“Jamie.”
“Ah. So you know about Jamie?” And when Lynley nodded, she continued by saying thoughtfully, “I suppose we all carry some sort of scars from our childhood for this and that reason, and Jon had his share. His father was a hard man with set ideas about what his boys should do with their lives, and he’d decided that what they should do was science. Very stupid to decide your children’s lives for them, to my way of thinking, but there you have it. That’s what he did. Unfortunately, neither boy was the least interested in science, so they both disappointed him and he never let them forget it. Jon was determined not to be that kind of father to our children, especially to Jamie, and I have to say he made a success of it. We both made a success of parenthood. I stayed home with the children because he insisted and I agreed with him, and I think that made a difference. We were close to the children. The children were close to each other although strung along quite a bit in age. At any rate, we were a very tight and very happy little unit.”
“And then your son died.”
“And then Jamie died.” She set her knife and fork down and folded her hands in her lap. “Jamie was a lovely boy. Oh, he had his quirks?what boy his age doesn’t?but at heart he was lovely. Lovely and loving. And very very good to his little sisters. We were all devastated by his death, but Jon couldn’t come to grips with it. I thought he would, eventually. Give it time, I told myself. But when a person’s life becomes all about the death of another and about nothing else…I had the girls to think of, you see. I had myself to think of. I couldn’t live like that.”
“Like what?”
“It was all he talked about and, as far as I could tell, it was all he thought about. It was as if Jamie’s death had invaded his brain and eaten away everything that wasn’t Jamie’s death.”
“I’ve learned he wasn’t satisfied with the investigation, so he mounted his own.”
“He must have mounted half a dozen. But it made no difference. And each time that it made no difference, he went just a bit more mad. Of course, he’d lost the business by then and we’d gone through our savings and had lost our home, and that made things worse for him because he knew he was responsible for it happening, but he couldn’t get himself to stop. I tried to tell him it would make no difference to his grief and his loss to bring someone to justice, but he thought it would. He was sure it would. Just the way people think that if the killer of their loved one is put to death, that’s somehow going to assuage their own desolation. But how can it, really? The death of a killer doesn’t bring anyone else back to life, and that’s what we want and can never have.”
“What happened to Jonathan when you divorced?”
“The first three years or so, he phoned me occasionally. To give me ‘updates,’ he said. Of course, there never were any viable updates to give me, but he needed to believe he was making progress instead of doing what he was really doing.”
“Which was?”
“Making it less and less likely that anyone involved in Jamie’s death would…would crack, I suppose the word is. He saw in this an enormous conspiracy involving everyone in Pengelly Cove, with himself the outsider and them the close-mouthed community determined to protect its own.”
“But you didn’t see it that way?”
“I didn’t know how to see it. I wanted to be supportive of Jon and I tried to be at first, but for me the real point was that Jamie was dead. We’d lost him?all of us had lost him?and nothing Jon could do was going to alter that. My…I suppose you might call it my focus…was on that one fact, and it seemed to me?rightly or wrongly?that the result of what Jon was doing was to keep Jamie’s death fresh, like a sore that one rubs and causes to bleed instead of allowing it to heal. And I believed that healing was what we all needed.”