51
Friday, 15 November 2002
The draught-excluding curtain was across the door so it would not open. Mary Thornton reached around and coaxed the fabric along the rail. She felt for the light switch. The bulb pinged. She left her bag by the umbrella stand and felt her way along the passage to where light showed under the living-room door.
‘Mum?’
The flickering light – her mum watched television in the dark – disorientated her. She waited to get her bearings.
Staring out of the muted set with dull expressionless eyes was the 1960s mug-shot of Myra Hindley. Mary stared back until the iconic image of Hindley was replaced by a prosaic shot of a sprawling building on a dark rainy night, its windows ablaze with light.
An ambulance came out of the entrance towards the camera and then swung out of the frame. A caption on the screen read: ‘LIVE: West Suffolk Hospital Statement.’ The camera cut to a reporter in a raincoat, collar up. Mary crossed the room and turned up the sound: ‘…can confirm that Myra Hindley, date of birth the twenty-third of July 1942, died in West Suffolk Hospital at 16.58 today, the fifteenth of November 2002, following respiratory failure. Myra Hindley was convicted of murder at the Chester Assizes Court on the sixth of May 1966 and was serving a whole life tariff. She had been in hospital since the twelfth of November…’
Mary switched the set off and, leaning over, plugged in the standard lamp. She had seen the newspaper headline at Stamford Brook station: ‘Myra Dead’. The news was no surprise.
Her mother was sitting on the sofa, lolling forward. Mary took in the scene in a series of stills. Pill bottle on the floor. Half-drunk bottle of Gilbey’s gin. A tumbler on its side in her lap. Fingers curled as if they still held the glass. One eye open, staring at the damp patch on her lap.
Mary walked out to the hall where her parents’ 1960s telephone had sat on the table designed for a phone and directories for over forty years. She dialled three numbers. The dial returned slowly to its rest position after each number.
Nine. Nine. Nine.
‘Ambulance. My mother’s taken an overdose of tranquillizers. Eighty-one British Grove.’ She laid down the receiver.
According to her watch it was five past ten; she wrote this down on her mother’s message pad with the stubby pencil attached to a string. That too had been there for four decades. No one left messages. The pad was blank.
Mary Thornton went back to the living room and looked at her mother. Mary did not need medical knowledge to see that this time – the third time to be precise – her mother had succeeded in killing herself.
Jean Thornton, a slight figure, was diminished further in the squashy oatmeal-coloured couch where she had spent most of the past years. She was a slow and steady drinker who never appeared drunk and would have slipped quietly from sobriety to death. Mary did not need to touch her to know her face would be as unyielding as marble. She contemplated putting the glass back in her mother’s drinking hand and getting rid of the bottle. It was her job to keep things tidy. But this was a mess that could not be tidied.
She went into the kitchen. The outside light was on. Michael’s swing stood in tall grass. The chains had tangled so the seat was at a funny angle and, in the watery moonlight, it appeared to be moving.
As before, there was no note – the wife of an insurance agent, her mother knew better – although she had no life insurance. They would pump her stomach to find the truth. A note would have been helpful. Why today, for example?
The powers that be would conclude that, still stricken by her boy’s death, Mrs Thornton could no longer live with the pain. Mary thought it a shame that Jean Thornton had died before Myra Hindley. She would have appreciated knowing about that. Or perhaps she had known.
‘That woman deserved to die.’
Her father’s brown leather briefcase dangled from one finger. It would only contain the local newspaper. He had been in the library all day. They kept up the fiction that he went to the office.
His raincoat was buttoned to his neck, the collar flat on his shoulders. He had combed his grey hair recently; the tooth grooves were visible. Before going to work he would rinse his metal comb under the kitchen tap and smartly make a straight side parting, flattening it with his palm. He would pass it to Michael. Michael’s hair would not obey the comb. Her dad never used Brylcreem; he said his clients would not trust him. She was a girl so she didn’t join in.
Mary could not see her father’s eyes behind his wire-framed spectacles, the lenses flashed in the kitchen light and it was herself she saw, worn and weary. Time had passed and Michael had been dead longer than he had been alive.
‘She didn’t mean to do it,’ she had said that last time, meaning to comfort.
‘Of course she did. She was evil. She never atoned for her crimes, or helped that kiddie’s mother. She never put her out of her misery. Now she will die never knowing the truth about her son. Hindley only cared about being released. She didn’t atone.’
‘Dad—’
‘We changed your name because of her. Myra was my mother’s name.’ He put his briefcase down. ‘She destroyed families. She destroyed our family.’
‘You never told me why.’ There, she had said it. He wasn’t listening. She had thought she had done something wrong. Mary. She had hated the name, but now it hardly mattered. Names, like people, came and went. She found she could change her name at the drop of a hat. She picked up the kettle; her mother had filled it. She switched it on.
Next to the saucer for spent tea bags was a scrap of paper. She unfolded it. The writing was her mother’s. She could only make out a ‘10/11’, which might be a date. The tenth of November. She knew that date, the pushy woman from the paper was on at her about that. ‘Do you know what this is?’ she said without thinking.
He snatched it off her and tossed it in the swing bin.
‘Dad, I don’t think you should…’ It was the nearest thing they had to a suicide note.
‘It’s rubbish.’
She could retrieve it later. She lifted down the Brooke Bond tea caddy from the cupboard. She would rather have a gin and tonic. ‘Have you been to the lounge?’ To some this would be a needless question. If he had been to the lounge he would have found her mother and his shock would say it all. Not her father – his feelings came out in other ways.
‘Dad, come and sit down, I’ll get you a cuppa.’ She unbuttoned his coat and lifted it from his shoulders. ‘There’s some people coming. I have bad news.’
‘Nothing can be bad with her dead and gone. What’s for tea?’
The bell was shrill and insistent. Like the day when the police came to tell Bob and Jean Thornton that their favourite child was dead.
This time it was the woman her parents called Mary who answered the door.