‘Well…’ she began but said nothing more. Her eyes were wet.
He stood, and seeing him stand, his mother stood too. He could not straighten to full height so remained a little stooped under the beams, and it seemed to him that his mother stooped too, though she was smaller today than ever. She dug in the sleeve of her cardigan and pulled out the shrivelled tissue that lived there, in the darkness, like a shrew. She blew her nose, her head bowed, and he was filled with a terrible sadness.
‘Mum,’ he said, and tried to take her stiff and tiny frame in his arms. Her body was rigid under his hands, her arms tucked up in front of her.
‘I prefer you without your beard,’ she said into his chest. ‘I can see your face. You will look after yourself, won’t you?’
‘You needn’t worry about me,’ he said. ‘I’m all grown up now.’
‘You’ll be in Jack’s old room when you come to visit. You won’t have to go up them steps.’
Ah yes, Margaret, you were right. He would never again go up those steps. He left his family there at the door of his childhood home. If he looked back, it was only once, only enough to see the four of them lined up with stiff formality, arms by their sides, small and muted and distant as an old photograph faded in the sun.
* * *
Did he drive to Phyllis without a thought for the family he had left, this week’s Top 40 in the cassette player? ‘Don’t Stand So Close to Me’, ‘Woman in Love’, ‘Geno’… did he sing all the way?
I don’t know. There are, after all, things I don’t know.
At the sight of the greenish spire of St Edward’s Church, his stomach flipped. He turned left into Langdale Road and pulled up to the house. Phyllis was at the front window. She waved and jumped up and down, had run out onto the driveway in her stockinged feet before he’d got out of the car.
‘You’re here for good,’ she cried. ‘I can’t believe it.’ She bent her knees and her hands flew to her face.
‘The first day of the rest of my life!’ He threw his arms around her and kissed her on the forehead. ‘I love you, Phyllis Curtiss.’
She burst into tears but she was laughing too, and she hugged him. ‘And I love you, Christopher who was Martin. My lost boy. My darling, darling boy.’
And like that, his life as Martin Curtiss, known to his friends and family simply as Christopher or Chris or even sometimes Chrissy, the life he had travelled steadfastly towards since that October day in 1977 when Margaret and Jack had sat him down in the front parlour, began.
Christopher started his teacher-training course in the October of that year, 1980. In November, another Leeds student, Jacqueline Hill, was killed, her body found in the ground of Lupton Residences. Christopher cut out the relevant articles for his scrapbook and studied his old map of Leeds, curious as to where Lupton Residences were in relation to Oxley Hall, the only female halls he had visited in his time at university.
When the Christmas break came around, Phyllis insisted he spend Christmas Eve and most of Christmas Day with his adoptive family.
‘I want you here, of course I do,’ she said, stroking his hair back from his face. ‘But they raised you and it’s not right to spend it with us. You’ll hurt their feelings.’ She didn’t know at this point that neither Margaret, nor Jack, nor Jack Junior nor Louise had any idea of her existence.
‘All right,’ he said, for her, for the sake of all that he had to keep hidden. ‘I’ll go.’
‘I’ve made some shortbread for you to take. And a card.’
‘Lovely. Thank you.’
He went. I have no idea what happened to the shortbread and the card. They will have ended up in some rubbish bin in a service station, I should think; like so many things in his life cast aside, forgotten.
* * *
In January 1981, Christopher took up a placement at a secondary school in Widnes. In the late afternoons, while the twins were out playing football or watching television or doing their homework, he and Phyllis would work together at the kitchen table: she on her marking and preparation, he on his assignments. They had learned to keep an eye on the time, and fifteen minutes before David was due home, Christopher would take his work upstairs and finish it at the desk David had painted for him, while Phyllis would jump up and busy herself with the evening meal.
What reason did either of them give for this, even to themselves?
It was on a Sunday night in January that the announcement came. Like most momentous historical events, everyone can remember where they were when they heard. And for Christopher, that moment was at home at 6 p.m. He and Phyllis and David were sitting in the lounge with their tea on trays on their laps. It was Phyllis who had suggested they have a TV dinner, saying she wanted to catch the news. They were chatting about something or other when from the television Big Ben chimed and what followed shocked them all into silence:
‘A man is charged with a Ripper murder…’
Those were the words. Not the Ripper murders, as we talk about them today, but a murder. I remember that press conference, the atmosphere of euphoria among the high-ranking police officers who had presided over the five-year waking nightmare. I can’t remember what came out during that first broadcast and what came out later, only that feeling: he’d been caught. Finally. It was over.
A fake number plate had given him away. The police had picked him up for routine, nothing more. Saying he needed a piss, he’d tried to stash the murder weapons. He hid another one in the cistern of the toilet at Dewsbury police station. The rest had fallen into place from there.
Confession at last. To every one.
The report finished. Christopher collapsed against the back of the sofa.
‘They’ve got him,’ he said, his voice strange, strangled. ‘They’ve caught him, the monster.’ He had to put his dinner on the floor. He was panting, running his hand over his forehead. David had to go and get him a glass of water.
‘Are you all right, love?’ Phyllis asked, rubbing his back.
‘Here.’ David passed him the water and he drank it down in one go.
‘I’m all right,’ he said. ‘Just so glad they got him. It’s such a relief. It’s over.’
Over the days that followed, whether it was the television news, the radio or out on the street, the talk was of nothing else. More came out. Thirteen victims: he had killed them with a ball-peen hammer and a kitchen knife – objects that hung heavy in the mind. On the surface, he was a normal man, living in a normal house with his wife, Sonia.