Our House(44)

‘Look,’ I growled, ‘you don’t seem to realize, these house prices, they’re meaningless. It’s Monopoly money. They’re people’s homes, that’s all.’

‘Valuable homes. Easy enough to sell up and move somewhere cheaper. You could start from scratch at your age, two decent salaries like yours.’

‘We’re not together, aren’t you hearing a single word I’m saying?’ I released the Coke glass before it shattered in my grip. ‘What pathetic delusion do you have here? That you’ll do what those criminals did and steal my house right under my nose?’

‘Now he comprehends.’

It was laughable; he couldn’t expect me to take him seriously. He was a fantasist, mentally ill. ‘You said yourself it’s jointly owned. How are you going to get around that, huh? Unless you’ve also got incriminating pictures of my wife? Well, I’d be interested to see those because she’s completely, one-hundred-per-cent clean.’

‘Great, so she won’t suspect anything’s going on then.’

‘Except when you ask her to sign a pile of legal contracts,’ I scoffed.

He inhaled, taking a moment to choose his words, and it was then that I saw it. Had the context been different, I would have been pleased with the speed of my deduction, but instead I was only sickened.

‘Wendy,’ I said.

He smirked. ‘From what I’ve seen of your wife on social media, their looks aren’t a million miles apart. Got a bit of a type, have you, mate? Bit of a cliché, the shapely blonde, if you ask me.’

The muscles in my throat and stomach convulsed with the sensations of seasickness. ‘It’s not a matter of looking the part. You’re talking about serious fraud. Theft. You’re talking about being locked up for life. Seriously, you’re both fucking idiots if you think that could work.’ Fucking idiots who’d struck up a miraculously fast and trusting friendship . . .

Something in his expression – a secrecy, a smugness – caused another sudden deduction: Wendy had spoken of identifying my face in profile and yet the image I’d been texted had not been taken from the side. It had been taken from the front and from quite a distance away. He had taken it, not she.

My pulse began to throb wildly. ‘She didn’t see anything that day, did she? You took that photo. I saw you at the time, holding up your phone, I remember now. I thought you were calling for help. Why did you take it? I don’t understand. You didn’t know me from Adam.’

He shrugged. ‘Just covering my back in case you decided to stick some story on me.’

But I hadn’t. Instead, I’d fled, never expecting to encounter him again, never expecting him to investigate me and decide he’d hit pay dirt.

‘Wendy wasn’t even there, was she? She made up that business of standing at the window. You told her exactly what to say to me.’

‘Get you, Sherlock.’

My face was flushed with rage, I could feel the heat beating under the skin. ‘You’re in this together, the two of you. You have been from the start.’

‘No, no, the three of us, Bram,’ he said, as if generously including me in a treat.

‘Who is she? Your wife? Girlfriend? She slept with me, did you know that?’

His expression turned unpleasantly lascivious. ‘What two consenting adults do in the privacy of their own home is nothing to do with me. She probably just felt like a shag, fancied her chances in the fleshpots of Alder Rise, eh.’

She must have followed me from the station to the pub. What the hell was going on here?

‘Why did she bother?’ I demanded. ‘Why didn’t you just approach me yourself straight away? Why send her as your special reconnaissance agent?’

He chuckled. ‘Reconnaissance agent, I like that. To answer your question, we thought she might be better than me at buttering you up. Like I say, we see this as a three-way project, excuse the innuendo.’

Again, a private slyness in his countenance was as clear a hint as the words he spoke: buttering you up . . .

Wendy must have recorded our conversation about the crash.

I remembered my admissions – ‘If the Fiat hadn’t swerved, we’d have smashed headlong and we’d all be dead!’ ‘So you did cause the crash?’ ‘Of course I fucking did!’ – and felt the last of any self-control slide from my grip. Was he recording this? ‘You’re both deranged,’ I said, lip snarling. ‘Don’t come near me again, do you understand? Find someone else’s house to steal. I’ll enjoy following your trial in the Daily Mail.’

With this, I dropped the phone he’d given me to the floor and stamped on it. As other drinkers frowned, intolerant of argy-bargy so early in the evening, Mike had the gall to look entertained.

‘Careful there, Bram. You don’t want to be seen engaging in senseless acts of violence, do you? If the police start nosing around, these sorts of things get remembered, you know what I mean?’ He turned to the bartender and said, ‘Bram here’s had some bad news. I’ll clear the mess up, mate, don’t worry.’ I scooped up the fragments myself; it had not passed me by that he’d used my name, very loudly. ‘Fuck off, Mike,’ I hissed.

‘I’m not going anywhere,’ he said, raising his drink to me as I exited.