‘I kept thinking he’d never actually do it. That it was fantasy. Then one day he woke up and said: “Today. I’m doing it today. While Anna’s away.”’
I remember that morning. ‘Enjoy yourself,’ he said. I was running late, rifling through my bag for my keys with a piece of toast in my free hand. Dad was sitting at the island, reading the Daily Mail and drinking strong black coffee. It took two cups to get him out of bed; three before he managed conversation; a fourth when he reached work, to get him firing on all cylinders.
‘Work hard, but play hard, too.’ He’d winked. And that was that. He hadn’t hugged me, hadn’t told me he loved me, or given me sage advice I would cherish later. Just work hard, play hard.
In the months after his death I decided I was glad of the lack of ceremony. It meant he hadn’t been planning to kill himself, I decided. If he’d known it was the last time he was going to see me, it would have felt different.
But he did know. He just didn’t care.
‘That day was horrendous,’ Mum said. ‘He picked fights with everyone. Billy, the reps, me. I thought it was an act – that he wanted to make his suicide convincing – but I wonder if it was nerves. I said it wasn’t too late for him to change his mind – that we’d find a way to pay the money we owed – but you know your dad. He was always stubborn.’
Do I know my dad? I don’t think I do any more.
‘When work finished we went our separate ways. He took an Audi from work, told Bill he wanted to see how it drove. That was the last time I saw him.’
I can’t sit still any more. I walk to the window and stare into the garden, at the big bay tree in the pot, and the roses Mum trained along the fence between our garden and Robert’s. I glance upwards to Robert’s house and think of his planned extension, and my irrational thought that he had something to do with the rabbit on our front step.
I pull the curtains. ‘What happened then?’
‘The agreement was that I’d hear nothing till ten a.m. He’d researched the tide times; he knew that at high tide, if a body is weighed down, it can be dragged out along the sea bed. That it might never be found.’ She shudders. ‘But at nine-thirty he sent a text to say he was sorry.’ She screws up her face and I see she’s trying not to cry. ‘And I didn’t know if he was sorry for what he was making me do, or for all the times he’d hurt me, or if it was just another part of his plan.’
I cross the kitchen again and put the kettle on the Aga, then change my mind and take it back off. I get out two glasses and the bottle of whiskey reserved for hot toddies, and pour myself a finger of rich, amber liquid. I look at Mum and hold up the bottle, but she shakes her head. I sip mine, and hold it in my mouth until it burns.
‘At ten the second text came: I can’t do this any more. I started to believe he was really going to kill himself. I decided that I had to go through with it. That no one could prove I knew anything about his plan. I did what he’d told me to do. I replied to his message, then I called the police. I called you.’
A sudden flash of anger. ‘Have you any idea how terrifying that call was?’ I don’t remember the drive home; I only remember the blind panic that Dad wouldn’t be found. That we’d be too late. ‘You should have told me!’
‘We’d committed a crime!’ Mum stands up.
As she walks towards me I take a step back. I don’t mean to – my feet move of their own accord – but it makes her stop short, hurt in her eyes.
‘We could have gone to prison – we still might! I didn’t want to ruin your life as well as my own.’
We fall silent. I take another sip of whiskey. It’s after midnight. Mark and Joan will be home soon.
‘We held a memorial service for you,’ I say quietly. ‘Laura organised it all. Billy made a speech.’ I think of the young chaplain who cried at the inquest. Who found me afterwards and took my hands, and told me he was sorry his actions hadn’t been enough to save my mother from herself.
A thought strikes me. ‘Someone put a brick through the nursery window last night.’
‘A brick?’ She looks at Ella in horror.
‘She’s fine. She was downstairs with Mark. There was a note with the brick, telling us not to go to the police. To stop before we got hurt.’
I look at Mum, who has covered her mouth with her hands, her fingers splayed around her eyes. ‘No. No, no, no.’
Fear courses through me. ‘Did Dad do it?’
Silence.
I stand up. ‘You need to leave.’
‘Anna, please—’
‘Mark will be back soon.’
‘There’s so much we need to talk about.’ She follows me out to the hall, trying to talk to me, but I won’t listen. I can’t listen to any more. I open the door, check the street is empty, then push her out into the cold, and for the second time today, I slam the door on my mother.
I lean my back against the stained-glass panel. I wonder if she’ll knock and ring, as she did this morning. There’s a moment’s pause, then I hear her footsteps on the steps, on the gravel. Silence.
My mind whirs. My father was a violent man. So cruel to Mum that she faked her own death to escape him.
And now he’s coming after me.
THIRTY-FOUR
MURRAY
When Murray woke up on Christmas morning, Sarah’s side of the bed was cold. He felt the familiar clutch of panic as he searched the house for her. The back door was unlocked, and Murray cursed himself for leaving the key out, but when he tore it open and ran out into the garden, he found Sarah sitting quietly on the bench.
She was barefoot, dew from the bench soaking into the cotton robe she wore over her nightdress. Her thin arms encircled the knees drawn up to her chest, a mug of tea warming her hands, which were black with soil.
Ignoring the damp, Murray sat on the bench beside her. The garden was narrow, a once well-tended vegetable patch at the end, with a greenhouse, and a neat rectangle of lawn between two beds raised with railway sleepers. Closer to the house, where he and Sarah sat, was a square patio lined with pots. Murray watered them on the rare occasions the British weather failed to deliver rain, but didn’t know what to cut back and what to leave, and gradually the colour had disappeared from the patio.
‘Look.’
Murray had followed Sarah’s gaze to the largest pot, in which a willow obelisk was embedded. There had been something growing, Murray remembered, with pale pink flowers as thin as tissue paper, before it had dried and withered, nothing more than a collection of dry sticks clinging to the willow. The sticks were on the ground now, the earth cleared of weeds and freshly turned.
‘That looks a lot tidier.’
‘Yes, but look.’
Murray looked. Beside one corner of the obelisk, where the willow sunk into the earth, was the tiniest shoot of light green. Murray felt a glimmer of hope as Sarah slipped her hand into his.
‘Happy Christmas.’
Dinner was turkey crown and all the trimmings.
‘You sit there,’ Sarah said, pushing Murray into the sofa. ‘Relax.’
It was hard to relax when he could hear Sarah swearing as several things came to the boil at once, just as something else proved to be ‘fuck, that’s hot’. After a while Murray poked his head around the door.
‘Need a hand?’
‘All under control.’
There were pans everywhere, including several on the floor and one balanced precariously on the windowsill.
‘It’s still just the two of us, right?’
‘We’ll have leftovers tomorrow.’
And for the next three weeks, Murray thought.
‘Oh crap, I’ve burned the bread sauce.’
‘I hate bread sauce.’ Murray undid Sarah’s apron. He pushed her gently towards a chair. ‘Sit there. Relax.’
As he stirred the gravy he felt Sarah’s eyes on him. He turned around.
She chewed at a piece of skin at the side of her fingernail. ‘Tell me the truth: is it easier when I’m at Highfield?’
Murray had never lied to her. ‘Easier? Yes. As enjoyable? Nowhere near.’
Sarah digested his answer. ‘I wonder if he’s after her money.’