Our House(84)

She can’t bring herself to shut the door behind her, using the edge of the lock to guide it gently into place as she’s done thousands of times over the years, and it is left to Merle to do this for her.

‘Don’t give up,’ Merle says, her eyes fierce. ‘It’s not over yet.’


Between Geneva and Lyon, 6 p.m.

The train is tearing through the darkness, passing from one land to another, neither one his own. It’s too dark to see the sights of the route, even if he cares to, though he is aware of the alteration in sound and pressure that marks the stretch of tunnel through the Alps. He makes no eye contact with the other travellers, the families and the skiers and the silent majority whose reasons for the journey he can only guess at.

His phone, SIM-less and, strictly speaking, the property of his (former) employer, delivers a slideshow of photos and video of the boys. He starts to watch the film he took of the carol concert, but the sound of their eager voices, the sight of their guiltless faces, is too painful and he has to close it.

Music, then, no pictures. He hits shuffle and the first song it brings up is an old one, ‘Comin’ Home Baby’ by Mel Tormé. He owns so few sentimental songs among the concept rock and the folk and the eighties and nineties favourites from his younger days, it seems cruel that this should be the one to play. It might have been selected by Mike himself to torment him.

I hate you, he thinks. I hate you with a depth that makes me see I have never hated before in my whole life. Only you.

Even now, if he could think of a way to do it without making things worse for Fi than they already are, he would get off this train, fly home and kill him.





44


Bram, Word document

New Year, new arrangements to make regarding the execution of a criminal fraud.

Wendy and I met our solicitor for the first and only time to sign the contracts prior to their exchange on Friday, 6 January. We sat side by side at his desk in the small, down-at-heel practice above a cheese shop in Crystal Palace. Graham Jenson, with his faded eyes and posture of near-collapse, had an air of having met middle age with a more crushing experience of defeat than he’d hoped, which reflected my own mood to an uncomfortable degree. In different circumstances, we might have traded war stories over a pint and vied for the attentions of his perky trainee, Rachel.

Instead, I laid two passports on the desk in front of him: mine and Fi’s.

‘Lucky they don’t ask for drivers’ licences for ID,’ Wendy said to me in an affable aside. Her fingers reached to pick up my passport and, as she flicked to the photograph, she touched my arm as if remembering with fondness this younger version of her husband. In her interpretation of our twisted role play, we were not estranged but very much together.

As for ‘her’ photo, I did not need to hold it up to her face to know that she’d done enough. Though considerably less attractive and at least a stone heavier than Fi, she was of a similar enough facial type to pass herself off. They both had dark eyes and blonde hair – Wendy had had hers tinted to ape Fi’s less strident shade and a fringe cut to conceal her thinner, higher eyebrows. Fi had a sweetly pointed chin, but it wasn’t a dominating feature and not something a casual observer – a qualified conveyancer, for instance, with the authority to handle millions of pounds – would pick up on. (They should make blood tests compulsory, I thought, or fingerprinting.) In the event, only the most cursory comparison was made between passport Fi and fake Fi, the filing of photocopies evidently considered due diligence enough.

I pocketed the passports. Both would be returned to the file at Trinity Avenue at the first opportunity.

‘Right, I think we’re pretty much there,’ Jenson told us. The paperwork was in order, all queries dealt with, the vendors’ multiple searches now complete. Wendy double-checked the details of the bank account into which funds were to be paid on completion, once the mortgage had been redeemed and agent’s and solicitor’s fees automatically deducted. (As I understood the scam from research of my own, the funds would spend a matter of minutes in a UK-registered account before being spirited to an untraceable offshore alternative.) We confirmed that Challoner’s would be taking care of transferring the utilities, having been issued with strict instructions that all final statements should be paperless and, like the rest of their correspondence, sent to the secret ‘joint’ email account.

‘Let’s sign these contracts,’ Jenson said, and I know it was only my imagination, but he made it sound like a set of death warrants.

‘Exciting,’ Wendy said to me, with a little tremble of glee.

‘Hmm.’ As we made eye contact, I imagined Fi’s disgust in place of Wendy’s phoney devotion, the wholesale retraction of any remaining benefit of the doubt, any last positive regard for me.

I’m signing away our house! Right here and now, that’s what I’m doing.

There was a sudden jolt of grotesque lucidity: how had I ever been so short-sighted? If I’d handed myself in after the Silver Road incident, I’d have been jailed, but the crime – and its punishment – would at least have ended there. Instead, it had grown and mutated. This was how human disaster worked: you began by trying to conceal a mistake and you finished up here, the perpetrator of a hundred further mistakes. To avoid a few years in a cell, you sacrificed your whole life – for as long as you chose to go on living the miserable piece of shit.