Epilogue
One Month Later
EMILY
From the outside window, the café looks all bare brick and trailing plants, but inside it is cosy, the air redolent with fresh coffee beans and burnt milk. I suggested we meet here because it feels like neutral ground. Far away from Orchard Lane.
Lara is already there when I arrive, sitting stiffly at a small table near the back. She still has her coat on, as if she might decide to leave at any moment. She looks thinner, her features sharpened as if bits of her have been peeled away.
‘Hello, Emily.’ She stands, fluttering her fingers when I approach, Ralph straining on his lead at my feet. She looks down, surprised. ‘Is that Vanessa’s dog?’
‘I couldn’t leave him in a shelter. I’m fostering him for now. One of the detectives organized it.’
Lara nods. ‘Good for you.’
When I reach the table, we both hesitate before leaning in for a brief, awkward hug. She stands back, her eyes flicking over my face as if she is trying to get the measure of me.
‘Hi,’ I say.
We sit, and a barista appears. We both order flat whites. On our shopping trips, Lara always used to drink cappuccinos piled with foam and extra chocolate.
Outside, the traffic crawls past under a low, grey sky.
I moved out of the Coach House three weeks ago, rented a small apartment in Trent Basin on the outskirts of the city.
One bedroom, second floor, with a river glimpse and thin walls.
I can hear my neighbour’s radio through the plaster, but I don’t mind.
Noise feels safer than silence right now, and it helps to stop the thoughts rushing in.
We sit for a few moments with the clink of cups and low chatter filling the gaps that neither of us seems ready to fill.
‘So . . . how are you?’ Someone has to start, I suppose.
‘I’m up and I’m down.’ She sighs. ‘Some days are better than others, but mostly I feel like I’m feeling gradually worse, not better.’
‘I get that.’
Lara’s face shifts. ‘You heard about Tim . . . that he didn’t make it?’
I nod. ‘I’m sorry. I know the doctors expected him to make a recovery after his operation.’
‘One minute they said he was stable, the next . . .’ She swallows. ‘He got an infection. Sepsis. The doctors tried everything, but he crashed overnight.’
She looks at me. ‘Have you been in touch with Oliver?’
I pick up my cup and hold it there. ‘Not for a while.’
‘They’ve kept him in custody?’
‘Yes. Charged him with fraud and conspiracy to defraud. Money laundering. They’ve kept him in custody because of the scale of it—the amount involved, the false identities, the offshore accounts. They say he’s a flight risk.’
‘And you?’
‘They haven’t charged me,’ I say carefully, Ralph warm and steady on my lap, his small weight anchoring me.
‘Not yet, at least. But I’m still “under investigation.”’ I hook my fingers around the phrase.
‘They’re deciding what I knew, when I knew it, and whether I knew I benefited.
But when it comes down to it, they haven’t got the evidence they need to charge me with anything yet. ’
I don’t tell her that Oliver confessed to me that he’d got in massive debt to some very unsavoury characters.
He’d borrowed a lot of money for stocks and shares in ‘sure-fire’ companies that turned out not to be sure-fire at all.
The result was the overdrawn personal investment bank account I’d found in the fuse-box cupboard.
‘I thought I could set it right,’ he said. ‘I didn’t want to tell you, to see the disappointment on your face again. I couldn’t touch our joint savings account, but I saw an opportunity in scamming Vanessa Lambert. I always planned to pay her back when I could.’
It sounded so pathetic. So same-old, same-old. Robbing Peter to pay Paul.
‘I started getting serious threats from these guys. They had my phone number and must have somehow traced me, because I saw someone sitting outside in a car watching the house a couple of times. I felt like I had no choice. Tim had also got himself in trouble, unbeknown to Lara, so Vanessa’s money felt like a gift to us both. ’
Scamming and cheating again. On a never-ending loop.
I walked out, told him I didn’t want to see him again.
And since then, he has insisted on taking all the blame for the scams we carried out.
There is so much evidence against him as the active partner, the instigator.
He has done his best to convince them that despite what I might say, I only had a minor role.
Plus, Roman did such a good clean-up job regarding my online contact with Vanessa, that part has remained hidden.
Lara runs a fingertip around the rim of her cup. ‘You said on the phone that Oliver is desperate for you two to stay together?’
I nod. ‘I haven’t decided what to do yet. The love is still there, but we bring out the worst in each other.’ I look towards the window; it’s almost opaque with condensation.
I think some relationships survive not because they’re healthy but because they’re familiar.
You recognize each other’s weaknesses and you learn how to excuse them.
Before you know it, love becomes the thing you hide behind while you do damage—to each other and to everyone else.
Now I know that Oliver has lied and lied to me.
So if I go back to him, I must accept that’s who he is.
‘I don’t believe he will ever change,’ I add.
Her mouth twists. ‘You’ve heard that old saying “We can’t be together, but we can’t be apart?” Well, that was me and Tim. Some people make you braver, and others make you smaller. With Tim, it was both at once.’
‘What happens now?’ I say. ‘What will you do?’
She looks down at her hands. ‘I’m under investigation for what I might know. Tim’s lies won’t all die with him. There’s always a digital trail, right?’
We look at each other. I want to ask her what she knew about Tim’s crimes, but I’m waiting for her to bring up the elephant in the room. It looks, though, as if I’ll have to do the honours.
‘When Oliver got arrested, I thought you’d stood by me because we were friends,’ I say. ‘But of course you were protecting Tim.’
‘No! That’s not true, Emily.’ She looks down at her hands. ‘I took you in because I cared. I didn’t have a clue what he’d done. Not a clue.’
‘But when you did find out, you kept it to yourself. Knowing how I was suffering, knowing Oliver was taking the full rap for it.’
‘Yes, I did.’ She looks at me. ‘If you ever find yourself in the same impossible situation, you might choose to do the same. It’s not as if Oliver was an innocent. He knew what he was doing.’
That’s true enough.
But I do wonder what Lara will choose to keep to herself now Tim is dead. That she knew about the cliff accident all this time? Another niggle is the text message Tim sent her that day I visited the house.
Suffice to say that maybe I’m not the only one holding back exactly what I know. ‘Why did you keep that recording when you knew it could undo Tim?’
‘It recorded by accident. The morning after Vanessa died, I’d left the equipment running like I often did if I got distracted. You were still in bed, and Tim came in, panicking, told me in a hushed voice what he’d done.’
I’d heard the front door slam after what was obviously a disagreement, and I’d assumed it was about me staying at the house.
‘Up until that point you had no idea?’ I ask.
She hesitates. ‘I want to be honest with you, Emily. Tim texted me one day, said he wanted to talk. When he got home, he did tell me that he and Oliver were planning to scam Vanessa. They’d apparently come up with the idea that night they went out for a drink.’
That text message. The one she never realized I’d seen.
Can we talk? There’s stuff I need to tell you.
Maybe the ‘stuff’ Tim referred to was the plan to con Vanessa, before it all went wrong.
Lara folds her arms tightly. ‘I’d had no idea about the debt he was in. Mortgage arrears he’d been hiding for months. Obviously, Vanessa’s money was supposed to fix that.’ She gives a hollow laugh. ‘Tim was the quintessential fixer. Always so confident he could find a way out.’
She looks at me with red-rimmed eyes.
‘At some point, Tim realized there was a way of getting all the money himself and framing Oliver. If he murdered Vanessa, he could set a trail so Oliver would be the obvious suspect.’ Her voice drops.
‘He drugged the wine, made it look like they were having an affair. Then he killed Vanessa, sat back and let Oliver take the fall. But he didn’t reckon for the police finding out what they did.
And Vanessa was too savvy for them in the end and had decided, at the eleventh hour, not to transfer the cash. ’
I swallow. I knew that Vanessa was far savvier than anyone realized. She’d known the score from day one.
And she was only in that orbit because of me. Even though we’d both agreed the set-up, I’d nudged her. Made suggestions. Framed it as harmless. I’d tempted Oliver with the perfect victim, a lonely, rich widow, flattered by attention and eager to invest.
There was only so angry I could be with Lara.
Lara leans in.
‘Word on the lane is that the minute Vanessa was gone, Evan Lambert and his lawyer turned the screws,’ she says.
‘No grief, no shock—just a handful of legal paperwork. Vanessa had no dependants, so he thought he could apply for everything as next of kin and claim it was “family property” through their father.’
I make a noise of disgust.
‘Then they found the will,’ she says. ‘She’s left the lot to the Dogs Trust.’
The snort escapes me before I can stop it. Lara gives a small, guilty laugh.
‘Even at the end,’ Lara says, a fondness creeping into her tone, ‘Vanessa was smart enough to beat them at their own game.’
No matter how much I tell myself I couldn’t have known how this would end, my actions still don’t feel like those of an innocent woman. It couldn’t have happened without me driving it all from the start.
Granted, Oliver and Tim had escalated it. Tim had been the one to cross the final line. But I can’t deny I initially opened the door.