‘But you … you don’t … I don’t mean this harshly, Lyds, but you can’t possibly understand this.’
‘Why’s that?’ she whispers. He might yet not say it. He might not. All this time, never letting her truly in, not in on the family WhatsApp group until recently, always on the sidelines with their inside jokes. He’s going to say it. He is.
‘You don’t have a family … you don’t have …’ Joe says, but Lydia is already walking away from him, towards those lit-up windows, towards the house they share together, away from those words, those words that are so careless, so reckless with her feelings, they may as well be knives.
Lydia sits up in bed, alone, Joe banished to the spare room. She is half a bottle of wine down, and angry. She cannot believe he said it. She cannot believe it.
None of it. That he buried a fucking body. That he lied to the police. That he bribed Evan. But, most of all, that he said it. That he said she didn’t understand family.
She brings the glass of wine to her mouth and finishes it, then pours another. She stares at herself in the mirrored wardrobes that sit at the end of their bed. She looks deranged. She looks heartbroken.
They’re going to find the body any day now.
And, when they do, it is Lydia who holds all the cards. It is Lydia who could ruin them, this perfect family. It is Lydia who could demand whatever she wants in return for her silence.
Part V
* * *
MISAPPROPRIATION OF CORPORATE ASSETS
54.
Joe
Joe goes into the room he uses as a study. It’s right next to Paul’s bedroom. Sometimes, at night, Joe used to be able to hear him crying, but the evening is silent tonight.
The room contains a pale wood-effect corner desk he and Lydia got from IKEA. ‘Let’s rescue this one!’ she’d said to him with a wide smile. ‘Look – it’s called “Klimpen” – is there a better name for a desk?’
God, he has hurt her, kicking tables, throwing insults. What a fucking dick he is.
He sits in the quiet of the study, the computer firing up, little green rectangles flashing, and thinks. He needs to sort it right now. Amend the partnership deed. Just do it. Just do it now. Cathy would caution against haste, but Cathy isn’t here. Besides, Cathy’s been messing up prescriptions. Been strangely absent in mind if not in body.
What else is he supposed to do? He understands why Lydia feels what she feels, but if they don’t pay off Evan, they will go to prison.
His mother will need to sign this transfer. It’s a problem. It’s another problem. He leans back in his chair, thinking, then goes downstairs and makes a pot of coffee. Halfway up the stairs, he turns around and gets two Snickers. He must stop eating but not tonight.
He logs on to the company bank account. There’s the overdraft. There’s the float. He sits back in the chair, the bright white screen hurting his eyes, and thinking. The heating clicks on, the radiator by his feet warming slowly as he tries to work it through.
Is there any way not to do this? He rests his fingers on the keyboard and thinks for just a second more. And then he hears it. A shifting, and then a small moan, a toddler sound. A watery cry, Paul, just through the layer of bricks that divides them.
Joe prints off their partnership deed with an amendment sheet. They should probably use a lawyer, but it looks easy enough. He adds in Evan’s name and ‘twenty per cent’ after it. Consideration: £1. And that’s it. Who knows if somebody will see it one day, will work it out. If HMRC will accuse them of insider trading, a sale at an undervalue, is that right? But what can they do? At every single stage of this, their options have been poor. They’ve made the best of the hand that Frannie dealt them.
He leans his head on the desk for a second. Fucking Frannie. His ear hurts as he lies against it on the hard desk. He reaches to rub it and turns his mind away from the question of whether he would have helped her if he had known the full circumstances, the truth. He doesn’t have the capacity to worry about it. He’s full up.
He looks sideways at the partnership deed lying on the desk right next to his eyes. Frannie, Cathy, Joe, his mother. The Partners agree to transfer twenty per cent of the Business to Evan Sawyer, to be held in equal parts of twenty per cent each.
How is he going to get that through without asking Maria to sign it?
He stares into space. Nope, he doesn’t have the capacity to worry about that either. He has sold off a controlling share of the business for a pound.
It’s a small price to pay. But it’s better than parting with what they really owe: Frannie.
55.
Cathy
‘I’m a stop-out,’ Cathy says, smiling, leaning into Tom as he stands in the doorway.
He ran her a bath this morning. He flitted in and out, bringing her tea, sorting his washing. They had a shouted conversation from bathroom to bedroom while he put his clothes away. ‘What’s with the aubergines, then?’ he’d said, from his room to where she lay.
‘Oh – you know. Just never really had a long-term aubergine.’ Tom only laughed.
‘I had a very bad aubergine,’ he called, then arrived in the bathroom, a stack of folded towels held on the flat of his hand like a waiter.
‘Did you?’ she said, turning to him. His bathroom was immaculate too. A low windowsill containing only his shampoo, a five-in-one he described as ‘good for hair washing, shower gel, road tarmacking, whatever you want’.
‘Yep, got divorced and all.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry.’
He waved the hand not holding the towels. ‘It’s fine. You don’t need to say that.’ It was the second serious thing he’d said. Tom was suddenly vaulted from fun fling to … to something more. To potential secret keeper. To boyfriend.
She stands now, on his threshold, not quite able to leave. ‘See you later?’ he says. ‘Tonight?’
‘Maybe,’ she says, and he smiles, then, into the kiss. ‘I’m a poor lonely aubergine,’ he says.
‘Me too,’ she says, turning to leave, waving to him from her car, wondering what she is doing. Wondering what he might do with those secrets, if she told them to him.
Part VI
* * *
FRAUD
56.
Joe
Joe dials his mother’s number. She picks up immediately. ‘Everything okay?’ she asks.
‘Yeah. I’m just … Evan is going to sit in on some partnership meetings,’ Joe says, his words joining up and overlapping as they rush out together, such obvious lies.
‘Right?’ Maria says. She, like Cathy, doesn’t miss a trick. At some point, Joe is thinking, as he stares at the new percentages, even if he hides this document forever, Maria will find out. Evan will refer to himself as a partner, or give a casting vote in a meeting, or sign a cheque. He stares at the wall, but there’s no solution. If their mother finds out, he will have to make something up. Yet another thing. When you’ve told so many lies, one more hardly seems to matter at all, not even one told to his mother.
‘Yeah, he raised some concerns about feeling, er, pushed out,’ Joe says. ‘So I thought I’d let you know.’
‘I mean – that’s quite a change,’ Maria says. Her tone is conversational, but her words aren’t.
‘Well, anyway. You’re not around day to day, so I wouldn’t expect you to understand the dynamics here,’ he says, hoping the deflection will be enough, but still wincing as he says it. It isn’t fair. She didn’t ask for this. He rubs at his eyes.
‘Well – hang on just a seco–’ Maria says, but he’s already making his excuses, feigning an emergency, saying a hurried goodbye, feeling like a tosser.
This is all such a fucking bodge job. How long can he keep papering over things?
But he’s decided what to do and so he scrawls his mother’s signature before he can convince himself otherwise. It’s barely an approximation of it, but it doesn’t seem to matter. Who would even check? He holds up the document to the light. Shit. He could at least hav
e used a different pen to the one he signed with.
He only needs Cathy and Frannie to sign it now. He hopes Cathy will just do it without quibbling. What if she doesn’t? He knows he’s being irrational, but he can’t help it. They’re each so reliant on the others …
He goes out into reception, unable to wait, sweating around his hairline, but finds Evan instead of Cathy, seeing out a giant house rabbit in a box, with what looks like an ear infection – the fur around it is sticky. ‘Got a sec?’ Joe says, gesturing into his consultation room.
‘What can I do you for?’ Evan says, the same twisted phrase he always uses, and Joe bites his tongue. If Joe is a tosser, then at least Evan is a cunt.
‘It’s all here,’ he says recklessly, even though it isn’t signed. He gestures to Evan. ‘Twenty per cent of the business sound reasonable.’
‘Sounds great,’ Evan says.
He takes the single sheet of paper that transfers Joe’s business, sold off gratis, to him. Just like that.
‘Joe,’ he says. There’s a laugh in his voice, though it isn’t a friendly one. It’s a powerful laugh. He can hardly believe his fucking luck.
‘I’m happy to extend an offer of partnership to you,’ Joe says. He was never a good negotiator. Too hot-headed. Always laid his cards straight out on the table. Maybe he should have started at ten per cent.
‘I’m happy to accept,’ Evan says, and, despite himself, Joe is relieved. It’s for the best.
He reaches for the lid of the dog-treats jar and fiddles with the glass stopper on the top.
‘And if you … if you renege,’ Joe says. ‘You know what? What we’re doing here is illegal.’ He thought about it last night. Nobody would shop somebody for murder if they themselves would get sent down for blackmail.
‘Right,’ Evan says, another laugh in his voice. It is being laughed at that angers Joe more than anything else. On the football field, at work and now too, it seems, in situations he never, ever thought he’d be in. ‘Sure,’ Evan adds.
It’s the sure that does it.
‘Do you know, you really don’t want to cross us.’ He walks two steps towards Evan, getting right in his space, making sure his shoulders look big.
Evan says nothing, just looks at him, then steps back, just a tiny bit.
The veiled threat, the reference to what they’ve already done, the hint at physical violence, they come from nowhere. As forceful as a volcano erupting.
Evan stares at him, his expression both judgemental and frightened. ‘I await the other signatures,’ he says eventually. Joe nods up at the ceiling, even though nobody can see him except the God who witnessed the crime in Italy. Something about that omniscience comforts him. That somebody may have a wide view of all of this. Can see what he is doing, and why.
They walk into the reception, Frannie on some fashion website, no lunch-time patients waiting.
Outside, the rain has finally stopped, and the sky is a burnt-sienna. There’s a dust cloud. It’s been on the news this week, turning their skies peach and orange instead of blue. After the flooding caused by the rain, and now this, outside has a post-apocalyptic vibe, people stopping to take photographs, tapping the arm of the person they’re with and pointing. The sun is barely visible through it, a haze amid the dust.
Evan moves to walk out the front door, to buy a sandwich from next door, Joe guesses.
He’ll get Frannie and Cathy to sign now and … well, then Evan joins the fold. He joins the numbers of people forced to keep this secret. Extortion, bribery, fraud, threats. He’s in as deep as they are, then. None of them can see the sun clearly.
‘Clock’s ticking on those other signatories,’ says Evan, over his shoulder.
Evan turns back to Frannie. She is totally still, surrounded by those bloody Chinese waving cats in perpetual motion, just looking at him, eyes wide and sad.
57.
Cathy
‘Mum signed this?’ Cathy says. She stares at the document, then up at Joe. It’s ten minutes before Evan joins them at the first partnership meeting. They’re always at seven o’clock, every other Tuesday. Cathy likes the mundanity of them. The instant coffee, the quiet.
‘Glad you think so,’ Joe says, plucking it from Cathy’s grip. ‘I did.’
Cathy moves away from him in shock. ‘What?’ she says. She stares down at it. Of course. Of course he hasn’t told their mother. That is a poor copy of the signature that she knows so well. Like it’s been traced. The same shape, but that’s about it. A facsimile.
‘You can’t do that,’ she says softly. ‘She needs to know. And – Joe. I need to know too.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You’re doing stuff without telling me. We need to be transparent with each other.’
‘Is that a threat?’ he barks.
‘What?’
‘She wouldn’t sign it. What would we possibly say?’
‘You sold a fifth of the company for a quid,’ Cathy says. ‘That’s – isn’t that fraud? Selling things off at an undervalue? The taxman will look into it – HMRC … I …’
‘If anyone looks into anything we’ve done over the last while, we will be fucked,’ Joe says, taking a sidelong glance at her. ‘You have anything constructive to add? Going to tell the police about me?’
Cathy feels her mouth turn down in sadness. None of them is their best self at the moment. ‘I can’t sign this,’ she says quietly. ‘I can’t be party to fraud, to all this … forging signatures.’
Joe thrusts a pen forcefully into her hands. The plastic burns her skin as he presses. ‘Just sign it,’ he barks.
She looks down, trying not to cry, knowing she’s going to do it, knowing she has to do it.
‘What have you told her?’ she asks.
‘That he’s attending partnership meetings.’
‘Joe, I …’ she starts to say, but he ignores her, staring down at the agenda Frannie’s printed off. Suddenly, Cathy can’t be bothered to raise it. The train they’re on is almost at their destination, she finds herself thinking, a thought she will come back to again and again. A team somewhere is probably uncovering Will, and discovering everything they tried to hide anyway. The end feels somehow near. She can only hope that she’s wrong. She signs her name.
‘What?’ he says, catching her expression. He doesn’t wait for an answer, and instead goes into the staff room. Cathy follows him. They’re all waiting there. Frannie, Maria, Evan. ‘Evan’s joining us today,’ Joe says tightly. ‘Just – because he’s interested in the management perspective.’
Maria looks over at Joe. Her dark hair is gathered at her neck. ‘Right,’ she says, her expression clearing and darkening, as though she is working something out. She will think she is being phased out.
Cathy gives a wan smile to Evan, keeping up the front. She’s liked her colleague well enough for the past decade, but she can’t believe he took the bribe. What would she do? Be given a stake in a profitable, successful business in exchange for silence? She would have waived that, she thinks, even if her silence could be purchased. And it was, after all, by Frannie. For free.
Evan’s brows are drawn together, looking from Maria to Joe. Cathy watches him work it out: that Maria doesn’t know he’s a partner, and so – Evan is no idiot – she still doesn’t know what happened in Verona either.
‘Not much to discuss,’ Joe says. ‘On target for the month. All going well. We’ve switched the supplier of blood tests to a cheaper lab that does them faster too.’
Frannie is taking a note, the tendons in her hand crisscrossing over each other as she grips the pen.
‘Okay,’ she says, nodding. She has on large hoop earrings that should look hideous but don’t.
‘What’s the matter?’ Maria says to Frannie. ‘You’re so tense. You’ll snap the pen.’
‘I’m really not.’
‘You – I mean – I just worry.’
Frannie drops her head and massages the back of her neck as Cathy watches. Those th
ree words – I just worry – are said so often. She appraises her mother across the staff room.
She shakes her head, looking down at her drink. The staff room is dim and smells damp this evening.
They discuss the practice’s footfall, whether they need to advertise. Joe tells everybody that they need to stop underestimating surgical time taken, which he addresses – kindly – to the room, but he means it directly to Cathy. She never bills even half what she should. That shouldn’t have taken three hours, she will think of a simple cruciate knee op. I’ll bill an hour and a half. That’s how long it would take an expert. Someone better than me. She does it all the time, shaving time off here and there, passing on the lab results only at cost. Feeling sorry for families who can’t work but who still want pets, families dealt bad hands with Labradors with arthritis and insurance companies who exploit loopholes. Families who want to do the best for their animals – most of them do – but can’t. Cathy bears the cost herself. Chipping away at the business. Putting them less in the black than they should be.
‘That means me,’ Cathy says, raising a hand, trying to dispel the atmosphere.
‘Bill them for everything,’ Evan says. ‘It’s the only way. Why wouldn’t you get the most out of a situation?’ he says lightly. He’s leaning back on the rear two legs of his chair. His gaze strays to Maria.
‘I know,’ Cathy says quickly. ‘I will – I just. Too much heart, I suppose.’
Goosebumps break out along her arms, but she ignores them. Tries to ignore this interloper in her family’s business that they sold out to in exchange for his silence. Evan must surely know Maria doesn’t know, and Cathy watches him smirk as he looks at her, but he doesn’t say anything. Not yet.
That Night Page 26
