‘Sure.’ He looked at his watch. ‘I’d better go. Hope you get a bit more sleep tonight.’
She walked him to the door and hugged him goodbye, and Murray kept a smile on his face until he was safely out of sight. Sometimes it was easier to leave Sarah at Highfield when she was having a bad day. Easier to go home when she was curled up in a ball on her bed, because he knew she was in the best possible place. That she’d be safe; looked after. But when Sarah was calm – happy, even – every step away felt like a step in the wrong direction. How could Highfield, with its clinical smell and cell-like bedrooms, be better than their comfortable, cosy bungalow? How could Sarah feel safer in hospital than at home?
Later, when he’d cleared away his plate, and washed the pan he’d used for his omelette, Murray sat at the table and opened the Johnsons’ files. He read through the call logs, the witness statements and the police reports. He looked at photographs of exhibits – of Tom Johnson’s abandoned wallet, and his wife’s handbag – and read the text messages sent by each of them prior to their deaths. He scrutinised the summing-up from each inquest, and the coroner’s verdict of suicide.
Murray laid everything out on the kitchen table, along with the evidence bag containing the anonymous card sent to Anna Johnson, which he placed in the middle, between her parents’ files. After reading through the coroner’s reports one more time, he put them at the back of the table and snapped open a brand-new notebook: as symbolic as it was practical. If Anna’s mother had been murdered, Murray needed to approach this investigation as though it were fresh out of the box, and that meant starting from the beginning, with Tom Johnson’s suicide.
Murray had become a detective in 1989, when files had still been written longhand, and cracking a crime had meant legwork, not cyber sleuthing. By 2012, when Murray had retired, the job had changed beyond all recognition, and among the feelings of loss as he handed in his warrant card was a barely acknowledged streak of relief. He had found it increasingly hard to get to grips with technology, and still preferred to write his statements with the engraved fountain pen that had been Sarah’s present to him when he had won a place on CID.
For a second Murray felt his confidence waver. Who did he think he was, that he’d find something in these files that hadn’t been seen before? He was sixty. Retired from the force and now working as a civilian. He’d spent the last five years checking driving licences and taking reports of lost property.
He fiddled with the fountain pen in his hand. Ran his finger over the writing. DC Mackenzie. Pulling his sleeve over his hand he buffed the silver until it shone. He wished Sarah were there.
Remember that post office robbery? he imagined her saying. There were no leads. No forensics. No one had a clue. No one except you.
They’d been close to filing the job, but Murray hadn’t let it lie. He’d hit the streets, knocking on doors, shaking up the community. He’d tapped up his network of informants, and gradually a name had emerged. The lad had gone down for fourteen years.
That was a long time ago, a voice whispered in his head. Murray shook it away. He gripped his pen. The job might have changed, but criminals hadn’t. Murray had been a good detective. One of the best. That hadn’t changed.
NINE
Anna and Laura are picking through the life we left behind. I don’t like it. I want to intervene – to stop them opening drawers and holding up notebooks and books and boxes of photographs.
The aftermath of a death is an unwanted gift to our loved ones. It is our children, our spouses, our friends who must tie up the loose ends and clear away the remnants of a sudden departure. I did it for my parents, at their house in Essex; you did the same for yours, here in Eastbourne. Now Anna’s doing it for me. For the two of us.
I watch Laura pick up a ceramic pot that once held a succulent – dried earth clinging to the inside – and discard it. Two distinct piles are emerging on either side of the desk, and I wonder who is driving this efficiency. Anna? Or Laura? Did she make Anna sort through our belongings today? Is Laura pushing her unwittingly towards danger?
They’re talking. Too distant for me to make out the words. My glimpse into this scene is narrow, obscured. It frustrates me because unless I know what’s happening now, how can I influence what happens next?
Our granddaughter lies on a padded mat, beneath an arch from which hang brightly coloured animals. She kicks her legs and Anna smiles at her, and my breath catches for a second as I imagine being a mother who could walk through the door as though she’d never been away. A mother who hadn’t missed a year of one life; the birth of a whole new one.
There are no decorations up, no twinkling lights on the bannister or wreath on the door. It is four days until Christmas, and I wonder if they are waiting until Christmas Eve – forming new traditions as a family – or whether the absence of festive cheer is intentional. Whether Anna can’t face the sight of tinsel and tawdry baubles.
Laura is looking through my diary. I see Anna glance at her; bite her bottom lip as if to stop herself from commenting. I know what she’s thinking.
We’d been at Oak View for a year when the burglary happened. They didn’t take a lot – there wasn’t a lot to take – but they rifled through the whole house, leaving destruction in their wake. A messy search, the police called it. It was weeks before the house was back to normal, and months before I felt at ease again. There was nothing secret about our lives – not back then – but still I felt angry that someone knew so much about me, when I knew nothing about them.
That same feeling of anger returns as I watch Laura flick through the pages of my appointment diary. There’s nothing of consequence in there, but the intrusion is unbearable. Stop it, I want to shout. Stop looking through my things, get out of my house!
Only it isn’t my house any more. It’s Anna’s. And she laughs at something Laura says, and smiles a sad smile when Laura points something out that I’m not permitted to see. I am excluded. But Anna’s laugh is short. Polite. Her smile doesn’t reach her eyes. She doesn’t want to be doing this.
Laura looks like her mother. I was at school with Alicia; the only person she told when, a week before her sixteenth birthday, she discovered she was pregnant. Skinny as a rake, she was showing before she was eight weeks gone, and out on her ear not long after, when the baggy jumpers she’d adopted did nothing to fool her mum.
When I left school two years later, my PA job just about covering an apartment with a lift and communal laundry, with enough left over for weekend chips and wine, Alicia was living on benefits in a high-rise in Battersea.
I took them on holiday. We spent three nights in a B&B in Derbyshire, sharing a double bed, with Laura in between.
‘We should get a place together,’ Alicia said, on the last day. ‘We’d have the best time.’
How could I tell her that wasn’t what I wanted from my life? That I’d been careful not to fall pregnant; that I loved my single life and my friends and my job? How could I tell her that I didn’t want to live in a damp flat, and that – however much I liked spending time with her and Laura – I didn’t want to live with someone else’s baby?
‘The best,’ I agreed, and then I changed the subject.
I should have helped more.