The Long Fall

by Crouch, Julia

  She lifted her head and looked at her alarm clock. It was eight o’clock in the evening and she needed to eat. All she had put inside herself that day had been wine.

  Swinging her legs around to the edge of the bed, she stood carefully, knowing that she would see black dots as she rose.

  She made her way down to the kitchen and fixed herself a bowl of yoghurt and blueberries, which she carried up to her office.

  The strange turret room suddenly seemed absurd to her, with its circle of windows, each punctuated, stabbed into, by ranks of cacti, prickly fingers flipping the bird to the world. Was that on her behalf? What arrogance, she thought. And coming from a woman whose whole existence was so tenuous, built on the shifting sands of her own feeble making.

  She crossed the room, carefully walking around the kelim on the floor. Then she sat down at her laptop and made herself pick at her berries as she downloaded her emails.

  There was no Martha’s Wish mail, not on the personal, nor the website account. Patience must be intercepting them for her, possibly on Mark’s instructions. While this had no doubt been motivated by kindness, it depressed Kate. She was being looked after like a child. No one wanted anything from her.

  Then she looked at her home email account. It hardly ever saw any traffic, but something was coming in, and the sender was Jake Mithras. The one person who wanted something from her very much indeed.

  How had he got this address? It wasn’t published anywhere.

  No doubt, though, anything was traceable if you had the power he seemed to have over the Internet.

  It was chilling.

  The email was bulleted and straight to the point. This was what he needed:

  • $2.5m for outstanding emergency services and medical bill

  • $500,000 for independent living equipment

  • $500,000 to set up a fund for care services, supplies, personal maintenance and on-going expenses

  After providing her with bank account details for someone called Stephen Smith, he signed off.

  Kate looked at the list. It was a lot of money. But then she and Mark had a lot of money. It would make a dent in their wealth, but it wouldn’t bring them down.

  Did she have a choice? She had seen on Beattie’s body what Jake was capable of. She shuddered when she remembered Tilly’s name in his mouth.

  She took a deep breath and tapped in the password for the account aggregator software that Mark’s people had installed for her. It let her see all of their personal investments on one screen – a good thing, since Mark’s one requirement of her management of the money he handed over was that she spread it around various banks and investment vehicles.

  The password Kate used everywhere was M@rtha1997. She was still always everywhere, Martha. Kate wondered, as she typed her daughter’s name, if she would ever cease to exist for her. If Jake could come back from the dead, then couldn’t Martha? Couldn’t she? Wouldn’t that be fair? Couldn’t she have a refund of the eye for an eye she’d paid for that she didn’t really owe?

  Shaking the madness out of her head, she looked at the total of all their instantly accessible investments. It was absurdly, obscenely healthy. She could entirely cover Jake’s demands and still have twenty thousand or so left over. The tax year had just ended and, as usual, Mark would soon be tipping his bonus into their own accounts for her to manage. For the past six years this had been upwards of a million, and Kate had no reason to think that it would be any less this time round. So, very shortly, a good sum of cash would be coming in to replace the money paid out to Jake, and it was highly unlikely that Mark would ever suspect a thing.

  She leaned back in her chair and breathed out, letting her shoulders settle away from the position they had assumed around her ears. Her neck ached. She ate two more blueberries and felt a faint twinge of nausea.

  Did she have a choice, though? Was there an alternative to paying up?

  She could afford to, and it was her obligation. The only way Mark would find out would be if he looked at their accounts, which, in all their time together, he had not once done. He was quite busy enough ploughing most of his profits back into his fund, building up their personal wealth that way. He saw the money he handed out to Kate in much the same way a fifties husband would have viewed his wife’s housekeeping money.

  So no one would suffer, everyone would win. Jake would get off Beattie’s back, Beattie would be able to breathe again and so, ultimately, would she, Kate.

  And, most importantly, Jake’s unspoken, but heavily implied, threat to Tilly would no longer exist.

  Perhaps he was right, too. Perhaps this was the way she could buy her way to heaven.

  But she needed to think about it first. Leave it for a day or two, wait for it all to sink in. She had not yet fully processed the thought that Jake was still alive, let alone what sort of monster he had become. He hadn’t given her any deadline, and, in any case, it would take a couple of days to release the money from its various holding places. She wasn’t going to rush into it.

  She tried out the thought that she was a victim. It was a role she had always forbidden herself because she reckoned she had earned everything bad that had happened to her: she had deserved to miss out on her education and the love of her parents; she had deserved to lose Martha; she even put what had happened to Emma James in Marseille – Kate Brown/Barratt had never put a name to it – as a sort of down payment against what she had committed in Ikaria.

  Yet, since she was innocent of the murder she had put at the root of all those losses, didn’t these demands Jake was making turn her into a victim of extortion?

  It was a perverse yet liberating idea.

  So long, she thought, with a chill that ran right through her, so long as Tilly is safe.

  And for the first time she saw that the fact that her daughter was going away, out of harm’s way, was a good thing.

  Four

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Kate said, looking at the gift Mark had just given her. It was wrapped in shiny paper printed with cupcakes, and done up with a rosette of curlicued ribbon – hardly his normal style.

  It was Monday evening and the first time she had seen him since he had set off to play golf the day before. In order to stop her mind from churning itself into soup after all the Jake stuff, she had taken a couple of sleeping pills on the Sunday. So she had been out cold whatever time Mark had returned from taking his client to dinner. And, as was his usual habit, he had slipped out of bed and off to work before she surfaced.

  She was glad of the hiatus. It had given her a chance to reassemble herself. As soon as she heard the front door slam behind Tilly, who was on day shifts, she had pulled herself from bed and started on the housework. Putting everything to a clean order was her way of keeping a grip on her world. For the second time in a week, she pulled everything out of the kitchen cupboards and bleached their insides, enjoying the sting on her cracked and chapped fingers. She stripped the beds and re-made them with the beautifully ironed linen that turned up every week from the laundry service. All this work stopped her thinking too much, and she was glad of it.

  Mark had texted to say that he would be home by eight, an event so rare that it was worth making an effort for it. Tilly’s message followed soon after: she was staying over at a friend’s house in Bow. At six, Kate stood under the shower until she nearly felt like she belonged to her new, non-murderer self. She blow-dried her hair, put on the almost bare make-up she had perfected over the years, and slipped into loose silk trousers and a cream cashmere jumper. Checking in the mirror, she saw the work had paid off: only the stitched gash – like a grotesque black caterpillar sitting on her forehead – suggested that this was anything other than a relaxed, elegant woman, entirely at home in her own skin.

  ‘It’s not from me,’ Mark said, nodding at the present, which Kate had now opened to reveal a book. I Want to Disappear, it was called, with a subtitle of Why Women Starve. It looked self-published, with a glossy, fussy cover.

&nb
sp; ‘Claire said you might find it helpful,’ he said, standing in the kitchen and sipping the gin and tonic she had made when she heard him slam the front door.

  ‘Claire?’

  ‘She called me at the office this afternoon to say she’d dropped by on you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I gave her my card when we met at the hospital. I told her what the doctor had said about your weight.’

  ‘And you know that’s rubbish, don’t you?’

  ‘You are thin.’

  ‘I’ve always been thin. I’m naturally thin. Clothes look better on me like this.’

  ‘I can’t deny that.’ Mark leaned forward and ran his hand over her hair in a gesture that felt to Kate only a small step away from a pat on the head. ‘So a little after the phone call, Serena signed for this parcel. There was a note from Claire stuck on it, explaining that one of her daughters had suffered an eating disorder and this book helped both of them get through it.’

  ‘Really,’ Kate said, turning the book over in her hands, working hard not to feel irritated that Mark and Beattie had been talking about her behind her back.

  ‘It was very sweet of her,’ Mark said.

  ‘Yes.’

  She was relieved at least that Mark had revealed that he knew about Beattie’s visit. She had been intending to tell him that she had been alone on Sunday. Even she, the seasoned liar, would have had difficulty wriggling out of that situation. She put the book down on the counter and started making the dressing for the Caesar salad she was putting together.

  ‘I also thought it might be nice if she came round for supper tomorrow,’ Mark said. ‘I could come back early. It’d be great to meet someone from your mysterious past.’

  ‘But that’s the night before Tilly leaves!’

  ‘And it would be great for Tills to meet an old friend of yours, too. She’d love to hear the truth about when you were young.’ Mark smiled. ‘All we’ve got is your word on what happened.’

  ‘But I wanted it to be a special evening for Tilly, though.’ Kate poured the dressing on the salad and tossed it furiously, crumbling the croutons. ‘Damn,’ she said, as a piece of lettuce fell on the floor.

  ‘You wanted it to be special for you, you mean,’ Mark said. ‘I’m sure Tilly couldn’t be bothered one way or another. She might even have other plans, you know, like seeing friends or something.’

  ‘And I haven’t got anything in.’ The thought of what an evening with Beattie, Mark and Tilly could turn out like was too much for Kate to contemplate.

  ‘Don’t worry. We’ll get something delivered,’ Mark said. ‘And I’ll tell Tilly she has to be here, no excuses. It’ll be fun.’

  Fun.

  Kate looked gloomily at the mess she had made of the salad.

  ‘Anyway. She’ll be here about seven,’ Mark said, moving to the kitchen noticeboard and unpinning a menu. ‘Shall I order from the Lebanese place?’

  ‘Why not?’

  So he had gone ahead and invited Beattie for supper without even consulting her. Of course. She had been so passive all these years, allowing him to first shape then look after her. Why on earth would he think that she even had a view?

  Oh, Martha’s Wish was a palliative, sure. She did good work for the charity. But apart from that, she had bedded herself down as the big man’s wife. It made an excellent hiding place, and, besides, she had a gift for it. She was always well turned out, not at all demanding, and kept the house clean and tidy and beautifully decorated. She made him believe he was an excellent lover, and yes, she supposed she loved him. It was a good partnership.

  She hadn’t yet fully decided to do so, but if she were to pass all that money on to Jake behind Mark’s back, she would utterly transgress all the unwritten rules of this marriage. Something of the old Kate – the Emma deeply buried inside her – felt a frisson of excitement at that thought.

  Could she justify herself like that? Could she tell herself that he deserved it for having had it so easy from her all these years?

  As if to confirm her thoughts, Mark moved towards her and put a smooth, clean hand on her cheek. ‘You look pale, Kate. Are you sure you should be up? Why don’t you go to bed after supper. I’ve got some reports to look at before I turn in, anyway.’

  As Kate lay sleeplessly in her bed, the moon full and bright above her, the thought came again to her that Jake’s disabilities were of his own making, not hers. Sure, for him to be in the mental state to want to kill himself might have its roots in what had happened to him on Ikaria. But that was thirty-three years ago! He couldn’t seriously blame her and Beattie for everything bad that had happened to him since?

  Propelled by this thought, she slipped out of bed and silently tiptoed upstairs to her office turret. She didn’t want Mark, who she assumed was still working in his basement study, to hear and come at her with awkward questions. He’d be cross about her getting out of bed when, in his view, she should be resting.

  Sitting at her desk in the darkness, she shook the mouse a couple of times to wake her computer. Outside she heard the wail of police cars, and saw their blue lights flooding the air above the road to the river. A helicopter buzzed over her, joining the ground forces with a roaming searchlight.

  It was a jungle out there.

  She fired up the email software and looked again at the figures Jake had quoted. Two and a half million dollars for emergency services and medical bills? Wasn’t there some sort of scheme that picked up the bill for that sort of care in America if you couldn’t afford it?

  She looked up an American disability aids website. The half-a-million dollars Jake had demanded would buy their whole inventory.

  There was no doubt about it: his figures stank.

  Not only was he being unreasonable, but he was also greedy: he was taking both her and Beattie for a ride. This was blackmail.

  Something hardened inside her. She wasn’t going to allow this to happen. She needed to reason with him.

  She quickly drafted a reply to his email, saying that she agreed to help him out, but she needed to see evidence of his figures. She was as polite as possible, but to the point. She pressed send, checked that it had gone, then quietly took herself downstairs to her bed, took a couple of pills and fell fast asleep.

  Five

  ‘She’s late,’ Mark said, as he and Kate sat at the kitchen island waiting for Beattie, having finally given in and broken out the champagne and pistachios. ‘And where the hell’s Tilly?’

  Mark always turned up on time, and considered anyone who did otherwise to be enacting some sort of betrayal. But Beattie’s tardiness was the least of Kate’s concerns. Had she had any say in the matter, she would never have let this dinner take place. At one point she had thought about pleading weakness and taking to her bed, but that would only have put the matter off and made it worse for her in the long run.

  No. However much it would feel like she was standing with her feet in two different worlds, she needed to face up to it. If she were ever going to explain Beattie’s presence in her current life, she was going to have to plunge into the evening.

  She had called Beattie that morning, ostensibly to thank her for the book.

  ‘I’m so sorry about tonight,’ Beattie said as soon as she picked up the phone. ‘He asked me out of the blue. I know it’s going to make things very awkward for both of us. But what could I do? I called him because I was concerned about you – you do look so frail, Emma. When he told me what the doc said to you, I couldn’t believe the coincidence. Jessie my eldest had exactly the same thing. The book was so useful to us. I do hope it helps.’

  ‘Thanks. It looks interesting,’ Kate said. She had, in fact, hidden it under a pile of magazines, but she didn’t want to appear impolite or ungrateful for Beattie’s concern. ‘So how are we going to survive tonight?’

  ‘I guess we’ll play it by ear. I’ll take my lead from you, and go along with whatever you say.’

  Kate blinked. For a moment she doubted if she
had it in her to create such an elaborate and impromptu deception in front of both her husband and her daughter. Then she came to her senses. Of course she could. It was what she had been doing all her life.

  But she had never had to rely on anyone else before. She hoped Beattie was up to it.

  The front door slammed and a clattering in the hallway heralded Tilly’s arrival. Kate offered up her usual thanks that her daughter had got home safely. The roads between the bus stop and the house were the worst inner city sort: dark residential front gardens and great blocks of flats rising from empty concrete courtyards. There were so many murky spots for attackers to hide, or to drag you away to. When Tilly started working at the National Theatre, Kate had wanted to pay for a cab to get her home at night, a plan that had been firmly rejected.

  ‘What’s the point of me going out to work if you then pay half my day’s wages to get me back? It’s a bit sick, Mum,’ Tilly had said. ‘Everyone else in the whole of London has to get home under their own steam, and so will I.’

  Kate couldn’t really argue with that. But she had signed both Tilly and herself up for a self-defence course and extracted a promise from her daughter never to use headphones at night, to walk down the middle of the quieter streets, and to keep her wits about her. Kate had enjoyed the classes, although she wished she had taken them when she was Tilly’s age.

  ‘God, can I have some?’ Tilly said, breathlessly making her entrance and spying the champagne.

  ‘“Hello, Mum and Dad. How are you?”’ Mark said, getting up to fetch her a glass.

  ‘What’s got his goat?’

  ‘Our dinner guest is late,’ Kate said.

  ‘Oops. Cardinal sin,’ Tilly said.

  ‘It’s not a big issue,’ Mark said, tetchily pouring the champagne for Tilly. ‘How was your day?’