‘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.
And I knew he meant it. Even as I cast the plastic shards into a bin in the street, even as I slotted the SIM card through the grating of a nearby drain, still growling with anger as I did so, I knew it would make no difference.
I knew he’d be back.
24
‘Fi’s Story’ > 01:31:00
Even when a detective came to the house to ask about the car, I remained unsuspecting. You know how it is, you focus on the short-term inconvenience of these things. You assume everyone gets the same prompt service: it was the Friday of the same week it had been stolen.
‘You need my husband,’ I said at the door. ‘He made the original report.’
The guy nodded, casual but polite. ‘Even so, I’d just like to clarify a couple of things with you, if I may.’
‘Of course. This is impressively quick. Do you work with Yvonne Edwards, by any chance? She’s the community support officer who came to talk to us about neighbourhood crime. She was very helpful.’
‘No, I’m with the Serious Collisions Investigation Unit based in Catford.’
I stared at him in confusion. He was not in uniform and it wasn’t a police team I’d ever heard of; as I led him inside, I chided myself for not taking a closer look at his ID. I’d read in the paper about innocent residents of a village in Leicestershire being hoodwinked and robbed by an impostor in a police costume. As we settled in the living room, I eyed my escape route.
‘So the vehicle was reported missing on Tuesday, but your husband was unable to say when you last saw it. Might it have been several days before? Even weeks?’
‘Weeks?’ I echoed, surprised. ‘No, I used it on Sunday. I parked it up near the junction with the Parade at about four o’clock and neither of us have seen it since.’
‘So that’s last Sunday, the second of October?’
‘Yes.’
‘And do you remember who was driving it on Friday the sixteenth of September?’
I looked blankly at him. ‘No, not off the top of my head. Why?’
‘Do you keep a diary or a calendar that might help you recall?’
He’d come to the right place there: I cross-referenced my work schedule with the kitchen calendar and the bird’s nest app. ‘Friday the sixteenth, here we are. Neither of us used it, so it would have been parked in the street all day. Bram had a sales conference out of town and I was at an antiques fair in Richmond for most of the day with a friend.’
‘Neither of you drove to these appointments?’
‘No. Well, I drove with a friend in her car. Bram took the train to his conference.’
There was a pause, a faint hardening of attention. ‘You saw him go to the station?’
‘No, not personally. We’re not together any more. We’re separated. He was at the flat.’ I gave him details of the address and its proximity to the house and train station. ‘But I know he leaves well before eight and when I came back from the school run the car was definitely there. I remember because my friend and I had second thoughts about whose car to take. I showed her the Audi’s boot space and we decided to take her Volvo, as planned.’
‘What time did you leave for this trip?’
‘About eight fifteen. We put our kids in the school breakfast club to get an early start.’ Not sure who I was so eager to help, him or Bram, I added: ‘If you need to double-check that Bram took the train, you could always look at the station security film. They definitely have cameras there.’
The corners of his mouth pulled, causing a stitch in the flesh on the left side. A detective with a dimple. ‘I see you know your police procedurals, Mrs Lawson,’ he said.
I smiled. ‘Sorry. I do like a crime drama.’
‘So you left at eight fifteen and then you returned when?’
‘In time for school pick-up. Three thirty.’
I talked him through my likely movements between pick-up and handover to Bram at 7 p.m., though the finer points of domesticity eluded me. ‘Pasta or sausages, I’m afraid I can’t tell you,’ I said wryly.
‘Did anyone stop by the house?’
To vouch for my having been there, he meant. I strained to recall. ‘I think my friend Kirsty came by. That’s right, our kids had taken home each other’s PE kit, so we swapped them back. I remember I had to leave the grill to answer the door. It was sausages.’
A second appearance of the dimple. ‘And what about later, after your husband arrived? Might you have used your own car then?’
‘No, I went to Brighton for the night and I took the train. I know I used the car that Sunday, though, because I took the kids for lunch at my parents in Kingston.’
‘Busy weekend.’
‘Yes, it was.’ I looked up, tried to read his expression. ‘Why are you asking all this? What happened that Friday?’
‘There was a collision in Thornton Heath that we’re investigating. You may have read about it in the local papers.’
‘I don’t think so,’ I admitted. ‘But I’ve used the car a few times since then so it can’t have been involved in any crash. Oh, hang on, is this because of the missing key?’
‘Missing key?’ There was a flicker of fresh energy. ‘House key?’
‘No, car key. We could only find one set – I thought Bram mentioned that in his report? It can be a bit chaotic around here. We take turns to be here with the kids, you see. We’re never here at the same time.’ I answered his look of surprise with a brief piece of evangelism about bird’s nest custody.
‘Right, so in terms of the car keys, might this second set have been missing for some time?’
‘Maybe. I guess.’ A thought struck. ‘You don’t think someone might have broken in and stolen it? We’ve had a burglary on the street recently.’ The community officer had mentioned this trend at the meeting, I remembered. Alison had raised the notion that you should always leave car keys out in the open, counterintuitive as it was, so as to avoid burglars ransacking the place in search of hidden keys, but the officer had cautioned against leaving them visible through a window.
‘Have you noticed any signs of forced entry?’ the detective asked.
‘No,’ I conceded. ‘But I know thieves can use wires and hooks through the letterbox, can’t they?’
‘That’s right.’ He paused. ‘Alternatively, you might simply have mislaid the key.’
I agreed that this was more likely and he asked if I’d noticed any scratches or other damage to the car over the last few weeks.