‘Then it’s up to them to volunteer that information.’
As the conversation continued and more roadblocks were thrown in our way, I became increasingly frustrated. It was like being behind the wheel of my own car but having someone drive it remotely.
‘There is something else,’ DS O’Connor added. ‘We’ve been approached by a news agency. We have a verbal agreement that they don’t normally report on suicides, but this is different as it was seemingly a pact between two strangers. They’ve had a tip-off and they believe it’s in the public interest to report on it.’
‘Tell them we don’t want to talk,’ I snapped. ‘It’s bad enough that our friends know, let alone the rest of the world.’
‘It might work in our favour though. It could help put names forward as to who the stranger might be.’
‘No,’ I replied adamantly, and slammed my hand down on the table.
‘Okay.’ DS O’Connor sighed and took a quick gulp of his tea. ‘I will pass your message on.’ He stood up to leave. ‘But we have no control over what they can and cannot write about. So you should prepare yourself, as there might be some interest in this story.’
He wasn’t wrong. Two days later and it had made the front of our weekly newspaper, page leads in four tabloids and a column in two broadsheets. Journalists raided Facebook for photographs of Charlotte and spoke to former workmates and acquaintances she had barely known. Stories were illustrated by tasteless graphics of the clifftop and the trajectory of their fall.
When journalists left me voicemail messages and texts urging me to talk to them, I turned off my phone. I could barely speak to the people around me, let alone strangers.
CHAPTER EIGHT
TWO MONTHS AFTER CHARLOTTE
I didn’t care about attending Charlotte’s funeral.
I didn’t need to say goodbye to her. I didn’t want to remember her fondly and I didn’t want to pay her my last respects. She deserved nothing from me. The only reason I agreed to attend the church ceremony and short journey to the crematorium was because I’d been guilt-tripped into it by my parents. If Charlotte didn’t want to celebrate her life, then why should I?
I was so muggy from swallowing two of Mum’s sleeping tablets and hungover from another beer binge the night before that I couldn’t focus on who was standing at the lectern, scrambling to find positive things to say about a woman who murdered her baby.
My eyes wandered around the church, which was decorated with vases of daffodils and posters advertising forthcoming Easter celebrations. But once they snapped towards the coffin as four pallbearers carried Charlotte in, they never left it. I ignored the order of service and didn’t join in with the hymns. I didn’t even bow my head in prayer.
Dad and Johnny flanked me and kept me steady for the moments when I was required to stand; and later they apologised to anyone who tried to converse with me as they guided me back towards the funeral car. I cared so little that I didn’t even try to avoid the reporters at the church gates, trying to engage anyone who made eye contact with them.
Once Charlotte’s body was released to me, I’d left it to my in-laws to organise her farewell. Choosing a funeral director, picking which clothes she would wear to go into the flames, what objects to throw into her coffin, what music should play as she was brought into the church, how many cars were required . . . She was their daughter so she was their problem. I told them through a third party that they could also keep her wedding ring. I had no use for my own, let alone hers. Everything it signified was a lie. Charlotte had thought so little of me, and now the feeling was mutual. I just wanted it all to be over.
I did, however, want to go to the coroner’s court later that same week for Charlotte’s inquest. I allowed Johnny and my mum to accompany me. We sat two rows behind Charlotte’s parents, but neither family looked at each other, not even the briefest glance.
I didn’t know why I’d wanted to attend. Perhaps I didn’t think I’d suffered enough and needed to know how much more pain I could endure before I completely cracked.
I listened carefully as witness and character statements were read aloud, and I watched as the dashboard footage taken at the clifftop was shown. Eventually, the senior coroner, a plump, middle-aged woman with a soft face and sympathetic eyes, ruled the medical cause of her death as ‘multiple injuries’.
‘No shit,’ I mumbled to myself. I think Johnny might have heard me.
‘Before I record a verdict of suicide, I have to be positive of two things beyond a reasonable doubt,’ she continued. ‘That Mrs Smith caused the act which led to her death and that she did so with the intention of killing herself. I have to be sure on both accounts this is what happened – and I am. Mrs Smith went to the top of Birling Gap with an as-yet-unidentified man, then tragically died when she impacted with the rocks below. Therefore, in these circumstances, I record a conclusion of suicide.’
So there it was: in the space of three days, my wife had been cremated and it was on public record for all the world to see that she had killed herself. Perhaps now I could move on.
After eight weeks of living at my parents’ house, I felt a prevailing urge to be back inside my flat again. I needed to surround myself with familiar objects to help me feel like something close to my old self. I couldn’t allow Charlotte’s ghost to bully me out of my own home.
As I unlocked the front door, I hovered nervously in the doorway. There were faint traces of the air fresheners she preferred. Her raincoat hung shapelessly on a coat hook. We grinned under an arch made of roses in a wedding photograph gathering dust in its frame.
I’d spent almost a third of my life as an ‘us’ and suddenly I had to accept being an ‘I’ again. It hit me that the former life I’d loved so much was irrecoverable and I’d never be able to copy it with anyone else. Once the tears began, I couldn’t shut them off.