‘I’m so sorry,’ I say, tears forming again.
‘I’m sorry, too,’ says Kathryn. ‘For being so awful to you. And to Jemima and Una. Even Matilde. If I’d only reported Jemima missing earlier the police might have – I don’t know – found Arlo sooner. Una might not have died.’
‘Why did you hide Jemima’s passport?’ asks Courtney, sharply.
Kathryn looks shame-faced. ‘I’m not proud of what I did. Money. It does strange things to you. Ed and I, we were struggling. I was worried that my mother would become so infatuated with one of the Viola-lookalikes that she’d push me out into the cold. She’s harsh like that. She cut off Viola for good because she didn’t approve of her boyfriend. When Matilde joined, Mother changed her will. She was going to leave a huge lump sum to her. To a girl she’d known five minutes!’ Her voice rises and, as though conscious of this, she lowers it again. ‘Anyway, I argued with Jemima. I didn’t trust her. Rightly or wrongly, I don’t know. When she flounced off with her bag but without her passport I thought she might be back. But when she didn’t appear, I was relieved. I hoped she’d just taken off, maybe moved in with that mystery man of hers – who, I think now, must have been Arlo – so I took it from her room and told my mother she’d resigned. I forgot all about the passport. And then when she died I was scared to throw it away, in case it was found and somehow traced back to me and looked suspicious. So I hid it. I panicked.’
‘And the necklace?’ I ask. ‘Was it Jemima’s?’
Kathryn shakes her head. ‘No. It was my mother’s. The photo inside was of Viola. I found it in the bin after Viola left. I fished it out and kept it. I’d forgotten all about it until you found it.’
There’s a beat of silence before Courtney says to me, ‘Did you ever suspect that Arlo was capable of murder?’
I shake my head vehemently. ‘Never. I’m not going to lie, he was always a little obsessed by wealth. He hated living in the commune, everyone having the same. He hated “being poor”, as he put it. But I never …’ my stomach turns ‘… I never thought he’d be capable of murder.’
How will I ever trust anyone again?
46
Three months later, Willow
We’re in the middle of a heatwave. The city feels stagnant with it. The air is breezeless, cloying with traffic fumes and cut grass. I can’t even walk to the end of the street without sweat running down my back.
But Clifton in July is a joy to behold, and I love it here. I love the little pavement cafés and the boutiques and the beautiful old buildings that shimmer in the sun. I love the view of the suspension bridge, even with the knowledge of what took place there, and the hot-air balloons in the cloudless cornflower-blue sky.
When I’m out and about I feel a bounce to my step for the first time since Arlo was arrested and subsequently charged with the murders of Matilde, Jemima and Una. He’s denying it, of course. But the evidence mounting up against him is undeniable. His van was taken away and analysed. Fibres from Jemima were found in the back. Una’s phone was in his flat, plus another phone, a spare with the message he sent on it pretending to be Peter. He also had a backpack containing Jemima’s clothes. Plus there’s the CCTV footage of a man fitting his description on the bridge at the same time as Jemima. He’s also been charged with obtaining money fraudulently and the assault on Kathryn.
I visited him once in prison, not long after he was charged. He sat there in front of me with unwashed hair and a cut down his face from some fight. He never admitted anything to me, and as I sat opposite him, I could barely look at him without disgust. ‘Why can’t you plead guilty and save everyone the stress of a trial?’ I hissed.
But he just smiled, refusing to say anything. Refusing to admit that he’d driven into Matilde with his van, or charmed his way into Jemima’s affections only to kill her, or pretended to be Peter to lure Una onto the bridge. And why had he been hanging around Courtney’s flat? Was he planning to murder her, too?
My brother might have thought he had his reasons but, when it came down to it, they were just excuses when, really, his instincts are animalistic: to kill. And with each kill his need grew more insatiable.
As I got up to leave he did say, ‘I was only thinking of you. Why should we get nothing? She’s family, for fuck’s sake.’
The irony is he didn’t have to kill for the money. If he’d only told Elspeth who he really was I’m sure she would have wanted a relationship with him. He’d grown up with tales from our own mother about what a wicked mean old woman Elspeth was, rich but controlling, with her little pet cuckoo who had kicked Viola out of the nest. My mum had vowed never to have anything to do with her mother again. I didn’t know any of this. Mum never talked to me about her childhood. I didn’t even know that she’d had rich parents. She told me they were dead. That was it. Arlo, being so much older, must have heard a different story. The real story. And maybe, back then, Elspeth had been a harder woman. How was he to know that she was softening in her ripe old age and that she’d wanted a reconciliation with her biological daughter? How was he to know that Elspeth had left it all too late?