Our House

by Louise Candlish

  He chuckled. ‘Reconnaissance agent, I like that. To answer your question, we thought she might be better than me at buttering you up. Like I say, we see this as a three-way project, excuse the innuendo.’

  Again, a private slyness in his countenance was as clear a hint as the words he spoke: buttering you up . . .

  Wendy must have recorded our conversation about the crash.

  I remembered my admissions – ‘If the Fiat hadn’t swerved, we’d have smashed headlong and we’d all be dead!’ ‘So you did cause the crash?’ ‘Of course I fucking did!’ – and felt the last of any self-control slide from my grip. Was he recording this? ‘You’re both deranged,’ I said, lip snarling. ‘Don’t come near me again, do you understand? Find someone else’s house to steal. I’ll enjoy following your trial in the Daily Mail.’

  With this, I dropped the phone he’d given me to the floor and stamped on it. As other drinkers frowned, intolerant of argy-bargy so early in the evening, Mike had the gall to look entertained.

  ‘Careful there, Bram. You don’t want to be seen engaging in senseless acts of violence, do you? If the police start nosing around, these sorts of things get remembered, you know what I mean?’ He turned to the bartender and said, ‘Bram here’s had some bad news. I’ll clear the mess up, mate, don’t worry.’ I scooped up the fragments myself; it had not passed me by that he’d used my name, very loudly. ‘Fuck off, Mike,’ I hissed.

  ‘I’m not going anywhere,’ he said, raising his drink to me as I exited.

  And I knew he meant it. Even as I cast the plastic shards into a bin in the street, even as I slotted the SIM card through the grating of a nearby drain, still growling with anger as I did so, I knew it would make no difference.

  I knew he’d be back.

  24

  ‘Fi’s Story’ > 01:31:00

  Even when a detective came to the house to ask about the car, I remained unsuspecting. You know how it is, you focus on the short-term inconvenience of these things. You assume everyone gets the same prompt service: it was the Friday of the same week it had been stolen.

  ‘You need my husband,’ I said at the door. ‘He made the original report.’

  The guy nodded, casual but polite. ‘Even so, I’d just like to clarify a couple of things with you, if I may.’

  ‘Of course. This is impressively quick. Do you work with Yvonne Edwards, by any chance? She’s the community support officer who came to talk to us about neighbourhood crime. She was very helpful.’

  ‘No, I’m with the Serious Collisions Investigation Unit based in Catford.’

  I stared at him in confusion. He was not in uniform and it wasn’t a police team I’d ever heard of; as I led him inside, I chided myself for not taking a closer look at his ID. I’d read in the paper about innocent residents of a village in Leicestershire being hoodwinked and robbed by an impostor in a police costume. As we settled in the living room, I eyed my escape route.

  ‘So the vehicle was reported missing on Tuesday, but your husband was unable to say when you last saw it. Might it have been several days before? Even weeks?’

  ‘Weeks?’ I echoed, surprised. ‘No, I used it on Sunday. I parked it up near the junction with the Parade at about four o’clock and neither of us have seen it since.’

  ‘So that’s last Sunday, the second of October?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And do you remember who was driving it on Friday the sixteenth of September?’

  I looked blankly at him. ‘No, not off the top of my head. Why?’

  ‘Do you keep a diary or a calendar that might help you recall?’

  He’d come to the right place there: I cross-referenced my work schedule with the kitchen calendar and the bird’s nest app. ‘Friday the sixteenth, here we are. Neither of us used it, so it would have been parked in the street all day. Bram had a sales conference out of town and I was at an antiques fair in Richmond for most of the day with a friend.’

  ‘Neither of you drove to these appointments?’

  ‘No. Well, I drove with a friend in her car. Bram took the train to his conference.’

  There was a pause, a faint hardening of attention. ‘You saw him go to the station?’

  ‘No, not personally. We’re not together any more. We’re separated. He was at the flat.’ I gave him details of the address and its proximity to the house and train station. ‘But I know he leaves well before eight and when I came back from the school run the car was definitely there. I remember because my friend and I had second thoughts about whose car to take. I showed her the Audi’s boot space and we decided to take her Volvo, as planned.’

  ‘What time did you leave for this trip?’

  ‘About eight fifteen. We put our kids in the school breakfast club to get an early start.’ Not sure who I was so eager to help, him or Bram, I added: ‘If you need to double-check that Bram took the train, you could always look at the station security film. They definitely have cameras there.’

  The corners of his mouth pulled, causing a stitch in the flesh on the left side. A detective with a dimple. ‘I see you know your police procedurals, Mrs Lawson,’ he said.

  I smiled. ‘Sorry. I do like a crime drama.’

  ‘So you left at eight fifteen and then you returned when?’

  ‘In time for school pick-up. Three thirty.’

  I talked him through my likely movements between pick-up and handover to Bram at 7 p.m., though the finer points of domesticity eluded me. ‘Pasta or sausages, I’m afraid I can’t tell you,’ I said wryly.

  ‘Did anyone stop by the house?’

  To vouch for my having been there, he meant. I strained to recall. ‘I think my friend Kirsty came by. That’s right, our kids had taken home each other’s PE kit, so we swapped them back. I remember I had to leave the grill to answer the door. It was sausages.’

  A second appearance of the dimple. ‘And what about later, after your husband arrived? Might you have used your own car then?’

  ‘No, I went to Brighton for the night and I took the train. I know I used the car that Sunday, though, because I took the kids for lunch at my parents in Kingston.’

  ‘Busy weekend.’

  ‘Yes, it was.’ I looked up, tried to read his expression. ‘Why are you asking all this? What happened that Friday?’

  ‘There was a collision in Thornton Heath that we’re investigating. You may have read about it in the local papers.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I admitted. ‘But I’ve used the car a few times since then so it can’t have been involved in any crash. Oh, hang on, is this because of the missing key?’

  ‘Missing key?’ There was a flicker of fresh energy. ‘House key?’

  ‘No, car key. We could only find one set – I thought Bram mentioned that in his report? It can be a bit chaotic around here. We take turns to be here with the kids, you see. We’re never here at the same time.’ I answered his look of surprise with a brief piece of evangelism about bird’s nest custody.

  ‘Right, so in terms of the car keys, might this second set have been missing for some time?’

  ‘Maybe. I guess.’ A thought struck. ‘You don’t think someone might have broken in and stolen it? We’ve had a burglary on the street recently.’ The community officer had mentioned this trend at the meeting, I remembered. Alison had raised the notion that you should always leave car keys out in the open, counterintuitive as it was, so as to avoid burglars ransacking the place in search of hidden keys, but the officer had cautioned against leaving them visible through a window.

  ‘Have you noticed any signs of forced entry?’ the detective asked.

  ‘No,’ I conceded. ‘But I know thieves can use wires and hooks through the letterbox, can’t they?’

  ‘That’s right.’ He paused. ‘Alternatively, you might simply have mislaid the key.’

  I agreed that this was more likely and he asked if I’d noticed any scratches or other damage to the car over the last few weeks.

  ‘No, it l
ooked the same as ever. There were some marks on the tyres from parking, you know, kerb damage, but they’ve been there for ages.’

  As soon as he’d left, I googled ‘Thornton Heath car accident’, adding the news filter. Here it was: an accident on Silver Road on Friday 16th at about 6 p.m. A dark-coloured VW or Audi had been seen close to the scene.

  Remembering the officer’s name, I found he was indeed a detective sergeant in the Serious Collisions Investigations Unit, which handled cases throughout south-east London and its suburbs. They must be visiting the owners of every dark-coloured VW or Audi reported stolen in South London, even those taken after the incident, like ours. That struck me as an inefficient way to investigate, but what did I know?

  Don’t answer that.

  VictimFi

  @crime_addict Where’s the car then? Husband involved in this crash, maybe?

  @rachelb72 @crime_addict Must’ve been, that’s why he’s done a Lord Lucan

  @crime_addict @rachelb72 Why no damage then? He got it fixed?

  @rachelb72 @crime_addict Maybe when they finally find it, they’ll discover his rotting body in the boot . . .

  Bram, Word document

  At that Friday’s handover, Fi said, ‘Did you know the police thought one of us might have been involved in some car crash down in Thornton Heath a few weeks ago?’

  I concealed a split-second’s paralysis. ‘They did? When did they say that?’

  ‘A detective came round this morning. Obviously, I checked the diary and told him neither of us used the car that day, but I guess there’s a process of elimination they have to follow, isn’t there?’

  ‘Yes.’ I swallowed.

  ‘I wondered if it was possible someone stole the keys before they took the car,’ she went on, musing. ‘But the police said that was unlikely since there’ve been no signs of a burglary. Still, we should have been more careful, Bram.’

  Though taken aback by this, I saw how fortunate it was that it had been she, genuinely in the dark, who had been the one to field the police’s enquiries. Would my own responses have sounded so natural, so guileless? How appalled she would be if I told her the truth about the Audi. That I’d thought seriously about finding a dark stretch of canal, or even the Thames, and taking the handbrake off to let it roll into the water, but then I’d decided it was better to hide it in plain sight.

  Contrary to my respective reports to insurer, police and her, I’d last seen our car late on Sunday night, last driven it then too. Left it in a street in Streatham with no parking restrictions, key dropped down the nearest drain. With any luck, the battery would go flat and it would sit there for months.

  ‘I doubt we’ll ever know what happened.’ I sighed. ‘But I really don’t think we should beat ourselves up about it. We’re still getting used to a whole new way of living. How are we supposed to know where the car keys are at any given moment?’

  ‘You’re right.’ The way she was looking at me, thankful for the solidarity, the shared attention to this latest aggravation, it not only flattered me, but it calmed me too.

  ‘We’re pretty security-conscious generally,’ I said. ‘Especially after what happened to the Ropers. And poor old Carys.’

  She looked pleased that I’d remembered Carys.

  I considered the issue of my ban: if the officer she had spoken to had known about it then he obviously hadn’t seen fit to divulge it. She must have explained early on that we’d split up and he’d erred on the side of diplomacy. ‘Tell the police to phone me if they have any more questions,’ I said.

  I was already formulating my responses for just such a follow-up. ‘The sixteenth? Oh, that was the away-day. It was at a hotel down near Gatwick, I’d have to look up the name.’ ‘Did you drive there?’ ‘No, I took the train. There was a delay, now I think about it. I only just made it to the first session.’ Surely they wouldn’t go so far as to check the station’s CCTV footage? If so, crowds had accumulated quickly that morning and it was possible I wouldn’t be easily identifiable on the platform, which was unfortunate. On the other hand, when I’d left I’d been part of a swarm too – hidden by it, with any luck.

  But what if they checked at the other end? There’d be no pictures of me hurrying through any station on the Gatwick line. ‘Where did you get off the train, Mr Lawson?’ they’d ask. I needed to google the station, I thought, check the exits. Or was it more natural to be vague – who remembered this stuff? What about CCTV at the hotel? Had cameras clocked the Audi near the collision site? And the police had number plate recognition technology, didn’t they? – oh God, could it be applied retrospectively?

  I became aware that I was blinking, over and over, a tic that was hard to control.

  ‘Are your eyes all right, Bram?’ Fi asked.

  ‘Fine, just a bit of grit.’ I recovered my cool. ‘You know . . . No, now might not be the right time . . .’

  ‘For what? Tell me.’

  ‘Just a suggestion, but I was reading a thing in the Guardian about families going car-free and I wondered if that might be something we could do. Get the boys involved, appeal to their inner eco warrior?’

  She looked as surprised as any sentient human would to hear Bram Lawson, no stranger to Top Gear and hardly a soul-searcher regarding his carbon footprint, speaking in this way. ‘Are you serious?’ she said ‘You’ve always driven. I can’t imagine you without a car.’

  ‘We all have to try new things now and again,’ I said.

  25

  ‘Fi’s Story’ > 01:36:31

  Toby texted on the Saturday morning:

  Let me guess, you’ve googled me and discovered I don’t exist? You think I must be a serial killer with an assumed identity?

  I smiled.

  Not quite.

  I’m just a social media refusenik. You’re lucky to get this text.

  You’re lucky I’m replying.

  There was a companionable silence, during which I grew steadily more aware of the beat of my own pulse. It was no coincidence that he’d waited till the weekend to make contact. I’d explained my unusual living arrangements, that this was my time at the flat.

  Free later? I asked, before he could.

  At your command, he answered.

  Bram, Word document

  Hell-bent though I was on eliminating Mike from my consciousness, I found myself outmanoeuvred yet again when, the Monday after our meeting in the Swan, a replacement phone, this one a Sony, was delivered by hand to my office. There was a charger attached, but no packaging, no envelope, no note.

  ‘The guy said he saw you leave it charging in the pub just now,’ Nerina on reception told me. ‘He must have followed you back. Wasn’t that nice of him? I do like a good deed, don’t you?’

  ‘I do,’ I agreed. What I don’t like is a psychotic stalker, I thought. (A lesser gripe: it was good of him to give the impression I’d been in the pub at midday on a Monday rather than at the meeting with a local minor injuries clinic marked in my diary and duly attended.) I took the phone reluctantly and, as if in response to my touch, a message notification lit up the screen:

  Uh oh, looks like someone’s getting her memory back . . .

  I read the news update right there, in reception, my bag of samples at my feet:

  Road rage caused Silver Road crash, says victim

  A victim of the Silver Road collision on 16 September has told police that the incident was caused by a reckless overtaking manoeuvre that may have been the result of road rage.

  ‘From what the victim remembers, a black hatchback was accelerating wildly past a third car, which was travelling well within the speed limit, and mistimed the manoeuvre, forcing her Fiat off the road and causing serious injury to her and her daughter,’ said Detective Sergeant Joanne McGowan.

  Until now, the victim has been too unwell to give police her account of events. Her daughter is still being treated in intensive care at Croydon Hospital for life-threatening injuries and is believed to have undergone multiple surge
ries.

  ‘We are very keen to speak to the driver of this third car, thought to be a white saloon, and work together to establish the identity of the speeding driver,’ DS McGowan continued.

  The victim’s account confirms that of the owner of the house where the collision occurred, who saw a black VW or Audi turning off Silver Road soon after.

  The victim’s husband has offered a £10,000 reward for information leading to a breakthrough in the investigation.

  I swore under my breath, ignoring Nerina’s curious gaze. It defied belief: the police might have been mouthing Mike’s own lines, so well did they serve his cause. The bastard hadn’t let me overtake, that was what caused the collision, but, no, in the official account I was reckless and he blameless. And what were the chances that his car’s brand had eluded recognition, while mine had not? A white saloon: was that all she’d noticed?

  Once again, I consoled myself that it was in my interests for him to escape the attention of the police; thanks to the evidence he’d collected against me, he’d be even more dangerous in their interview room than he was in his harassment of me now. Far worse was the fact that the car was no longer dark-coloured, but definitively black – and a hatchback.

  Any thoughts? a text prompted.

  I did not reply immediately. There was enough time before I left for an early afternoon client visit in Surrey to find an anonymous local shop and buy an unregistered pay-as-you-go phone. I knew better now than to trust that any phone supplied by Mike came free of invisible weaponry to be used against me. I’d ditch it in the flat later.

  I texted him in the car on the way to the client. In a week heavy with external meetings, a new intern had been charged with chauffeuring me, less convenient than it might have been had he not also shadowed me to the meetings themselves, forcing me to reach for a level of professionalism I was fairly sure I would never produce again in my lifetime. (What did it matter if a hospital or clinic repeated its order of cervical collars? Doubled it or cancelled it? I was going down here.)