The Long Fall

by Crouch, Julia

  ‘I’ve spoken to them, Emma! Can you believe it? The kids are looking great! They even seem happy to see me. And Marnie – well, I’m no threat now, am I? It’s not like I CAN HURT HER ANY MORE. Hey, she even looked a little tearful when she saw the state of me.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Kate said.

  ‘Oh, sorry. Sorry. You don’t have to feel sorry any more, Emma! That’s the great liberation I offer you, hun. Oh, the kids, they are so bright. Chips off the old block.’

  ‘How old are they?’ It seemed she had to go through with this conversation now.

  ‘Zeb’s sixteen, and Moon’s fourteen. Marnie wants them to go to college. I want them to go to college, but then hey, what Daddy wouldn’t? The problem is they don’t have any cash – The Fellowship just provides board and food and bare basic expenses in exchange for Marnie’s work in the kitchens. There’s nothing spare. Plus, of course, there’s The Fellowship stance on education. Back when I was with them, they needed the men to go out and earn cash, so I was able to train in my craft. But no longer. Having moved more or less fully into self-sufficiency, these days they disapprove of formal schooling beyond the basics, preferring the children to move unquestioningly into servicing the community. But Marnie, who trained as a teacher before she met me, has kept Zeb and Moon up to speed. Hey. Do you know, Emma, how much it costs to put a child through a good school in the good ol’ U S of A?’

  Kate leaned her head back against her seat, closed her eyes and sighed. Beattie had been right. It wasn’t over. ‘You want more money.’

  ‘A lot more than it’s going to cost you and Mark to send sweet Tilly to read drama at Bristol University.’

  ‘But you gave me your word this would be the end of it.’

  ‘HA! The word of a dead man? Not worth the breath that forms it.’

  Kate didn’t move.

  ‘You see, my dear,’ he went on, ‘I’m offering you the chance to do even more for me. You know how good it makes you feel. And I know how PASSIONATE you are about education for disadvantaged kids. WELL, THEY DON’T GET MORE DISADVANTAGED THAN ZEB AND MOON.’

  ‘How much?’ Kate said, her eyes still closed.

  Jake composed himself and lowered his voice. ‘Well now, it seems indelicate to discuss money face to face. I’ve put it in an email for you. It really would be better for everyone, for all of our children, if you read it very, very carefully. If you have any questions, just whistle. I’m not going anywhere.’

  Kate refused to answer or to look at the screen. After several minutes’ silence, Jake sucked in some air and broke the standoff.

  ‘How’s little Tilly doing, Ems?’

  ‘She’s fine, thanks.’

  ‘Still enjoying working in the National Theatre staff canteen?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Kate tried not to smile. It seemed Jake didn’t know everything about her life, then.

  ‘And how is dear Beattie settling in?’

  ‘Beattie?’

  ‘She’s moved in with you, I believe.’

  So he knew this detail. She could fully imagine that he had guys sitting in that Mondeo watching the house day and night. How long would it take him to find out that Tilly was away? But he wouldn’t be able to discover where she was, surely?

  Then a sickening thought occurred to her. Had he hacked into her computer? Could he see her emails? Listen to her Skype calls?

  ‘HOW’S BEATTIE? I SAID,’ he roared.

  ‘Beattie’s doing fine.’

  ‘I do like the feeling that I’ve brought old friends together, like a little TETRAPLEGIC CUPID. I’m sad I can’t be there, in fact. We’d have a ball, the three of us. Just like back in the day.’ He leaned in towards the camera, so that all Kate could see was his mouth, surrounded by the ragged whiskers of his moustache and beard. His teeth, she noticed, looked remarkably good for someone in his physical condition.

  ‘Remember the island?’ he said. ‘How we thought it had been put there just for us? How, when we got on that boat, we felt we were escaping the world? Remember our beach, Emma? With the cave and how we kissed and then you pushed my hand away, like some little pricktease?’

  Everything inside Kate tightened and she felt as if she might be going to suffocate.

  ‘What was it, little girl?’ Jake said, spittle flecking his lips. Lips that once had been full and cherubic but which now just looked fat and thick. ‘Why didn’t you want poor Jake to touch you?’

  ‘I – I – it wasn’t you. It was me.’

  Again, he roared with laughter, ending with a gale of coughing and spluttering. ‘The classic phrase! Oh, Emma, did you never grow up?’

  Kate sat there, her mouth held in a twitching scowl that she knew would dissolve into tears if she let it go. The Emma in her wanted to blurt it all out, to tell him what had happened to her in Marseille, and how that had made it impossible for her to let him near her, but Kate held her back. She refused to explain herself to this – this – unable to bear it any more, she stopped the call, slamming the mouse down to disconnect.

  Immediately an email buzzed into her inbox: Jake’s new demands.

  • $2m for each child (total $4m), to be established into a fund for college fees, living expenses and to compensate them for their violent, miserable, disabled father.

  • $1.5m for my ex-wife Marnie, to enable her to extract herself from The Fellowship and to live independently.

  • $2m to enable me to buy a suitably adapted house on the East Coast, to be near my poor, estranged family.

  Remember, Emma. This is non-negotiable. I give you two days to get the money to me. Once more: NO NEGOTIATION.

  Seven point five million dollars. Five million pounds. In two days. Kate wanted to laugh at the absurdity of the sums. But instead, all she could do was look at them, aghast. Jake’s first demands had been within her reach. But this was too much. She just didn’t have access to that sort of cash.

  Her mind raced on. What could she sell without Mark noticing? The art on the walls – which would have easily covered what Jake wanted – was completely out of the question. Mark was the collector. He knew exactly what they had and where it hung. It would be impossible even to move a picture or sculpture without him noticing, let alone get rid of it. There was a graphic Tracey Emin drawing of a naked woman on the living-room wall. Identifying too closely with the self-loathing nature of the work, Kate had once tried to move it to one of the guest rooms. But Mark had been quite put out. He’d patiently explained to her as he returned it to its original position that he had bought the piece specifically with that distressed, bare-brick wall in mind and couldn’t she see how badly it fitted against the smooth plaster in the bedroom?

  Perhaps she could stage a burglary, pretend the Rothko had been stolen from their bedroom wall and get rid of it somehow on the black market. But the potential complications of that strategy – and the fact that she would be layering another whole stratum of deceit over her relationship with her husband – ruled that plan out.

  Jewellery, then? But again, Mark had bought every single piece she possessed, and often suggested this or that necklace or bracelet to go with an outfit. She thought about perhaps re-mortgaging either the house or the Cornish cottage, but it wouldn’t raise enough, it would take far too long, and then there would be the repayments to explain away.

  She sat at her desk. The smell from the kitchen was now that of cakes baking. Her hunger deepened.

  Seizing her keyboard, she replied to Jake’s email.

  I don’t have this sort of money.

  Immediately, the reply came back.

  I said two days, no negotiation. You know I have my eye on pretty little Tilly walking those London streets at night, as well as not quite so pretty nor so little Jessie and Saira in their ugly suburbs.

  You’ll think of something.

  Eleven

  ‘How’d it go?’ Beattie said as she stood at the stove.

  The kitchen looked as if a group of giddy children had smashe
d a giant piñata full of food in it. Every sleek, glossy surface was smeared, the floor was littered with peelings and open packets; spilled spices and flour dusted the work surfaces. At least five kitchen gadgets had been used; each one stood caked in something gloopy.

  Kate felt the itchiness that such disorder set off in her – if she wasn’t careful, she’d start scratching herself.

  ‘Oh, fine,’ she lied. ‘He’s happy.’

  She had decided on the way downstairs that she wasn’t going to tell Beattie about the new demands. If she did, she’d never see the back of her.

  In any case, by the time Beattie did leave, she would have found a way around this new problem, she was certain. She would just have to, as Jake had put it, think of something.

  ‘Oh, I am so relieved!’ Beattie turned to her, one hand to her chest, her face glistening from the heat of the stove. ‘I really had this idea that he was going to keep on and on taking money from you until you were ruined as much as me.’

  ‘I think he’s finally satisfied.’

  ‘Hey! We can breathe again,’ Beattie said, turning back to the fritters she was making, and Kate knew she had made the right decision in not telling her.

  ‘Wine?’ Kate said.

  ‘A celebration?’

  ‘Indeed.’ Kate stooped to take a bottle of Rioja from the wine rack. She felt far from celebratory, but this was the story she had chosen to tell. ‘In fact,’ she said, changing her mind and heading for the fridge. ‘I’ve got a nice bottle of bubbly in here. Let’s go for that.’

  ‘Far more suitable.’ Beattie pulled a plate out of the warming oven and scooped the batch of fritters – Kate thought perhaps they might be sweetcorn – onto a pile of earlier creations.

  ‘They smell heavenly,’ Kate said. They did – all sweetness and salty butter, like a real version of that ersatz cinema popcorn aroma. She popped the cork on the champagne and poured out a glass each for her and Beattie.

  ‘Do you mind if I smoke in here?’ Beattie said, pulling the packet of cigarettes Kate had bought her from the handbag Kate had bought her.

  ‘Um, I’d rather you didn’t,’ Kate said.

  Beattie frowned. ‘I thought Mark smoked, though.’

  ‘No. He gave up ten years ago.’

  ‘Oh. I thought –’ Beattie shook her head then smiled brightly at Kate. ‘Ah. He just looks like a smoker. I’ll just step out onto the terrace, then.’ Beattie took her glass and her cigarettes towards the French windows at the other end of the living area. ‘Oh, a message came through on your phone, I think. It pinged in your purse over there.’

  It was unlike Kate to leave her phone lying around – or her handbag, come to that. It was a sign of how distracted she had become.

  She glanced at the message. It was sent by Mark at six-thirty, saying he was on his way home: an event so rare at that early hour as to be extraordinary. It was probably his way of saying sorry for not asking before inviting Beattie to stay. Or perhaps he wanted to check that she was all right after saying goodbye to Tilly.

  He was a good man, she thought. Like Beattie said, almost suspiciously kind.

  It took an enormous effort, but she managed to restrain herself from clearing up the kitchen while she waited for Beattie to finish her cigarette – she knew that to do so would seem rude. Instead, she sipped her champagne and looked at the Martha’s Wish website on her phone. It had been days since she’d checked it, longer since she’d contacted the office. Patience had posted the Face of Kindness image on the home page to accompany an article about how successful it had been for the charity, and how the donations kept rolling in. She outlined what possibilities the extra money opened up for the charity.

  Kate shook her head. It was depressing that a sentimental photograph could make people cough up when the shocking facts about poverty and lack of opportunity for West African girls had failed to have anything like that effect.

  ‘What was the text?’ Beattie said as she came back in again, bringing cold air and an acrid waft of tobacco smoke with her.

  ‘Mark’s coming home for supper,’ Kate said. ‘Which is most unusual. We should feel honoured.’

  ‘I asked him,’ Beattie said.

  ‘What?’ Kate said, surprised.

  ‘I called him a while back and asked him. I want to say thank you with this meal.’

  ‘Oh. OK.’

  ‘He has been very kind to me. Well, you both have.’

  ‘It’s nothing. Really.’

  ‘Especially because he has no idea . . .’

  ‘Indeed. What time is it now?’

  ‘Seven-thirty.’

  Kate frowned. ‘He said he’d be back by seven. It’s not like him to be late.’

  ‘Oh, anything could have happened. The traffic was pretty bad when we were coming back.’

  ‘But he’s on his bike.’

  ‘On his bike? Isn’t it too far for that?’

  ‘He can normally do it in fifteen minutes. Keeps him fit, he says.’

  ‘Oh well, I don’t know. Perhaps he got waylaid on his way out of the office.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Kate said. Apprehension buzzed around her fingertips like an angry fly.

  ‘How long did Jake hound you for?’ she asked Beattie as she sat at the kitchen island to drink champagne and watch her make more of a mess of the kitchen.

  ‘It started nearly three years back.’

  ‘I hadn’t realised it was so long.’

  ‘Believe me, it seems like a lifetime. Ed was still alive then, of course, so it was real hard sneaking the money out of our accounts without him noticing. I had some things to sell – a little of my mother’s jewellery, for instance, but I didn’t have any money of my own.’

  ‘You didn’t have a job at all?’

  ‘Nope. I was a homemaker. I guess I just wanted to hunker down after all that stuff in Greece. I didn’t want to get out there and battle or anything. Ed earned enough, and I loved my babies.’

  ‘I felt exactly the same,’ Kate said. ‘It’s funny, that, isn’t it?’

  ‘I guess so. I never went to a shrink. Did you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I guess we both had what you’d call post-traumatic stress disorder, from what we thought we did to Jake.’

  ‘What I did to Jake.’

  ‘That’s what you say. But I’ll say it again: I would have pushed him, had I got there first.’ Beattie narrowed her eyes, but she really didn’t have the knack of looking mean. ‘I really wanted him dead after what he did to me.’

  Kate frowned. She hadn’t meant to push him over the edge, though. She had merely wanted to keep him away from her and Beattie. But was she remembering correctly? It all happened so quickly that perhaps she only believed it had gone like that to save herself from the worse truth.

  In any case, it didn’t matter, because Jake was still alive.

  She had to hold on to that fact, whatever problems it caused her.

  She had not killed him.

  She was not a murderer.

  ‘What happened to you after Ikaria?’ she asked Beattie, who was now dunking chicken pieces in egg, then throwing them into an over-spilling bowl of breadcrumbs.

  ‘Well, now,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t nearly so brave as you, Emma. I mean, you totally reinvented yourself, didn’t you?’

  Kate nodded.

  ‘I thought about giving up my drama school place. But then I thought, well, we had his ID. No one on that island knew who he was, or who we were, come to that.

  ‘Shall I tell you something? I met Ed on the plane coming back to New York from Athens. He was a junior doctor at St Vincent’s, and had been enjoying something of a more civilised time in Greece than we had. I didn’t plan anything. I just told him my name was Claire Cohen. So that was it. When I got back, that was who I was. It wasn’t unheard of for a drama student to change her name.

  ‘What did your parents say?’

  ‘My parents? They thought it amusing. Then Ed and I got married the fo
llowing summer, after I graduated, and we moved down to Georgia. I didn’t get any acting jobs. I don’t think I was honestly cut out for that life anyway. Not after all that happened. Instead, I got pregnant, kept a lovely home and learned to cook like a Southern mammy.’ With a slotted spoon, she lowered the breaded chicken into a pan of hot oil.

  ‘It all smells delicious,’ Kate said, wondering how you could keep a ‘lovely home’ when you cooked in such a chaotic matter.

  With the chicken pieces sizzling in the pan, Beattie turned to Kate. ‘I’ve never told anyone this. And I didn’t want to tell you earlier, before Jake backed off. But I think he was responsible for Ed’s death.’

  Kate could hear her heart pick up a beat. ‘What do you mean?’

  Beattie’s eyes glistened. ‘He was killed in a hit-and-run. Mown down at a crosswalk. The driver got away and no one got the license plate. It may just have been some drunk kids or something, of course, but I have this idea that it was Jake’s guys. I was refusing to pay at that point, see. Well, not refusing, unable. I couldn’t find any other money.’

  ‘But that’s murder. That’s way beyond intimidation.’ Kate registered that, despite the state-of-art under-floor heating in the kitchen and the fierce heat emanating from the stove, goosebumps were prickling on her arm.

  ‘I asked him if he had done it, but he denied it. Perhaps he had only meant to scare me, and it went wrong.’

  ‘We know how that goes, don’t we?’ Kate said.

  Beattie nodded gravely. ‘Jake got the result he wanted, though. I could pay him after Ed died, because of the life insurance. And, of course, with no Ed to object, I was free to do what I wanted with the house. Or, rather, what Jake wanted.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  Kate looked at the clock on the cooker. It was gone eight now. Mark was over an hour late. Where the hell was he?

  She closed her mind against the image of him, winged by a speeding Mondeo with tinted windows, thrown through the air to land cheek first on the gritty road, caught in a flying fall, the realisation on his face the same as that she had witnessed all those years ago on someone else’s: the awful look she had never truly been able to escape, even in the midst of the most joyous days of her life, when she had two young daughters and the darkness was in abeyance.