It takes a moment to figure out where she is. There’s a bus stop on the main road and she sees that she is several stops south of Alder Rise, with no service due in the next fifteen minutes. Her mind churns. Faster to walk? Or wait for a taxi? Can she afford one, now everything is lost? Where is the money? What has Bram done? What will Toby do? Will he turn back and come after her, dish out some of the violence that was all too implicit in the car?
She walks. When she reaches Baby Deco, the building is alight with Friday night humanity, people whose lives have been improved by the arrival of the weekend, a laughable notion if it didn’t make her want to sob. She takes the stairs to the second floor. She’s moving strangely, sluggishly, and the light times out before she reaches the door. Any other time, she’d be unnerved by the dark, the hollow silence of a stairwell, but tonight she embraces it for what it is, a respite from scrutiny, exposure.
When she opens the door to the flat, she actually stumbles back out again. The whole unit, barring the kitchen area immediately inside the door, is crammed with heavy-duty removals boxes, a ceiling-high rock face of brown, stamped with the blue of a brand logo. The glazed doors to the balcony can be seen only through a single fractured line, though a wider gorge has been created to allow access to the bathroom. The bed must be hidden under the boxes, while, thoughtfully, the two grey armchairs have been relocated to the kitchen area.
Her fingers probe the items on the kitchen worktop as if her eyes are no longer to be trusted: Bram’s keys to the flat; a yellow A4 sheet, which proves to be the paid invoice for a self-storage company in Beckenham that she guesses contains her furniture; also, inexplicably, Harry’s little blue spelling book. What was going through Bram’s mind, she wonders, to cheat his family on such a scale and yet think to pull aside a school exercise book? When did he last speak to the boys? Did he prepare them for this trauma? Can he really have said goodbye to them and intended it to be the final time?
There is no note, nor any details of bank accounts, but she had not expected that. This is not a puzzle set by Bram for her edification; this is the last act of a desperate man.
With no true instinct as to what to do next, she dislodges the nearest of the boxes and looks inside. Ornaments, photographs, books: all from the Trinity Avenue living room. The next three contain more books from the same room. The fifth holds items from the study, including files and documents from the cabinet, a lucky find so early – if anything can be described as lucky on this most diabolical of days – because she’ll need financial documents for her meeting with the solicitor on Monday. When she pulls herself together, with her parents’ help, she’ll need them to prove her ownership of the house. She starts to sift, removing anything useful, including the blue plastic folder that contains the family’s passports. She is stunned to find Bram’s, untouched, intact, so stunned that she sits for a moment to think.
He must still be in the UK, then. Though bludgeoned by fatigue, her brain seems to know that a passport is required of UK citizens even for France or Ireland. Of course, he may have acquired a false one. If he can steal a house (half a house, technically), then he can buy illegal ID. The criminal underworld is his oyster, evidently, Toby his erstwhile travelling companion.
She experiences a rush of fury at the thought of Toby, which at least energizes her next spell of unpacking. Kitchen utensils, clothing, shoes, toys . . . on it goes. After an hour or so, she breaks to find something to eat and drink. There is nothing in the fridge, not even milk or water, just a bottle of red wine in the rack on the counter, and so she tries the top shelf of the cupboard where they keep pasta and other groceries. Instant noodles will do, or soup.
Immediately, her fingers find something flat and plastic. Behind the stocks of tinned tomatoes and crackers and teabags, there is a phone, a battered-looking Sony belonging to Bram, since it is definitely not hers, and with a charger lead attached. It’s dead, so she plugs it into the nearest socket, eats the crackers and drinks a glass of water while waiting for it to come to life.
When at last it responds, she finds herself looking at a home screen with neither passcode to crack nor contents to protect. No photos, no emails, no history of internet searches. There are, however, two text messages from an unnamed number. The first, dating from October and opened, reads, Uh oh, looks like someone’s getting her memory back . . . and links to an article about the Thornton Heath accident:
Road rage caused Silver Road crash, says victim
She knows who must have sent it even before she remembers those grotesque words in the car – ‘He ran another car off the road and it crashed . . . The kid died’ – and even before she opens the second message, sent earlier today and until now unread:
- Wtf going on with your phones? No answer from usual number. Fi on way back to London. Call ASAP.
Her anger returns in a torrent.
You’re obviously no use to anyone . . .
A younger, sexier model . . .
What kind of a dumb fuck . . .?
Almost immediately a new alert sounds and she sees that by opening the last message she has announced her presence – or Bram’s – to him.
- I know you’re there. Big problem, solicitor paid wrong account. Know anything about that?
She waits, breathless, for the next to land:
- No money, no passport – you know the deal. You have till Monday morning to sort this out or the evidence goes to the police.
No money, no passport? And yet Bram’s passport is here, in the flat. She can see the folder from where she’s standing. She was right then, there must have been a replacement one, procured by Toby and withheld until he’d received his pay-off. How cunning he has been – thought he had been. And yet he finds himself with nothing, because somehow Bram has triumphed, triumphed over all of them. And either he’s forgotten this second phone exists or he’s deliberately left it. Should she dispose of it? What is he expecting her to do?
Then she has a thought she hasn’t had before: this couldn’t have been . . . this couldn’t be Bram’s revenge for her having chosen Toby over him?
But no: Bram must have understood Toby’s interest in her was merely a pretence. She is ashamed to remember her own vanity that night Bram found Toby at Trinity Avenue: all her feminist faith, all her pride in her independence, and it comes down to the cavewoman excitement of two hunter-gatherers fighting over her.
Which it turns out they were not.
How pathetic she is. Homeless and defeated and debased.
As her eye rests on the bottle of wine, the phone starts to ring.
Lyon, 10.30 p.m.
He thought he would never sleep again, but in fact he passes out early and sleeps deeply that first night in Lyon, yanked to the surface only twice. The first time, the pea under his mattresses is a phone. The third phone, to be precise, the Sony Mike delivered to him at the office to replace the Samsung he’d smashed. He knows he never used it, but where did he leave it? In the office? In the flat?
Is there any way it could lead Mike to him here? No. His searches on Geneva and Lyon were made in the internet café in Croydon and his calls to Mike were from the pay-as-you-go, now sitting in the bottom of a bin at Victoria Station.
His eyes close.
His eyes open once more. There was that one text, wasn’t there? A link to a news piece about the Silver Road investigation. Is there any way that could lead the police to Mike?
Possibly. But maybe that would be no bad thing.
London, 10.30 p.m.
She declines five calls from him before sending a text of her own:
- Calm down. I’m at the flat.
- You fucking twat. Where’s the money?
- I have it, don’t worry. Mix up with account numbers. Come to flat and I’ll do the transfer while you’re here.
- Not sure flat is safe. Fi has been to house, had the police out.
- It’s clear. Police won’t come this late.
- You think?
- Come if you want the money. Your choice.
He must have driven like a bat out of hell because he arrives in minutes. When she presses the intercom button, he barks into it without waiting for a greeting: ‘Mike. Let me in.’
Mike? So Toby has been a fake right down to the name he fed her.