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.
Your guess is as good as mine as to whether this will ever go to trial, if they ever find this other me, this second Fiona Lawson. Neither the estate agent nor the solicitor had a phone number for her, only for Bram, and the address and date of birth she gave were mine. We know she used my passport as her proof of ID and that she and Bram attended a meeting together, posing as us. Both her appearance and signature were credible enough, evidently. No, it’s hard to imagine she will come forward any time soon and get herself slapped with some sort of conspiracy to commit fraud charge. I mean, would you?
As for where the money is, that remains a tangle. Graham Jenson and his colleagues at Dixon Boyle still deny any misconduct and they have emails and phone logs to prove that the details for the receiving account were supplied by Bram himself. The sale proceeds duly landed in a legitimate UK high street account in our joint names: so far so simple (if you overlook the fact that I knew nothing about the opening of said account). But, within hours, the same sum was transferred offshore. Not so simple. There’s talk of anonymous accounts in the Middle East and God knows where else – banking nations with no reciprocity agreement with the UK.
You know what upsets me the most about that? He didn’t need to hide it offshore for tax evasion reasons – there’s no tax owed to the government on this sale. It was purely to hide it from me.
Anyway, the police say they are hopeful of recovering something for me, but my solicitor is more guarded. She says the Serious Fraud Office have bigger fish to fry. Far bigger.
David and Lucy Vaughan are still in the house. It’s legally theirs, after all. Everyone uses that term, they’re the ‘legal’ owners, as if we all agree that I remain the moral one, the spiritual one. They won’t mind my telling you they’ve said that as soon as I am in a position to do so, I can buy it back for market rate, even if we all know I’ll never be in a position to do that. With all of this going on, I’ve been lucky to keep hold of my job.
Toby? No, I’m not seeing him any more, let alone planning to set up house together. I’m glad your listeners can’t see me blushing, because it will come as no surprise to hear that I haven’t laid eyes on him since the day of the theft. I guess I was less attractive to him once it became clear I’d lost my big house on Trinity Avenue.
What can I say? Gentlemen prefer homeowners!
Obviously, I’m making light of this. A coping mechanism, no doubt. I’ve already told you I was starting to trust him, to believe I could love him. All I know for sure is that we parted that Friday with him promising to phone me at the weekend, but there was never any call. His phone, like Bram’s, has been out of service ever since. At least his vanishing is explicable in a way Bram’s never will be – imagine if I’d had to make a missing persons report on him as well! They’d think I was some sort of black widow.
‘He’s probably spending a bit of quality time with his wife,’ Polly said, when I told her. ‘Have you tried putting his picture into Google to see what comes up?’
I had to admit I had no photo to try.
‘He wouldn’t let you take one, would he? Oh, Fi, how could you have missed all these obvious signs? You know what I think? I think the wife was pregnant and you were his maternity cover fling. And I bet he didn’t work for any Department of Transport think tank. I bet he was a car salesman. No, a traffic warden.’
At least she didn’t say ‘I told you so’, not in those exact words, though if she had, it would have been as good a line as any to end my story.
Because this is the end. There is nothing more.
#VictimFi
@deadheadmel No way, that’s it?
@IngridF2015 @deadheadmel Like she says, it’s still a live investigation.
@richieschambers @deadheadmel @IngridF2015 I think we’re looking at a part deux, people.