I asked the barman for a Coke. I would have preferred a pint but was damned if I was going to make any concession to male bonding. The day I shared a drink with Mike was the day I was discharged from hospital following a lobotomy. It was disconcerting how deep my hatred for him was, how rich and complicated, as if there’d been a whole lifetime of hostilities between us, not a few weeks.
The Coke, served at room temperature, was sweet enough to make me wince.
‘You read the article?’ Mike was at my side. No greeting this time, like I wasn’t worth the extra seconds it would cost him. He had the bruised eyes of the hungover (it took one to know one) and a nasty shaving rash. It was impossible to judge from his clothing – jeans, nondescript grey shirt – whether he’d been in an office all day or at home passed out on the floor.
‘I skimmed it,’ I muttered.
‘Bram, my friend, I’m very sorry to hear you didn’t take it more seriously than that.’
Already, I was getting used to his persona, which evidently included expressing dismay at my inadequacies, as if I were an apprentice taken on against his better judgement and, lo and behold, proving to be not quite up to scratch.
‘No one could take it seriously,’ I said, terror and loathing preventing me from making the connections I guessed I was expected to make. ‘It’s just sensationalist pap. Pandering to homeowners’ fears. Do you own your own place, Mike? Where do you live? I don’t think you’ve told me.’
He ignored the questions, of course, taking a moment to order himself a pint. He was polite to the point of obsequiousness to the barman. ‘It happens more often than you think,’ he said, turning back my way. ‘What with all these cheap online legal services, there’s hardly any face to face in the house-buying process. Things slip through the net.’
‘Oh, come on,’ I said. ‘It happens once in a blue moon, otherwise it wouldn’t be news. These people are professional criminals.’
Again, he ignored the comment entirely. ‘How much is your house worth, Bram?’
‘What? No idea.’ I kept both my gaze and tone dead flat, giving him nothing.
‘Two mil, would you say? Two and a half?’
‘I told you, I don’t know. It’s not even mine.’
‘Fuck off, I know it is. You own it fifty-fifty with your wife, Fiona Claire Lawson. Date of birth 18th January 1974.’
This, presumably, had been ascertained the same way all his other information had.
‘My soon-to-be ex-wife,’ I corrected him. ‘We’re divorcing and she’s getting the house in the settlement. It’s already been agreed.’
There was a long pause. Did he believe me?
‘We’d better get on with it then,’ he said, cheerfully.
Even though I’d anticipated them, his words stole my breath from me, and the contempt in my reaction was pure bluster: ‘Get on with what, you dickhead?’
The insult didn’t register. ‘Selling the house, of course. What’s the time frame on the divorce?’
‘That’s none of your business. None of this is. And if you think I’m selling my house, you’re insane.’ I’d raised my voice, attracted glances, and he allowed the energy to dissipate before speaking again.
‘How much have you got left to pay on your mortgage, Bram?’
I glowered at him. ‘What, you haven’t found that out yourself?’
‘I could, but it would be so much more efficient if you just told me. Let’s say half a million. More? No. Less? Closer to 400K? Good. So if the place is worth two million, that’s well over one and a half million profit after fees. There’s a house on your street on the market at the moment, did you know?’
I didn’t. Fi would, of course.
‘Two point four, it’s on at. Punchy. Just a couple along from you, actually. They haven’t got your pretty little tree out front, but it’s still a very desirable family home. Big conservatory. Chrome fittings in the master bathroom. Nice little cellar that could be converted into a den. They use it for the laundry at the moment.’
I gaped. ‘You mean you’ve been there?’
‘Anyone can arrange to view a house that’s for sale, Bram. Estate agents are the last of the egalitarians, eh?’
I couldn’t bear his pomposity, his look of pride when he used a word of more than three syllables. As for the idea of him strolling past our gate – our ‘pretty little tree’ – and walking through one of our neighbours’ into a house like ours, probably with children like ours, it caused a molten fury at the deepest core of me. Had he arranged the viewing for last Saturday, then stalked me up Trinity Avenue to the park? I leant forwards, my breath hot. ‘Keep away from my family, do you understand?’
‘Calm down,’ Mike said, palm raised between us. ‘No one said anything about your family.’
Yet, was the implication.
‘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?