We present an extract from The End of Us, the new thriller by Olivia Kiernan, author of The Murder Box, If Looks Could Kill, Play Dead for Me and Too Close to Breathe.
Myles and Lana Butler live on a gorgeous new development in Wimbledon, leaning on a mortgage that is just within reach. When one of Myles' investments fails they are bound to lose everything. Gabriel and Holly Wright have just moved in next door. The Wrights are sophisticated, ambitious and apparently very wealthy. At an after-dinner drink with their new neighbours, Myles and Lana share their worries and a solution is suggested between the couples. Life Insurance fraud. For a cut of the pay out, the Wrights would help them. No one thought they were being serious. No one agreed they’d actually go through with it. And no one mentioned it would involve murder. Then, one night, Lana doesn’t come home...
I don't know if it all started with the murder.
I say that because surely there is a run-up to killing someone. Events that precede. Culminate.
So, before then, I think.
That night after dinner. The night the Wrights made us the offer. We were desperate, and although we could hardly take them seriously, I had the sense that they were throwing us a lifeline but of a preposterous sort where just as your head is slipping beneath the water, instead of a helping hand to pull you free, someone throws you a cruise liner.
At first, Lana laughed at their suggestion. However, I noticed that every time the conversation drifted on, she found a way to steer our chat back to the subject. She attempted to disguise her interest, kept it light, pairing the end of her questions with an easy laugh. She reclined in her chair and held herself with the relaxed pose of someone testing a hypothetical for entertainment’s sake.
'No one would actually have to be killed?’ she asked with a half-smile, curling and uncurling a lock of her hair between thumb and forefinger.
But despite her playful tone, I could see the earnest fix in her wide dark eyes. How, as the idea was turned about, her questions became more pointed. And by the end of the evening, I knew the whole thing had taken root in her mind and already begun its corruption.
Maybe events were set in motion even earlier than that, on the morning Lana threw herself on the bed and showed me an advert in a Wimbledon lifestyle magazine.
‘Look at these houses,’ she said. ‘Didn’t you used to live near here?’
Belvedere Court. A new development. Six luxury houses in a closed court. Georgian style, Hampton chic. The Court, as we came to call it, was situated just outside Wimbledon Village, along the edge of West Side Common. And it had a price tag to match.
‘Yes,’ I said, looking over the glossy advert. ‘Five or six bedrooms. For all our children?’ I gave her a smirk. ‘Could we use all that space?’
But that was the point of these houses, wasn’t it? You didn’t pay for capacity because you needed it, you paid because you could.
Lana and I were on the same page when it came to children. Not yet. Not for a while. If ever. Another reason her parents disliked me. We intended to enjoy our freedoms for a few years because that’s what we equated children to, an end to fun. We’d no idea we could end it all on our own.
‘Dog?’ Lana offered with a raised brow.
‘Dog,’ I agreed.
We’d been married two months and were still living in my one-room flat in the village. We were happy as loved-up teens, pressed up against one another in that flat, but we were ready to move, if only to make a statement about where we were going, how our life was going to look. We were stupid enough to think that validation came in the shape of four thousand, nine hundred square feet of Georgian house.
The moment I saw those houses, it felt more than I belonged there but that it was owed. Financially, the repayments were a stretch. The one-foot-wrong-and-we-were-fucked kind of stretch, but how often does life give you the chance to take back something stolen from you? I’d spent my childhood in that area although our home had long been demolished. Some people want to move as far away from their history as possible but I had an overwhelming urge to press my face right up against it and whisper Fuck you into its ear. Within a couple of weeks of that morning, the banks had given us a mortgage, helped along with a more than sizeable payment from Lana’s father, and within three we’d moved into our new home sans dog. But the house was new. Whatever issues unfurled within its walls were issues we brought in. And therefore, it couldn’t have started there.
The more I think on it, the more I wonder whether there was any way things could have turned out differently. What would Lana call it? Determinism. The idea of choice is an illusion; we are all prisoners to our experience. I could have lived a hundred different endings but it’s only after it has all unfolded that I can see the choices that were available to me. I could have started out in a thousand different directions, but I feel that somehow, all paths were pointing towards the same end.
And so, if Lana was right, perhaps fate began to play on a scorching day in 1981, the summer that Charles and Diana wed and the afternoon of my twelfth birthday. My friends had just left, my mother was clearing up the garden and I was sitting in our drawing room with my dad, Ambie. We were eating birthday cake and watching Wimbledon highlights. John McEnroe was shouting ‘You cannot be serious!’ at the umpire, which seemed, at the time, the most outrageous act of disorder. My dad muttered something about Americans, then beyond the large bay window that overlooked our garden a movement caught his eye. A man was approaching my mother.
I could just about make out ‘Can I help you?’ then the low rumble of the man’s voice.
All the while my dad sat still as a dog on point; his head tilted; his breath held so he could hear.
‘No. No,’ finally from my mother. And whatever spell had held Ambie frozen was broken.
Slowly, he put down the cake, then murmured, ‘I hoped they wouldn’t come today.’ Life as I knew it dissolved like salt in water. Within hours, we’d been evicted from our home and were out on the street, squinting against the humiliating glare of our neighbours.
However, if I could draw a line from then to here, I could see that my need to create a future out of my past was not the sole reason for events to turn out like they did. If I were a man who looked for patterns in life, those little flags that, on reflection, indicated a change, I might notice that all the significant events in my life were connected to either a departure or an arrival. The bailiffs arriving at our door on my twelfth birthday. My mother leaving for Spain a few weeks later. Lana and I moving to Belvedere Court.
And if I were to put my finger under any one occasion and name it as the day it all started to go wrong, I’d rest my hand beneath the day our new neighbours, the Wrights, moved in.
The End of Us is published by riverrun
