Our House by Louise Candlish (48)

49

February 2017

London

It has been a very long day, but both the producer and interviewer of The Victim have been exemplary in their professionalism and Fi leaves the Farringdon studio with a sense of accomplishment, of good having been done. There’s a freeing feeling too, though she of all people knows freedom is an illusion.

In a café on Greville Street near Farringdon Station, Merle is waiting. It’s one of those self-consciously hipster places with bulbs hanging bare from cables and chairs salvaged from skips. Their coffees have a love heart sketched in the foam and come with a chocolate-covered edamame bean on the side.

‘Is it Valentine’s Day or something?’ Fi says, obliterating her love heart with the back of her spoon.

‘We’ve passed that,’ Merle says. Like Fi, she wears black. They always do when they meet, as if the two of them mourn not an individual but an ethos or a state of being. Privilege, perhaps, or control. ‘What did Adrian give me? Oh yeah, I forgot.’ She glances down at her own body, the growing baby bump, and Fi thinks suddenly of poor Lucy Vaughan and the way she eyed Merle’s red smock that day at the house, wondering whether she should offer her congratulations.

Merle checks that there’s no one in earshot. ‘So how did it go?’

Fi nods. ‘Really well. Tiring, though. I feel like I could sleep for a week.’

Merle reaches to take her hand. They’ve done this a lot, lately, grasped hands in sisterly support. ‘Well done, darling. Concentrating for that length of time is exhausting. Any idea when they’ll be releasing it?’

‘The first week of March, the producer said. They have a really quick turnaround.’

‘They didn’t ask anything too awkward?’

‘They did, but I stuck to the house sale, obviously. I said I’ve been advised by the police not to discuss anything else.’

‘Which is perfectly true. Excellent. Look what I’ve just found.’ Merle has a page from a missing persons website open on her phone. Thumb and forefinger enlarge a face as familiar to Fi as her own:

‘Interesting that they don’t say what the crime is,’ Merle says.

‘Maybe that’s standard policy.’ Fi sighs. ‘But after this recording goes out, everyone will know what he did.’

‘You realize that he might hear it? You can download The Victim from anywhere.’

‘That’s what the producer said. It’s happened a few times that the accused has come forward to deny the allegations. Very helpful to the police, apparently.’

‘Well, if he did get in touch, it would only be his word against yours.’

‘It always has been, hasn’t it?’ Fi says. ‘All those years together, his word against mine.’

‘That’s what marriage is,’ Merle says, with a trace of her old smile, playful, wicked.

‘I spoke to the police this morning, actually,’ Fi tells her. ‘Before I did the interview. They told me something interesting.’

‘Oh yes?’

‘They’ve found a phone they think was Bram’s. It has the numbers of the Challoner’s estate agent and the solicitor, plus searches relating to Silver Road. Obviously they’ll check out all the other numbers, but the main thing is this phone had the forensic code from our address. It was marked with our security pen.’

‘The pens we gave out at the meeting? With the fluid that shows under UV lamps?’ Merle stares at her, a smile creeping across her mouth. ‘That’s an incredible piece of evidence. It obviously was Bram’s phone, then.’

‘Must have been. Harry went around the house marking everything that wasn’t nailed down. Bram must have had it in his pocket or left it out on the side or something.’

‘Where did they find it? In the flat?’

‘No, it came in with some petty criminal. He had a haul of stolen phones, claims he found Bram’s in a bin in Victoria.’

‘Wow.’ Merle exhales. ‘That’s it, then. He’ll be arrested the moment he’s found. Where the hell is he? Do you think he’s still in London?’

‘I doubt it,’ Fi says. ‘One thing’s for sure, he’ll never go back to Alder Rise.’

‘But you will, won’t you? As soon as they find the money.’

‘If they do. And apparently, any accounts involved will be frozen while they investigate, maybe for years. Then there are all the costs.’

‘But after all that, you might be able to come back to Trinity Avenue?’

Again their hands touch. ‘I don’t see how,’ Fi says. ‘Property prices will have gone up even more by then.’ There’s a bittersweet moment when she’s plunged into the past, to simpler times, when she and Merle and Alison and the other women of Trinity Avenue talked about house prices, how their properties had saved them, ensnared them, obsessed them. ‘It’ll be a long time before I buy again, Merle, but that’s fine. It’s not my main concern. The boys are. They’re my only concern.’

‘Of course they are. Fi, did you . . .?’ Merle falters. It is a rare moment of self-doubt. ‘I have to ask: did you say anything about me during the interview? Do I need to prepare myself for when this goes out? All the women at work listen to it.’

‘Of course not,’ Fi says. ‘The occasional bit of conversation from Kent, that kind of thing, but nothing else.’

They pay for the coffees and walk together to the station. At the barriers for the overland train, which Merle will take to Alder Rise, they hug goodbye. It’s still odd knowing she will take a different route, the tube to Waterloo and then the train to Kingston.

‘We’ll come and visit you soon,’ she promises. ‘I’ve told Leo and Harry about the baby and they’re very excited.’

‘That’s sweet,’ Merle says. ‘Give them a kiss from me. It sounds as if you did brilliantly today, Fi. I’m really proud of you.’

Fi watches her friend make her way towards the stairs to the platform, her movements, like her mind, lithe and elegant. She’s pleased that Merle is proud of her; she’s proud of herself, if it’s not too immodest to say. Yes, it was painful having to relive the events of the last six months, but it was also, as Merle warned, a necessary pre-emptive strike.

They say all confessions are self-serving, don’t they? Well, hers was no exception. And, hand on heart, she can recall only a couple of lines in the whole interview that were outright lies.

*

She wonders sometimes why it was Merle she phoned that night and not Alison. It couldn’t have been simply because she’d seen her during the day, accepted her help in battling the Vaughans, in contacting solicitors and police and hospitals. Or that she’d said, when Fi had left, ‘Phone me if there’s anything I can do. Anything.’

I owe you.

Had she actually said that, in a whisper, or had Fi’s ears conjured it on the breeze?

Because Merle owed her all right. And now she has repaid her debt with interest. In the aftermath of it all, when Fi’s mind had been clogged and useless, Merle’s worked with clarity and verve.

It was Merle’s idea for her to get in touch with the makers of The Victim. The police had been progressing so torturously in their attempts to prove that the fraud was linked to the collision and other crimes, their questions for Fi probing so little, that it was messing with her mind. It was making her think they were withholding what they knew, lulling her into a false sense of security before staging their ambush.

‘There needs to be a statement out there,’ Merle said. ‘What you knew and when. We need to establish you as the injured party before anyone thinks to suggest otherwise.’

Fi had found the idea terrifying. ‘Why would I draw attention to myself like that? Those stories on The Victim get followed up in the Mail, all over the internet.’

‘Exactly. Why draw attention to yourself if you’re in any way at fault? This is public service, virtually an act of charity.’

She is a born strategist, Merle.

There’s a game Fi plays when she can’t sleep: she tries to remember her last moment of innocence, of ignorance – because they were, in the end, the same. The day is not in doubt: Friday, 13 January, of course, when she discovered Lucy Vaughan in her house, her furniture, her belongings, her rights, replaced by a stranger’s. But when precisely that day? Not when she heard about Challoner’s open house, nor when it emerged that Bram had a female accomplice, nor even when David announced the transfer of title deeds from the Lawsons to the Vaughans. No, it was in the evening, after she’d decamped to Merle’s house and Toby had arrived, and he was holding her, comforting her, listening to their story, the three of them cursing Bram and discussing where he might be hiding. Over the course of the afternoon, her last sense of possession of him had disintegrated, but Toby was there, Toby was her rock.

She’d forgotten that rock forms over many years, not in a matter of months.

Leaving Merle’s house that evening: that was probably the moment. Walking down the path, not allowing herself to turn towards her own beloved property, to see the lights blazing through old glass for the new owners.

Yes, she was still ignorant, still innocent, when she followed Toby to his car. She was like Leo’s old favourite Jemima Puddleduck, when she followed the fox to his kitchen, witlessly carrying the herbs to be used for her own stuffing.