My Mum and Dad didn’t want me to come to this inquest today, but anyone can and I’m eighteen now. It’s totally weirding me out, though, that there are people sat in this room who never knew him at all. Even journalists. How messed up is that? One of them is staring at me. I look away. I know authentic voices are really hot right now – and I’m not telling him shit. Not after what happened when someone turned up on our doorstep and, still really upset, I somehow said enough to make it look like I’d given them a whole interview slagging off Jonny’s dad. I’m too scared to say anything at all now.
I’ve been working with a really nice therapist who reminds me all the time that you can’t be responsible for other people’s actions and that I can’t feel guilt for what I think I did or didn’t do. But I can’t help it.
Jonny is literally the only thing I can think about all the time. I keep seeing him walking in the forest. I have nightmares about it.
I feel like I’m going to cry again, so I try and blink the tears back and blow my nose. When I look up, the journalist across the way is still staring right at me – and also writing something.
I tense and instead look across at Christy and Ruby, tightly holding hands. They’ve moved to London now, away from Gary. We texted for a bit – me and Ruby – but then it got too painful, and we stopped.
I honestly don’t know what I would have done without Alice and the girls right now. They have been so amazingly supportive and understanding. They’ve kept my life feeling normal and grounded. They said today would be good closure, but it won’t be. No one understands. I can’t forget him. Everyone keeps telling me I’ll fall in love again and be happy one day, but there will always be a part of my heart that is just his, even though he lied to me.
I should have done more. If I could go back in time and do it differently, I would. I could have saved him from himself, because that’s what I know we’re all about to hear – that Jonny killed himself – and I feel so, so sad.
And so guilty.
20
Rob
‘I would like to remind everyone of what I said at the start – this is an inquest, not a trial. Its purpose is not to attribute blame, but rather use the evidence we have heard to confirm the identity of the deceased, where and when they died, and the cause of death.’
I watch the journalist preparing to take notes at the back of the room as the coroner starts her summary. He looks positively excited and I get why, the chance to rehash it all again; two very physically attractive people (nice big front-page sorted), an older woman – a family GP no less. A young, vulnerable, rising social media star, and a passionate night in Ibiza. Allegations of unethical conduct, marital strife, harassment, illicit sex trysts, messages, a pretty, wronged girlfriend, parents publicly gunning for the woman they’d apparently tried to employ… but this juicy bone has culminated in the tragic death of a young man, and those parents are sitting in this very room. This journalist isn’t even trying to hide that he’s licking his lips.
In return, I don’t make any effort to conceal my look of contempt. He doesn’t care about the people involved here, just the happy thought that Jonathan Day died less than a mile from his ex-lover’s home. Lovely detail. I hope he’s really disappointed that we’ve wound up here, and not in court, the parasitic worm.
After all, God knows Kent Police performed a very thorough investigation. As one of them said to me, they don’t actually get bodies in the woods that often. They’re excited when something like that happens, and they were all over it, given Day’s profile. But they found nothing; there was no criminal case to answer and everything was turned over to the coroner.
‘As we have heard,’ she continues, ‘at approximately seven thirty p.m. on 6 October 2017, Jonathan told his mother that he was going out to meet his girlfriend, Cherry, and would stay at her house – he’d let them know if his plans changed but otherwise he’d be back in the morning. He drove instead to Broadwater Woods – a twenty-minute journey – parking his car in a clearing.’
I watch Christy Day reach out, grip her daughter’s hand and close her eyes. The poor woman’s face is etched with agony and guilt. I glance over at Gary Day, sat on the opposite side of the room to his estranged wife. He stares at the floor, eyes wide, hands clasped tightly, and I shift uncomfortably. I am sorry for his loss, as any parent would be, but the man frightens me.
We all listen silently as the coroner determines that at approximately 8 p.m. Jonathan walked about a hundred metres into the forest and injected his whole insulin pen into his stomach before collapsing on the ground never to wake up. He had earlier taken his pre-meal insulin shot at the dinner table without then eating enough to balance its effects. He would have already been hypoglycaemic on arriving at the woods. It would have been enough for him to simply lie down and wait to fall unconscious – in the absence of immediate medical attention he would have died anyway. He wasn’t taking any chances, however, hence the sleeping tablets that were discovered in his system at the post-mortem – the same brand his mother takes – and the injecting of his whole pen. The forensic post-mortem also revealed extraordinarily high levels of insulin in his system. He meant business.
He was found, dead and soaked to the skin by the night’s heavy rain, by a man walking his dog early on Saturday morning. His wallet, keys and his switched-off phone were laid out neatly beside him. There was one typed note on the phone, which said:
Sorry for everything and what this will do.
‘Sorry’ to whom is not clear. Sorry to his poor parents and sister or sorry to my wife – obviously not present right now and not just because she’s back at work – for the damning lies he told about her? What comfort could any of them take from that apology in any case? A young man is still needlessly dead.
When we were first told how he’d died, I was appalled. He’d seemed so in control that afternoon when I’d confronted him, apart from when I’d nearly hit him. I remembered the fear on his face and felt ashamed of myself. What if telling him I had evidence that he was lying had pushed him over the edge? Had he believed me and panicked, having dug himself into his lies so deeply he was unable to climb out? But as Alex says, you cannot take responsibility for anyone else’s choices, only your own. It seems that in any case, the row he’d had with his father distressed him more than anything I might have said. God knows what was going on in his head to make him do what he did.