“What happened? Did she do something to you? Darling . . .”
Helen blushed and something in the pit of my stomach squirmed. “It’s nothing,” she said quickly. “It’s nothing. It wasn’t her. My hand slipped when I was chopping onions.”
Patrick looked at her other hand, at the knife she still held. Gently he took it from her. “What’s she doing here?” he asked, without looking at me.
Helen cocked her head to one side, looking from her father-in-law to me and back again. “She’s been asking questions,” she said, “about Nel Abbott.” She swallowed. “About Sean. About his professional conduct.”
“I just need to clarify something, it’s procedural, relating to the handling of the investigation.”
Patrick didn’t seem interested. He sat down at the kitchen table without looking at me. “Do you know,” he said to Helen, “why they moved her up here? I asked around—I still know people, of course, and I spoke to one of my former colleagues down in London, and he told me that this fine detective here was removed from her post in the Met because she’d seduced a younger colleague. And not just any colleague, a woman! Can you imagine that?” His dry laugh segued into a hacking smoker’s cough. “Here she is, chasing down your Mr. Henderson, while she’s guilty of exactly the same thing. An abuse of power for her own sexual gratification. And she still has a job.” He lit a cigarette. “And then she comes here and says she wants to talk about my son’s professional conduct!”
Finally he looked at me. “You should have been thrown off the force altogether, but because you’re a woman, because you’re a dyke, you’re allowed to get away with it. That’s what they call equality.” He scoffed. “Can you imagine what would happen if it were a man? If Sean got caught sleeping with one of his juniors, he’d be out on his ear.”
I balled my hands into fists to stop them shaking. “How about if Sean was sleeping with a woman who ended up dead?” I asked. “What d’you think would happen to him then?”
He moves quickly for an old guy. He was on his feet, chair crashing back, and his hand around my throat in what seemed like less than a second. “Watch your mouth, you dirty bitch,” he whispered, breathing sour smoke in my face. I gave him a good hard shove in the chest and he let me go.
He stepped back, his arms by his sides, fists clenched. “My son has done nothing wrong,” he said quietly. “So if you make trouble for him, girlie, I’ll make trouble for you. Do you understand that? You’ll get it back with interest.”
“Dad,” Helen said. “That’s enough. You’re scaring her.”
He turned to his daughter-in-law with a smile. “I know, love. I mean to.” He looked back at me and smiled again. “With some of them, it’s the only thing they understand.”
JULES
I left the car on the side of the track leading to the Townsends’ place. I didn’t need to, there was plenty of space to park in their courtyard, but it felt right that I should. This felt like it ought to be a furtive mission, like I ought to surprise them. The fearless relic, the one who appeared the day I confronted my rapist, was back. The bracelet in my pocket, I strode into that sun-drenched courtyard, straight-backed and resolute. I had come on behalf of my sister, to make things right for her. I was determined. I was unafraid.
I was unafraid until Patrick Townsend opened the door to me, his face stained with rage, a knife in his hand.
“What do you want?” he demanded.
I took a couple of steps away from the front door. “I . . .” He was about to slam the door in my face and I was too frightened to say what I needed to. He did for his wife, Nickie had told me, and for your sister, too. “I was . . .”
“Jules?” a voice called out to me. “Is that you?”
• • •
IT WAS QUITE A SCENE. Helen was there, with blood on her hand and her face, and Erin, too, doing a poor job of pretending that she was in control of the situation. She greeted me with a cheery smile. “What brings you here? We’re supposed to be meeting at the station.”
“Yes, I know, I . . .”
“Spit it out,” Patrick muttered. My skin prickled with heat, breath shortening. “You Abbotts! Christ, what a family!” His voice rose as he slammed the knife down on the kitchen table. “I remember you, you know? Obese, weren’t you, when you were younger?” He turned to speak to Helen. “Disgusting fat thing, she was. And the parents! Pathetic.” My hands were trembling as he turned back to look at me. “I suppose the mother had an excuse, because she was dying, but someone should have taken them in hand. You ran wild, didn’t you, you and your sister? And look how well you both turned out! She was mentally unstable, and you . . . well. What are you? Simple?”
“That’s quite enough, Mr. Townsend,” Erin said. She took my arm. “Come on, let’s get you to the station. We need to get Lena’s statement.”
“Ah yes, the girl. That one will go the same way as her mother, she’s got the same dirty look about her, filthy mouth, the kind of face you want to slap—”
“You spend a lot of time thinking about doing things to my teenage niece, do you?” I said loudly. “Do you think that’s appropriate?” My anger was roused again, and Patrick wasn’t ready for it. “Well? Do you? Disgusting old man.” I turned to Erin. “I’m actually not quite ready to leave yet,” I said. “But I’m glad you’re here, Erin, I think it’s appropriate, because the reason I came was not to speak to him”—I jerked my head in Patrick’s direction—“but to her. To you, Mrs. Townsend.” My hand trembling, I fished the little plastic bag out of my pocket and placed it on the table, next to the knife. “I wanted to ask you, when did you take this bracelet from my sister’s wrist?”
Helen’s eyes widened and I knew that she was guilty.
“Where did the bracelet come from, Jules?” Erin asked.
“From Lena. Who got it from Mark Henderson. Who took it from Helen. Who, I’m guessing from the guilty-as-sin look on her face, took it from my sister before she killed her.”
Patrick started laughing, a loud, fake bark of a laugh. “She took it from Lena, who took it from Mark, who took it from Helen, who took it from the fairy on the fucking Christmas tree! Sorry, love,” he apologized to Helen, “excuse my French, but what utter garbage.”
“It was in your office, wasn’t it, Helen?” I looked at Erin. “It’ll have prints on it, DNA, won’t it?”
Patrick chuckled again, but Helen looked stricken. “No, I . . .” she said at last, her eyes flicking from me to Erin to her father-in-law. “It was . . . No.” She took a deep breath. “I found it,” she said. “But I didn’t know . . . I didn’t know it was hers. I just . . . I kept it. I was going to hand it in to lost property.”
“You found it where, Helen?” Erin asked. “You found it at the school?”
Helen glanced at Patrick and then back to the detective, as though considering whether the lie would hold. “I think that I . . . yes, I did. And, er, I didn’t know whose it was, so . . .”
“My sister wore that bracelet all the time,” I said. “It has my mother’s initials on it. I’m finding it a bit hard to believe you didn’t realize what it was, that it was important.”
“I didn’t,” Helen said, but her voice was thin and her face was reddening.
“Of course she didn’t know!” Patrick shouted suddenly. “Of course she didn’t know whose it was or where it came from.” He went quickly to her side, placing his hand on her shoulder. “Helen had the bracelet because I left it in her car. Careless of me. I was going to throw it out, I meant to, but . . . I’ve become rather forgetful. I’ve become forgetful, haven’t I, darling?” Helen said nothing, she didn’t move. “I left it in the car,” he said again.
“OK,” Erin said. “And where did you get it?”
He looked right at me when he answered her. “Where do you think I got it, you moron? I ripped it off that whore’s wrist before I threw her over.
”
PATRICK
He had loved her a long time, but never so much as in the moment when she flew to his defence.
“That is not what happened!” Helen sprang to her feet. “That is not . . . Don’t! Don’t you take the blame for this, Dad, that is not what happened. You didn’t . . . you didn’t even . . .”
Patrick smiled at her, reaching out a hand. She took it and he pulled her closer. She was soft but not weak, her modesty, her unashamed plainness more stirring than any facile beauty. It moved him now—he felt his blood rising, the pump of his weakened old heart.
No one spoke. The sister was crying silently, mouthing words without any sound. The detective watched him, watched Helen, something knowing in her face.
“Are you . . .?” She shook her head, lost for words. “Mr. Townsend, I . . .”
“Come on, then!” He felt suddenly irritable, desperate to get away from the woman’s evident distress. “For Christ’s sake, you’re a police officer, do what you have to do.”
Erin took a deep breath and stepped towards him. “Patrick Townsend, I am arresting you on suspicion of the murder of Danielle Abbott. You do not have to say anything—”
“Yes, yes, yes, all right,” he said wearily. “I know, I know all that. God. Women like you, you don’t ever know when to stop talking.” Then he turned to Helen. “But you, darling, you do. You know when to speak and when to be quiet. You tell the truth, my girl.”
She started to cry, and he wanted more than anything to be beside her, in the room upstairs, just one last time, before he was taken away from her. He kissed her forehead then, and before he followed the detective out of the door, bid her goodbye.
• • •
PATRICK HAD NEVER BEEN one for mysticism, for gut feelings or hunches, but if he was honest, he’d felt this coming: the reckoning. The endgame. He’d felt it long before they’d dragged Nel Abbott’s cold corpse out of the water, only he’d dismissed it as a symptom of age. His mind had been playing a lot of tricks lately, boosting the colour and the sound in his old memories, blurring the edges of his new ones. He knew it was the start of it, the long goodbye, that he would be eaten from the inside out, core to husk. He could be grateful, at least, that he still had time to tie up the loose ends, to seize control. It was, he realized now, the only way to salvage something of the life they’d built, though he knew that not everyone could be spared.
When they sat him in the interview room at Beckford station, he thought at first that the humiliation was more than he could bear, but bear it he did. What made it easier, he found, was the surprising sensation of relief. He wanted to tell his story. If it was going to come out, then he should be the one to tell it, while he still had time, while his mind was still his own. More than just relief, there was pride. All his life, there had been a part of him that had wanted to tell what had happened the night Lauren died, but he hadn’t been able to. He had held back, out of love for his son.
He spoke in short, simple sentences. He was very clear. He expressed his intention to make a full confession to the murders of Lauren Slater in 1983 and Danielle Abbott in 2015.
Lauren was easier, of course. It was a straightforward tale. They had argued at the house. She had attacked him, and he had defended himself, and in the course of that defence she had been seriously wounded, too grievously to save. So, in an effort to spare his son the truth, and—he admitted—to spare himself a prison sentence, he drove her to the river, carried her body to the top of the cliff, and threw her, lifeless now, into the water.
DS Morgan listened politely, but she stopped him there. “Was your son with you at this time, Mr. Townsend?” she asked.
“He didn’t see anything,” Patrick replied. “He was too little and too frightened to understand what was happening. He didn’t see his mother get hurt, and he didn’t see her fall.”
“He didn’t watch you throw her from the cliff?”
It took every ounce of his strength not to leap across the table and smack her. “He didn’t see anything. I had to put him in the car because I couldn’t leave a six-year-old alone in the house during a thunderstorm. If you had children, you would understand that. He didn’t see anything. He was confused, and so I told him . . . a version of the truth that would make sense to him. That he could make sense of.”
“A version of the truth?”
“I told him a story—that’s what you do with children, with things they won’t be able to understand. I told him a story he could live with, one which would make his life liveable. Don’t you see that?” Try as he might, he couldn’t stop his voice from rising. “I wasn’t going to leave him alone, was I? His mother was gone, and if I went to prison, what would have happened to him then? What sort of life would he have had? He would have been put in care. I’ve seen what happens to kids who grow up in care, there’s not one of them who doesn’t come out damaged and perverted. I have protected him,” Patrick said, pride swelling his chest, “all his life.”
The story of Nel Abbott was, inevitably, less easy to recount. When he discovered that she had been speaking to Nickie Sage and taking her allegations about Lauren seriously, he became concerned. Not that she would go to the police, no. She wasn’t interested in justice or anything like that, she was only interested in sensationalizing her worthless art. What concerned him was that she might say something upsetting to Sean. Once again, he was protecting his son. “It’s what fathers do,” he pointed out. “Though you might not be aware of that. I’m told yours was a boozer.” He smiled at Erin Morgan, watching her flinch as that punch landed. “I’m told he had a temper.”
He said that he arranged to meet Nel Abbott late one evening to speak about the allegations.
“And she went to meet you at the cliff?” DS Morgan was incredulous.
Patrick smiled. “You never met her. You have no idea of the extent of her vanity, her self-importance. All I had to do was suggest to her that I would take her through exactly what happened between Lauren and me. I would show her how the terrible events of that night unfolded right there, on the spot where they took place. I would tell her the story as it had never been told before; she would be the first to hear it. Then, once I had her up there, it was easy. She’d been drinking, she was unsteady on her feet.”
“And the bracelet?”
Patrick shifted in his seat and forced himself to look DS Morgan directly in the eye. “There was a bit of a struggle, and I grabbed her arm as she was trying to pull away from me. Her bracelet came off her wrist.”
“You ripped it off—that’s what you told me earlier, isn’t it?” She looked down at her notes. “You ‘ripped it off that whore’s wrist’?”
Patrick nodded. “Yes. I was angry, I’ll admit. I was angry that she had been carrying on with my son, threatening his marriage. She seduced him. Even the strongest and most moral of men can find themselves in thrall to a woman who offers herself in that way.”
“In what way?”
Patrick ground his teeth. “Offering a sort of sexual abandon he might not find at home. It’s sad, I know. It happens. I was angry about it. My son’s marriage is very strong.” Patrick saw DS Morgan’s eyebrows shoot up, and again he had to steel himself. “I was angry about that. I ripped the bracelet from her wrist. I pushed her.”
PART FOUR
September
LENA
I thought I wouldn’t want to leave, but I can’t look at the river every day, cross it on my way to school. I don’t even want to swim in it anymore. It’s too cold now, in any case. We’re going to London tomorrow, I’m almost all packed.
The house will be rented out. I didn’t want that. I didn’t want people living in our rooms and filling up our spaces, but Jules said that if we didn’t we might get squatters, or things might start to fall apart and there would be no one there to pick up the pieces, and I didn’t like that idea either. So I agreed.
It’ll still be mine. Mum left it to me, so when I’m eighteen (or twenty-one, or something like that) it’ll be mine properly. And I will live here again. I know I will. I’ll come back when it doesn’t hurt so much and I don’t see her everywhere I look.
I’m scared about going to London, but I feel better about it than I did. Jules (not Julia) is really odd, she’s always going to be odd, she’s fucked up. But I’m a bit weird and fucked up, too, so maybe we’ll be fine. There are things I like about her. She cooks and fusses around me, she tells me off for smoking, she makes me tell her where I’m going and when I’ll be back. Like other people’s mums do.
In any case, I’m glad it’ll just be the two of us, no husband and I’m guessing no boyfriends or anything like that, and at least when I go to my new school no one will know who I am or anything about me. You can remake yourself, Jules said, which I thought was a bit off because, like, what’s wrong with me? But I know what she meant. I cut all my hair off and I look different now, and when I go to the new school in London, I won’t be the pretty girl that no one likes, I’ll just be ordinary.
JOSH
Lena came over to say goodbye. She’s cut all her hair off. She’s still pretty, but not as pretty as she used to be. I said I liked it more when it was longer, and she laughed and said it’ll grow back. She said it’ll be long again next time you see me, and that made me feel better because at least she thinks we’ll see each other again, which I wasn’t sure about, because she’ll be in London now and we’re going to Devon, which is not exactly close by. But she said it wasn’t that far, only five hours or something, and in a few years she would have her driver’s licence and she’d come and get me and see what trouble we could get into.