Lasting Damage

Chapter 17

Friday 23 July 2010



‘Connie.’

Don’t look pleased to see me. You won’t be, once you’ve heard what I’ve got to say.

‘Thanks for coming.’ He’s not your husband. He’s a stranger. This is a business meeting.

I try to pass Kit a menu but he pushes it away. He smells of beer. We’re in the restaurant at the Doubletree by Hilton Garden House, Selina Gane’s hotel and now mine too. I checked in an hour ago.

‘Not hungry?’ I say. ‘I’m not either.’ It seems a shame. The food would probably be good. The lime green and purple velvet upholstery looks expensive. It makes me think of the dead woman’s dress; the colours are the same.

I put the menus down on the table, pour us both some water.

‘Don’t play games,’ Kit says. ‘Why are we here?’ He’s still on his feet, poised for flight, unwilling to commit to a conversation with me without knowing what its subject will be.

‘I’m staying here.’ I don’t tell him that Selina Gane is too. Of course, he might know that already.

‘You’re . . .’ His breathing speeds up, like someone running. I wonder if he’s thinking about escape. How hard is it for him to stay where he is? ‘You walk out of your own birthday party without any explanation . . .’

‘The birthday party was the explanation. That and the dress you bought me.’

‘I swear to God, Con . . .’

‘Forget it,’ I say. ‘I don’t care. I need to talk to you about something else. Sit down. Sit.’

Reluctantly, he lowers himself into a chair across the table from me. He looks as unrelaxed as I’ve ever seen a person look – shoulders hunched, jaw rigid, red in the face. ‘We ought to discuss work,’ he says.

‘Go ahead.’ This is a business meeting, after all. You can’t invite your husband to a business meeting and then tell him he can’t talk about work.

‘You’re Nulli’s business and financial director. All the strategy originates with you, all the planning . . . You’re the one who makes sure everyone gets paid. I can slog my guts out, my team can do the same, but we’re wasting our time if you’re not doing your bit.’

‘Agreed,’ I say.

‘If you don’t keep on top of things, Nulli falls apart.’

‘And you don’t think I’m keeping on top of things?’

‘Are you?’

‘I haven’t been, no,’ I admit. ‘Not since I saw that woman’s body on Roundthehouses. But it’s been less than a week. The company’s not going to crumble to dust because I’ve neglected the paperwork for a week. Anyway, all this is irrelevant. This time next year, Nulli’s unlikely to exist.’

The colour drains from Kit’s face. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘You’re bright, you’re determined,’ I say briskly, deciding I ought to offer him some compensation for losing both his wife and his business. ‘You’ll start another company without me. I’m sure it’ll do very well.’

Kit’s mouth and eyes start to move – random twitches, uncoordinated. He doesn’t think this can be happening to him. I know how he feels.

‘How can you . . . ?’

I’m sorry. I don’t love you any less than I did before all this happened. I trust you less, like you less, am more willing to cause you pain, but the love hasn’t changed. I wouldn’t have thought that was possible – would you, Kit?

I resist the urge to explain, knowing it wouldn’t help.

‘How can you calmly sit there and announce your intention to destroy everything we’ve got?’ Kit’s voice is hollow, hoarse. ‘Our marriage, our company . . .’

‘I need you to read something.’ I pull the letter out of my bag and pass it across the table to him. ‘I wanted you to see it before Selina Gane does. Once you’ve approved it, I’ll push it under her door. She’s staying here too. Did you know that?’

Kit shakes his head slowly, his eyes wide, fixed on my handwritten words.

I expected it to be hard, but it was the easiest letter I’ve ever written. I assumed, for the purposes of the exercise, that Selina Gane was innocent, and I explained everything, or at least as much as I could explain: finding her address in Kit’s SatNav, my suspicions and fears, how they led me to wait outside her house and follow her, how in retrospect I wish I’d been more upfront about it, spoken to her directly. That’s what she’ll want if she’s as frightened and baffled as I am, I thought: a straightforward letter of clarification and apology, one innocent person to another.

I didn’t waste time worrying about what to include and what to leave out; I was generous with information, telling her far more than she needed to know – even that I was staying at the Garden House, though in a room nowhere near hers. ‘I’m sorry if that makes you feel as if I’m stalking you all over again,’ I wrote. ‘I’m really not. I chose this hotel because its name was in my mind, because I rang you here. In an ideal world, I’d have been tactful and chosen another hotel, but I’m exhausted and my energy levels are well into the red, so I didn’t.’

Reading snatches of the letter upside down, as Kit reads it, I decide that I did a good job of making myself sound sane. If I were Selina Gane, I would agree to meet and talk to me.

Kit drops the pages on the table. He raises his head slowly, as if he can hardly bear to drag his eyes up to meet mine.

‘Well?’ I say.

‘You’re offering to buy her house.’

‘Yes.’

‘Have you gone mad? Even more mad? You’re offering the asking price – 1.2 million pounds. You can’t afford—’

‘Your information’s out of date,’ I tell him. ‘As of today, the asking price is a million. She must be pretty desperate to sell if she’s discounting it after only a week, don’t you think?’

Kit puts his head in his hands. ‘So you’re offering her more money, when she’s asking for less – all of it money you don’t have and wouldn’t be able to borrow. I don’t understand, Connie. Help me out here.’

‘Or you could help me out,’ I say evenly. ‘All I want, now, is to know the truth. I don’t care what it is. I really mean that. However bad it is, even if it’s worse than I can possibly imagine. I don’t care about our marriage . . .’

‘Thanks a lot.’

‘. . . I don’t care if you’ve killed someone – on your own or with Selina Gane’s help. I won’t even go to the police – that’s how much I don’t care. I only care about myself – my need to know what exactly happened to my life.’

‘Stop.’

‘I’m sorry if I’m upsetting you,’ I say. ‘I just want you to realise that this can be easy: you can just tell me. Tell me what’s going on, Kit. Then I won’t have to shove this letter under Selina Gane’s hotel room door . . .’

‘Connie.’ He grabs my hands across the table.

‘Tell me!’

I see something shift in his eyes: fear, awareness, calculation. Mainly fear, I think. ‘Oh, God, Con . . . I don’t know how to . . .’

I wait, afraid to move a muscle in case he changes his mind. Am I going to hear the truth, finally?

‘How can I convince you?’ he says in a harder voice. ‘I don’t know anything. I haven’t done anything.’

No. You didn’t imagine it. There was a chance, and now it’s gone. He chose not to take it.

‘You don’t believe me, do you?’ he says.

‘No, I don’t.’ The sinking heaviness inside me is so overpowering that for a few seconds I can’t speak. What did you expect, a full confession? ‘All right, then,’ I say eventually. ‘If you won’t tell me the truth, I’ll have to find it out for myself. Hence this letter.’

‘Hence?’ Kit’s laugh shocks me. How can one short sound contain so much rage? ‘Sorry, are you implying a logical connection? How does sharing all the details of our misery with a stranger and offering to buy a house you can’t afford take you closer to the truth?’

‘Maybe it won’t.’

‘What do you achieve, with this?’ He hits the letter with the back of his hand.

‘Probably nothing. I’m not doing it because I think it’s a brilliant idea and bound to work.’ If I wasn’t so exhausted, I would try harder to make him see how far I’ve drifted, in the past six days, from the realm of winning possibilities and positive options. ‘I’m doing it because it’s the only idea I have – the only way I can think of to take things forward, now that the police have said they’re not going to do anything.’

A waiter approaches. Kit holds out a hand to repel him, like a lollipop man stopping traffic. ‘We don’t want anything apart from to be left alone,’ he snaps. Some businessmen at a nearby table turn to stare at us. One raises his eyebrows.

‘I know two things for sure,’ I say calmly, sticking to my planned script. ‘11 Bentley Grove was in your SatNav as “Home”. A woman was murdered there, in the lounge. I can’t explain those two things. You say you can’t either. So. If I want to get to the truth, I need to find out a lot more about that house than I know at the moment.’ I shrug. ‘Buying it’s the only plan I can come up with. Don’t bother to tell me how unlikely it is to work – I know that already. I also know that when you buy a house, you find out all sorts of things about it that you wouldn’t have known otherwise: there’s a musty smell in the airing cupboard, a safe under the bedroom floorboards . . .’

‘Connie, you can’t afford to buy 11 Bentley Grove.’

‘Yes, I can. Or, rather, we can. I need your help and you’re going to give it to me. If you don’t, I’ll start divorce proceedings tomorrow. Or Monday – as soon as I can. I’ll also walk away from Nulli without a backward glance, and refuse to sell you my half of the business. I’ll be your worst nightmare: an equal partner who contributes nothing. I know exactly how to make your life hell and run Nulli into the ground. Don’t make the mistake of thinking I wouldn’t do it.’

I’ve never heard a silence so loud. Other people in the restaurant are talking – I can see their mouths moving – but the sound is drowned out by the vast blackness in my head, Kit’s horrified wordless stare.

Two or three minutes pass, the two of us frozen in place. Then Kit says, ‘What have you turned into?’

‘Someone who fights her corner,’ I tell him. ‘So, are you going to help me?’

‘How?’

‘All you’ll need to do is sign forms as and when I tell you to.’

‘I don’t get to hear the financial master plan?’

What harm can it do to tell him?

I take a gulp from my water glass, suddenly nervous, as if my maths teacher is about to mark my homework. ‘As things stand, you’re right – we can’t afford to buy 11 Bentley Grove. We haven’t sold our house – it isn’t even on the market. Even if we put it on tomorrow, it’s unlikely we’d have a firm buyer in time. Now that 11 Bentley Grove’s asking price is down to a million, it’ll be sold within days. It’s being marketed as a bargain – price reduced for a quick sale. And it’s in one of the best parts of Cambridge. If I had to guess, I’d say a deal will have been done by the end of Monday.’

‘Can I inject a bit of realism into this fantasy?’ Kit says. ‘Even if we could magic up a buyer, the most we’d get for Mellers is three hundred grand. We still wouldn’t be able to afford it.’

‘With our incomes and Nulli’s profits, we could get a mortgage for somewhere between eight hundred and nine hundred thousand, I think. Not from the Halifax or NatWest . . .’

‘Then who?’

‘There are plenty of private banks who’d like nothing more than to lend us a shedload of money in exchange for us transferring our business and personal accounts over to them. We’re exactly the sort of clients they’d want to attract. Think of Nulli’s profits in the last two years – they’ve rocketed. I’ll need to beef up projected profits for this year and next by equivalent amounts, so that the bank looks at the figures and thinks, ‘‘Great, no risk,’’ but that’s easy enough to do. The bank’d get Nulli and 11 Bentley Grove as security – I can’t see why they’d turn us down.’

Kit says nothing. At least he’s listening. I wasn’t sure he would. I thought that by this point I might be talking to an empty lime green chair.

‘You’ve read the letter,’ I say steadily, working my way through my prepared speech. ‘You’ve seen that I’m offering Selina Gane 1.2 million, the original asking price. I’ve done that for two reasons. One: she doesn’t want to see or speak to me. An extra two hundred grand that she wasn’t counting on getting might prove to be the incentive she needs. Two: once word gets round that 11 Bentley Grove is now going for a million, it’ll attract so much interest, there’ll probably be people bidding against each other. Once that happens, the price will start to rise again. Unless Selina Gane’s a naïve idiot, she’ll know this. If I want to put in a successful pre-emptive bid, I need to make sure it takes into account that demand might force the price up. Realistically, I reckon the top bid in that situation might be 1.1 million.’

‘So why not offer that?’ Kit asks, his voice stony. I tell myself this is progress: he is engaging with the possibility, at least. Asking sensible questions.

‘I thought about it,’ I tell him. ‘But the combination of Selina Gane’s antipathy towards me and the possibility that she might end up getting 1.1 million anyway might make her more inclined to tell me to get stuffed. 1.2 million is an offer she’d be truly crazy to refuse – I don’t see how she could.’

And she’ll know things about the house that no one else knows – about what’s hidden there and what’s disappeared, what was there once and has been taken away. A woman’s body, the death button . . .

I could ring Lancing Damisz and give a false name, ask Lorraine Turner to show me round 11 Bentley Grove, but what’s the point? Even a well-informed estate agent would only know a fraction of what the owner knows.

Offering Selina Gane more than a million pounds seems a good way of persuading her to talk to me.

‘Are you listening to yourself?’ Kit hisses, leaning across the table as if greater proximity to his hostility is likely to make me change my mind. ‘An offer she’d be truly crazy to refuse? It’s an offer you’d be truly crazy to make! Even if we could borrow nine hundred thousand from some private bank . . .’

‘How would we afford the monthly payments?’ I have anticipated every question he might ask, all possible objections. ‘I’ve done some very rough calculations. Borrowing on an interest-only basis, and if we pour in ninety per cent of our salaries and all our personal savings, we could afford to make the payments for two to three years, depending on certain variables. After that, I don’t know. Maybe we’ll be rich by then from some new business venture, or . . .’

No. Stop.

I promised myself I wouldn’t lie in order to make this easier, for Kit or for me.

There’s not going to be a new business. There’s no ‘we’, not any more.

‘When we can no longer make the payments, 11 Bentley Grove will be repossessed,’ I tell Kit. ‘It’s inevitable, and it doesn’t worry me. If I haven’t found out what I need to know in two years, the chances are I’ll never find out. At that point, I’d have to think about giving up.’

‘You’re proposing this plan knowing it’s going to lead to bankruptcy?’

‘There’s no point in having money if you’re not willing to spend it on the things that matter. I assume that if I was literally penniless, the government would have to provide me with somewhere to live – a room in a B&B, a council flat, benefits. I wouldn’t starve.’

‘Your figures don’t add up,’ says Kit, a triumphant sneer on his face. He ought to know better. When have my figures ever not added up? Hysteria bubbles up inside me. My life might be falling apart but my accounting skills have survived intact. Yippee. ‘You’re talking about borrowing nine hundred grand, but this letter’s offering 1.2 million.’ Kit hits it again with the back of his hand. ‘Where’s the missing three hundred grand going to come from?’

‘The sale of Melrose Cottage,’ I tell him. ‘You talked about magicking up a buyer? That’s exactly what I’ve done. A firm buyer who won’t let us down, so that we can make a deal with Selina Gane straight away and know it won’t fall through.’

‘Who? You’re talking crap! You haven’t had time to find anyone. The house isn’t even on the market! Your mum and dad aren’t going to help you bankrupt yourself, that’s for sure – they’d drop dead from a unanimous heart attack if they heard what I’ve just heard. Fran and Anton haven’t got any money. Who’s your buyer, Connie? You’re f*cking delusional!’

‘We’re going to sell Melrose Cottage to ourselves. To Nulli.’

No reaction.

I press on. ‘Nulli has a hundred and fifty grand in its account at the moment, give or take. Legally, it’s a separate entity from you and me, even though we own it. It can borrow money in its own right. This is how it works: Nulli buys Melrose for three hundred grand. I don’t know, maybe it could even pay a bit over the odds – three hundred and twenty, say, or three hundred and fifty. Yes, come to think of it, I think Nulli might be so impressed with our high-spec interior, it won’t be able to resist offering an extra fifty grand to see off the competition. The surveyor will be told that’s the price the vendor and buyer agreed on, and won’t think to question it – three hundred and fifty grand isn’t unthinkable for our house, with all the work we’ve done to it.’

‘The work I’ve done,’ Kit mutters.

I’m not going to argue with him. It’s a fair point. ‘Nulli puts down a hundred grand toward Melrose, borrows two hundred and fifty,’ I say. ‘The fifty grand left in the company account would then cover the stamp duty on Melrose, legal costs, everything – there might even be some left over for salaries.’ You have to laugh, don’t you, Kit? Or else you cry. ‘Soon as Nulli owns Melrose, it puts it up for sale. Shouldn’t take too long to sell. Someone I went to school with will buy it, or one of Mum and Dad’s friends who wants to downsize now that their kids have left home. Meanwhile, we’ll have got a lump sum from selling our house – we’ll have three hundred and fifty grand in cash. We put down three hundred towards 11 Bentley Grove and borrow nine hundred. ‘No,’ I correct myself. ‘Sorry. We put down two ninety, borrow nine hundred and ten. The sixty we don’t put down from the sale of Melrose covers stamp duty, which’ll be colossal, and legal costs. Soon as Melrose sells to a genuine buyer, Nulli gets two hundred and ninety grand back, and ends up only sixty grand out of pocket. And it won’t really be out of pocket at all, because it’s us and we’re it – we’ll have made use of that sixty grand already. Apart from anything else, it’s a brilliant way of getting a huge amount of money out of the company tax-free.’

Kit says nothing, doesn’t even blink. Perhaps he’s dead; I’ve shocked the life out of him.

‘At first I thought Nulli could buy 11 Bentley Grove, but that wouldn’t work,’ I say. ‘I need to move in, live there – I won’t find out anything if I’m not there. If Nulli owns the house and I live there, it becomes a taxable benefit in kind. Plus, a private bank wouldn’t lend Nulli anywhere near as much as it’d lend us, and it’d charge twice as much interest – the terms for commercial loans are much tougher than for personal mortgages. This way round, it’s perfect. Nulli buys Melrose, which we’re no longer living in, so it isn’t a taxable benefit – it’s an investment. We feed the bank some crap about maybe renting it out.’

‘Shut up!’ Kit bellows. ‘I don’t want to hear any more, just . . . stop.’

Obediently, I wait in silence for him to be ready to tear me to pieces. He’s not an impulsive person, Kit. He’ll want to rehearse his attack first.

Everyone in the restaurant is watching us and trying to pretend they’re not. I consider making a public announcement: Don’t bother with the subtlety. We’re beyond caring what anybody thinks of us.

Suddenly, desperately, I want a Kir Royale. This is a Kir Royale sort of place. Why would anybody want to drink anything else, in this lime and purple velvet room with its soft lighting and river views?

I can’t ask for a Kir Royale. It wouldn’t be right. Inappropriate. Crazy Connie.

‘Do you have any idea how f*cked up this is?’ Kit says after a few minutes. He’s lowered his voice to a whisper; perhaps he does care about making a good impression, even now. I remind myself that I know nothing about him, nothing that matters. ‘You say, “We’ll have made use of that sixty grand already,’’ as if there’s a profit in this for us! Yeah, we’ll have made use of the sixty grand – hooray. We’ll have used it to buy a house we’ll lose within two to five years because we can’t afford it. And Nulli, that we’ve taken so long to build up and poured all our effort and energy into – Nulli’ll go down the tubes. By the time the sale of Melrose Cottage to a legitimate buyer completes, we’ll have had, what? Two, three months of not being able to pay anybody?’

‘You’re right,’ I cut him off. ‘Nulli will be a casualty of the plan, almost certainly. And we’ll lose both houses, Melrose Cottage and 11 Bentley Grove. On the plus side, if 11 Bentley Grove is repossessed, we might get some equity out of it, depending on what the bank sells it for. And when Nulli sells Melrose, even if it’s in the process of folding by then, that’s three hundred grand that’ll come back to us, minus the costs associated with going bankrupt.’

‘We’ll be left with nothing,’ says Kit, his voice leaden with misery. ‘That’s the one thing all people who go bankrupt have in common. Use your brain, for f*ck’s sake.’

‘I think you’re being too pessimistic,’ I tell him. ‘We’ll get something out of it. Remember, there are two houses to sell to generate funds.’ Time to be generous. Incentivise him. ‘You can have all of it,’ I say. ‘Everything we’re left with at the end of all this. I meant what I said: I don’t care if I end up poor and homeless.’ A voice in my head – my mother’s, probably – says, It’s all very well saying you don’t care. You should care.

But I don’t.

‘I need to know the truth,’ I tell Kit. ‘I may never find out, but if I do, this is how it’s going to happen. This plan is the beginning of me maybe getting some answers to my questions.’

1.2 million pounds. The most expensive answer in the history of the world.

‘If I say no, you’re going to divorce me, right?’ Kit says.

I nod.

‘What happens to our marriage if I say yes?’

‘That depends. If I find out the truth, and the truth is that you’re not a liar, not a murderer . . .’ I shrug. ‘Maybe we can find a way back, but . . .’ I stop. It’s not fair to offer him false hope, even if it would further my cause. ‘I think our marriage is probably over either way,’ I say.

‘It’s what your average dimwit-on-the-street would call a “no-brainer”.’ Kit’s smile is shaky. ‘If my choice is between definitely losing the woman I love and only probably losing her, I’m going to have to opt for only probably.’ He stands up. ‘I’ll sign anything you want me to sign. Just say the word. You know where to find me.’