I WENT BACK just before Christmas. I can’t really say why, except that I’d dreamed about the river almost every night, and I thought a trip to Beckford might exorcize the demon.
I left the car by the church and walked north from the pool, up the cliff, past a few bunches of flowers dying in cellophane. I walked all the way to the cottage. It was hunched and miserable, with its curtains drawn and red paint splashed on the door. I tried the handle, but it was locked, so I turned and crunched down over the frosted grass to the river, which was pale blue and silent, mist rising off it like a ghost. My breath hung white in the air in front of me, my ears ached with the cold. Should have worn a hat.
I came to the river because there was nowhere else to go, and no one to talk to. The person I really wanted to speak to was Sean, but I couldn’t find him. I was told he’d moved to a place called Pity Me in County Durham – it sounds made up, but it isn’t. The town is there, but he wasn’t. The address I was given turned out to be an empty house with a TO LET sign outside. I even contacted HMP Frankland, which is where Patrick will see out the rest of his days, but they said the old man hadn’t had a single visitor since his arrival.
I wanted to ask Sean for the truth. I thought he might tell me, now he’s no longer with the police. I thought he might be able to explain how he’d lived the life he did and whether, when he was supposedly investigating Nel’s death, he’d known about his father all along. It wouldn’t be such a stretch. He’d been protecting his father all his life, after all.
The river itself offered no answers. When, a month back, a fisherman dug a mobile phone out of the mud in which his wellington boots were planted, I had hope. But Nel Abbott’s phone told us nothing we hadn’t already gleaned from her phone records. If there were damning photographs, images that would explain all that was left unexplained, we had no way of accessing them – the phone wouldn’t even turn on, it was dead, its insides clogged and corroded by silt and water.
After Sean left, there was a mountain of paperwork to get through, an inquiry, questions asked and left unanswered over what Sean knew and when, and why the fuck the whole thing had been handled as badly as it had. And not just Nel’s case, but Henderson’s, too: how was it that he was able to disappear without trace from under our noses?
As for me, I just went over and over that last interview with Patrick, the story he told. Nel’s bracelet torn from her wrist, Patrick grabbing her arm. The struggle they’d had up there on the cliff before he pushed her. But there had been no bruises in the places where he said he had grabbed her, no marks on her wrist where he’d torn off that bracelet, no signs of any struggle whatsoever. And the clasp on the bracelet was unbroken.
I did point all of this out at the time, but after everything that had happened, after Patrick’s confession and Sean’s resignation and all the general arse-covering and buck-passing, no one was really in the mood to listen.
I sat by the river and I felt as I’d been feeling for a while: that all this, Nel’s story and Lauren’s and Katie’s too, it was all incomplete, unfinished. I never really saw all there was to see.
Helen
HELEN HAD AN aunt who lived outside Pity Me, just north of Durham. She had a farm, and Helen could remember visiting one summer, feeding donkeys with bits of carrot and picking blackberries in the hedgerows. The aunt was no longer there; Helen wasn’t sure about the farm. The town was shabbier and poorer than she’d remembered and there were no donkeys to be seen, but it was small and anonymous and no one paid her any mind.
She’d found herself a job for which she was overqualified, and a small ground-floor flat with a patio at the back. It got the sun in the afternoon. When they first got to the town, they rented a house, but that only lasted a matter of weeks and then she woke up one morning and Sean was gone, so she gave the keys back to the landlord and started looking again.
She hadn’t tried to call him. She knew he wasn’t coming back. Their family was broken, it was always going to break without Patrick, he was the glue that held them together.
Her heart, too, was shattered in ways she didn’t like to think about. She hadn’t been to visit Patrick. She knew she shouldn’t even feel sorry for him – he had admitted killing his wife, murdering Nel Abbott in cold blood.
Not cold blood, no. That’s not right. Helen understood that Patrick saw things in very black and white terms, and that he believed, genuinely believed, that Nel Abbott was a threat to their family, to their togetherness. She was. And so he acted. He did it for Sean, and he did it for her. That’s not so cold-blooded, is it?
But every night she had the same nightmare: Patrick holding her tabby under the water. In the dream, his eyes were sealed shut but the cat’s were open, and when the struggling animal twisted its heard around towards her, she saw that its eyes were bright green, just like Nel Abbott’s.
She slept badly, and she was lonely. A few days previously she had driven twenty miles to the nearest garden centre to purchase a rosemary bush. And later that day she was driving to the animal-rescue centre over in Chester-le-Street, to select a suitable cat.
JANUARY
Jules
IT’S AN ODD thing, to sit across the breakfast table every morning from fifteen-year-old you. She has your same bad table manners, and rolls her eyes as hard as you did when this is pointed out. She sits at the table with her feet tucked up underneath her on the chair, bony knees sticking out to either side, exactly the way that you used to do. She adopts the same dreamlike expression when she is lost in music, or thought. She doesn’t listen. She is wilful and annoying. She sings, constantly and tunelessly, just like Mum did. She has our father’s laugh. She kisses me on the cheek every morning before she goes to school.
I cannot make up to you the things I did wrong – my refusal to listen to you, my eagerness to think the worst of you, my failure to help you when you were desperate, my failure to even try to love you. Because there is nothing I can do for you, my atonement will have to be an act of motherhood. Many acts of motherhood. I could not be a sister to you, but I will try to be a mother to your child.
In my tiny, ordered Stoke Newington flat, she wreaks havoc on a daily basis. It takes an enormous effort of will not to become anxious and panicked by the chaos. But I’m trying. I remember the fearless version of myself who surfaced the day I confronted Lena’s father; I would like that woman to return. I would like to have more of that woman in me, more of you in me, more of Lena. (When Sean Townsend dropped me home on the day of your funeral, he told me I was like you, and I denied it, I said I was the anti-Nel. I used to be proud of that. Not any more.)
I try to take pleasure in the life I have with your daughter, since she’s the only family I have, or will ever have now. I take pleasure in her, and comfort in this: the man who killed you will die in jail, not too long from now. He is paying for what he did to his wife, and to his son, and to you.
Patrick
PATRICK NO LONGER dreamed of his wife. Nowadays, he had a different dream, in which that day at the house played out differently. Instead of confessing to the detective, he took the paring knife from the table and put it into her heart, and when he was done with her he started on Nel Abbott’s sister. The excitement of it built and built until, finally sated, he pulled the knife from the sister’s chest and looked up, and there was Helen, watching, tears coursing down her cheeks and blood dripping from her hands.