He gave her the weakest, most apologetic look she’d ever seen, but still she could not believe him. She did not want to, because over time, she had learned to accept her pivotal role in Billy’s death. It had been an accident.
For it to have been deliberate . . . for her husband – the boy’s father – to have allowed him to die . . . that was so much worse than her negligence. It was evil. And she had loved this evil man. She raised her voice in a last-ditch attempt to persuade him to concede he was muddled.
‘I accept you’ve done a lot of wicked things,’ she continued, ‘but the man I adored back then would never have let that happen. You could never have held me and dried my tears and kept our family together like you did, knowing it wasn’t my fault. So I’m begging you to tell me now that you’re confused and that you didn’t let Billy die.’
He couldn’t have answered even if he’d wanted to. The stranglehold guilt had on him was so tight it barely allowed him to breathe. He couldn’t move, yet he swore he felt his body convulsing.
She sank deep into her armchair while she evaluated what it all meant. She had never got over Billy’s death, because no parent ever does when something so tender and innocent is wrenched away from your arms without warning. But gradually, the image of his lifeless body in the bath wasn’t the first that came to mind when she thought of him. It was of his warm, toothless smile in photographs she’d taken during his first and second Christmases. She’d pored over them hundreds of times since.
And every year on his birthday, she’d lock herself in her bedroom away from everyone, take his tiny blue satin booties from the crushed-velvet box in her wardrobe, and rub them gently between her fingers like she’d done as a child with her mother’s clothes. She’d hold them to her nose and inhale deeply in the hope of picking up a long-faded scent.
Only, now she’d learned Billy hadn’t died because of her careless parenting, but because of the insanely misdirected spite of his own father. She pictured him standing over Billy like the Grim Reaper, captivated by the panicking infant drowning before him.
It enraged her. She wanted to kill him.
He was oblivious to the escalating fury before him. He’d been used to finding ways of justifying his aberrations by blaming other people. But now there was no one left to blame. Kenneth had been right when he told his only son he was a monster.
The first physical contact in twenty-five years between Simon and Catherine Nicholson came after she jumped from her chair with such speed for a woman of her age, it terrified him.
‘You bastard!’ she screamed as her fists pummelled his head, over and over again. He had little time to raise his arms to protect himself from her blows. He struggled to push her away at first, but when he succeeded, she came back more ferocious than before.
He grabbed her arms, so she kneed him in the groin. He bent double in excruciating pain as an onslaught of slaps and scratches began. She caught slivers of flesh from his cheeks under her fingernails. Finally, he was able to muster up the strength to grab her arms and twist them behind her back. She shrieked in pain.
‘Kitty, Kitty, please,’ he begged, trying to catch his breath and calm her.
‘Get off me!’ she screamed, and squirmed to release herself from his grip, but to no avail.
‘I’m sorry for what I did to Billy and for not trusting you. You have to know that.’
‘Don’t you dare use his name! You aren’t fit to use his name!’
‘I know, I know, but I had to tell you the truth before my disease made it impossible.’
‘Am I supposed to be grateful? How could you let me spend my life believing it was my fault when it was you who’d killed him? His own father!’
She tried to jab her elbow in his stomach but her arm wouldn’t budge against his clutch. The last time she’d been forcibly restrained by a man, she’d eventually given in and accepted her fate. She would not make that mistake again.
‘Please, please forgive me,’ he cried. ‘Don’t let me die knowing you couldn’t find it in your heart to accept my apology.’
His desperate hope filled the room as it fell silent. Finally, she replied in a voice so fuelled by venom, he barely recognised it.
‘Never.’
Her response immediately drained him of his energy and she wriggled until one of her arms came free. It flailed around behind her, trying to hit anything that felt like him. A fingernail scraped across his eyeball, and instinctively his hand reached to cover it.
While he was temporarily blinded, he failed to notice her grab a metal picture frame of his children before it smashed against the side of his head. He fell to the sofa, dazed, but moved just before the orange glass vase from the fireplace shattered against the wall above him.
‘Kitty, please!’ he yelled, but she would not listen. A man capable of such evil did not deserve to be heard.
As he opened his mouth to beg for her forgiveness one last time, she reached for a brass poker from the fireplace and swung it above her head. He backed away but not fast enough to avoid the brunt of its force on his wrist. They both heard the bone crack, but he felt nothing as he fell to the floor.
Then, as she raised the poker again, he didn’t flinch or try to protect himself. Instead, he lay there, sodden and shaking, accepting his fate, as weak and pathetic as she’d ever seen a man. With a final lift, the poker was as high as she could carry it.
Then she threw it against the fireplace with all her might.
‘You don’t deserve the easy way out,’ she spat. ‘I want your disease to slowly eat away at you until your one and only memory is of the son you killed. Now get out of my house!’
He used the wall to support him as he slowly rose. He backed away from her towards the door, while blood poured from the open wound to his head. He touched his temple to stem the bleeding and pricked his finger on a shard of glass that jutted out from it.
He opened his mouth to make one final apology but his vocabulary was barren. And when she glared at him with such menace, he knew there was nothing he could say with his hollow words that would make any of this better.
So he fumbled for the handle, opened the door and stumbled down the gravel path, his heavy feet shunting stones in all directions.
He didn’t hear the door slam behind him, or see her slump to the floor and wail like no other person had wailed before.
EPILOGUE
Northampton, today
8.40pm
Simon steadied himself against the church railings as he lurched through the village, his body as traumatised as his mind.
He failed to notice the school he’d once attended, the Fox & Hounds where he’d tasted his first pint of beer, or the village green where he, Roger, Steven and Dougie had spent so much of their youth playing.