fraudsters. The crucial act of double-crossing took place while I was in the air between London and Geneva, but I didn’t know for sure that I’d succeeded until several days later, when I located an internet café here in Lyon and satisfied myself that there were no cameras or unusually suspicious staff and I could probably risk fifteen minutes online.

  That was probably my final moment of earthbound joy, connecting to the internet for the last (sorry, penultimate) time and seeing that the money was there, it definitely was, sitting in an anonymous offshore account outside the search capabilities of the UK government. ‘Beyond their tentacles,’ as Mike put it. Beyond his.

  A little under £1.6 million. It doesn’t sound like much, does it, after all this?

  *

  It was relatively recently that I decided that two could play at Mike’s game. It was just after Christmas, when I understood Fi was never going to save me, save us, never going to fix the abominable mess I had created for our family, never going to take the torment out of my hands, out of my head.

  That had been a pipe dream. She really was done with me.

  Using an agent whose details you’ll find on no legitimate search engine, I bought myself a counterfeit passport, and then I furnished Graham Jenson with the innocent details of that new bank account. You see, the strength of Mike’s plan – the legitimacy my involvement gave it – was also it
s weakness: I didn’t need the sinister aid of phishing to ‘correct’ the details, I could simply email Jenson myself. Obviously I couldn’t use the email account Mike and Wendy had access to, so I sent the new instruction from my work email.

  Dixon Boyle & Co weren’t nearly as slapdash as I’d hoped, however, and Jenson’s trainee, Rachel, rang to query the last-minute change of receiving account. Naturally, I reassured her that the instruction was genuine and I hadn’t had my email hacked by crooks.

  ‘We have to be very careful,’ she said. ‘We just had a warning from the Law Society about criminals intercepting emails between solicitors and their clients. There was even a case recently where they set up a fake branch of the conveyancing firm.’

  ‘Unbelievable,’ I said. ‘Thank you for being so thorough.’

  I take pleasure – measly, hollow, but pleasure nonetheless – in Mike’s defeat. In the thought of him cancelling his flight to Dubai, cancelling everything, checking his balance day after day, waiting for the £1.6 million that will never come. Firing off threats, discussing with his sidekick what torture they will visit on me when at last they track me down.

  But that won’t happen. I’m off the grid now. Let his texts pile up, never to be delivered, let the emails gather, never to be read.

  Let the boys cry only briefly.

  Because in a few hours I’ll be off grid old-school. If you know what I’m saying.

  *

  You know, maybe I was wrong to call it a divine revelation. The decision to take your own life doesn’t come upon you as an epiphany. I do know a bit about suicide, including the fact that it’s the biggest killer of young men in the UK. Undiagnosed depression, the alcohol and drugs factor . . . I won’t lecture you. It’s not like I haven’t just spent a hundred pages explaining the context of my decision.

  I really believe it has been there in me, dormant, for my whole marriage, my whole life – or at least since my father died. It wasn’t only the drinking that camouflaged it (or expressed it), but also the sex, the risk-taking, the fights, the recklessness. Wasn’t it all just self-destruction by a thousand cuts?

  A slow slicing.

  You know, on the speed awareness course I took a couple of years ago, there was an exercise in which the instructor went around the room and asked us to say in one word why we’d been speeding.

  ‘Ignorance.’

  ‘Lateness.’

  ‘Impatience.’

  ‘Overtaking.’

  ‘Habit.’

  On it went, all the predictable culprits, until one guy said, ‘I was chasing my brother’, and we all cracked up.

  Then it was my turn. I could make something up (‘noble causes’ seemed to go down well, even if it was two words: taking a heavily pregnant wife to hospital, for instance, or a child with something stuck in his throat). Or I could tell the truth.

  ‘Bram?’ the instructor said, making a point of reading from my name tag, a little touch of ceremony. ‘Why do you think you were speeding?’

  I could tell the truth in one word, and it’s the same one I’ll use now to account for this, the end of me:

  ‘Pain.’

  49

  February 2017

  London

  It has been a very long day, but both the producer and interviewer of The Victim have been exemplary in their professionalism and Fi leaves the Farringdon studio with a sense of accomplishment, of good having been done. There’s a freeing feeling too, though she of all people knows freedom is an illusion.

  In a café on Greville Street near Farringdon Station, Merle is waiting. It’s one of those self-consciously hipster places with bulbs hanging bare from cables and chairs salvaged from skips. Their coffees have a love heart sketched in the foam and come with a chocolate-covered edamame bean on the side.

  ‘Is it Valentine’s Day or something?’ Fi says, obliterating her love heart with the back of her spoon.

  ‘We’ve passed that,’ Merle says. Like Fi, she wears black. They always do when they meet, as if the two of them mourn not an individual but an ethos or a state of being. Privilege, perhaps, or control. ‘What did Adrian give me? Oh yeah, I forgot.’ She glances down at her own body, the growing baby bump, and Fi thinks suddenly of poor Lucy Vaughan and the way she eyed Merle’s red smock that day at the house, wondering whether she should offer her congratulations.

  Merle checks that there’s no one in earshot. ‘So how did it go?’

  Fi nods. ‘Really well. Tiring, though. I feel like I could sleep for a week.’

  Merle reaches to take her hand. They’ve done this a lot, lately, grasped hands in sisterly support. ‘Well done, darling. Concentrating for that length of time is exhausting. Any idea when they’ll be releasing it?’

  ‘The first week of March, the producer said. They have a really quick turnaround.’

  ‘They didn’t ask anything too awkward?’

  ‘They did, but I stuck to the house sale, obviously. I said I’ve been advised by the police not to discuss anything else.’

  ‘Which is perfectly true. Excellent. Look what I’ve just found.’ Merle has a page from a missing persons website open on her phone. Thumb and forefinger enlarge a face as familiar to Fi as her own:

  Abraham Lawson (known as Bram)

  Reported missing after the weekend of 14–15 January 2017, when a crime took place at Mr Lawson’s residence in Alder Rise, South London. Has not been seen since Thursday 12 January, when he spoke with neighbours and with the staff of a storage facility in Beckenham.

  If you know the whereabouts of this man, please call the Metropolitan Police on the number shown below.

  ‘Interesting that they don’t say what the crime is,’ Merle says.

  ‘Maybe that’s standard policy.’ Fi sighs. ‘But after this recording goes out, everyone will know what he did.’

  ‘You realize that he might hear it? You can download The Victim from anywhere.’

  ‘That’s what the producer said. It’s happened a few times that the accused has come forward to deny the allegations. Very helpful to the police, apparently.’

  ‘Well, if he did get in touch, it would only be his word against yours.’

  ‘It always has been, hasn’t it?’ Fi says. ‘All those years together, his word against mine.’

  ‘That’s what marriage is,’ Merle says, with a trace of her old smile, playful, wicked.

  ‘I spoke to the police this morning, actually,’ Fi tells her. ‘Before I did the interview. They told me something interesting.’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘They’ve found a phone they think was Bram’s. It has the numbers of the Challoner’s estate agent and the solicitor, plus searches relating to Silver Road. Obviously they’ll check out all the other numbers, but the main thing is this phone had the forensic code from our address. It was marked with our security pen.’

  ‘The pens we gave out at the meeting? With the fluid that shows under UV lamps?’ Merle stares at her, a smile creeping across her mouth. ‘That’s an incredible piece of evidence. It obviously was Bram’s phone, then.’

  ‘Must have been. Harry went around the house marking everything that wasn’t nailed down. Bram must have had it in his pocket or left it out on the side or something.’

  ‘Where did they find it? In the flat?’

  ‘No, it came in with some petty criminal. He had a haul of stolen phones, claims he found Bram’s in a bin in Victoria.’

  ‘Wow.’ Merle exhales. ‘That’s it, then. He’ll be arrested the moment he’s found. Where the hell is he? Do you think he’s still in London?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ Fi says. ‘One thing’s for sure, he’ll never go back to Alder Rise.’

  ‘But you will, won’t you? As soon as they find the money.’

  ‘If they do. And apparently, any accounts involved will be frozen while they investigate, maybe for years. Then there are all the costs.’

  ‘But after all that, you might be able to come back to Trinity Avenue?’
<
br />   Again their hands touch. ‘I don’t see how,’ Fi says. ‘Property prices will have gone up even more by then.’ There’s a bittersweet moment when she’s plunged into the past, to simpler times, when she and Merle and Alison and the other women of Trinity Avenue talked about house prices, how their properties had saved them, ensnared them, obsessed them. ‘It’ll be a long time before I buy again, Merle, but that’s fine. It’s not my main concern. The boys are. They’re my only concern.’

  ‘Of course they are. Fi, did you . . .?’ Merle falters. It is a rare moment of self-doubt. ‘I have to ask: did you say anything about me during the interview? Do I need to prepare myself for when this goes out? All the women at work listen to it.’

  ‘Of course not,’ Fi says. ‘The occasional bit of conversation from Kent, that kind of thing, but nothing else.’

  They pay for the coffees and walk together to the station. At the barriers for the overland train, which Merle will take to Alder Rise, they hug goodbye. It’s still odd knowing she will take a different route, the tube to Waterloo and then the train to Kingston.

  ‘We’ll come and visit you soon,’ she promises. ‘I’ve told Leo and Harry about the baby and they’re very excited.’

  ‘That’s sweet,’ Merle says. ‘Give them a kiss from me. It sounds as if you did brilliantly today, Fi. I’m really proud of you.’

  Fi watches her friend make her way towards the stairs to the platform, her movements, like her mind, lithe and elegant. She’s pleased that Merle is proud of her; she’s proud of herself, if it’s not too immodest to say. Yes, it was painful having to relive the events of the last six months, but it was also, as Merle warned, a necessary pre-emptive strike.

  They say all confessions are self-serving, don’t they? Well, hers was no exception. And, hand on heart, she can recall only a couple of lines in the whole interview that were outright lies.