Our House by Louise Candlish (40)

41

Bram, Word document

‘Why are you doing this, Wendy?’

‘What?’ Caught off guard, she gave a half-embarrassed laugh, clutched the tissue in her hand a little tighter.

‘I’m serious. Why are you hitching your wagon to his star like this?’

Normally, on her visits to the flat, I kept social interaction to a minimum, grunting my responses to her attempts at flirtation and evading her eye for fear of the violent hatred she might provoke in me. As a go-between, she liked to present herself as girlish, almost simple, but it would be I who was the simpleton if I allowed myself to forget previous evidence of her guile: that emotionless steel when she phoned the hospital in front of me to test my nerve; the malicious way she had toyed with me after our night together.

But on her last call before Christmas, I found I was in the mood to engage. Maybe it was because she had a cold, sniffing pathetically every ten seconds and kneading sore eyes with her knuckles, or maybe the pills were finally blunting my rage, but I found myself feeling half-sorry for the woman.

She was pouting at me now, her expression querulous. ‘Hitching my wagon? What does that mean?’

‘You know, riding on his coat tails. Trusting he’s right when he says it will work. What the hell does he know? He’s an amateur, like us.’

She shrugged. I sensed I’d hit a nerve, though, because she wasn’t so quick with that fake giggle of hers.

‘This whole idea was his, wasn’t it?’ I pressed. ‘Have you done scams together before? Probably just petty stuff, eh? Nothing like this. This is hard core. More of a long game.’

The very blankness of her gaze confirmed my guesses to be correct. Making her wait for the building regs form the Vaughans’ solicitor had requested (and which I’d found exactly where I’d expected to, in the Trinity Avenue file marked ‘Home Improvements’), I went on, ‘How come you have such faith in him? Are you two married? Going out? You know he’s screwing my wife, don’t you?’

I thought I read a negative message in her eyes, then. She was not wholly approving of his behaviour and yet remained in his thrall, somehow. Did he have something on her too?

‘Don’t you care that you’re destroying my life and my children’s lives?’

She shook her head. ‘No, you’re doing that, not me.’

‘Right. So you’re a monster like him. You take no responsibility for your actions. How admirable.’

She gazed at me, clearly struggling between the dim-witted act she’d been cultivating and the more complex intelligence she surely realized I knew she possessed. ‘It’s so boring the way you think, Bram.’

Boring? Sorry, love. I’ll try to be more sparkling in my efforts to claw myself from the stinking bowels of hell. ‘I’m just trying to understand why you would get mixed up in blackmail and fraud. They’re really serious offences, you know. Fine, so you don’t give a shit about me and my family, but you must see the risk you’re taking personally? This isn’t nicking a hundred quid from someone’s wallet. You said you had a decent job, don’t you earn enough to get by? You’ll get a promotion, a pay rise. You seem pretty smart to me – other than going along with this, of course.’

She suffered this pitch in silence, other than to cough at me, a natural repellent. Her nostrils were raw from rubbing. No doubt she wondered why I hadn’t researched her and Mike as they had me. Hired a PI to follow them – or even the services of the same underworld scum they’d used themselves. The truth was, I’d considered it a hundred times, but on each occasion allowed the delusion to persist that my ordeal would end before I needed to act myself. The truth was, I was gutless.

Until now, evidently.

‘Are you scared of him, Wendy? Is that it? He’s intimidating, I know, a big guy. Believe me, I’ve felt how solid he is, no doubt he told you about our little wrestling match at the house? But there are ways of protecting yourself, you know. If we both tell him we’re backing out, we can stand up to a thug like him, don’t you think?’

But I understood I’d made a mistake before I’d finished the sentence. She went rigid with objection, her upper teeth snapping shut like a portcullis. ‘He is not a thug,’ she said through her teeth. ‘That’s my brother you’re slagging off.’

‘Your brother?’ It was the one possibility I’d failed to consider. ‘You look nothing alike.’

‘We’re not twins, for fuck’s sake.’ She gestured to the document in my hand with new belligerence. ‘Can you just give me that? I need to get back.’

To the solicitor or to Mike? Her brother, Jesus. Would she tell him what I’d said? And if she did, would he care? What could he do now that he hadn’t already done?

It wasn’t hard to imagine. After she left, I texted Fi with trembling fingers:

‘Fi’s Story’ > 02:33:36

On the Wednesday evening before Christmas, Bram fetched the stepladder and strung fairy lights in the magnolia, while I hung a hundred silver baubles from its lower branches. We do it – I mean, did it – every year and though I say so myself, it always looks beautiful (people have stopped to film it, seriously). Ideally, there would have been the decorative frosting of snow we’d had earlier in the month, but the second half of December had turned oddly mild, a false spring that had even encouraged daffodils to sprout.

The playhouse lights we’d kept up all year. Bram had built the house the previous Christmas Eve while I took the boys into the West End to see The Snowman at the theatre. After they’d gone to bed, we rigged up icicle lights and put little seats draped with sheepskins on the deck so it looked like a miniature mountain lodge. It was still dark when they got up on Christmas morning and we took them to the window for the big reveal.

‘That is just nauseatingly cute,’ Merle said, when she and Adrian came for drinks on Boxing Day and we presented our new attraction. ‘I almost wish you hadn’t shown me.’

‘You’re funny,’ I said, giving her arm a little squeeze.

Bram, Word document

‘I almost forgot,’ Fi said during my last Wednesday visit to Trinity Avenue before Christmas Day, after we’d pimped up the magnolia tree in time-honoured tradition (there may have been no formal prize but, believe me, there was a competition on the street for the best decorations – and no one understood this better than the woman who worked in homewares). ‘This came for you today. By hand.’

She passed me a white envelope with my name scrawled in slapdash capitals. The flap had not been sealed, only tucked inside. It couldn’t be anything to do with the house sale, I thought. Mike wouldn’t take a risk like that, surely?

‘I didn’t look,’ Fi added, seeing my face.

‘Thank you.’

I opened it as I walked back to the flat. It was from him of course, a reprisal for my overtures to Wendy. There were two items, the first a download from a news site, the Telegraph site no less (I imagined him being pleased with himself about that. I’m not some oik. I read quality news, don’t you know?):

The second was a single-page printout from a government website, a dense table of names, my father’s among them. My vision actually blurred: the shock at this display of knowledge was even more breath-stealing than at any of the previous ones. How could he possibly know – and why would he send this? What was going on here? Surely what my father did decades ago could have no bearing on any prosecution of my crimes – could it? Was it admissible at trial as background information?

Not for the first time, it crossed my mind that he might be with the police and only posing as a fraudster. But wouldn’t his actions to date constitute entrapment? Not a defensible practice, everyone knew that. No, what other purpose could there be for goading and intimidating me in this way if not for financial gain?

What this was was a turning of the screw, a declaration that I could go on resisting, I could attempt to groom Wendy till the cows came home, but he had no intention of letting me go.

I threw the Telegraph printout in the bin by the park gates, but kept the second sheet, folding it into my wallet. I couldn’t just toss it in the bin and see it on the pavement the next day, scavenged by a fox or maybe the wind.

‘Fi’s Story’ > 02:35:10

Christmas was a big compromise, yes. Did my sympathy for him have anything to do with his father? All those Christmases Bram spent without him? The delight he’d always taken in ours?

I don’t know. Maybe. It was always there in my feelings for him, a complexity, a nuance, that had to be considered.

I wasn’t going to reveal this, but now we’ve come this far I think it’s relevant to mention that Bram’s father served a prison sentence for drink-driving. He hit a pedestrian, an elderly man – no, he wasn’t badly injured, nothing like that, but this was the 1970s and society was just starting to understand how frequent a factor alcohol was in road fatalities. As part of a crackdown, Bram’s father was made an example of and given a custodial sentence.

Talking about prison, or watching a news item about overcrowding and violence in our jails, was probably the only thing that truly unnerved Bram, it seemed to me. I remember we took the boys to the Clink Prison Museum once, you know, the medieval jail by the river? You can see the old cells and instruments of torture, that sort of thing – the boys loved it. Anyway, Bram wouldn’t go in. Seriously, he had to wait outside. They call it carcerophobia, someone told me.

His father died not long after that and so it’s possible his prison stories were the last Bram remembers him telling. Such a sad thought.

The reason I’m sharing this is to show that there’s a context to all this: Bram learned his lawbreaking from the back seat. (Actually, in those days, small kids were allowed in the front and weren’t even made to wear a seatbelt. Bram was playing with his Action Man when his father was pulled over by the police.)

I remember him saying to me before we got married, ‘Are you sure you want to take on someone from criminal stock?’

‘Oh, I imagine we’re all from criminal stock if you go back far enough,’ I said.

‘Good answer,’ he said, as pleased with me as I was with myself. Back then, I wanted him as much for his edge as in spite of it.

But we grow out of those sorts of tastes, don’t we?

At least some of us do.