Our House(112)

(To put it mildly.)

As Merle has instructed, she showers, puts both the clothes she wore yesterday and those from her break with Toby through the wash, then changes into the jeans and jumper Merle has lent her. At 4 p.m., as agreed, Merle phones and Fi announces to her parents that she needs to go to the flat. ‘Merle thinks Bram’s probably stored some of our stuff there and I think she might be right. I need to find all our mortgage and banking paperwork so I can start to talk to a lawyer.’

The reappearance of Merle in Fi’s life is met with raised eyebrows but no special interrogation: extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures, is the message. Whatever – whoever – helps her untangle this unholy mess. Her mother agrees to drive Fi to the flat, a journey lengthened painfully by rain and Saturday traffic, and when they pull up at Baby Deco, Merle is already waiting outside.

‘Shall I come in and help?’ her mother asks, turning off the engine.

‘No, no, you go back to the boys. Thank you, Mum. Thank you so much.’ Fi wants to say more, she wants to say, ‘Take care of Leo and Harry, because I might be arrested in a few hours.’

‘It will all work out fine,’ Merle says as they wait for the lift; no need now to skulk in unlit stairways. ‘Adrian’s just back from skiing, he’s with the kids at home. I’ve filled him in – on Bram and the house, I mean. He’s completely appalled, as you can imagine. And Alison has given me a recommendation for a lawyer, by the way. She and Rog think we shouldn’t deal directly with this Jenson character because his loyalty will be to his client, not us.’

Us. We. It’s still evident in Merle’s words, in her manner: the unconditional fidelity.

‘Seeing them hasn’t . . . hasn’t changed your mind? About helping me?’ Fi speaks in gulps. ‘I’d understand if it had.’ Who, even the most guilt-stricken, would want to get embroiled in this? ‘You’ve already helped me enough, Merle. You need to concentrate on yourself and the baby.’

‘Here’s the lift,’ Merle says, firmly.

Inside the flat, nothing has changed from the scene they abandoned that morning, except the smell, which has grown richer, more fetid. It must be the vomit . . . unless he is starting to decompose: is that possible?

Fi eyes the body as if for the first time. It’s not the way she’s read a decaying corpse is supposed to make you feel, that profound sense of the departed, an empty vessel, the soul stolen.

Maybe because he didn’t have a soul.

Merle strides forward, thinking aloud. ‘What would we do first if we were just finding him now? One of us needs to check his pulse. Best it’s me – you’re still very distressed after what happened yesterday with the house.’ She touches his neck and wrist with her fingertips. ‘I don’t think anyone would expect us to try CPR or anything, would they? I think I’d be sick if I had to put my mouth on his.’

Fi hangs back, avoiding looking at his face. ‘Is he cold?’ she asks, shivering.

Merle takes her hand, passing on the touch of his skin. ‘Yes, but I think he’s warmer than you are. Can’t you feel the heating in this building? It’s suffocating. I’ll try to get through to the balcony doors, let some air in. Otherwise I’m going to throw up.’

‘Careful,’ Fi says. As Merle squeezes between the towers of boxes, she runs her icy fingers under the hot tap in the bathroom. She does not look at the murderer in the mirror.

When she returns, Merle has succeeded in opening the balcony doors and has her mobile phone in her hand. ‘Right. Shall I call, or will you?’

Fi says she will do it. Her hand trembles as she uses the phone; her voice is dull with shock. ‘Hello? Please, I need someone to come to my flat . . . There’s a man here . . . My friend and I have just arrived and there’s a body. We think it’s someone my ex-husband knows. We think he’s dead.’

‘Good,’ Merle says, when she’s finished. ‘That sounded exactly right.’

Because she’s not acting. That’s the unintended beauty of this plan of theirs: none of it has to be manufactured. The feeling that she might sob or be sick or wail and wail until someone puts a needle in her arm and blacks the world out: it’s all real.


Lyon, 6.30 p.m.

It is evening now and he is smoking a cigarette, ready to begin. He is not a fluent writer and he expects it to take him weeks, perhaps even as long as a month. When it is done, he will collect up his remaining antidepressants, plus any other medication to be had over the counter from the French pharmacies, and he will swallow them in fistfuls with the strongest vodka he can find. And he will die. He will go where he put little Ellie Rutherford.

He writes: Let me remove any doubt straight away and tell you that this is a suicide note . . . And at once, he understands why he is doing it, why he is delaying the inevitable. He wants to spend his last weeks with them, with Leo and Harry and Fi. Writing about them is not the same as being with them, in the flesh, in the house, but it’s still time together, isn’t it?

He can give them that, if nothing else.


London, 6 p.m.

While they wait, they retrieve the paperwork Fi unearthed the previous night and dig through some of the boxes to assemble the rest she might need to start investigating Bram’s embezzlement.

‘Would we do this?’ she asks Merle. ‘Would we not be too shocked by what we’ve discovered to want to go hunting through files?’