Our House

by Louise Candlish

  Except she’d worn rubber gloves to handle the pills, hadn’t she?

  I am a murderer. She claps her hand to her mouth to catch the vomit. Swallows.

  Her phone is in her bag. She brings up the numbers keypad and her finger hovers over the ‘9’ before she gasps and stops. The police can request phone records, see where calls were made. There was that one episode of The Victim where the whole thing hinged on mobile phone masts. She’s read about it in the paper as well, how the police can trace emergency calls to within thirty metres; they use computerized mapping, national grid co-ordinates.

  She blinks. Her brain is working better, then, if she can remember that. And now it wants her to turn, take a closer look at the hideous thing still sitting there.

  Don’t.

  Think.

  Move.

  Leave.

  She takes her handbag and leaves the flat, tears down the corridor and the stairwell, through the lobby, out into a freezing mist. Hurrying through the smothered streets, she calms. The world is quiet, the fog benign, not eerie, as if the streets are respecting her need for anonymity. She avoids the main road around the north of the park and instead loops south around Alder Rise Road and up towards Wyndham Gardens, into Trinity Avenue that way.

  At number 87, she rings the bell, just once, balling her hands to stop her from doing it over and over.

  At last the voice comes – ‘Who is it?’ – and she dips to her haunches to call through the letterbox. ‘Merle, it’s me. Are you still on your own? Can I come in?’

  ‘Fi!’ The door opens and heat rushes towards her. Merle is there, sleepy and rumpled in sky-blue pyjamas, feet bare. ‘I thought you were at the flat. Are you okay?’

  Say it now or you’ll never say it.

  ‘I think I’ve killed him,’ she says.

  Merle’s eyes flare with fear. Her hand goes to her abdomen. ‘What? Bram?’

  ‘Toby. But he’s really called Mike.’

  There is a sickening moment when she thinks it’s going to go the other way, when she feels sure Merle will decide against her. And she will accept it; she will not run.

  ‘Quick, come in.’ Merle pulls her over the threshold, closes the door. They face each other in the hallway. The stricken innocence of her friend’s face is something Fi herself will never again convey, not without acting. ‘You mean that guy from last night? You said he was your boyfriend . . . I don’t understand.’

  ‘He stole the house, Merle. With Bram. He made Bram do it.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘He told me in the car. He blackmailed him.’ Now she’s saying it, she’s understanding the hideousness again, feeling the wrongness swell inside her, ready to split her open. ‘He threw me out of the car. He said I was dumb and useless. He only took me to Winchester because— Oh God! I’ve left my bag in the flat!’

  Merle touches the strap of Fi’s handbag in the crook of her elbow. ‘No, you’ve got it, look.’

  ‘I mean my overnight bag. I need to go back, I need to get it!’

  ‘Breathe,’ Merle says, gently. ‘Come and sit here.’

  They sit on the stair side by side. Merle is a radiator, her face flushed, breath hot. ‘Go back a bit. What happened after you got out of the car?’

  ‘I went to the flat and I sent him a text.’

  ‘From your phone?’

  ‘No, from Bram’s. There was one at the flat, an old one, he must have forgotten it. That’s all he was interested in, getting to Bram. Bram must have the money.’

  ‘Where is he now? Toby? Mike?’

  ‘Still there. At the flat.’

  ‘What did you do, Fi?’

  She sucks in warm air. ‘I gave him the sleeping pills.’

  ‘The ones I gave you last night? All of them?’

  ‘Yes. And other pills as well. Bram’s medication. He must have OD’d. He didn’t wake up when he was sick and he choked.’

  Merle’s throat convulses. ‘You saw this?’

  ‘No, I was in the bathroom. I was scared, I locked myself in. I sat in the dark just shaking and then things went quiet and I must have passed out. It was hours before I came out and found him.’

  ‘And he’s definitely not breathing now?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  Merle remains very still. ‘Did you mean to kill him, Fi?’

  ‘No. I don’t know. I think I did but then this morning I don’t recognize that person as me.’

  ‘You must have flipped. You were in shock yesterday, I can vouch for that. You acted in a fugue state, that’s what they call it, don’t they? It’s diminished responsibility, Fi.’

  Fi begins to cry. ‘Merle, I can’t. I can’t go to the police.’

  Merle is silent then, consciously choosing her path at the crossroads before rising from the stair. She hurries upstairs, re-emerges in jeans and a jumper and then adds boots and a long black coat, a knitted grey hat low to the brow. She pulls Fi’s hat low too, almost to her eyes, and uses her fingers to brush aside the tears.

  ‘We have to go there, Fi,’ she says. ‘I need to see him for myself.’

  53

  Saturday, 14 January 2017

  London, 4 a.m.

  Out on Trinity Avenue, it’s still dark, still misty; the same haze that conceals the windows they pass must also be concealing them. Merle has said not to talk, that Fi shouldn’t think about anything now, just empty her mind and concentrate on moving and breathing.

  Only as they approach Baby Deco does Merle speak again: ‘Are there CCTV cameras here?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Good. I’ve been checking along the way and I don’t think there’s been anything, it’s all residential. Plus the fog. Don’t use the lights, though, just in case.’

  Climbing the stairs, Fi can’t feel her legs, as if she’s gliding. There is no sound as her feet move along the carpeted hallway, no sense of breath entering and leaving her body. As they step into the flat, there is a smell of vomit and wine and he is right there in front of them, still sitting with his neck stretched backwards as if broken. Her overriding feeling is of shame, shame that he was her boyfriend, shame that he duped and humiliated her. He makes the place squalid.

  ‘Oh God,’ Merle says. ‘I thought you might have been, I don’t know . . .’

  Deluded or confused, she means. Still in that fugue state. Not herself, but some ghostly other Fi. But no, this is death and she has caused it. She must now face the consequences, consequences that make the loss of her home negligible.

  The boys. What will happen to them? One parent missing, the other in prison.

  ‘What am I going to do, Merle?’ Her voice is a thin, pathetic wail.

  Merle looks at her and it seems to Fi that nothing in her eyes has changed from yesterday: Fi is still the victim, the human sacrifice. ‘I don’t know yet. Let me think. Tell me why he’s Mike and not Toby.’ As Fi explains, Merle picks up the coat draped on an open box near the kitchen, interrupting her to ask, ‘Is this his?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Merle’s fingers disappear into its folds, re-emerge with a brown leather wallet. ‘Michael Fuller. Okay. That’s good, I think.’

  ‘Why’s it good?’ Fi asks.

  ‘Because you called him Toby. You’ve probably never mentioned Mike or Michael to anyone, have you?’

  ‘No. I didn’t know it was his name until last night.’

  Merle continues to poke through the wallet. ‘And I remember Alison saying you haven’t met his family yet. Is that true?’

  ‘Yes. Or friends.’

  Merle glances up at her. ‘Not a single one? No colleague or neighbour? Kids?’

  ‘No one. We didn’t share lives like that.’ Because ‘we’ didn’t exist. She has no idea who Toby – Michael Fuller – is. Who he was. Because he’s not a man now, he’s remains. As Fi suppresses the need to retch, Merle looks oddly heartened.

  ‘I’d say that’s very fortunate,’ she says, and places the
wallet on the worktop before searching the coat pockets for other items. Car keys. Nicorette chewing gum. Two phones. Both are charged, both present security screens requiring passcodes the women have no way of guessing. ‘Which one does he use when he calls you?’ she murmurs, to herself as much as to Fi.

  ‘I don’t know, but if I call it from mine, it will ring and we’ll find out,’ Fi suggests.

  ‘No!’ Merle grips her arm. ‘Don’t make any calls from your phone while you’re here, okay?’

  Fi nods. Merle’s mood is commanding, constructive, and Fi has a childlike desire to please her. ‘What if I call the number I have from Bram’s phone? The one I used to text him? Then we could assume it’s the other one that he uses for me?’

  It is as if he has no name now; she can’t bring herself to use it, as if to do so would be to rekindle his life force.

  Merle pauses, before thinking aloud: ‘For all we know, he might have your number on both these phones. We’ll get rid of them both and hope they’re not traceable. This man is a criminal, right? He uses false names. Someone like him isn’t going to have a nice family plan, is he? Will it look weird, though? He came here because Bram texted him, so where’s the phone he got the text on? Still, there might be a hundred reasons why he’s ditched his phone on the way.’ She finds a plastic bag in one of the drawers, drops the two phones into it, then pulls Fi into the passageway between boxes, as if removing the two of them from the dead man’s sightline. She speaks in low, clipped utterances: ‘Listen to me, Fi, does anyone else know you came here last night?’

  ‘No. Only him.’

  ‘Did you call anyone when you were here? Bram’s mother, maybe? To speak to the boys?’

  ‘No, only from your place earlier. Well, I texted him, like I said, but only from Bram’s phone.’

  ‘Did you use the internet?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Where’s your laptop? You haven’t used that here, have you?’

  ‘No. I don’t know where Bram put it. In one of these boxes, I’m guessing. I haven’t used it since before I went to Winchester. Tuesday evening.’

  ‘Good.’ Merle backs out of the passageway and scans the items on the counter before wiping the wine bottle and glasses with a tea towel. She does the same with the discarded packaging from Bram’s pills. Without explanation, Fi hands her the knife, which Merle cleans and returns to the cutlery drawer.

  ‘Anything else? Where’s this other phone you texted from?’

  This too is wiped. Fi wonders if it will join Toby’s in the bag, but instead Merle places it on the yellow paper.

  ‘Why are you leaving it? That’s the one I’ve used!’

  ‘Exactly. Listen, Fi, there’s a way out of this. The police find him – maybe even you do, or we do together, that’s better! Later today, okay? We’ll find his body and we’ll call the police and we’ll say we recognize him from yesterday, that he caused a scene at Trinity Avenue when he came looking for Bram. We spoke to him inside for a few minutes but he got aggressive and we asked him to leave. Before that, we’d never laid eyes on him in our lives. Do you see where I’m going?’

  There is a slow, spreading sensation through her stomach and chest: it takes a few moments to recognize it as hope. ‘You mean Bram came back and sent the text? Bram gave him the pills?’

  ‘Yes, or left him here in such misery that he took an overdose himself. I don’t know, I wasn’t here. And neither were you. They’re Bram’s pills, not yours.’

  Fi stares, her mind sifting images of the early hours. ‘The sleeping pills, though, Merle. Oh God, were they from a prescription made out to you?’

  ‘Yes, but so what if they were?’ Merle’s focus is intense. ‘There’s no box with my name on it. If anyone gets that far, I’ll say I gave them to Bram. A few weeks ago, I don’t remember exactly when, but when he was complaining about insomnia. He didn’t tell me he had any other prescription medication or I would never have given them to him.’

  Fi stares at her, struggling to keep up. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘The point is, you didn’t touch the wine or the pills. And anything else in this place with your prints on it is purely because you live here half the time. This stuff is yours.’

  ‘I wore gloves to break up the medication and push it through the neck of the bottle,’ Fi tells her.

  ‘Good.’

  ‘But I searched through some of the boxes without wearing the gloves, and they’ve only been here since Thursday. But that’s okay, isn’t it? I needed to find financial records to show the police and the lawyers about the house.’

  ‘Exactly. It’s natural to look for essential things Bram packed without your consent. You might need stuff for the boys as well. But you do that when you come back later today, all right? That’s when you touch things. Last night, you stayed with me, then this morning I took you to Bram’s mum’s to pick up the boys, which I’ll do at, what, eight o’clock? Nine? Let’s go back to Trinity Avenue until it’s time to leave.’

  ‘I can’t bring the boys back here,’ Fi objects in horror.

  ‘Of course not,’ Merle agrees. ‘We’ll go straight on to your parents, shall we? You’ll want to tell them about the house, get their advice. Focus on that. You haven’t been here since . . . when?’

  ‘Wednesday. I picked up some shoes.’

  ‘Good. Adrian’s back today, so he’ll look after Robbie and Daisy when I come back to meet you later. Lucky I was too tired last night to speak to him. Shall we go then? Fi?’

  Go? Fi is rooted to the spot, staring at him. Is he really cooling and stiffening, existing for the first whole day as a thing, an entity that is finished with life for ever? How can it have been so easy to do this? How could he have drunk the wine with all those pills dissolved in it? Didn’t it taste bitter? Poisoned?

  Her heart stops. ‘I googled the medication. On my phone, when I was here on Wednesday.’

  Merle frowns. ‘Okay. Well, just because you saw it and wanted to know what it was, it doesn’t mean you took it. Keep this simple, Fi, in your head. Keep it as simple as possible.’

  ‘Yes.’ How unfaltering Merle is. She has all the answers, all the lines. She is Fi’s saviour, her all-seeing angel.

  But there’s something else. ‘Lucy saw Bram’s pills. She saw them today, in the kitchen. They fell out of my bag.’

  ‘Did you tell her they were Bram’s?’

  ‘No, she thought they were mine, she kept saying it.’

  ‘Good. Have you had any other prescriptions recently?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Has anyone in the family?’

  ‘Only Leo. He has those allergy tablets. It’s a repeat prescription, we use them as needed. But we haven’t had a new batch for ages.’

  ‘That doesn’t matter. Do they come in a packet like Bram’s?’

  ‘Maybe a different colour. I can’t remember.’

  ‘Show me,’ Merle says.

  ‘I can’t, I don’t know where they are.’ Fi hears the panic in her voice, the sense of salvation slipping from her grasp. ‘They were at the house, in the bathroom cabinet.’

  Together they survey the mass of identical boxes, not a single one labelled.

  ‘This isn’t everything,’ Fi says. ‘There’s another lot in storage.’

  ‘Then we look.’ Even Merle’s sigh is abbreviated, efficient. ‘And we do it quietly. We can’t have anyone in the block hearing us bumping around.’

  It takes over an hour to find the boxes containing the items from the family bathroom, but Leo’s tablets are among them. There is one half-used blister pack and one intact, still in its box. Fi puts this into her handbag. ‘I always carry a box with me in case Leo develops symptoms when we’re out?’

  ‘Excellent.’

  At last, they leave, Fi with her overnight bag, the carrier containing Toby’s phones in Merle’s coat pocket. The fog has lifted but still the morning feels gentle, supportive of their cause, delivering them back to Trinity Avenue under its protectio
n. The script continues to be written as they walk back, Merle speaking in low tones, not quite murmuring.

  ‘Did any of your neighbours in the building ever see you and Toby together?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I’ve hardly ever bumped into anyone, even on my own. When he arrived, I buzzed him in and he usually let himself out, so anyone who saw him wouldn’t necessarily have known it was me he was visiting, not Bram.’

  ‘Excellent. And when he came to my place yesterday, he said he’d already been to the flat, didn’t he? He’d got a neighbour to let him in and then he’d hammered on the door. I bet he was pretty unpleasant about it, probably made it clear he was angry with Bram.’

  They are almost at Merle’s house, just passing Fi’s – the Vaughans’ – and her peripheral vision registers only stillness.

  She stops dead, clutches Merle’s arm. ‘The Vaughans, Merle! The Vaughans saw him.’

  ‘Keep moving,’ Merle says. ‘Yes, they did, but he was looking for Bram, not you. Remember, he was shouting for Bram, and David said something like, “Join the queue.” Then I went out and invited him in. So the Vaughans have no reason to think he’s connected to you. They might have seen you leave with him, but I doubt it, they were camped out in the kitchen. We can deny that, anyway.’

  There is not long to wait before it’s time for Merle to gather her car keys and Fi to text Tina, and then they are retracing their steps towards Wyndham Gardens, where Merle’s Range Rover is parked.

  ‘So, tell me what’s going to happen later.’

  Fi recites the plan: ‘You’ll phone me at four and suggest we go to the flat and see if Bram’s left any documents to do with the house, any clues that might help us with the police and solicitor on Monday. We’ll discover the body together and say we think he might be the same man who came to Trinity Avenue last night looking for Bram. We looked in his wallet to find some ID.’

  ‘Perfect. They’ll see the wine, check Bram’s phone, start to make their own connections with the house theft.’