‘Yes.’
Merle’s fingers disappear into its folds, re-emerge with a brown leather wallet. ‘Michael Fuller. Okay. That’s good, I think.’
‘Why’s it good?’ Fi asks.
‘Because you called him Toby. You’ve probably never mentioned Mike or Michael to anyone, have you?’
‘No. I didn’t know it was his name until last night.’
Merle continues to poke through the wallet. ‘And I remember Alison saying you haven’t met his family yet. Is that true?’
‘Yes. Or friends.’
Merle glances up at her. ‘Not a single one? No colleague or neighbour? Kids?’
‘No one. We didn’t share lives like that.’ Because ‘we’ didn’t exist. She has no idea who Toby – Michael Fuller – is. Who he was. Because he’s not a man now, he’s remains. As Fi suppresses the need to retch, Merle looks oddly heartened.
‘I’d say that’s very fortunate,’ she says, and places the wallet on the worktop before searching the coat pockets for other items. Car keys. Nicorette chewing gum. Two phones. Both are charged, both present security screens requiring passcodes the women have no way of guessing. ‘Which one does he use when he calls you?’ she murmurs, to herself as much as to Fi.
‘I don’t know, but if I call it from mine, it will ring and we’ll find out,’ Fi suggests.
‘No!’ Merle grips her arm. ‘Don’t make any calls from your phone while you’re here, okay?’
Fi nods. Merle’s mood is commanding, constructive, and Fi has a childlike desire to please her. ‘What if I call the number I have from Bram’s phone? The one I used to text him? Then we could assume it’s the other one that he uses for me?’
It is as if he has no name now; she can’t bring herself to use it, as if to do so would be to rekindle his life force.
Merle pauses, before thinking aloud: ‘For all we know, he might have your number on both these phones. We’ll get rid of them both and hope they’re not traceable. This man is a criminal, right? He uses false names. Someone like him isn’t going to have a nice family plan, is he? Will it look weird, though? He came here because Bram texted him, so where’s the phone he got the text on? Still, there might be a hundred reasons why he’s ditched his phone on the way.’ She finds a plastic bag in one of the drawers, drops the two phones into it, then pulls Fi into the passageway between boxes, as if removing the two of them from the dead man’s sightline. She speaks in low, clipped utterances: ‘Listen to me, Fi, does anyone else know you came here last night?’
‘No. Only him.’
‘Did you call anyone when you were here? Bram’s mother, maybe? To speak to the boys?’
‘No, only from your place earlier. Well, I texted him, like I said, but only from Bram’s phone.’
‘Did you use the internet?’
‘No.’
‘Where’s your laptop? You haven’t used that here, have you?’
‘No. I don’t know where Bram put it. In one of these boxes, I’m guessing. I haven’t used it since before I went to Winchester. Tuesday evening.’
‘Good.’ Merle backs out of the passageway and scans the items on the counter before wiping the wine bottle and glasses with a tea towel. She does the same with the discarded packaging from Bram’s pills. Without explanation, Fi hands her the knife, which Merle cleans and returns to the cutlery drawer.
‘Anything else? Where’s this other phone you texted from?’
This too is wiped. Fi wonders if it will join Toby’s in the bag, but instead Merle places it on the yellow paper.
‘Why are you leaving it? That’s the one I’ve used!’
‘Exactly. Listen, Fi, there’s a way out of this. The police find him – maybe even you do, or we do together, that’s better! Later today, okay? We’ll find his body and we’ll call the police and we’ll say we recognize him from yesterday, that he caused a scene at Trinity Avenue when he came looking for Bram. We spoke to him inside for a few minutes but he got aggressive and we asked him to leave. Before that, we’d never laid eyes on him in our lives. Do you see where I’m going?’
There is a slow, spreading sensation through her stomach and chest: it takes a few moments to recognize it as hope. ‘You mean Bram came back and sent the text? Bram gave him the pills?’
‘Yes, or left him here in such misery that he took an overdose himself. I don’t know, I wasn’t here. And neither were you. They’re Bram’s pills, not yours.’
Fi stares, her mind sifting images of the early hours. ‘The sleeping pills, though, Merle. Oh God, were they from a prescription made out to you?’
‘Yes, but so what if they were?’ Merle’s focus is intense. ‘There’s no box with my name on it. If anyone gets that far, I’ll say I gave them to Bram. A few weeks ago, I don’t remember exactly when, but when he was complaining about insomnia. He didn’t tell me he had any other prescription medication or I would never have given them to him.’
Fi stares at her, struggling to keep up. ‘Thank you.’
‘The point is, you didn’t touch the wine or the pills. And anything else in this place with your prints on it is purely because you live here half the time. This stuff is yours.’
‘I wore gloves to break up the medication and push it through the neck of the bottle,’ Fi tells her.
‘Good.’
‘But I searched through some of the boxes without wearing the gloves, and they’ve only been here since Thursday. But that’s okay, isn’t it? I needed to find financial records to show the police and the lawyers about the house.’
‘Exactly. It’s natural to look for essential things Bram packed without your consent. You might need stuff for the boys as well. But you do that when you come back later today, all right? That’s when you touch things. Last night, you stayed with me, then this morning I took you to Bram’s mum’s to pick up the boys, which I’ll do at, what, eight o’clock? Nine? Let’s go back to Trinity Avenue until it’s time to leave.’
‘I can’t bring the boys back here,’ Fi objects in horror.
‘Of course not,’ Merle agrees. ‘We’ll go straight on to your parents, shall we? You’ll want to tell them about the house, get their advice. Focus on that. You haven’t been here since . . . when?’
‘Wednesday. I picked up some shoes.’
‘Good. Adrian’s back today, so he’ll look after Robbie and Daisy when I come back to meet you later. Lucky I was too tired last night to speak to him. Shall we go then? Fi?’
Go? Fi is rooted to the spot, staring at him. Is he really cooling and stiffening, existing for the first whole day as a thing, an entity that is finished with life for ever? How can it have been so easy to do this? How could he have drunk the wine with all those pills dissolved in it? Didn’t it taste bitter? Poisoned?
Her heart stops. ‘I googled the medication. On my phone, when I was here on Wednesday.’
Merle frowns. ‘Okay. Well, just because you saw it and wanted to know what it was, it doesn’t mean you took it. Keep this simple, Fi, in your head. Keep it as simple as possible.’
‘Yes.’ How unfaltering Merle is. She has all the answers, all the lines. She is Fi’s saviour, her all-seeing angel.
But there’s something else. ‘Lucy saw Bram’s pills. She saw them today, in the kitchen. They fell out of my bag.’
‘Did you tell her they were Bram’s?’
‘No, she thought they were mine, she kept saying it.’
‘Good. Have you had any other prescriptions recently?’
‘No.’
‘Has anyone in the family?’
‘Only Leo. He has those allergy tablets. It’s a repeat prescription, we use them as needed. But we haven’t had a new batch for ages.’
‘That doesn’t matter. Do they come in a packet like Bram’s?’
‘Maybe a different colour. I can’t remember.’
‘Show me,’ Merle says.
‘I can’t, I don’t know where they are.’ Fi hears the panic in her voice, the sense of salvation slipping from her grasp. ‘They were at the house, in the bathroom cabinet.’
Together they survey the mass of identical boxes, not a single one labelled.