I didn’t speak. He waited, expectantly. Hopefully.
I imagined standing at the altar with him, Ella a toddling flower girl. I imagined turning and looking at the congregation, and I felt fresh loss at the absence of my father. Billy would give me away, I supposed. Not my dad, but the nearest thing I had to one. I was lucky to have him.
There would be friends, neighbours filling up the pews.
No Laura.
I felt no grief about that. Her trial date had been set, and although the thought of testifying against her was already giving me nightmares, Victim Support had talked me through the process. I’d be alone on the stand, but I knew there was a team of people behind me. She’d be convicted, I was sure of it.
She’d written a couple of times, begging forgiveness. Remand prisoners were forbidden from making contact with trial witnesses, and the letters had come via a mutual acquaintance, too blinded by friendship to believe Laura had truly done the things of which she’d been accused.
The letters were long. Effusive. They played on our shared history, on the fact that we only had each other. That we’d both lost our mothers. I kept them as insurance, not out of sentiment, although I knew I’d never show them to the police. Laura was taking a risk, writing to me, but it was a small one. She knew me too well.
I felt no grief, either, that my mother wouldn’t be at my wedding. Thinking of her forms a hard ball of hatred in my heart that no amount of counselling will lessen. But it isn’t Dad’s murder I hate her for – although that is where it starts. It isn’t even for the lies she told in faking her death, in abandoning me in my grief. It’s for the ones she told afterwards; the story she spun from the half-truths of her marriage to my father. It’s for making me believe that he was the alcoholic; that it was he who hit her, not the other way around. It’s for making me trust her again.
‘Well?’ Mark had prompted. ‘Will you?’
I realised the ‘no’ on the tip of my tongue had nothing to do with who would or wouldn’t be at our wedding.
‘If we hadn’t have had Ella,’ I said, ‘do you think we’d still be together?’
He paused – a fraction too long. ‘Of course we would.’ I held his gaze and for a moment we stayed that way. He broke away, gave a tiny smile that didn’t reach his eyes. ‘Maybe.’
I reached for his hand. ‘I don’t think maybe’s enough.’
Oak View sold quickly, to a family with three children who accepted the house’s history in exchange for a price far below market value, and who will, I hope, fill the rooms with laughter and noise. Mark’s Putney flat is on the market, and for now he’s staying in Eastbourne, so we can continue to bring up Ella together.
I cried when the sold sign went up, but only for a moment. I had no desire to stay in Cleveland Avenue, where the neighbours looked at me with morbid fascination, and tourists went out of their way to walk past the house and gawp at a garden they couldn’t even see.
Laura and Mum had disposed of the broken glass in the septic tank, along with Dad’s body. Mum’s prints were on the neck of the wine bottle; Laura’s on the pieces of glass she’d so carefully picked up and thrown in the tank.
The tank is long gone. Robert’s extension is underway, his thirty-grand sweetener a carrot dangled before the new owners in exchange for the inconvenience. They don’t plan to replace Mum’s rose beds, though; a football goal and climbing frame are on their shopping list instead.
I walk back towards Oak View, my hands feeling empty without a buggy to push. Rita strains at the lead as a black and white cat crosses my path, and I just manage to stop myself from pointing it out to an absent Ella. I wonder if I’ll ever get used to her not being with me all the time.
The house I’ve bought is as different to my family home as it is possible to get. A neat modern box, with three bedrooms and an open-plan ground floor, where, as Ella starts to crawl, I can keep an eye on her from the kitchen.
Back at Oak View, they’re loading the lorry. They’ll leave my bed, and Ella’s cot, and tonight we’ll sleep in a near-empty house, ready for the big move tomorrow. It’s only a mile down the road, but it feels so much further.
‘Nearly done, love.’ The removal man is sweating with the effort of heaving furniture into the van. I’ve left the heavy wardrobes, the long kitchen table and the big hall dresser for the new family, who were delighted to be saved the expense. They’re too big for my new house, and too tied up in memories I no longer want. The removal man wipes his brow with the back of his hand. ‘Post came. I popped it on the side for you.’
It’s on the dresser. Hand-delivered by Laura’s friend, again. I wonder if she’ll still be so supportive after the trial, once all the evidence has been laid out for the world to see. The charges stack up. Concealing a crime; hiding Dad’s body; threats to kill.
The envelope prompts unwanted images. Laura with a gun in her hand. My mother, edging closer towards the edge of the balcony. I shake myself. It’s over. It’s all over.
I pull out the letter. A single sheet. None of the effusive apologies of her previous letters. My failure to respond – to withdraw my support for the prosecution – has clearly hit home.
I unfold the paper, and suddenly there’s a buzzing in my ears. Blood singing; my pulse racing.
A single line, in the centre of the page.
Suicide?
The letter shakes in my hand. Heat envelops me and I think I might pass out. I walk through the kitchen – through the boxes and the removal men moving like worker bees back and forth from house to van – and open the back door.
Suicide?
I walk into the garden. Make myself take deep, slow breaths until I’m no longer dizzy, only the buzzing won’t leave my ears, and my chest feels tight with fear.
Because this time I don’t need to look elsewhere for the answer.
It wasn’t suicide this time, either.
My mother didn’t jump.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Like many people around the world, I was gripped by the apparently miraculous reappearance in 2007 of John Darwin, who, five years previously, had been declared dead after what was believed to have been a canoeing accident in north east England. His wife Anne later confessed that John had continued living with her in the family home, before the couple embarked on a new life in Panama.
I was fascinated by the story, and by the sheer audacity of John Darwin, who had adopted a disguise in order to move undetected around his hometown, and who had frequently eavesdropped on his two grown-up sons as they visited their supposedly distraught mother. I wondered how it must feel to discover your parents had deliberately caused you the pain of bereavement, and how you would begin to rebuild a relationship with them. I found it hard to understand how any parent could treat their children in such a callous manner.
As I wrote Let Me Lie, I found the following publications particularly valuable for the detail behind the Darwins’ extraordinary story: Up the Creek Without a Paddle (Tammy Cohen) and Out of My Depth (Anne Darwin). However, the events and characters in Let Me Lie are fictional products of my imagination, and not based on any stories I have read or heard about.
In researching suicides at Beachy Head, I was very moved by Life on the Edge (Keith Lane) – the autobiography of a man whose wife jumped to her death from the Sussex cliffs. Keith Lane dedicated the next four years of his life to patrolling the cliffs, preventing twenty-nine people from taking their own lives.