The Heights

by Louise Candlish

  I sit on the edge of her bed and lightly place a hand on her long jeaned calves. I can feel a tremble rising; I mustn’t let her see how distressed I am.

  ‘I know who you saw last night,’ I say.

  ‘What?’ Her expression clouds. ‘Who?’

  ‘Sam. Sam Harding. I assume you know who he really is?’

  She stares at me, horror-struck. ‘How am I supposed to unpack that?’

  Unpack. They speak differently, this generation. What would Lucas have made of his grown-up sister, I wonder? They were five years apart, but a different breed in language, in spirit. ‘Let me rephrase. This man who calls himself Sam, you do know he’s actually Kieran Watts?’ It may sound ridiculous that I ask this, but she was only thirteen or so when she last had any contact with Kieran and, given his new name and altered appearance, I can’t discount the possibility that she’s been duped.

  ‘Whoa,’ Freya says and puts down her phone.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It just means whoa. Of course I know it’s him, Mum. I don’t have amnesia.’ Noticing my hand on her calf, she shakes it off, tucking her feet to the side of her.

  ‘Okay,’ I say. ‘He looks a bit different, that’s all, and it’s been a few years. I just wanted to be sure.’

  ‘You followed me,’ she accuses. ‘I told you not to. It’s a complete invasion of privacy.’

  ‘I didn’t follow you,’ I say.

  ‘Well, my Find My Phone’s turned off, so you couldn’t have tracked me that way. How did you know?’

  ‘Someone who knows us saw you going into his building,’ I say.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I’d prefer not to say. Please trust me when I say that’s not what’s important here.’

  She chews a thumbnail, her brow creased. She’s calmer now, thinking like her father, finding the rational path through this. ‘Why don’t you tell me what is important?’

  ‘Keeping you safe is important,’ I say simply. ‘Nothing matters as much as that. How long have you been in touch with him?’

  ‘I don’t know, not long.’ I’m heartened by her eye contact, her basic willingness to engage.

  ‘Months? Weeks? Days? Try and think, Frey.’

  ‘It was ten days ago, maybe.’

  Ten days, and yet already she is prepared to cover for him. First Vic and now her. Why are they so ready to collude with Lucas’s killer? I feel a stinging behind my eyes. ‘Did he contact you or the other way around?’

  She sighs. ‘He contacted me. He found me on Instagram. Don’t ask me for his socials, Mum. I’m not going to tell you. It’s weird enough you know his address.’

  I nod, as if in the spirit of compromise. I’ve searched at length for accounts in the name of Sam Harding and found nothing I believe to be connected with him. I glance at her phone, face down on the duvet. Was she communicating with him when I walked in? Great to see you, Frey. You free again tonight?

  ‘He tried to get in touch with me before,’ she says, watching me. ‘He told me last night. He sent me a letter, years ago, after he was released, but I never got it. Do you know anything about that?’

  I try not to flinch. ‘I don’t, no. Maybe it got lost in the post.’

  Her mouth tightens. ‘He posted it through the door, Mum.’

  I gaze at her, reining in my fear. I can’t let a foiled attempt to insinuate himself in the past overshadow a charm offensive gathering pace in the present. ‘Freya, you were a child. He was a convicted criminal.’

  ‘Stealing mail is a crime, as well,’ she points out.

  I exhale heavily. I am not about to debate the relative merits of intercepting a single piece of post and leaving a man to drown. ‘Please, tell me what happened when you were in his flat last night.’

  She groans, obviously sensing I’m not going to give this up. She’ll be willing her father to come home early from work and appear in the doorway to save her from my inquisition, like he did when she was leaving last night, like he always does. ‘Nothing. We had a few beers. Had a good talk.’

  ‘A good talk? What about?’

  ‘I don’t know. Everything.’

  Nothing, everything: which is it?

  ‘It was just the two of you, was it?’

  She looks down, as if there really is something to hide, and I feel my fear slip its lead and rear up in front of me. ‘Why, Freya? I don’t understand! Why did you want be alone in the same room as your brother’s killer?’

  ‘Mum!’

  ‘Please, just try to explain to me.’

  Her eyes meet mine again. Wide, grey, full of compassion – for him. ‘Maybe because it helps. Like the counsellors told us, you feel better if you forgive.’

  Ah, forgiveness. You may find it stunning that I’ve reached this late stage in my account without having introduced the notion, at least not where he is concerned. And Freya is right, it has been proposed, both by professionals and amateurs. Only when you forgive can you move on…

  Absolute bullshit.

  ‘I will never forgive him,’ I tell her.

  ‘That’s not healthy,’ she replies.

  ‘Maybe, but it’s the way it is.’

  ‘Well, it shouldn’t be! Lucas’s death was an accident, but you still act like Kieran deliberately murdered him.’

  He did! As good as!

  ‘It wasn’t like the internet said,’ she continues. ‘I hated it, you know, your horrible campaign. I know you made sure the papers weren’t ever in the house, you put parental controls on my phone, but everything was still out there. I could read it on a computer at school, at friends’ houses. It was vile.’

  Horrible? Vile? I’m winded by this, just as she is warming up, her eyes firing. ‘It was supposed to be about justice, but it was malicious, all those things people said about him. It was bullying.’

  I gape. I didn’t give enough thought to her, clearly, as I travelled around the southeast with Vic warning strangers of the perils of their teenagers’ inadequate road sense, the systemic failings that added insult to injury when tragedy struck. When, not if. I put the fear of God into those audiences when I could have been urging them to love, to trust, to live.

  ‘People are bullied for far less online, Freya. That’s why we’ve always advised you to keep off social media. It’s one big kangaroo court. Anyway, when all that was going on, Kieran wasn’t allowed online. He was in prison.’ Seeing her expression grow more resolute, I continue, ‘You have to understand that if people took a hard line during the campaign, it was because they thought what he did deserved a more severe punishment than he got.’

  ‘They were whipped into a frenzy, Mum. By you and Vic and that journalist. What if it was me driving a friend?’ she demands, straightening her back as she changes tack. ‘What if I was the one who crashed a car? Would you say I needed to be punished? Or would you say it’s only natural to fight your way out of a submerged vehicle, that I was right to save myself no matter what?’

  I grip her hand, pulling air into my lungs. ‘He should have gone back down. Once he realized Lucas hadn’t come out after him, he should have gone back down and dragged him out. At the very least he should have called 999 the second he knew he couldn’t attempt the rescue himself.’

  ‘He didn’t have his phone, though, did he? And he was in shock. It was so bad he had PTSD.’

  ‘Yes, very convenient,’ I say.

  ‘PTSD is not “convenient”, Mum, it’s a psychological disorder. This is 2019, you can’t say things like that anymore.’

  Freya tears her hand from mine, disgusted by me. I don’t know how to make this right. Maybe we will never agree. But I can’t bring an end to this conversation until I know exactly what is being set up here. What Kieran’s limits are in using my remaining child as his pawn. I think of Jade, there for him when he came out of Danstone. He spun his lies with her and now he is doing the same with Freya.

  ‘He’s actually doing great things now,’ she says, on cue. ‘He’s not allowed t
o talk about it, but he started something that’s going to help a lot of people, maybe millions.’

  ‘Yes, I know about that,’ I say. I also know that he is not supposed to discuss his part in it. How did Ratcliffe put it? Even ‘casual gossip’ could be dangerous. Which means either Kieran’s keenness to impress her led him to be indiscreet or – I breathe in sharply as the possibility takes shape – he intended us to have this conversation. It’s developing just as he scripted it, with himself right at its centre.

  Freya is looking encouraged. ‘Then how can you not be impressed by how he’s turned his life around?’

  Like he did when he joined Foxwell, I think? A troubled youngster worth supporting, worth nurturing. Let’s buddy him up with one of our best. ‘I’m glad his work will help people. It definitely sounds like something worthwhile.’ And although it takes all of my mental strength to make this statement, my reward is a form of settlement between us.

  ‘You can’t stop me seeing him again,’ Freya says finally.

  ‘I know I can’t.’

  It would only put her in the position of having to choose and I would never do that.

  All I can do is take the choice away.

  Killing Time (cont)

  There is a memorable scene in Saint or Sinner in which Ellen visits a notorious South London housing estate with the aim of obtaining a firearm. It’s an episode that is both excruciating and compelling: a sometimes pompous-sounding suburban housewife doing business with the criminal underclass. (Can’t you just see the scene in the movie? Some national treasure with RADA training code-switching with the best of them.)

  One of Ellen’s recurring criticisms of Kieran Watts – besides the obvious and justifiable – is his habit as a teenager of speaking like a gangster, and yet the chilling taciturnity of the real-life estate juveniles she encounters only accentuates the fallacy at the heart of her loathing of him. In this respect, and possibly others besides, Watts was never anything more than a pretender.

  The scene also raises further questions about the author’s exposure to a potential review of criminal charges. ‘Something easy to use,’ she briefs the gang apparatchiks, showing them a photo of her preferred model, and if that is not an expression of intent to cause bodily harm, then I don’t know what is.

  Sunday Times magazine,

  December 2021

  Chapter 33

  I know you’ll want to hear about the gun.

  You’ll want to be scandalized by how easy it was for me to get hold of one – I would be exactly the same if I were reading this. We like to think it’s so hard to obtain weapons here in the UK; we like to think we’re so civilized compared to our trigger-happy friends across the Atlantic.

  Well, let me tell you, some of us are a lot less civilized than others.

  But first, to be strictly chronological, there is a call from Asha at The Heights.

  My immediate guess is she’s been talking with her partner about her new plans to spend an awful lot of money on light of all things – it’s common once the initial excitement has blown over to be advised that budgets are out of reach after all – and so I’m amazed when she says, ‘You know my neighbour upstairs, the one I told you about when you were here?’

  ‘Oh, yes, the hermit,’ I say as if groping for the memory.

  ‘That’s him, though maybe he’s a bit more sociable than I thought. We got talking in the lobby this morning and I mentioned the work I’m thinking of having done and he asked for your details for some advice about his place. I thought I’d better ask first before just handing over your number to a random male. He looks – how can I put it? – a bit strange, but I think he’s harmless.’

  My heart drums painfully. Kieran must have been monitoring the entry-phone video and seen me arrive or leave. Did he linger outside Asha’s flat as I once did his? There is no reason for her to wonder why this neighbour she’s barely exchanged two words with before is suddenly being so friendly, but every reason for me to. He could have found my details in a couple of clicks, but this way he makes his point. He’s planning something, even if I don’t yet know what. ‘Thank you, I appreciate that, Asha. I’m sure he’s perfectly trustworthy. I’ll pop by when I next come in.’

  ‘That will be the day of my party, so why don’t I ask him if he wants to drop in and meet you then? I need to invite the neighbours, anyway.’

  ‘Great idea,’ I tell her.

  * * *

  So, the gun. An investigative piece in the South London Press sends me to the Whitley Estate on the outskirts of Bromley. It’s both brutalist and brutal, set up on a hill, low rise but for a grim trio of towers at its centre. It’s a scary place, of course it is – we’ve all read about gangs and county lines, these places where the savage few rule and everyone else is classified as ‘vulnerable’. As I cross from safe postcode to unsafe, my body brims with the strange tension between instinctive fear and a kind of learned abandon.

  I haven’t thought it through, no, especially where Freya is concerned. I’m not thinking of how it might feel for her years from now, should her mother choose to make use of that gun. How long the scandal and the shame would last. I’m only thinking I have to put a stop to the horror of Kieran being in her life, inhabiting her brain as he did Lucas’s. Contaminating, destroying.

  What did my darling Justin say that time to the detective? Our family was very, very unlucky to have crossed paths with this boy…

  A narrow street of low-rise housing opens onto a so-called plaza, the concrete lobbies of the towers on three sides and a parade of shops on the fourth. At its centre is an area of bench seating and a small children’s playground. There is a smell of burning, but no obvious source. As if entering the compound of a jail, I’m surrounded immediately by guards. Kids, really. Lads. (It is, by the way, a school day.) All black kit and baseball caps and trainers in brands that presumably signify something to them and their kind but nothing to me and mine. Three of them are on bikes and another rides a scooter meant for an infant. Some have smooth skin and gentle features, others skinny, undeveloped physiques, but they all eyeball me with the same empty, inhospitable glare of adults with decades of wrongdoing under their belts.

  I identify the leader and hold out my phone to display a photo of a Smith & Wesson revolver I’ve researched online. My pitch is rehearsed right down to the last word: ‘Listen to me, I am not police. I am a private citizen and I need to get hold of something like this. Something easy to use. Please go and tell whoever your decision maker is. Your boss.’ My tone is clipped and commanding and though the boy mutters a string of insults about me to the group, he snatches my phone out of my hand and peels away on his bike.

  I wait, my heart hammering. Why did I let him take my phone like that? It’s not worth anything, but it contains texts to Vic, as well as that audio clip of Kieran. Worse, I didn’t bring my regular phone, which means that if this feral pack comes at me, I can’t even call 999.

  More optimistically, at least any plans to search me for valuables are on hold until the boss returns and I’m too old for these boys to want to sexually harass me. They remain close by, only half-watching me as they scroll on their phones. Loud music starts up in a flat overhead, with menacing bassline and nasty vocals. It is soon opposed by a second stream from a floor in the same tower and the kids react with a brief show of excitement that feels routine. It’s as if I’ve arrived midway through a war.

  My nose runs and I wipe it with the back of my hand, feel the liquid drying on my skin. Just get through this Think of Freya.

  Think of Lucas.

  Finally, the leader spins back into view on his bike, comes at me so fast I cringe, before swerving and stopping with real skill, like a skier. Not powder, but dust. ‘Three G,’ he says.

  Three thousand pounds is almost certainly above market rate, and, if I pay it, these kids – or more likely their over-lords – will be partying on my stupidity. But what do I care? I think of my cash at home. A little over two and a half; I c
an top up the rest. ‘Fine. I’ll bring cash. When?’

  He indicates my phone. ‘This clean?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He thumbs a message, presumably to himself, then hands it back. There is no question of our exchanging names.

  ‘When?’ I repeat, then, when he still declines to answer, ‘I need it by next Wednesday at the latest.’ The day before Asha’s party.

  He just sneers. ‘Christmas present, innit?’

  I harden my tone. ‘Seriously. If you can’t get it by then, forget it. Text me and let me know. I’m going now, okay?’

  A trio of younglings accompany me back to the main street, baying and buoyant. They’re suddenly like real kids, not a million miles from Lucas and his pals when they were this age.

  There’s a lump in my throat so big I can’t swallow.

  * * *

  The message arrives on Wednesday morning.

  Leave $ in fone box Mare St 3pm

  I noticed the kiosk on my first foray. It’s right on the corner of the street leading to the square, disused, of course, as they all are now. It’s been burned out and pissed in and generally abused, so classically a PO box for gangs I wonder if the police might have put a camera in it. But criminals would sweep any devices, surely.

  As I drop the cash, zipped in a small knapsack, I think of Vic and the story he gave me of leaving my fifteen thousand pounds for Kieran – It was a risk. It paid off – and feel a fresh surge of rage. Why, Vic? If you’d only followed the plan first time around, this could all be over now, long since finished. I could be up in town today, Christmas shopping with Freya. We could have our noses at the window of Fortnum & Mason, before cutting through to Regent Street to gasp in delight at this year’s lights. Thinking life is worth living, after all.

  Not that there aren’t Christmas lights on the Whitley Estate. The house nearest the phone box is practically sheathed in them, an oversized fake snowman by the door. I linger by it for ten minutes or so. The pavements are empty, but I know I’m being watched. I’ve never been so aware of my own nervous system: my stomach is eating itself, my heart is speeding. At last, a child I recognize from my first visit bikes up and enters the box. He’s in there for a minute or two and I picture him thumbing through the notes, checking it’s all there. When he leaves, he shoves his foot in the door, and gestures in my direction. As I step forward, he lets the door bang shut, throws a leg over his bike and pedals away.