Adam got to Serena’s long before Matty. For him, it was just a conjuring up of the image of the little terraced house in Tufnell Park and he was there. Later, he wondered whether he should have stayed at Tea and Sympathy until his daughter and his girlfriend had actually parted. Followed the pair of them out and down onto the busy Soho street. Heard their last revealing words to each other.
But he had gone. As devastated as any father would be at a fatal accident involving his child (even though he was dead himself).
At Serena’s he found a scene of shock. His first wife’s cheeks were puffy and red from crying. Leo’s lovely fiancée Abby sat straight-backed on the sofa, a blank expression on her face. Walter was striding around like a spare part, trying, unsuccessfully, to be helpful. He had opened a bottle of Italian red, which he was quaffing freely.
As he waited for Matilda to return, Adam stood to one side, watching and listening, hoping to pick up more details of what exactly had happened. Leo loved his cars, always had done, since he’d been a small boy who called out the marques of vehicles parked up on the street as he passed them. Recently, he had got rid of his diesel BMW 4 and invested in an all-electric VW e-Golf, much to everyone’s surprise, as he’d never been that bothered about climate change.
But that was Leo. He had bought Steve Jobs’s game-changing MacBook Air when he was still a teenager; a Dyson bag-free vacuum as a student; ditto Alexa as soon as she had first appeared. Since then, pretty much any fab new device that added a bit of tech fun to his life. If he hadn’t been the broad-shouldered, jolly, rugger-playing fellow that he was, you might have accused him of being a geek.
And now he was dead. In a head-on collision with a lorry on the A10, apparently. Adam could hardly cry. He had no eyes, no tear ducts. But he felt gutted to his soul. His lovely boy Leo, with his whole life ahead of him. Leo, who had always been the happy-go-lucky one, whose easy charm meant that he’d so often punched above his weight. He had sailed through school, accumulating friends. He had got into a better uni than his raw intellect perhaps deserved and had had a great time there too, popular and productive. He had got his degree and then treated himself to a gap year, travelling the Far East and Australia, Instagramming as he went. On his return he had walked straight into a good job. And now he was marrying Abby, with her big blue eyes and easy smile. How had he managed to land her? his mates had joked. But they all knew. Leo was always the jammy one, wasn’t he?
But his luck had run out. It was heartbreaking, even if you no longer had a heart to break. Leo had been taken from Adam, before he’d even had a chance to get through to him and say goodbye.
Now, it seemed, that would never be.
‘Hello, Dad.’
Adam spun round. He could see nothing.
‘Dad, it’s me, Leo.’
‘Where?’
‘Here,’ came his son’s voice again, clear as a bell. ‘Where are we? I thought you were–’
‘Dead. I am.’
‘How come… I mean, what’s happened?’
As Leo was speaking, he was materialising. Why so soon? Adam thought. It took me close to eight weeks to ‘go through’. But he was relieved, as his son’s image thickened into a three-dimensional likeness, that he didn’t appear to be damaged in any way. His cheerily-grinning face was much the same as it had been in life.
‘I think you’ve had an accident,’ Adam replied.
‘An accident,’ Leo repeated. ‘How d’you mean?’
The poor boy clearly had no recollection of his death.
‘A car crash, was what your sister said.’
‘Matty. Where is she?’
‘She’s on her way… here.’
‘Here…’ He was looking round. ‘Where am I?’
‘At your mother’s house.’
‘Mum!’ Leo cried. ‘Mum,’ he repeated, seeing Serena below him. He sailed down towards her.
‘Leo, stop!’ Adam said. ‘She can’t hear you,’ he explained. ‘Or see you. I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but it seems that this accident you were in was fatal. Have you got no memory of anything like that?’
‘No.’
‘So what’s the last thing you do remember?’
‘Actually, yes, I was driving.’
‘Where?’
‘On the A10. I was coming back from this super-boring meeting in Royston.’
‘Driving what?’
‘The e-Golf. It has amazing acceleration. It can literally do nought to sixty, just like that.’
‘But what happened, Leo? Can you remember?’
‘That’s what people don’t realise about these electric cars, Dad. Guys like me aren’t buying them because they want to be part of some worthy green revolution, although, sure, we’re happy that that’s part of the package. But we actually slam down the cash on the table because of the fucking torque. It’s like driving a turbocharged milk float.’
‘Sure,’ Adam agreed. It didn’t seem that what had happened to him had fully hit home.
‘So where am I now?’ Leo asked.
‘You’re on the other side.’
His son looked baffled. ‘The other side? Of what?’
‘It’s an expression, Leo, for what lies beyond…’
‘You mean…?’
‘You’re dead,’ Adam said bluntly. ‘Like me.’
‘Like you? So… Abby…?’
‘Is still alive.’
‘Walter?’
‘They’re all still alive, mate. It’s us who are dead.’
‘But they’re just over there.’ Leo gestured at his fiancée, his mother and her partner, across the room.
‘They’re in another dimension. You can’t get to them.’
‘Watch me!’ Leo cried. ‘Abby!’
But his fiancée didn’t turn. Leo ran towards her, but when he reached out for her, his hands didn’t engage. They were flailing, round and round and through her. Eventually he gave up and looked back at his father.
‘So where… are we? In this room? I mean, surely–’
‘But we’re not in this room. It’s like a parallel world.’
‘You mean… we’re some kind of ghosts?’
‘So it seems.’
‘Wowsers!’
Leo stood stock-still for ten seconds, digesting this, then he strode purposefully across to where Walter was standing. He stepped back, theatrically, squared up to him and unleashed a punch. It cut straight through him.
‘Okay,’ Leo said, laughing. ‘So he is in a different dimension. Boy, would I like to freak him out, though.’
Leo’s genial frivolity had always amused Adam when he was alive. But now, you would have thought that his own death would have wiped the smile off his face. Presumably he was in some weird kind of shock.
‘It’s not that simple,’ Adam said. He had just started to explain to his son about the apparently random way in which he was sometimes invisible, sometimes in visible form; sometimes able to speak to people down in the world, and then sometimes not – when the front doorbell rang. Matilda had arrived, flushed from her journey from Soho. She ran to her mother and enfolded her in a long hug. They wept together, while Walter stood by with a glass of wine he’d poured for her. More hugs with Abby, then she eventually sat down. She drained her glass in a single gulp. Adam and Leo kept schtum, watching.
‘What happened?’ she asked.
Serena was beyond words, so Walter took charge. ‘We don’t quite know,’ he said. ‘Leo was driving that new electric car of his and he somehow smashed into a lorry in the opposite lane. His vehicle was a total write-off. He was killed instantly.’
‘It’s coming back to me,’ Leo said, looking over at his father. ‘I was overtaking. On a long bend. But I could see clearly. Then suddenly there was, yes, this big lorry coming from the other direction. I jammed the brakes on but I didn’t slow down. Dad, I didn’t slow down. Something was wrong with the brakes. They’d been a bit soft, but nothing I didn’t think a service wouldn’t sort out.…’
Down in the room, Matty was sobbing. ‘But Leo was a sensible driver,’ she was saying.
‘Was he?’ said Walter. ‘Not when I was with him.’
‘Walter!’ Serena warned.
‘I’m sorry, but it’s the truth. He drove like the proverbial bat out of hell.’
‘That’s not fair,’ Matty said. ‘He was fast, but always careful. He totally understood cars.’
‘He did,’ Leo agreed.
‘He even did that advanced driving course,’ Matty continued. ‘That police drivers do. Somebody sabotaged the car, Mum. Somebody killed Leo, just like they killed Daddy.’
‘Now come on,’ Walter said. ‘Let’s not get hysterical here.’
‘Hysterical! I’ve just lost my brother… and my father.’
‘Could it have been sabotage?’ Adam asked his son. ‘You can fiddle with brakes, can’t you? Cut leads or something.’
‘Lines,’ Leo replied, correcting him. ‘You wouldn’t really cut them. Or if you did the driver would know about it pretty much straight away. I guess you could drill small holes in them so the brake fluid slowly drained off. That might have explained why they felt soft. But there’s a warning light that should come on to prevent that. Anyway, why would anyone want to kill me?’
‘A very good question, Leo.’
‘The plain, if unfortunate truth,’ Walter was saying, ‘is that Leo has had an accident and your father killed himself. It’s all very shocking and sad, but–’
‘Daddy didn’t kill himself,’ Matilda interrupted.
‘Matilda, we’ve been over this,’ Serena said.
‘You may have “been over” this, but you don’t know, do you?’
‘Your mother and I were at the inquest,’ Walter said. ‘The coroner reached a clear verdict. Suicide.’
‘You think what you like.’
‘I’m afraid there was no question about it.’
There was silence. Matilda sat stony faced.
‘She hates Walter,’ Leo said. ‘With a vengeance.’
‘She did say he was a prize plonker,’ Adam agreed.
‘She’s right about that. First prize in the annual plonker parade.’
Walter was speaking again, attempting to pour oil on troubled waters and failing. ‘And now this is even harder to face. Leo, a young man in the prime of life, soon to be married to Abby here. It’s heartbreaking, but with the best will in the world, I don’t think anybody could countenance foul play.’
‘Foul play?’ said Matty. ‘What’s that?’
‘It’s an expression for… murder, darling,’ Serena explained.
‘Fowl play,’ Matty repeated, then laughed wildly as she made the noise of hens clucking. ‘If it was “fowl play”, Walter, maybe that was because whoever murdered Daddy realised that Leo had sussed them out.’ She ended with a long cock crow, which Walter ignored.
‘Matty, darling, please,’ Serena said. ‘Stop being silly. Nobody murdered Daddy.’
‘I don’t know who did it, but I know it happened.’
‘This is my fault,’ Adam said to Leo. ‘She knows because I told her.’
‘You told her, what, that…?’
‘I didn’t kill myself, yes.’
‘When?’
Adam explained about his visit. ‘She actually never thought I had,’ he said.
‘Nor did I, Dad.’
‘Not unless I managed to do it in a trance. Surely I would have remembered if I’d felt so despairing that I’d had to go into my garage and set up a hose, complete with special adapter and everything. Apart from anything else, it’s just not my style. I’ve had a few disappointments recently. But I basically loved my life.’
For a moment Adam paused, doubting himself. Had he in fact done himself in, and all this frantic looking for his murderer was just part of a massive state of denial? Had he fixed up that hose himself? No, no, no – and then again no.
‘That’s what I said to Abby,’ Leo said. ‘Dad loves life; he’s always on the go. Abby’s argument was that energetic people were also the kind who could kill themselves. That despair is the other side of the coin of great activity and passion. Grandma didn’t agree with me either. She was adamant, in that way she is sometimes. “The fact is,” he mimicked Patricia’s cut-glass accent, “the police and the inquest have determined…” I had to face both of them…’
‘What, Grandma and Abby…?’
‘No, Grandma and her annoying carer, parroting away.’
‘The carer thought I’d killed myself? Which one?’
‘The interfering Polish one who doesn’t believe in climate change.’
‘Jadwiga?’
‘Her, yes. Granny loves her. God knows why.’
‘Because she behaves like a servant,’ Adam said dryly. ‘While most of the others have delusions of grandeur. Or at least of basic equality.’
They were laughing together now, father and son, in their parallel dimension. But neither the noise, nor the mood, carried across to the room in the real world, where Matilda had now moved on to positing suspects for the murders of her father and brother.
‘You can’t just start casting wild aspersions against people, Matty,’ Serena was saying. ‘None of us know this Rod character.’
‘It’s actually offensive,’ Walter added, ‘to say that because he was once a marine he would know how to kill Adam.’
‘Well, he would,’ Matilda riposted. ‘That’s what they learn in the army, isn’t it?’
‘The marines aren’t the army.’
‘They’re all professional killers.’
‘So what exactly is his motive supposed to be, Matilda?’ Walter had topped his glass up to the brim with Rioja and was now standing like the counsel for the prosecution in a courtroom; or more likely, some bogus legal inquisitor on daytime TV. Rod’s motive, Matilda replied, was the same as Julie’s. With Adam out of the way, they would get Fallowfields all to themselves, together with whatever Adam had left Julie in his will, which had to be a lot, quite apart from the life insurance.
‘I hate to disillusion you, Matilda.’ Walter’s features were triumphantly smug. ‘But life insurance companies don’t pay out on suicide.’
‘No?’ Matilda looked only momentarily deflated. ‘Well, he and Julie still get all the other stuff, don’t they? So he goes from being a painter-decorator living in a houseboat on the canal by the sewage works in Tempelsham to lord of the manor in one bound.’
‘How do you know he lives on a houseboat?’ Walter asked. ‘Or even where it is.’
‘I have my sources.’
‘Did you tell her?’ Leo asked Adam.
‘I didn’t know he did.’
‘I must have done.’ Leo chuckled.
‘You knew about Rod as well?’
‘’Fraid so. Everyone did, Dad. I was actually planning to tell you. I just didn’t know how to do it.’
‘I really think this is a most unlikely scenario, darling,’ Serena was saying, across the room. ‘I think Walter’s right. You can’t go around making accusations about people you barely know. I mean, Julie–’
‘Mummy, why do you always persist in seeing the good in people? Julie is an evil scheming bitch.’
Serena was laughing. ‘That’s a little harsh, darling.’
‘How can you say that? When she ruined your life…’
‘Don’t be silly. Your father and I grew apart, that’s all. Our split was as much my fault as his.’
‘You didn’t used to say that, Mum.’
‘I’m not Julie’s greatest fan, as you know,’ Walter cut in, ‘but come on, she isn’t a murderer. This whole idea is preposterous. If what she wanted was to be with Rod rather than Adam there is a perfectly civilised way of organising that that doesn’t involve killing people, like something off a second-rate Netflix series. You tell your partner you no longer want to be with them, and then you separate. In due course, if you want one, you get a divorce.’
‘The point is,’ Matilda returned, scornfully, even as she misquoted him, ‘if Julie had followed that “civilised procedure” she wouldn’t have got the house. Would she, Mummy? Or anything like so much money. There’s no way Daddy would have let her stay in Fallowfields with some handyman shag. It’s his house. He designed it.’
‘So where does Leo fit into this analysis of yours?’ Walter asked. ‘Were Julie and Rod behind his death too? And if so, why?’
‘I told you. Leo found something out. So they had to kill him as well.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Walter scoffed.
‘I’m not being ridiculous.’ Matilda was sobbing again.
‘Oh, Matty, darling,’ said Serena, going to her. She held her tight and stroked her hair, looking angrily over at Walter.
Eventually Matilda looked up, eyes gleaming with tears. ‘I don’t believe it was an accident. I’m sorry. I just don’t think it was.’