Our House(27)

Crazy, but even after he’d cleared baggage reclaim and customs and was out among the general public, he still expected to be approached and asked to step aside.

To be asked if the name on his passport was really his own.





16


‘Fi’s Story’ > 01:01:36

Have I considered alternative theories about Bram’s disappearance? Believe me, I’ve considered everything. Even the police acknowledge that his continued absence might be owing to circumstances unrelated to the house fraud, that he might never have got as far as being a fugitive from the law. He might have been killed in a brawl and his body hidden, or he might have gone on a drinking binge and fallen into the river – you wouldn’t last five minutes in the Thames in January temperatures. We’re talking about someone with a volatile temperament here; we’re talking about a heavy drinker.

I know it sounds awful, but when the police ask me what Bram was like, really like, what made him tick, the first thing I think of is the boozing. I don’t remember a day when he didn’t drink. Mind you, that didn’t make him unique on Trinity Avenue. There were men – and women – who would come home from work and within an hour have inhaled a bottle of wine. I used to think it was pure luck that their fix of choice happened to be a socially acceptable one, but then I realized it was their fix of choice because it was socially acceptable.

(I say ‘their’ but I mean ‘our’: it’s not like I’m teetotal myself.)

One of Bram’s little quirks was that he disliked lime; he joked that it was an allergy and that this was where Leo got his allergies from, but in fact it was to do with some epic tequila session when he was a student. He mocked alcohol-free lager, he mocked Dry January, he mocked mocktails; he mocked anything that didn’t have alcohol in it.

I realize I’m using the past tense, which I shouldn’t do. But you see why I’m so certain that if he is dead then he won’t have died sober?

*

I know now that September was a significant time for Bram and his misdemeanours, but my own crime-related concerns during this period were about the wave of incidents that had suddenly swept Trinity Avenue.

First, one of the tenants in the flats on the corner of Wyndham Gardens returned from holiday to discover his place ransacked by people renting it in his absence through some Airbnb-type website. Though avid in our interest, we all agreed he probably shouldn’t have been subletting in the first place.

Deeper sympathies were extended to Matt and Kirsty Roper soon after when they were burgled in broad daylight. Kirsty was one of us, hers a misfortune we could get on board with: a side gate left on the latch while the family nipped out to the garden centre; the alarm not activated (they were only going to be gone twenty minutes); a Stonehenge of laptops and other devices left enticingly on the kitchen table; a barking spaniel that the neighbours had been trained to ignore – it was a perfect storm of elements that might have broken over any of us.

‘The police think he must have been watching the house,’ Kirsty told us. ‘In a way, that’s the most upsetting bit.’

Gripped by the drama, her son Ben, Merle’s Robbie and my Leo formed a detective society, meeting in our playhouse to hypothesize. I delivered biscuits and juice to them, at no time pointing out that their meeting place had itself once been the scene of a crime of sorts.

There was no news of the culprits being caught and soon Kirsty reported that the police had decided not to investigate. ‘They haven’t got the manpower. They have to prioritize real crimes.’

‘Burglary isn’t considered a real crime?’ I said.

‘You know what she means,’ Alison said. ‘Murder. Assault. Rape. The kidnapping of our infants. The kind of thing that gets on Crimewatch or The Victim.’

Though I did know what she meant, I personally thought breaking and entering a most unsettling violation. The idea of criminals soft-footing around my house, touching the boys’ possessions, seeing how we shared our lives (or didn’t, in the case of Bram’s and my separate bedrooms): it was not so much an invasion of privacy as of the soul.


Bram, Word document

If I can just keep my job, I thought, riding the lift up to the HR department on Monday morning and thinking it couldn’t climb high enough as far as I was concerned, that I’d happily stay in that little mirrored box for hours, days, perpetually between places, between problems. If I can somehow keep all of this a secret from Fi. If those poor people in the car pull through and the police close their investigation owing to lack of evidence, then I’ll never sin again. I’ll become a missionary, I’ll be celibate, I’ll—

‘Bram?’ Saskia said.

I started. I hadn’t noticed that I’d exited the lift, navigated the corridor, reached her desk.

‘Did you want me?’ she prompted, with an impressive game face. She wondered perhaps if I was a simpleton, employed here on some minorities quota.

‘Yes, sorry. I’ve got your contract,’ I said.

‘It’s your contract, but thank you.’ She gave me a small smile as she took it from me, prim but pleased.

I cleared my throat, reached for the prepared lines. ‘As you’ll see, there’s some personal information I’ve disclosed and I wanted to chat to you about it face to face. Can we . . .?’