Fi stares at her, utterly chilled. Her impression is astute (women tend to notice the details of Bram), but how on earth has she come to form it?
‘That does sound like him,’ Merle concedes.
Prickling with fresh dread, Fi fiddles with her phone to find a picture; she still has a couple of Bram with the boys.
‘Definitely him,’ the Vaughans agree.
‘I don’t understand,’ Lucy says to David, semi-privately. ‘You think her husband cheated her?’
‘Bram wouldn’t do anything as evil as that,’ Merle says, with profound certainty. ‘Would he, Fi?’
But shock has swept her in a fresh tide, making it impossible for her to follow the exchange with a rational mind.
‘When exactly did you meet him?’ Merle asks the Vaughans.
‘At one of the viewings. He was only here that once, though,’ David says. ‘The next two times it was the agent on his own. So yes, just at the open house.’
‘Open house?’ These two words cause the hairs on Fi’s arms to stand on end. A memory; a connection on her part, in her experience, between blameless past and treacherous present.
Lucy turns to her, her memory jogged. ‘That’s right! You were out of town, he said. I remember now. The way he said it, I assumed you were still married.’
We are, Fi thinks. However deep Bram’s ship has sunk, legally, financially, she goes down with it.
Merle, however, is still clinging to the prow. ‘I’m sorry, but there’s no way there could have been an open house here without my noticing. I live two doors down.’
‘Well, there was,’ David says, exasperated. ‘It was a Saturday in October.’
‘Saturday the twenty-ninth,’ Lucy adds. It has sentimental value to her, Fi can tell. The day she first saw her dream house, her for ever home.
As her eye meets Merle’s, she sees the beginnings of doubt in her friend’s response. ‘Kent,’ she says. ‘Half term.’ She turns to David, his features blurring through the gathering of fresh tears. ‘So you’re saying Bram was a part of this? He actively tried to sell my home?’
‘I’m saying he did sell it,’ David says. ‘In which case, he’s not likely to have been abducted, is he? He’s probably gone of his own accord.’
As Fi covers her sobbing face with her hands and Merle strokes her slumped shoulders, the doorbell rings.
‘Let’s see what the police think,’ Merle says.
Geneva, 3.30 p.m.
In the hotel bathroom, he plays Nick Cave on his phone and sets about cutting his hair. The curls fall in chunks, only the dark visible on the white porcelain, the grey imperceptible. The lighting, the music, his anxiety: together they create an artificial mood, almost ceremonial, as if he’s an actor playing an outlaw and this is the scene in which he must alter his appearance, become someone else. He’s a great train robber, perhaps, or Jesse James.
No, Samson, he thinks. He’s a more edifying point of reference. A man blessed with superhuman strength. The boys loved the children’s Bible stories gifted by Grandma Tina. Harry, in particular, relished the violence of Samson’s story: the tearing apart of a lion, the ripping of gates from their hinges with his bare hands, the slaying of a whole army (Bram remembers explaining what ‘slay’ means, following initial confusion with Santa’s sleigh).
Having given it brief, desperate thought, he gave no clue to his mother that he was leaving. He may have no faith of his own, but he does have faith that hers will sustain her. And Fi won’t cut off contact, she is scrupulous about grandparental rights. If anything, they will close ranks, once the police reveal the extent of his crimes; they’ll prepare their assault on a shared enemy.
All he can pray for is that they’ll temper their denunciations around Leo and Harry, that they’ll let them remember him at his best – whatever that was.
He rakes up the shorn hair with his fingers and transfers it to the toilet for flushing. When he stands back and looks in the mirror, he is alarmed. Though he is altered, it is in an undesirable way: he looks younger, more striking, the fear in his eyes more candid and memorable. He remembers again the man by the lifts at the restaurant and he knows now that he must trust his instinct, that it is the only thing left to trust. Someone – if not that man, then another – is in Geneva, watching him, biding his time before . . . what? Forcing him back to Mike? Arresting him? Killing him?
At once, the compulsion to be on the move overcomes him and he repacks the few items removed from his rucksack and leaves the room.
The receptionist, at the start of her shift, has no way of knowing that his appearance has changed and makes no comment about his premature departure, his room having been paid for in cash on check-in.
As he exits, he tries not to think of Samson’s end, how he brought down the temple, killing not only himself but everyone in it.
28
Bram, Word document
Are you beginning to see how appalling it looked on paper? How trapped I felt, how terrorized? The confessed – and recorded – guilt to the Silver Road crash, the driving ban, the suspended sentence for assault, not to mention a conviction for possession . . . the last was ancient history, but what did that matter? As Mike said, it all counts when the time comes.
Counts against me.
I can only defend myself by saying these have been my only crimes in forty-eight years and I believe that there are very few people who haven’t committed some variation of at least one of them, even police officers themselves. Seriously, have you never gone over the speed limit? Have you never tried drugs or got a bit lairy outside a pub? I didn’t say did you get caught doing one of these; I just asked, did you do it?
Well, I got caught for all of them. Which meant that there could be no barrister in the land convincing enough to argue that Silver Road was a one-time mistake. Not when the record showed that I was someone who was always in the wrong place at the wrong time. Doing the wrong thing.
Okay, so the fight at the pub was pretty damn serious. I didn’t start it, but I certainly finished it: the guy was hospitalized, off work for weeks. I was lucky the sentence was suspended and that, miraculously, I managed to hide the prosecution process from Fi. I won’t go into the labyrinthine logistics of that (it helped that there were renovations going on at the house and, the boys not having started school yet, she had based herself with them at her parents’ place, leaving me to my own devices). Nor will I explain what I imagined would happen if my remorse had not convinced the court and I’d been sent down (‘Fi? I’m calling from a prison payphone. I need to tell you something . . .’)
‘In return for a guilty plea, was it?’ Mike said that night at the flat, his gaze voyeuristic, as if he was able to see into my soul and measure my pain. And his instinct was sharp, I’ll give him that. I would have pleaded guilty to far worse if it meant avoiding jail time. I won’t say prison is a phobia of mine, because that would make it irrational, all in the mind.
Whereas it is rational, real. So real that I would have done anything, sacrificed anyone, to avoid it.
‘Fi’s Story’ > 01:37:11