‘I don’t mean that – I just meant … are you sure you want to do it now?’
‘Laura, you’ve spent the best part of a year nagging me to do it!’
‘Only because it’s ludicrous to have been working at the kitchen table when you could have been using that lovely study. And I wasn’t nagging. Although I do think it would have been cathartic, whatever Mark said.’
I keep my response light. ‘He does do this sort of thing for a living, you know.’
‘What’s healthy about shutting everything away and pretending it isn’t there?’
‘He didn’t tell me to pretend it wasn’t there, just that I should deal with it when I felt ready.’
‘When he said you were ready?’
‘No. When I felt ready.’ Firmer now. I know Laura’s loyalties – like Uncle Billy’s – lie with me, first and foremost, but I wish they were less protective.
It was too fast, that was the problem. Mark and I haven’t even been together a year, and our baby is eight weeks old. We’re still finding out each other’s favourite foods, movies, books. I’ve only met his mother twice. We’re like teenagers, caught out the first time they have sex, except that I’m twenty-six and Mark’s forty.
That’s part of it, too.
‘He’s old enough to be your father,’ Billy said when I’d got all the announcements over in one go. I’ve met someone, he’s moving in with me, oh and by the way our baby’s due in October.
‘Barely. And Dad was ten years older than Mum.’
‘And look how that turned out.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
But he wouldn’t be drawn, and I was secretly glad. I didn’t want to know. I’d never wanted to know. When you’re young you think your parents are perfect. Perhaps they shout at you a bit too often, or withhold pocket money till your room’s been tidied, but they’re your parents. They love you. You love them.
I was at university when I realised not everyone’s parents were like mine. That not everyone’s mum and dad had screaming rows; not everyone’s mum and dad took daily trips to the bottle bank. The insight was enough – I didn’t want more. I didn’t want to know how my parents’ marriage worked. If it worked at all. It wasn’t my concern.
Like the other ground-floor rooms, the windows in the study are full-height, with painted shutters so rarely used they now don’t close. A partners’ desk in the centre of the room meant my parents could work at the same time, although the only time they did so was when they were doing the VAT return, the stress of which invariably caused a row.
‘Anna, ask your father to pass me the stapler,’ Mum said one Saturday, when I’d pushed open the door to the study to see if they’d be much longer. I handed her the stapler myself and went out on my bike until it was all over.
Mostly my parents would take it in turns to stay late at the showroom, until I was old enough to join them at work after school, or to come home on my own.
My hand on the doorknob, I take a deep breath. I don’t use this room. I don’t go in there. I pretend it doesn’t exist.
‘You don’t have to do this. All the important papers have been gone through.’ It’s a generously oblique reference to the long day Laura spent, patiently weeding out paperwork from the rest of my parents’ belongings, to then spend another day on the phone on my behalf, changing the name on utility bills and cancelling dozens of subscriptions in my parents’ names. My gratitude had been tinged with guilt. Who did this for Laura when Alicia died? I pictured a seventeen-year-old Laura in her newly acquired modern council house, sorting through her mother’s paperwork, and my heart broke.
‘It’s time,’ I say.
I want to know everything about my parents’ lives. Everything I turned a blind eye to; everything I hoped wasn’t true. I need to know it all. Who were my parents’ friends? Who were their enemies?
Who killed them?
EIGHT
MURRAY
The archivist, Dennis Thompson, had been bordering on the large side when he and Murray had been on shift together. Now Dennis was as wide as he was tall, with a shiny pate and two sets of glasses perched above his eyebrows.
‘Can’t get on with varifocals.’ He retrieved the reading pair and popped them on the bridge of his nose, then peered at the lids of the two files he had found for Murray. ‘Tom Johnson. Caroline Johnson.’
The fact that the anonymous card had been delivered on the anniversary of Caroline Johnson’s death suggested that was where suspicion lay, but since her death had been so inextricably linked with her husband’s, Murray intended to start at the beginning.
‘Those are the ones. Thanks.’
Dennis pushed an A4 book across the counter. On each page were neat columns recording signatures against every file removed from the archive, along with the date it was returned. Murray picked up the pen, then hesitated. He looked at his old crewmate.
‘I don’t suppose …’
‘On the QT?’
‘Please. I’ll get them back before you know it.’
Sometimes, Murray concluded, as he left the archive room with the files, there were advantages to having been around as long as he had.
*
He wanted to look through the case file again on the bus home, but there were two response officers – their ties and epaulettes hidden beneath North Face fleeces – sitting directly behind him. They hadn’t noticed him (it was funny how invisible you became once you’d retired) but Murray wasn’t about to advertise his presence with illicitly obtained police files. Instead he looked out of the window, and wondered what Sarah would think about the Johnson case.
For most of his career Murray had taken his work home. In the early years of their marriage Sarah had struggled through a number of low-paid jobs. Each had required levels of punctuality, politeness and positivity that had proved impossible for Sarah to sustain, and each had triggered long periods of depression when they had ended prematurely. Eventually Sarah had given in to what Murray had suggested from the start: that she stay home and he bring home the bacon. It had been a relief for them both.
Murray had begun sharing snippets of his day with Sarah. He had been conscious of the confidentiality boundaries within which he worked, but he was mindful, too, that on days when Sarah felt unable to leave the house, this insight into the wider world was as important to her as it was interesting. To his surprise, he grew to rely on these exchanges as much as Sarah did, reaping the benefits of a fresh perspective, untarnished by police prejudice. He looked forward to telling her about Tom and Caroline Johnson.
The bus stopped at the end of Murray’s street, a cul-de-sac of chalet bungalows built in the sixties and occupied by a mix of first-timers, families and pensioners. Several of the bungalows had been extended so much they were now rather grand two-storey detached houses, their back gardens decked for summer barbecues. With the exception of new carpets and a lick of paint every few years, Murray’s house looked exactly the way it had looked when he and Sarah bought it in 1984, the year he finished his probationary period and was confirmed as a police officer.