‘Who was that chasing us?’ I scream it, and she takes a breath but ignores my question.
‘Give me the phone, Anna.’
She’s as terrified as I am. Her knuckles are white with fear, not anger; her voice shakes with panic, not rage. The knowledge should make me feel safer – stronger – but it doesn’t.
Because she’s in the driving seat.
I give her the phone.
FIFTY-SIX
It was an accident. That’s what you have to understand. I never meant for it to happen.
I didn’t hate you. I didn’t love you, but I didn’t hate you either, and I don’t think you hated me. I think we were young and I was pregnant, and we did what our parents expected us to do, and then we were stuck with each other, like a lot of people in relationships.
It’s taken a while for me to understand that.
For all of our marriage I was either drinking, or recovering from drinking, or thinking about drinking. Rarely enough to be drunk; rarely so little to be sober. On and on, for so many years that no one who had never seen me sober would ever know that I wasn’t.
I blamed you for cutting short my freedom, never seeing that what I had in London wasn’t freedom at all. It was just as much a cage, in its own way, as marriage was: a never-ending cycle of working, boozing, clubbing, looking for a one-night stand, slipping away in the early hours.
I thought you trapped me. I never realised you were actually saving me.
I fought it. And I went on fighting it for twenty-five years.
On the night you died I was halfway down a bottle of wine, with three G&Ts under my belt. With Anna away I didn’t have to hide anything – I’d long since stopped pretending in front of you.
Not that I’d ever have admitted I had a problem. They say that’s the first step. I hadn’t taken it – not then. Not till afterwards.
‘Don’t you think you’ve had enough?’ You’d had a drink, too. Otherwise you’d never have dared. We were in the kitchen, Rita curled up in her bed. The house felt empty without Anna, and I knew I was drinking more because of it. Not just because I could, but because it felt strange. Unbalanced. The way it did when she was at university. Then, I had a glimpse of how life would be when she moved out for good, and I didn’t like it. Our marriage was built around our daughter; who were we without her? The thought unsettled me.
‘Actually, I think I’ll have another one.’ I didn’t even want it. I poured the rest of the wine into a glass meant to be more empty than full. I held the empty bottle upside down by its neck. Taunting you. ‘Cheers.’ A dribble of red wine ran down my sleeve.
You looked at me like you were seeing me for the first time. Shook your head, like I’d asked you a question. ‘I can’t do this any more, Caroline.’
I don’t think you’d planned it. It was just one of those things you say. But I asked what you meant, and it made you think, and I saw the moment the decision made itself in your mind. The decisive nod, the firmness in your lips. Yes, you were thinking, this is what I want. This is what’s going to happen.
‘I don’t want to be married to you any more.’
Like I said: my trigger is alcohol.
I was drunk the first time I hit you, and I was drunk the last time. It’s not an excuse – it’s a reason. Did it make a difference to you that I was sorry afterwards? Did you know that I meant what I said, that each time I vowed to myself it would be the last? Sometimes the apologies came late; sometimes they came right away, when the sudden release of pent-up anger sobered me as surely as if I’d slept it off.
When the police came, you lied with me. Nothing to see here. After the 999 calls, we said it was a mistake. A child, messing with the phone.
You stopped saying you forgave me. You stopped saying anything at all; just pretended it hadn’t happened. When I hurled Anna’s clay paperweight at you, and it ricocheted off you and broke against the wall, you picked up the pieces and glued them back together. And you let Anna think you’d broken it.
‘She loves you,’ you said. ‘I can’t bear to think of her knowing the truth.’
That should have stopped me. It didn’t.
If I hadn’t been drinking that last night, I might have got upset rather than angry. I might even have nodded, thought: You’re right – this isn’t working. I might have realised that neither of us was happy, and maybe it was time to call it quits.
I didn’t do that.
Before the words were even out of your mouth, my arm was moving. Hard. Fast. Unthinking. The bottle smashed against your head.
I stood in the kitchen, the neck of the bottle still in my hand, and a carpet of green glass at my feet. And you. Lying on your side. A glossy pool of blood beneath your head, from where you’d hit the granite worktop on your way to meet the tiles.
Dead.
FIFTY-SEVEN
MURRAY
Murray pressed redial, but Anna Johnson’s phone went straight to voicemail.
‘I don’t want the daughter knowing anything till we’ve got a positive ident,’ DS Kennedy had said when he’d called to say that Murray had been right, there was a body in the septic tank, and early indications suggested it was Tom Johnson.
Murray had considered what to do. The detective sergeant was right, of course. It couldn’t possibly be anyone other than Tom Johnson in the septic tank, but until the body had been recovered and identified, information should be on a strictly need-to-know basis.
But surely Anna did need to know? And at the earliest opportunity. It had been Anna who had insisted the police look again at her mother’s suicide; Anna who had been abandoned when her parents disappeared within months of each other. She deserved to know that there was a very high probability her father had been murdered, and his body hidden in his own septic tank.
As Murray scrolled through his phone for her number, he ignored the voice in his head that said he was calling as much for his own benefit as for hers. You carried on digging after she told you to stop, the voice said. Now you want to show her you were right to have done that.
Only Anna had hung up on him again. And now her phone was switched off. She was in shock, of course. People did strange things at times of crisis. But even so, Murray had a horrible feeling he had done the wrong thing by calling her.
Sarah pulled up on the driveway. Murray was feeling deflated; not just from Anna’s reaction, but from suddenly having nothing to do on the investigation in which he had been so heavily invested. He recognised the feeling from his time as a uniformed response officer, when the rush of picking up a juicy job was swiftly followed by the anti-climax of handing it over to CID. Never knowing what the suspect had said in interview; sometimes not even knowing who had been charged, or what sentence they’d received. Seeing someone else get the pat on the back, when you were the one who’d torn your trousers in a rugby tackle, who’d pulled out a child from a drink-drive wreckage.
‘You should go.’ Sarah was resting one hand lightly on the gearstick, looking totally at home behind the wheel now. It had been a long time since Murray had been a passenger, and when his battery had died, and he could no longer make calls, he had rested his head against the seat and watched his wife’s confidence grow by the mile. It occurred to him that his efforts to protect Sarah’s comfort zone over the years might sometimes have been better spent helping her climb out of it.
Murray got out of the car. ‘James is there. It’s his job now.’
‘It’s your job, too.’
Was it? If Murray went inside and put on his slippers, stuck something on the TV, the police world would keep turning. James had the scene under control; officers were out looking for Caroline Johnson. What could Murray do?
And yet there were loose ends that were frustrating him. How had Caroline managed to get Tom – by no means a small man, the case files confirmed – into the septic tank? Had someone helped her? Who had sent the anniversary card that suggested Caroline Johnson hadn’t really jumped?
‘Go.’ Sarah pressed the car keys into his hand.