‘I know something about what happened to Dad,’ she says.
I am silent, terrified suddenly. What she is about to say will change how I feel about her, I know it will. It will damage us all over again and I don’t want that. I almost ask her not to tell me. I don’t want anything else to batter our family.
‘I didn’t tell the police about it because I was too scared.’
‘Tell me,’ I say to her.
She shakes her head, breathless sobs falling from her lips. ‘Please don’t be cross with me. Please don’t shout at me. Please don’t hate me.’
‘I won’t,’ I reply. ‘Whatever it is, just tell me, Phoebe.’
And she does.
‘Are you going to tell the police?’ she asks afterwards.
‘I think I have to,’ I say. My mouth is dry, my mind is racing to so many different places and thoughts and decisions all at once, I can’t keep up. I can’t hold a single thought in my head for too long because another dashes into its place. Air keeps snagging itself on the way in and out of my lungs so I haven’t taken a proper breath since my daughter started to speak, and my heart is running cold with the knowledge of who it was that killed my husband. And why.
I have to tell the police this, of course I do.
‘Please don’t, Mum.’
‘But, Phoebe—’
‘Please don’t, Mum. Please. Please. Please.’ Her twelve-year-old body, nestled on my lap, shakes with fretful sobs. ‘Please. Please. Please. I’m scared. I’m really scared.’
‘Phoebe, we can’t—’
‘Please, Mum. I’m really sorry, but please, don’t.’
‘Shhh, shhhhh,’ I say, rocking her, trying to hush her. This isn’t fair. None of this is fair. ‘Let’s not talk about it now. It’ll be OK, I’ll make it all OK.’
10 weeks after That Day (January, 2012)
‘Do you know if your husband ever used prostitutes?’
I stare at the he one who is my FLO for long, uncertain seconds, then rise from my seat and go to shut the living room door. The children don’t need to hear this. No one needs to hear this, but certainly not Phoebe and Zane.
‘No, he didn’t,’ I reply. I stand behind the door, needing the solidity of the wood to keep me upright. My body is simultaneously hot and cold, I’m trembling. What is he about to tell me? Is he going to take Joel away from me all over again?
The FLO sits back in his seat, looks uncomfortable. He lowers his voice, makes it soothing and caring. ‘It’s just there were long blonde hairs found on his clothing from the time of his death, but no way of knowing who they belong to because they didn’t have the bulb at the end with the DNA.’ His tone doesn’t fit with what he is saying – he sounds concerned while he is being accusatory.
‘Why immediately assume prostitutes? Why not an affair or a female friend or colleague, why straight to a prostitute? Why would you try and hurt me like that?’
‘I’m sorry if this has upset you, but we do have to follow all lines of enquiry.’
‘He’d had sex just before he’d died, then?’ I ask. The cold-hot-cold feeling siphons itself from my heart to my feet, from my feet to my head and back to my heart.
‘No.’
‘You found out that he’d likely kissed someone?’
‘No.’
‘Someone had gone down on him?’ I am desperate to understand why this man would say this to me if there was nothing more than blonde hairs on his clothing.
‘No.’
‘He’d had a shower right before he died, meaning he was maybe trying to hide something?’
‘No.’
I am suddenly aware of every muscle in my body, I am aware of them tensing, contracting, adrenalin pumping through like drivers on a Formula One circuit.
I say nothing, so he does: ‘You just mentioned an affair, do you think your husband might have been seeing someone else?’
‘No. I was just … You know what I meant. And, anyway, wouldn’t his phone records tell you if he was calling one number more than any other?’
‘Men who have affairs or have some other kind of secret life involving drugs, prostitutes, gangs and the like often have more than one phone.’
‘Do they? I wouldn’t know.’
‘It wouldn’t be entirely surprising if you had no idea what your husband was up to. We thought we’d ask in case …’
‘You’re not searching my house for another phone,’ I state.
‘Mrs Mack-el-roy—’
‘Like I said, wouldn’t you have found something else – known prostitutes who recognised him, secret bank accounts, maybe drug dealers who … you’ve talked to all those types of people and no one has even vaguely recognised him, have they?’
The FLO says nothing because he doesn’t want to say no again, because for some reason I’m the one now conducting the interrogation. We stare at each other across the room – me the sudden investigator, he the potential criminal.
In the seconds that slide by in silence, I know with a clear certainty I haven’t had since this all began that I can’t tell them what Phoebe told me. She’s right to panic about them not understanding. They will twist it, they will sully Joel’s name. Not even intentionally, they’ll simply want to ‘cover all angles’, not realising what that is doing to the people who loved him in the process. Phoebe won’t be able to cope, either. Not if they’re like this with her. Not if they start asking questions that imply Joel was someone other than who he was. I can’t protect her if they’ll say things like this to her.
‘Please don’t come back here again,’ I say, even-tempered despite the adrenalin that is fluttering rapidly and fiercely in my chest. ‘I can’t answer your questions because you’re not taking this seriously.’
‘We are taking this very seriously,’ he protests.
‘All right, let me put it this way: my husband didn’t take drugs – he tried them once in his late teens and hated it. He didn’t go with prostitutes or go to lap-dancing clubs no matter what his mates did because he had a brain of his own and he hated those places. He drank too much occasionally but no more than anyone else. He didn’t gamble. He didn’t sleep around. He wasn’t part of a gang. He got one parking ticket in his whole life. He paid his bills, he paid his tax, he visited his parents at least once a month, he visited his elderly aunt the same amount. He occasionally gave other people the wrong impression because he was so friendly he didn’t realise they thought he was flirting. Those are all the things I can tell you.
‘Don’t come back here. If you do come back here, I will not let you in nor speak to you.’ I stand aside and open the living room door. ‘Please leave now.’
‘Mrs Mack-el-roy, I’m you’re FLO, I’m here for you. I’m sorry this is so upsetting, but all we want to do is get to the truth.’
‘It’s Mack-le-roy. And go now, please, just go away and leave us alone.’
IX
The letter sits on my kitchen table, placid and deadly.
I inhale as much as I can and my body moves. I am no longer frozen as I relive the past, I am in the present and I can move.
I take a step back. I take another step back. And another step. And another. Until I step back and I am on the other side of the room. I have the solidity of a wall behind me. I have the ability to press my body against it, the coolness of the painted plaster, a welcoming, shocking reminder that I am back in the present. I let myself go, slide to the ground and stare at the letter.
If I touch that letter again, if I read any more of those words, I’ll end up back there, I’ll end up re-experiencing the moments of what it was like to be her again.
Right now, I am the woman whose husband was murdered, the woman who the world thinks is successfully ‘moving on’ and ‘coping’. If I read the letter, even touch it again, I will be her all over again. I will be the woman stuck in the loop of dropping a bowl of blackberries and being told her life is over again and again and again.
Tuesday, 16 April
(F
or Wednesday, 17th)
Dear Saffron.
I’m not sure how to start this letter because I think you probably know who I am even though we have never met. I feel like I know you, too. I knew your husband, Joel. He was my friend. That’s why this next thing I’m going to say may shock you, and I hope you’re sitting down as you read this.
I need you to know I didn’t murder him.
It really wasn’t like that.
Murder means you plan something, but I didn’t plan it. It happened. It was fast and it was immediate and it was deeply shocking for both of us. He was my friend so I felt the pain too, when he was hurt.
I’m telling you this now, eighteen months later, because it has stayed with me. What happened is in my thoughts every day and I want to share it with the one person I thought might understand? Also, I think it is only fair for you to know how it really was, not how they described it on the news and not in the way the police probably told you. It wasn’t a callous, malicious act. It was nothing like that. I did not want him to suffer and no one can feel as traumatised as I was when I had to leave him on the side of the road. I did not simply dump him there, like they said on the news and in the papers, I had no choice but to leave him. Even he understood that. I don’t think he’d hate me for it if he had lived.
It’s a sad truth that you’ve probably had letters like this before, that people claiming to have killed him will have contacted you and said all these terrible things. How are you supposed to know if this is another letter like that or if this is genuine? I can assure that I am 100 per cent the real deal.
No one ever mentioned this in the papers or on the news, not even in the coroner’s court but he died with his phone near him. Not beside him, it was out of reach. And it had an unsent text message to you that read: Love you xxxxx
I think he was trying to get it to you but didn’t manage to send it before he died. I hope you realise this is a genuine communication from someone who was there.
I’m writing this letter because I hope it will be of some comfort to you. I hope now you know it wasn’t how it sounded – it wasn’t a viciously planned murder, it was a sad misunderstanding between two friends.
We were very close friends, we cared for each other, deeply. I am only sorry it ended so tragically.
Please take care of your beautiful children. Life is short and precious, and we should cherish every moment we have with the people we love whenever we can.
Kind regards
A
IV
X
The Mr Bromsgrove is sitting today.
He stands when we enter and shakes my hand, firmly, formally, almost as though he hasn’t met me before. As I take my hand away, I admit to myself that this is another of those situations where I don’t know how to be, how to act.
‘Be yourself,’ Joel would say to me if I was stressed about something.
That’s easy, if you know who you are, I’d silently reply.
‘And who you are is amazing,’ he’d add because sometimes, just sometimes, Joel could read my mind. He could look at me and know what he had to say to make me believe in myself.
Be yourself.
Who am I in this moment? Oh yes, a widow with a knocked-up teenager; one of those don’t-have-a-clue mothers that are only fit for condemnation.
After our hellos, we all sit in our designated seats. Phoebe is nearer to me this time, not through choice, obviously. She hasn’t spoken this morning. She grunted at me when I asked if she was going to eat anything for breakfast; she gurned at her brother when he asked her if she was going back to school for the rest of the week; she shrugged at Aunty Betty when she asked if Phoebe’s school hairstyle was always afro-puff pigtails. Any meaningful communication had been conducted between her and her mobile. She knew she wasn’t meant to use it at the table and I’d been tempted to take it off her, but decided not to. I needed her onside. If we’re going to work out a way through this, I needed to not alienate her.
Especially since that letter arrived. Mostly unread, but what I have read has told me I need to not alienate Phoebe right now. She, like me, could be in danger.
‘Mrs Mackleroy, it’s good to see you,’ the headteacher says and brings me away from the cream A4 sheets of paper back to the present and his modern, bright office. I glance at the black lettering on the bronze nameplate on his desk, something I didn’t notice the other day. Or maybe I did because his name – Mr Newton – isn’t a surprise to me. I simply didn’t take it in – too busy being shocked, I think.
Mr Newton is lying if he is trying to convince himself, me or anyone else it’s nothing short of a disaster that he’s having this conversation with a parent. I’m sure he’s had this conversation before, but that doesn’t make it any easier. I’ve had the conversation many, many times before about my husband dying, about who might have done it, about why the police investigation never found the killer, but it’s never got any easier. In fact, I search the lined face of the middle-aged-crisis-ridden man in front of me and wonder if, like me, he finds these conversations harder the more he has them.
‘How are you, Phoebe?’ He is tender and compassionate when talking to her, highlighting how clipped and hard-edged his manner is towards me. Why wouldn’t he treat me like that, though, when I am the woman whose daughter was too scared to tell her she was pregnant, who allowed her daughter to get into that condition in the first place? They blame me. Of course they do. And they’ve probably been imagining the horrors I’ve subjected Phoebe to in the intervening hours since leaving here.
My instinct is to tell him that I wouldn’t hurt her. To explain that while I don’t know why she couldn’t tell me herself about this, it’s not because I would hurt her. Even when she’s done something awful in the past I haven’t hurt her.
‘I’m OK,’ Phoebe says, proving that she’s capable of speaking nicely to people.
‘Good, good,’ Mr Newton replies, and manages a not-very-subtle look to The Mr Bromsgrove. Good, good, she didn’t beat her, he’s obviously thinking at his colleague. Or least, nowhere the bruises can be seen. ‘Well, are you able to tell me what decisions you’ve made about Phoebe’s … condition?’ he asks, focused on me again and back to snipping the edges off his words.
I turn my head to Phoebe. ‘Have you made any decisions, Phoebe?’ I ask.
All eyes on her and in response she silently lowers her head and stares at her feet.
‘Understandably, Phoebe hasn’t wanted to discuss much of anything with me since I found out,’ I confess. ‘I think she’s still in a bit of shock, so she’s considering her options. We had a doctor’s appointment on Wednesday, and we’ll probably be having another next week, when hopefully we’ll be in a better position to decide how we proceed.’
The Mr Bromsgrove and Mr Newton both look at me as if I have grown another head or two. I’ve done something wrong, clearly. Possibly I have not taken proper control of the situation and laid down the law about what was going to happen next, maybe I’ve been too hard on her by making a doctor’s appointment, or maybe, just maybe, whatever I do is not going to be right for these two. Maybe, being me, being in this situation is always going to mean I am in the wrong. I used to hear that phrase: ‘A mother’s place is in the wrong’ and smile to myself, understanding the vague sentiment behind it. I never realised that I would be living it at some point, that other people would be rephrasing it to: ‘Saffron Mackleroy’s place is in the wrong’.
A knock on the door accompanies an ‘Ah-he-hem!’ from Mr Newton clearing his throat and we all wonder for a moment if he’s created that sound. Then it comes again: Rat-a-tat-tat!
Mr Newton knits his whole face into a frown as he looks up at the door, bemused at the interruption. ‘Yes?’ he calls.
His secretary, Ms Taylor, opens the door and appears in the doorway, purposely filling the gap with her slender frame. She has the manner of a woman who is trying to hide something outside from those of us in the office.
‘E
rm, Mr Bromsgrove, may I have a quick word with you outside?’ she says, nervously. She keeps moving her body, blocking something from being seen, or, rather, stopping someone from seeing into the room.
Perplexed, The Mr Bromsgrove replies, ‘Not really, Ms Taylor, we’re in the middle of a meet—’
‘Dad!’ A boy’s voice calls out from behind the school secretary when he hears The Mr Bromsgrove speak. ‘Dad, I need to talk to you.’
The Mr Bromsgrove stands, embarrassment pouring off him like sweat off a man who has just run a four-hour marathon on a summer’s day. ‘Curtis?’ he says.
Mr Newton throws himself backwards in his chair, irritation and contempt plain on his once flabby face. I’m surrounded by amateurs, he’s thinking with an unsubtle look of disapproval in my direction.
Resigned, but not a little disgruntled, Ms Taylor steps aside and allows the boy into the inner sanctum. In walks a tall young man, impeccably turned out in his school uniform, a short, neat haircut, his skin a gorgeous hazelnut brown and large, inquisitive eyes. Apart from the lighter shade of his skin and the absence of the gold-rimmed glasses, he is almost a miniature replica of The Mr Bromsgrove, right down to the way he walks and sets his face as his eyes scan the room to see what is going on.
The boy, Curtis, now that he has gained entry, ignores everyone and goes to what he came for: Phoebe. Their eyes lock and horror immediately overtakes her features, settling in her eyes, in the way she holds her body. She shakes her head really fast at him.
‘I’m doing it,’ he says. ‘I don’t care.’
‘No,’ Phoebe replies. ‘No, don’t.’
Anyone would think they were conducting this intimate, short-handed conversation alone.
‘Yes,’ he declares. His voice has broken, but it does not have the slants and nuances of maturity that are added by experiences of the world. He is tall but does not have the height of a fully grown man. He is good-looking, but in a youthful way that will develop with time.