I’ve imagined getting a call from the police to tell me my father was swept out to sea. That he was rescued by a fishing boat; lost his memory. That my mother survived her fall. That they were coming back to me.
In my dreams, I throw myself at my parents. We cling to each other fiercely; hugging, touching. Making sure. And then we talk, words tumbling over each other. Interrupting, crying, apologising, promising. In my dreams there is noise and happiness and sheer joy.
My mother and I stand silently in the doorway.
The grandfather clock whirrs in the prelude to the hour. Rita, who has never liked the sound, disappears to the kitchen, having presumably satisfied herself that her mistress is here. Is real.
The chimes ring out. When my father brought home this clock, bought at auction the year I started secondary school, the three of us looked at each other as it rang the hour.
‘We’ll never sleep through that!’ my mother said, half laughing, half appalled. Even the ticking was intrusive, echoing each passing second in the empty hall. But sleep we did, and before too long I only noticed the clock when the mechanism had stopped, and the absence of tick-tock, tick-tock made the house feel empty.
Now we look at each other, my mother and I, as each hour echoes into the space between us. Only when it has stopped, and the final peal has faded, does she speak.
‘I know this is a shock.’
Was there ever more of an understatement?
‘We’ve got a lot to talk about.’
I find my voice. ‘You didn’t die.’ There are so many questions, but this one – the fundamental truth – is the one with which I am struggling the most. She didn’t die. She isn’t a ghost.
She shakes her head. ‘We didn’t die.’
We. I hold my breath. ‘Dad?’
A beat. ‘Darling, there’s a lot you have to know.’
Slowly, I make my brain compute what I’m hearing. My father is alive. My parents didn’t die at Beachy Head.
‘So, it was an accident?’
I knew it. Was certain of it. My parents would never try to kill themselves.
But … an accident. Not murder; an accident.
Two accidents?
A ticker tape runs through my head as I apply this new narrative to the scenes I never have understood. Two accidents. Eyewitnesses mistaken. Falls, not jumps.
Identical falls?
The tape stops.
A sigh from my mother. Resigned. Tired. She fidgets, pushing one black strand of hair behind her ears in a gesture futile now that it is so short. She nods towards the kitchen.
‘Can I come in?’
But the ticker tape has jammed. It twists into knots in my head because what I’m imagining doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t add up.
‘Dad sent you a text.’
The longest of pauses.
‘Yes.’ She holds my gaze. ‘Please – can we sit down inside? It’s complicated.’
But suddenly it seems simple. And the shifting sands beneath my feet grow still, and the tilted world starts to spin again. There’s only one explanation.
‘You faked your deaths.’
I observe my calmness as though standing in the wings; congratulate myself on my presence of mind. Yet even as I say it – even as I know without any shred of doubt that I’m right – I pray that I’m wrong. Because it’s preposterous. Because it’s illegal. Immoral. But more than that, because it’s cruel. Because their leaving me broke my heart, and has continued to chip away at it every day since, and to know that my parents did that deliberately will shatter it completely.
My mother’s face screws up like paper. Tears splash onto the stone step.
A single word.
‘Yes.’
The hand I move could belong to someone else. I touch the edge of the door, lightly, with two fingers.
And I slam it hard in her face.
TWENTY-EIGHT
MURRAY
The second floor of the police station was deserted. Most of the back-office staff didn’t work weekends, and those who did were already on leave. Only the superintendent’s office was occupied, with the boss himself on a call, and his PA typing a report without a single glance at her fingers.
She had tinsel in her hair and was wearing bauble earrings that flashed distractingly. ‘The super needs case papers typing up,’ she had explained, when Murray had wondered what she was doing at work on a Sunday morning, and Christmas Eve, to boot. ‘He wants everything shipshape before the break.’
‘Doing something nice tomorrow?’ she said now.
‘Just a quiet one at home.’ There was a pause. ‘You?’ he added, when it became clear she was waiting for the question.
‘Off to Mum and Dad’s.’ She stopped typing and leaned her folded arms on the desk. ‘We all still have stockings, even though my brother’s twenty-four. We open those first, then we have smoked salmon and scrambled eggs with Buck’s Fizz.’ Murray smiled and nodded as she took him through the traditions of her family Christmas. He wondered how long his bollocking was going to last.
The office door opened.
‘Murray! Sorry to keep you waiting.’
‘No problem.’ Murray omitted the ‘sir’. Not only because he was a civilian now, and no longer bound by rank, but because when Leo Griffiths had been a probationer, and Murray his tutor constable, the younger man had been a grade-A turd.
There were two easy chairs in Leo’s office, but the superintendent sat at his desk, and so Murray took the wooden chair across from him. An expanse of polished wood lay between them, on which Leo pushed around the paperclips that justified his salary.
Leo laced his fingers together and leaned back in his chair. ‘I’m a little confused.’ He wasn’t, of course, but the superintendent liked to show his workings-out, which tended to draw out the process somewhat. ‘Night-turn attended an incident just before midnight last night, where they spoke to a Mr Mark Hemmings and his partner, Miss Anna Johnson.’
Ah, so it was indeed about the Johnson case.
‘A brick was thrown through a bedroom window. It had a threatening note wrapped around it.’
‘So I heard. A few of the houses in that street have their own security cameras. It would be worth—’
‘All in hand, thank you,’ Leo interrupted smoothly. ‘I’m more concerned about the fact that Miss Johnson reported the incident as part of an ongoing series.’ He paused for dramatic effect. ‘An ongoing series being investigated by … you.’
Murray said nothing. You could tie yourself up in knots, saying something for the sake of it. Filling gaps. Ask a question, Leo. Then I’ll answer it.
The pause went on for ever.
‘And what I’m confused about, Murray, is that I was under the impression you were a Station Duty Officer. A civilian Station Duty Officer. And that you retired from CID – and indeed from the police service – several years ago.’
No comment.
A hint of annoyance had crept into Leo’s voice. He was having to work far harder than he was used to. ‘Murray, are you investigating a crime series involving two historic suicides?’
‘I’m not, no.’ They were murders, not suicides.
‘Then what, exactly, have you been doing?’
‘Anna Johnson came in to the front counter on Thursday to discuss some concerns she had over her parents’ sudden deaths, both of which occurred last year. I spent some time answering her questions.’ Murray gave Leo a benign smile. ‘One of the objectives in my PDR is to deliver a high level of customer service. Sir.’
Leo narrowed his eyes. ‘Night-turn said she’d received a malicious communication.’
‘An anonymous card, delivered on the anniversary of her mother’s death.’
‘There’s nothing on the system. Why didn’t you generate a crime report?’
‘What offence would that have been?’ Murray asked politely. ‘There was no threat in the card. No abuse. It was upsetting, of course, but it wasn’t illegal.’ There was a long pause while Leo digested this information.
‘A brick through a window—’
‘Is a criminal act,’ interrupted Murray smoothly, ‘and I’m sure the attending officers will do an excellent job investigating it.’
‘Miss Johnson seems to think her mother’s suicide was, in fact, murder.’