The Sudden Departure of the Frasers (34 page)

‘You still don’t know where they went?’ Christy said.

‘No. The one time Richard managed to speak to him he said they wanted a clean break and hoped we’d all respect that. He said to forget they’d ever lived in Lime Park, because that was what
they
were trying to do. We think he’s probably back in the office now, but Richard says we shouldn’t make contact.’ Caroline groaned, a guttural, animal sound, her fingers tearing at the ends of her hair. ‘As you can imagine, I’ve thought about this thing till I’m blue in the face. I’ve tried and tried to understand why they felt they had to disappear when I’m sure everyone would have preferred
him
to go.’

‘And
do
you understand?’ Christy asked her.

‘Not completely. But I keep coming back to the same thing. To leave like that, literally overnight, not a word to
a soul, whatever happened or didn’t happen she must have been scared out of her wits.’

‘I agree,’ said Christy. Noticing a tear rolling from Caroline’s eye, she touched her arm in sympathy, in apology. ‘Thank you for talking about it. It’s really helped.’

‘We didn’t have this conversation,’ Caroline said.

Not long after she returned home, darkness having finally fallen on that longest of days, the inevitable came to pass: Rob Whalen was on their doorstep. She could tell it was him by his outline behind the stained glass, the tall, broad-shouldered bulk of him, once menacing, then seductively benign, and now, all too soon, threatening once again.

Christy opened the door and planted her feet firmly apart, trying not to shrink from him even as she found herself incapable of drawing a full breath.

‘You know,’ he said, simply. They were the same words he’d used before, and hearing them caused a powerful sense of fatalism in her. To have convinced herself she’d had him wrong, when it now appeared she’d had him right all along: well, it pained and confused her.

This time, at least, she had Joe to speak for her. He was at her shoulder, one hand on her hip, steady and protective. ‘We know there was a police investigation and we know it was dropped. I for one don’t think we need to know anything else.’ His tone was laudably devoid of accusation or insult.

‘But you’ve filled in the gaps for yourselves,’ Rob said. ‘Go on, say it, it won’t be worse than anything I’ve already heard.’

‘We’re not going to say anything, mate. It’s none of our business.’

Rob looked directly at Christy. ‘But you,
you
think I attacked her, don’t you? You probably think I terrified her into not pressing charges, forced her to leave, and now you think you live next door to a rapist and are wondering how quickly you can sell up too. It’s written all over your face.’

‘I don’t know what I think,’ Christy said flatly, though he had in fact summarized her thoughts rather accurately. She didn’t
want
to think what she thought, however. And the fact that he plainly cared, well, that was not lost on her.

‘That’s the conventional line, anyway,’ Rob said. There was a tremor in his voice, the first inkling of frailty she’d observed in him. The fire had gone from him, that devouring intensity that had moved her one way or another right from the beginning, and he looked, for the first time, beaten. ‘And I can’t stop them thinking it any more than I can stop you.’

‘What
I
think is that you should come in,’ Joe said, and he stepped back, pulling Christy with him. ‘This isn’t a conversation to be having on the doorstep.’

So he was nailing his colours to Rob’s mast, Christy thought. He believed him and was inviting him into their home without having sought her consent, presumably because he suspected she would object; after all, she’d performed her own interrogation on the doorstep earlier that afternoon, too cowardly to take the discussion indoors. Trooping after the two men, she felt a chasm
open between Joe and her –
I for one
, he’d said, not
I speak for both of us
– followed at once by a primitive instinct to close it. As long as she did not know for sure if Rob Whalen was craven and manipulative or unjustly misunderstood, he was a danger to them. She would not let him threaten their household as he had the Frasers’.

In the kitchen, Joe poured typically oversized glasses of wine, placing them on the table to draw the three of them into closer conference. It was the first time Rob had been in their house while they had been in residence.

‘You’ve obviously had a hellish time,’ Joe said, every inch the good neighbour and friend.

Rob’s chin sank towards his glass. ‘You could say that. Let’s see, I’ve had hate mail in every form of media you can name, I’ve had to change all my numbers and email addresses, I’ve had people spit at me in the street and scream obscenities at my window. I’ve been punched and kicked. For weeks I couldn’t leave the flat at all, and when I did I might as well not have existed because no one looked at me or answered when I spoke, which was almost as bad as the punches. You know they don’t allow their teenage kids to walk down the street on their own? It’s a real-life case of “lock up your daughters”. Lime Park Mothers Against Sex Offenders: never mind that there was never a conviction.’

‘But how did they all know?’ Christy asked. ‘It wasn’t in the press. I’ve checked online.’

‘I’m sure you have.’ Rob looked at her with sorrowful resignation, as if her words had just proved his point. ‘My lawyers issued warnings, so the local forums and news
sites took my name down. But it was too late: enough of them had seen the arrest. And now I’ve lost work, I’ve lost my girlfriend …’

‘So Pippa knew what you were accused of?’ Christy asked, interrupting. She was determined to discover the missing pieces of her own hypotheses, even if Joe chose to distance himself from them.

‘Of course she did. She didn’t believe it for a second, but the tensions of it all …’ Rob broke off, groaning. ‘To be honest, I still don’t know whether I can stay or not, even though I’ve lived on this street longer than most of the people here. And all because everyone is prepared to believe a lie. They
want
to believe it.’

None of this was uttered in self-pity.

‘Maybe what they want is to believe
her
,’ Joe said. ‘And that automatically means disbelieving you. She was very popular, wasn’t she, Amber Fraser?’

‘Oh, she was popular all right,’ Rob said. ‘The life and soul. They all worshipped the ground she walked on. Old Felicity had her measure, but she was the only one. When I heard that even
she
had believed Amber’s story, then I knew it was hopeless. I knew I was going to prison.’

‘But if it’s
not
true, why would she make something like that up?’ Christy demanded. For all her bluster, she did not dare speak the word ‘rape’; its utterance felt like an allegation in itself. ‘Why would she be prepared to lose her home just after she’d bought it and spent so much money on it? They hadn’t even been here a year, they
intended staying long term. It makes no sense to make a false claim like that and sacrifice everything.’

‘She had her reasons,’ Rob muttered.

‘What reasons?’ Joe asked, but discreetly, mindful that he was leading a conversation and not an inquisition. He poured them each more wine, though his was the only glass that was finished.

‘It was to cover up what she’d really been doing,’ Rob said, his expression grim.

‘Which was what?’

‘Having an affair.’

‘With you?’

‘Of course with me.’

The admission stirred a physical response in Christy that was both curious and frightening, a blend of moral vindication and sensory agitation. Caroline and the others hadn’t know, she realized. No one had known.

‘I’m not clear how fabricating an assault charge covered anything up,’ Joe said, fingers tapping on his glass. ‘Wouldn’t it produce the opposite effect? Unless … the husband found out, did he?’

Rob nodded. ‘I’m not exactly sure of the chronology myself, but I think he must have done. And she came up with the rape story to save her marriage. I know how she got the idea, as well, because it was something we talked about. A similar thing happened to someone I used to know. That case was dropped early on, as well.’

What a strange affair they must have been having, Christy thought, if
that
was their idea of pillow talk. She
was as sceptical of his version of events as her husband was – apparently – accepting.

‘She had nothing on her own,’ Rob continued. ‘Jeremy was the one with the money.’

‘If they were married, then all their property would have been jointly owned,’ Christy pointed out stiffly.

‘Sure, but he might have divorced her, screwed her over in the financial settlement. She wasn’t working, she had no income of her own. They didn’t have kids.’

It took a supreme effort for Christy not to note the parallels with her own marriage, to suppress afresh the memory of that sunny afternoon on the Parade, the sudden moment of understanding she and Rob had shared when left alone together. Was that how he and Amber had started? A cup of coffee, an unseasonably warm day, an unexpected shift in mood? Had all of this been born of that great suburban cliché:
boredom
?

‘She was the kind of woman who needed a wealthy man,’ Rob said, then corrected himself: ‘Actually, not so much wealthy as adoring. A believer, an acolyte, you know? She needed him to put her on a pedestal. That was their dynamic and they were both very happy with it.’

As he spoke about his accuser, the woman who he claimed had destroyed his life, it was impossible to read his emotions; there was loathing, yes, but it did not run as deep as you might have expected. The allure of Amber Fraser endured, perhaps. Or was it that his words were weighted with the guilt of what he’d done to her? Having damned her by driving her out, he sought to praise her by appearing to understand her motives for going.

‘There must have been other options open to her,’ Joe persisted. ‘Didn’t you ask her why she did such a terrible thing?’

Catching his eye, Christy gave Joe a look that said,
Shouldn’t you be asking him how
he
could do such a terrible thing?
He did not acknowledge it, however, his attention returning to their guest, alert to his answer. Quite apart from Joe’s position on any other aspect of the matter, he seemed entirely unaffected by the revelation that Rob was the sort of person who slept with other men’s wives.

Well, she had a mind of her own and, above all else, it was certain of one thing: Rob was not to be trusted.

Joe went on: ‘If not at the time, then afterwards, when the case was closed and you were free to talk to her?’

But Rob was shaking his head, his hunched posture that of a man thunderstruck by his experiences. Whatever he had or had not done, he had not recovered. Cosmetic transformation or not, he had not been able to reclaim himself.

‘No,’ he said. ‘By then she was gone.’

Within an hour of leaving the police suite, Jeremy had booked us into a hotel on the Southbank. It was the perfect safe house, an artificial community of the carefree, tourists and out-of-towners coming and going in high-spirited gaggles. As we checked in, carrying only the possessions we’d taken with us for the interviews, I never imagined that I’d left the house on Lime Park Road for good.

But I had. Though Jeremy returned that evening to pack a bag of clothes and toiletries, and then again later to supervise removals, I never set foot over the threshold again.

We spent many quiet hours together in our hotel room, sitting side by side on the sofa by the drizzle-stained picture window, the new glass towers beyond concealing all but a chalky sliver of Shakespeare’s Globe. I imagined the actors contained within, weaving a drama as real as my own; the only difference between us was that they had the advantage of knowing their ending.

How I wish I’d known mine.

Late that first night, neither of us capable of sleep, I found myself able to revisit the subject that had been the
catalyst to this crisis, this flight of ours. Without it, I was certain I would never have told Jeremy what had happened with Rob that day.

‘How long have you known?’ I said.

‘About what?’

‘You know.’

‘Oh.’

‘Was it really only when the test results came from the clinic?’

‘Yes, of course. That’s the only time I’ve ever been tested.’

‘I suppose you’ve never tried for a baby with anyone else.’

His face etched with dejection, he looked for once every inch his fifty-two years. ‘No, but Sarah came off the Pill without telling me, and nothing happened there.’

Sarah had been the one before me. She’d wanted marriage and children when Jeremy had not and, to be fair to her, it had been reasonable to expect them of a man in his forties. When they’d split up she’d tearfully predicted that he would ‘do it all’ with his next girlfriend, but I could have told her at the time that changes of heart never come purely in reaction to what went before. Whatever else you may have decided about me, trust me when I tell you that Jeremy and I, when we met, when we married, we were the real thing. Any life philosophies altered, any new dreams created, they were
for
us, not
against
other people.

‘She said later it had been almost a year. She thought
she
must have been the problem. I didn’t think much of it other than to consider myself lucky to have avoided that
kind of complication. Obviously I now know I should have thought about it a bit more.’

I watched as he blinked repeatedly, a symptom in him not of weariness but of sincerity.

‘I hope you believe me when I say I’ve never tried to trick you, Amber.’

‘Of course I believe you!’ The possibility needed instant smothering; this situation was dysfunctional enough already. ‘Besides, there was your girlfriend in college who got pregnant, wasn’t there?’

‘I’ve been thinking about that. It can’t have been mine,’ Jeremy said. ‘Apparently, this isn’t something that’s suddenly happened to me, so the only explanation is she must have been sleeping with someone else. Maybe she didn’t know whose baby it was. Maybe it didn’t occur to her that it could have been anyone’s but mine.’

The parallel between his present predicament and this historical one was as strong as Rob’s with
his
. Both haunted by college ordeals, the two men were more alike than they could know.

‘In any case, I was her boyfriend so I was the one who went with her to the hospital for the termination.’

Neither of us mentioned the embryo inside me and whether a visit to a hospital was the next step for us, too. I could only guess at Jeremy’s thoughts. Perhaps he was still absorbing the news of the rape itself and had not yet turned his mind to the pregnancy; there was ample time to make a decision and act on it.

It goes without saying that I greatly feared he might wonder of the existence of a fuller story than the one given.
In the seconds between my announcement that I was pregnant and my confession that I’d been raped, there could have been only one hypothesis in his mind: an affair. And an affair-gone-wrong provided a motive for assault just as plausible as the one given on record. Inevitably he must have wondered if I had ended it and been raped in anger, my lover refusing to let me go without punishing me.

Well, even if he hadn’t yet considered the possibility, he would soon because it could only be a matter of days, perhaps hours, before Rob made a statement to the police and its contents were shared with us. If I knew anything for certain it was that he would dispute my version of events and propose one of his own.

‘You were so serious about us cutting down on drinking,’ I remembered, ‘even though you must have known it would make no difference.’

‘Yes, but that was because …’ Jeremy faltered, clearly wanting to spare my feelings.

‘Because what? Please tell me.’

He gazed at me with a depth of remorse that was nothing short of heroic. ‘I suppose I was getting the feeling you were partying more, needing a bit more excitement than I was giving you. I was worried you might …’ Again, loath to insult me, he let the comment hang incomplete.

‘Slip back into my old ways?’

‘Yes, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have tried to restrict you. I should have told you the situation as soon as I knew myself. Please forgive me.’

‘There’s nothing to forgive,’ I said, taking his hands in mine, squeezing until I felt the bones inside. ‘We both
know the truth now and that’s the most important thing, don’t you think?’

But looking at him in the grey winter light of our hideaway, I wasn’t sure he knew
what
was important. Not yet.

‘I have an idea,’ I said to him the following evening. We were sitting on the bed after a room-service dinner, propped up with stacks of pillows and flanked by the soothing amber spheres of our bedside lamps.

‘Oh yes?’

Wendy had by then phoned to tell us that Rob had been questioned that morning and, just as I expected, had not only claimed consensual intercourse with me on the 15th of January but also a long-term sexual relationship between us. We’d rowed, he claimed, because he’d tried to break off the affair and I had objected. He’d had a lawyer with him for the interview, after which he’d been released on police bail with conditions: he was not to leave London without consulting the police and he was not to contact Jeremy or me, either directly or through a third party. A forensic search of his flat had taken place in his absence, but not yet the search for physical evidence during which his mobile phone and computer would likely be seized. The thought of his phone and the records the network provider might be compelled to supply remained my primary source of anxiety, causing a distress that had to be buried deep if it were not to spill out and catch Jeremy’s devoted eye.

And then there was my new concern: the business of the tribunal. Until then overlooked – it had been, after all,
several years ago – I saw now that if anything promised to be twisted out of shape it was that. The term ‘sexual harassment’ was incendiary in itself, and I knew that Rob would be just as aware as I was of its potential to obscure. Wendy hadn’t mentioned it in her update, but it was surely only a matter of time before the investigation found its way towards it.

‘What idea?’ Jeremy put down his BlackBerry. Though he’d been keeping up with work email, the moment I gave the signal that I wanted to talk he was scrupulous about putting technology aside and giving me his full attention.

‘What if we sell the house and move from Lime Park –’

‘Of course!’ Across the covers his hand captured mine. ‘I’ve already decided we’ll be doing that. We can’t go back now. We can’t live next door to that man. Even if he’s put away for it, he’ll be out again soon enough – aren’t prison sentences for rape always being said to be scandalously short? You’ll be terrified in your own home. Besides, everyone will be making their own judgements, all the neighbours, even the ones we think are friends. You’ll be surprised who supports you and who blames you; this kind of thing divides people, sends the gossips into overdrive. Some of them will be asked to testify, as well. It will be horrific for you. I wouldn’t dream of putting you through that.’

I listened patiently as he outlined the likely consequences, all of which I’d already turned over and over for myself until it left me dizzy. But the words were powerless, even meaningless, now that I’d made up my mind. ‘No, I mean move from London, or at least to the
opposite side of it. Cut all ties with Lime Park. I mean have the baby.’

Jeremy stared at me, his fingers quite still, and I could see that whatever he’d been pondering these last two days it had not included this. ‘But I assumed … You mean you want to go through with the pregnancy?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I want to have the baby and say it’s yours. I want to believe it’s yours.’

His astonishment increased. ‘It’s
not
mine, though, is it? It’s
his
.’

I nodded, self-possessed, grave. ‘
We
know that, but no one else would, including him. It would be like an adoption,’ I went on. ‘There’d be no difference emotionally. From day one we’d be the family,
you’d
be the father.’

Jeremy did not answer and I knew I’d said enough for now. I got up from the bed and made us hot drinks, black coffee for him, peppermint tea for me; I had not wanted caffeine since I’d discovered I was pregnant, finally subscribing to the clean-living regime the clinic had urged of me – better late than never. Mr Atherton had had a strategy for every set of circumstances, I recalled: what would he suggest for this one? Would he back mine?

Jeremy drank his coffee in silence before turning back to me with a neutral expression. ‘You mustn’t think this is the only way we can have a baby, darling. There are still options, when you’re ready again –
if
you’re ready. I know Atherton wanted to talk to us about sperm donors …’ He did not press this particular point for obvious reasons.

‘I agree,’ I said. ‘There are options. But the fact is I
am
pregnant already. I may not like how it got there but there’s a baby growing inside me right now. And now we know you can’t be the genetic father in any scenario, we don’t
need
other options. Like I say, it would be a form of adoption.’

Again there was silence. ‘Could you do that?’ he said, when at last he spoke again. ‘Could you go through with being the parent of a child conceived by rape?’

We looked at each other, as searching, as candid, as we dared. ‘If we adopted we wouldn’t know the circumstances of
that
conception, would we?’ I said.

‘True, but we need to think about this case, these circumstances, which we obviously
do
know. And they’re as bad as it gets, aren’t they? Could you seriously get past that, darling?’

My eyes filled. ‘Yes, I could. I know I could.’ I paused. ‘But could
you
do what we would have to do to make it possible?’

‘What would that be?’

I pressed closer to him, taking his hand in mine in gentle appeal. I would not bully him into this. ‘Support me when I withdraw the allegation. Get the police to close this investigation.’

Just as I anticipated, he went rigid with opposition. ‘
What?
Drop the charges against that bastard? Why on earth would we do that?’

‘It’s the only way, Jeremy. Think about it, if they go ahead with the prosecution it will take months to get to court, maybe a whole year. I’ll either be heavily pregnant or have just had a baby, and either way we won’t be able to
conceal it. But if we disappear now, he’ll never know.’
Never know he is a father. Never know I am the mother of his child.
‘We’ll ask the police not to tell him I’m pregnant, and I’m sure they would respect that.’ I’d already gained their support on the matter of the medical examination, after all.

Jeremy was frowning heavily, I could feel his body temperature rising. ‘What does it matter if he knows? From his point of view it would be mine anyway, wouldn’t it? He attacked you once. He couldn’t possibly have imagined that he made you pregnant in the process.’

Which was, when you thought about it, precisely the scenario I’d envisaged, had we not discovered he was infertile and had I continued to suppress the memory of January 15th. I would have had what I assumed was my husband’s child while my former lover lived next door, with no reason for him or anyone else to doubt the paternity. But that outcome struck me now as having been hopelessly naive, at worst a public disaster – what if the baby clearly resembled Rob? – and at best an uncomfortable compromise that could only ever have been temporary.

As I considered this, surer with every minute that my solution was the right one, Jeremy’s thoughts had moved along parallel lines. ‘Say we did go ahead and keep the baby, don’t you think that if anything it would
help
our case for the jury to see you pregnant? If the defence let them think you were already pregnant when you were attacked, they’d have even more sympathy for you.’

I inhaled deeply. ‘But I wasn’t already pregnant, was I? That wouldn’t be fair.’

‘
Fair?
’ Jeremy’s face twisted in indignation. ‘He’s a violent criminal, Amber, don’t worry about being fair to
him
. You trusted him and he assaulted you. Quite apart from the physical violation, who knows what the psychological damage might be?’

I closed my eyes, imagined cool, cool fingertips on them, a gentle, sweet-scented touch that would cure me of all disquiet. ‘I don’t think there’ll be any psychological damage, Jeremy. The worst is over. I’m strong, and now I have a reason to
stay
strong.’

He did not answer.

I thought about what DS Graham had said to us in the police suite before we left, a comment dismissed as irrelevant by Jeremy but that had been useful to me, sowing as it did the seed of this idea. ‘Also, I’m worried about this DNA test the police mentioned,’ I said. ‘If the baby is born by the time the CPS bring the case to trial, they might ask for a test on him or her.’ Just for the purposes of elimination, DS Graham had said, not implying anything else. But I’d worked up the storyline for myself: if the test went ahead and the true paternity was made public, it would not only let the world know that Jeremy was not the father, it would also let Rob know he
was
. And then I’d be connected forever to a man I’d either helped send down or tried to at least, and that was no way to live the rest of my life. That was no way for my child to have to live his. Which gave me two choices: do as Jeremy had
assumed I would and terminate the pregnancy, or persuade him to agree to my plan.