Our House(95)
‘You know something we don’t, Merle?’ Toby says, his mistrust of her unconcealed.
‘Of course not,’ Merle says, evenly. ‘But he’s their father, they’ll be distressed to think something might have happened to him.’
‘I won’t say anything to them,’ Fi promises. ‘Or Tina. But I think I will sleep at the flat tonight. Find some fresh clothes, see if Bram left any of our stuff there.’
‘Right.’ Toby is on his feet in a bid to take charge. Already he has the keys to his Toyota in his hand. ‘I’ll drop you there.’
Merle eyes his empty vodka glass.
‘I’ve only had this one,’ he tells her. ‘I’ll be fine to drive.’
Merle tails them to the door. ‘Phone me if you need anything,’ she says to Fi. She squeezes her and then says a second time, with feeling, ‘Anything.’
Lyon, 8 p.m.
He goes straight from the station in Lyon to the first bar he sees and orders a beer. He’s not the only traveller in the place and the mood is impersonal, but that’s fine, he’s not looking to make friends. The beer comes quickly, the bill with it. Retrieving his first euros from his wallet, he notices the folded sheet Mike posted through the door at Trinity Avenue and feels oddly comforted to have it in his possession.
He’s aware that something has changed during the train journey, the passing from one realm into another. A shoot is pushing through him, but it is not looking for the light, it is looking for the darkest part of him. This bad shoot makes him feel calmer, which is ironic.
He needs an alternative adjective to ‘ironic’, he thinks, a deeper, more emphatic one. What would Fi choose? ‘Twisted’, maybe. No, not ‘twisted’. ‘Destined’. ‘Doomed’.
He snaps shut the wallet, downs the beer and leaves.
48
‘Fi’s Story’ > 02:53:34
There’s no need to pity me, honestly. I don’t want that. I’m not the worst punished by this – or the most bereft. Yes, I have lost my home and my children have lost contact with their father, yes, we are suffering, but the bottom line is that another family is mourning a child. Little Ellie Rutherford, who died in that car accident in Thornton Heath, an accident that Bram may or may not have been involved in.
The police certainly think he was. A week or so before he went missing, they found our car in a back street in Streatham. There were no signs of theft or misuse, no forensic matches with any of their joyrider suspects, and so they returned their attention to the owners of the vehicle, specifically the one whose driving ban meant he had good reason to leave the scene of an accident, whether directly involved or not. They’d interviewed him before – not that he’d thought to tell me that – and had a sense that he was withholding something, perhaps to do with the missing key, but the security footage at Alder Rise Station from the morning of 16 September clearly identified him among the waiting commuters on the platform and they put his name to one side. Other leads were more plausible. But now they talked to his employer’s HR department about his attendance at the sales conference and were told he’d only disclosed his driving disqualification after that date. The very next working day, in fact: quite some coincidence. They decided to re-interview him as soon as he returned from ‘holiday’, which he obviously never did. Then, about a week after he disappeared, they were sent an anonymous tip, a photo of our car on Silver Road, taken the same day as the collision, a dark-haired male visible at the wheel. Facial recognition technology confirmed a match for Bram.
What they suspect happened is that he ran the victims’ car off the road in some sort of road rage incident, then secretly put our house on the market to fund his escape. The fact that he had been driving while disqualified only confirmed his bad character.
It shames me that while a family was grieving, I was more concerned that our insurance claim had been rejected, about the impact this would have on our finances. The parents of that little girl would swap a thousand new cars, a thousand million-pound houses, to get her back! As would I in their situation. In the end, establishing the facts about how Ellie died is the only thing worth pursuing, the only thing worth crying over.
Easier said than done, of course, when your own life is in tatters.
How much do the boys know? At this point, very little. I’ve told them Bram has gone to work overseas and that if anyone says differently they should walk away and think about something else. They’re still at Alder Rise Primary, but we’re living at my parents’ place in Kingston and the long commute isn’t really sustainable. By the time this is aired, they will have moved schools. Everyone in Alder Rise will be talking about Bram then – and perhaps people in their new neighbourhood too. Basically, a loss of privacy is the price I’ve paid for getting this story out there, for helping other innocent homeowners avoid falling victim to fraud on this scale.
I gave notice on the Baby Deco flat as soon as the contract allowed and the landlord was very understanding about it. I’ve been asked by the police not to comment on what happened there the day after the house sale. Nothing will persuade me to say any more – Lord knows I’ve probably already revealed details the police would have preferred to keep confidential at this stage. I don’t want to be charged with perverting the course of justice. But I also feel strongly that we have to trust them to investigate.