Our House(35)

‘No, she was in another room. Don’t worry, I didn’t tell her I’d seen you.’

Don’t worry? ‘Why were you at the hospital?’

‘Just interested. You know how it is, you’re just drawn there.’

As I had been. ‘Did you . . . did you speak to the detective you saw?’

If she had, then there’d been a delay, possibly, in my having been apprehended because the car was registered to Trinity Avenue. The police had called there, perhaps, when no one was home. I had a very clear picture of myself fleeing, of leaving the flat right now and making my way to Heathrow.

When she shook her head, I relaxed a fraction, summoned the old Bram bravado. ‘Well, Wendy, then it sounds like we’re guilty of the same thing. Neither of us reported something we know we probably ought to have.’

There was a sudden sharpening of her features. ‘Oh, I don’t think we’re guilty of the same thing at all, Bram. It wasn’t my dangerous driving that put two people on life support.’

Her words rained on me as brutal as a rockfall and yet she was very cool, unnaturally so. If she really thought I was capable of a violent rampage like that, why wasn’t she frightened I’d attack her here? She must have texted someone the address, I thought.

I became aware of a wild, accelerating rage displacing the fear, a perilous leap in body temperature. ‘Since you seem so clear about what happened, why don’t you go after the other driver, the bastard who really caused the crash?’

‘Oh, come off it,’ she said, ‘you were the one in the wrong lane.’

‘Only because he wouldn’t let me back in the right one! If the Fiat hadn’t swerved, we’d have smashed headlong and we’d all be dead.’

‘You shouldn’t have been overtaking him. You were speeding when you tried to get around him, you can’t deny that.’

I said nothing.

‘So you did cause the crash? Come on, Bram, I was there.’

‘Of course I fucking did. I told you I had no choice! Because of him!’

It was an admission of guilt and I hastened to smother it with a show of aggression: ‘I’d like to know why you don’t find him and spring this shit on him ten minutes after getting out of his bed?’

‘Maybe I will,’ she said, agreeably, and put down her coffee mug.

Will, she said, not already have. It was all very well arguing that Toyota Man and I were equally at fault, but I was the one whose car had been semi-identified in the news reports.

It was clear she was preparing me for some sort of blackmail demand.

She stepped around me and reached for her jacket, a cheap denim thing she’d flung onto an armchair last night. I remembered the painful suction of her mouth on mine. ‘So I thought we might do business,’ she said.

As I’d suspected. ‘Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you, Wendy, but I don’t have any money to do business with. Seriously, I’m broke. I can show you my latest bank statement if you like?’

She shook her head, a grim smile on her lips. ‘Come on, you’ve got that big house on Trinity Avenue.’

I recalled the way she’d pulled me in its direction the previous night. She must have followed me on the evening of the crash. I hadn’t questioned it; I’d been thinking about getting her into bed. Thinking she was exactly the simple, no-strings partner I needed for the night.

She continued undaunted: ‘You can afford this place as well. That’s two properties in this posh area. You’ve obviously got cash.’

‘I don’t, I’m telling you. I’m going through a divorce.’ Not technically true – yet – but what did that matter?

‘Even so.’ In a sudden move, she placed warm fingers on my wrist and I recoiled.

‘Don’t touch me!’

‘Hey, don’t be like that.’ She withdrew the hand, used it to smooth her hair, touch her mouth, as if she had all the time in the world to indulge me my foibles. ‘Since we’re going to be involved for a while, we might as well get some pleasure out of it. I really enjoyed last night. I thought you did too.’

I was at a loss as to how to respond. If her aim from the start had been to extort money, I could not see why she had needed to sleep with me. There had been no need for a honeytrap, she could have delivered her cowardly message in the pub. ‘I want you to leave, Wendy. Is that even your real name?’

‘Wow, you are paranoid.’

‘What’s the name of the company you work for? You said it was commercial cleaning services? Which department are you?’

‘Why?’ She laughed. ‘You going to complain to my manager?’

She knew full well I couldn’t complain to anyone. I couldn’t breathe a word to a soul about this squalid little episode.

‘You going to tell him I didn’t report a crime?’ she taunted. ‘Maybe I didn’t realize it was serious until I read about it in the paper? Maybe it was only when I saw you in the pub last night that it triggered my memory of a hit and run?’

‘It wasn’t a hit and run,’ I snapped.

‘As good as. As bad as.’

‘No, it was an accident, that’s all.’

That’s all. The words startled us both and there was a pause, a moment of shared honesty, maybe even disgrace.