‘Hello there, Phyllis.’
I raise my hand, even though she is already gone. ‘Hello, Betsy.’
They’ve taken me off suicide watch. They say I’m making progress. I have started to eat again. I answer in full sentences when they ask me a question. I can take a shower and get dressed by myself. I have written most of what I had to write. I had hoped that if I wrote it all down, it would help me understand. What do I understand?
I understand that I loved him, Christopher, not as a son but as a man. I understand that he killed his real mother because she was not the mother he wanted. I understand that he realised too late how cruelly and completely he had abandoned the mother and father who had raised him. He did at least recognise that. I understand that even after he had told me he’d killed my son, I still loved him. And I understand that whatever deception he carried out, he included himself in that same deception. None of this understanding makes any of it any easier to carry.
Why did I turn him in? Because he took lives, and that is a mortal sin. His poor mother, God rest her soul, is in a better place, but Ben, my baby Martin, died thinking that I had abandoned him. I will never come to terms with that and perhaps, ultimately, that’s why I betrayed Christopher.
But now it’s almost visiting time. David and the twins are coming to see me. David has been here every day.
‘Phyl,’ he says. He holds both my hands in both of his. ‘Come back to me. We can get through this, I promise.’
David. I always thought I loved him because he was good, a good person. But now I think it is because from the moment I met him he told me that I was good, and of course I wanted to see myself that way too. Because the thing is, when I gave my son away, I gave away with him all perception of myself as in any way good. It was David who restored me, restored that goodness in me. I believed him once, and if he keeps telling me, one day I hope to believe him again. I will go back to him and the boys. We will in time put all this behind us.
Chapter Thirty
Last Words
One last point, before I lock this whole thing in a drawer and throw away the key. Under Christopher’s bed, behind the box of letters, was his scrapbook. It was full of newspaper clippings, all of them about the Yorkshire Ripper, some photocopied, most actual news reports from various papers, dating from the time Christopher went to university – that is, from the time he knew himself to be adopted. The book bulged like a wallet full of banknotes.
At the back, dated Friday, 3 April 1981, a few months after they caught Peter Sutcliffe and not long before Ben appeared, was another article concerning the murder of a female Leeds University student in 1978. The article said that the police had removed her name from the list of Sutcliffe’s victims. The method of killing was not his and Sutcliffe had not included her name in his confession. According to the report, sexual intercourse had taken place before her death. She had suffered some bruising but there was no forensic evidence to link the victim to Sutcliffe. The woman’s name was Sophie Hampton-Scott. Her body had been found in woodland opposite Oxley Hall, behind Weetwood Lane. She had been strangled.
And I remembered that conversation in the pub, when I asked Christopher what he meant when he said he’d always known.
‘Do you think that feeling came from actual concrete events,’ I said, ‘or was it more of a sixth sense?’
‘No,’ he said, shaking his head, ‘but I could breathe it in the air.’
Nothing tangible, not a single event, but a multitude of little things – chance remarks, sudden silences, glances exchanged between relatives. Call it a sixth sense, call it intuition, call it the accumulation of small moments; in this life there are simply some things that even without proof we know absolutely. And so to this: what I, Phyllis Curtiss, know and what will be buried with me: When Christopher volunteered to be Adam’s alibi, he was effectively securing his own.
‘I’d always known,’ he used to say. How true those words were; how little I understood them.
* * *
***
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Also by S.E. Lynes
Mother
Valentina
A Letter from S.E. Lynes
Dear Reader,
Thank you so much for taking the time to read Mother. I am thrilled that you did and hope you enjoyed it.
Mother came, as many of my ideas do, from a chance remark. The book is for me about the deep need to belong and to know who we are. I have lived in many different countries, but thanks to growing up in a loving family am fortunate enough to have always known where home is. For Mother I have drawn from all sorts of sources, not least from my hometown, Runcorn, where I lived until I was eighteen and which formed much of who I am.
If you enjoyed Mother, I would be so grateful if you could spare a couple of minutes to write a review. It only needs to be a line or two, and I would really appreciate it! I am always happy to chat via my Twitter account and Facebook author page if you wish to get in touch. Any writer knows that writing can sometimes be a lonely business, so when a reader reaches out and tells me my work has stayed with them or that they loved it, I am truly delighted. I have loved making new friends online through my first novel, Valentina, and hope to make more with Mother.
My next book is well underway, and I hope you will want to read that one too. If you’d like to be the first to hear about my new releases, you can sign up using the link below:
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Best wishes
Susie
Acknowledgements
First of all, thank you to my wonderful editor at Bookouture, Jenny Geras, whose positivity, tact and expertise have been instrumental in getting this manuscript to where it is.
Huge thanks to Stephanie Zia for her generosity, love and encouragement in this new flight – Stephanie, you are an actual angel.
Thanks as always to my co-pilot in this life, Paul Lynes, who read Mother in its rudimentary stages and said, Blimey, I never knew you were so devious. Your love is the air I breathe, my darling, but one more football injury and it’s over between us, all right?