“Seven! Six!”
There’s a dull clunk of something heavy from the landing.
Laura moves the gun. Points it directly at me. Her finger tightens on the trigger. Behind me, Mum is crying. The wind whistles across the balcony.
“Five! Four! Three!” The cheers from next door grow louder. Around us, more fireworks, more cheers, more music.
“Don’t shoot!” I scream it as loudly as I can.
The sound is extraordinary. A thousand decibels. More. The door off its hinges, crashing to the floor, and a hundred armed police running over it. Noise—so much noise—from them and from us and—
“Drop the weapon!”
Laura backs toward the corner of the room, the gun still in her hand. My mother’s feet graze the broken glass at the edge of the balcony. The hem of her dress flutters.
And then she goes.
I scream—on and on until I don’t know if it’s only in my head or if everyone else can hear it, too. Her dress billows like a failed parachute and she spins over and over, plummeting downward. Fireworks explode overhead, filling the sky with gold and silver rain.
A police officer, by my side. Mouthing words I can’t hear, a face full of concern. Wrapping a blanket around me. Around Ella. He puts a hand on my back and guides me inside, not letting me check my pace as we walk through the apartment and out to the landing, even though I can see Laura lying on the ground; a police officer kneeling beside her. I don’t know if she’s dead or alive, and I don’t know if I care.
In the ambulance, I can’t stop shaking. The paramedic is cheerful and efficient, with blonde hair in two thick plaits over her shoulders. She puts a shot in my arm that, seconds later, makes me feel as though I’ve drunk a bottle of wine.
“I’m breastfeeding,” I say, too late.
“You’re no good to her if you’re having a panic attack. Better she’s a bit sleepy than hyper on secondhand adrenaline.”
There’s a clunk as the back door of the ambulance opens. I think I recognize the police officer with the blanket, but the drugs have made me woozy and everyone in uniform looks the same.
“Visitors,” he says, and steps to one side.
“They wouldn’t let us past the police tape.” Mark clambers into the ambulance and half sits, half falls onto the bed next to me. “No one would tell me what was going on. I was so scared you were . . .” He breaks off before his voice lets him down, and instead wraps his arms around Ella and me. She’s asleep, and I wonder again what babies dream of, and if she’ll ever have nightmares about what happened tonight.
“Been in the wars, Annie?” Billy tries for a smile but fails. Worry is etched on his face.
“Laura . . . ,” I start, but my head feels too heavy; my tongue too big for my mouth.
“I’ve given her something for the shock,” I hear the paramedic say. “She’ll be feeling a bit groggy for a while.”
“We know,” Billy says to me. “When Mark canceled the party, he told me what had happened. About Caroline’s cousin and her violent ex. It didn’t sit right with me. Caroline never mentioned a cousin Angela, and then there was the Shogun Laura had borrowed . . .”
Just hours ago, I was lying across Ella’s car seat. Keeping out of sight, terrified I’d be seen. It’s as though I’m recalling a film, or a story that happened to someone else. I can’t recapture the fear I felt, and I wonder if it’s just the drugs making it feel unreal. I hope it isn’t.
“I picked up Billy and we got here as quickly as we could.”
There’s something different between them—no more tension; no more verbal rutting—but I’m too tired to analyze it, and now the paramedics are gently ushering them both outside, and laying me down on the bed, and strapping down Ella, too. I close my eyes. Give in to sleep.
It’s all over.
CHAPTER
SIXTY-NINE
MURRAY
Sarah’s eyes were closed, her face as peaceful as though she were sleeping. Her hand felt heavy and cold, and Murray gently rubbed his thumb against her papery skin. His tears fell unashamedly onto the white hospital blanket, forming dark spots like the onset of a summer shower.
There were four beds in this section of the ward, all but Sarah’s unoccupied. A nurse hovered discreetly in the corridor, giving him solitude at this most private of moments. Seeing him look up, she came to his side.
“Take as much time as you need.”
Murray stroked Sarah’s hair. Time. That most precious commodity. How much time had he and Sarah spent together? How many days? How many hours, minutes?
Not enough. It could never be enough.
“You can talk to her. If you like.”
“Can she hear me?” He watched the gentle rise and fall of Sarah’s chest.
“Jury’s still out on that one.” The nurse was in her forties, with soft dark eyes and a voice filled with compassion.
Murray followed the tubes and wires that snaked across his wife’s body, to the myriad of machines keeping her alive, to the IV drip with its soothing morphine.
They would increase the dose, the consultant had explained. When it was time.
The ambulance had taken only minutes, but they were minutes too long. In the days that had followed—in the blur of nurses and consultants and machinery and paperwork—Murray had made himself relive those minutes as though he had been there. As though this had happened to him.
There had been an upturned chair in the kitchen; a broken glass where Sarah had fallen by the sink. The phone, beside her on the tiles. Murray forced the images through, one after another, each one like a blade dragged against his skin.
Nish had begged him to stop. She’d arrived with something foil wrapped, still hot from the oven, and caught Murray in the brief space between hospital visits. She had listened to Murray tell her what no one knew for certain had happened; then she had put her hands around his and cried with him. “Why are you torturing yourself like this?”
“Because I wasn’t there,” Murray had said simply.
Nish’s tears left tracks down her cheeks. “You couldn’t have prevented this.”
Cerebral aneurysm, the doctor had said.
Coma.
Hope for the best. Prepare for the worst.
Then: I’m sorry. There’s nothing more we can do.
She wouldn’t feel anything, they had insisted. It was the right thing to do. It was the only thing to do.
* * *
• • •
Murray opened his mouth, but nothing came out. There was a pain in his chest and he knew his heart was breaking. He looked at the nurse. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Say anything. Talk about the weather. Tell her what you had for breakfast. Have a moan about work.” She put a hand on Murray’s shoulder, squeezed gently, then took it away. “Say whatever’s in your head.”
She moved away to the corner farthest from where Murray sat with Sarah and began folding blankets and tidying the contents of the metal cupboard beside the empty bed.
Murray looked at his wife. He ran a single finger over her forehead—its worried furrows now smoothed flat—and along the bridge of her nose. He skirted the plastic mask that held the tube in Sarah’s throat, and stroked instead her cheek, her neck. He traced the curve of her ear.
Say whatever’s in your head.
Behind him, the steady burr of machines continued, rhythmic sounds that formed the language of the ICU.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t there . . . ,” he began, but the words were sobs and his eyes were streaming and he could no longer see. How much time had they had together? How much time would they have had left, if this hadn’t happened? Murray pictured Sarah on their wedding day, in the dark green dress she had picked in lieu of white. He remembered her joy when they bought their house. He held Sarah’s limp fingers and saw instead the nails filled with dir
t; her face not pale against a hospital pillow, but flushed from a morning’s gardening.
It hadn’t been enough, but the time they had spent together meant the world to him.
It had been his world.
Their world.
Murray cleared his throat. He looked across at the nurse. “I’m ready.”
There was a pause. Murray half hoped she’d say not yet—in an hour or so, perhaps, yet at the same time he knew he couldn’t bear it if she did. More time wouldn’t make this any easier.
She nodded. “I’ll get Dr. Christie.”
There was no more talking. They removed the tube from Sarah’s throat as gently as if she had been made of glass; pushed away the wheeled machines that had been keeping the beat of a heart too weak to do so alone. They promised to be right outside, in the corridor, in case they were needed. That he mustn’t feel afraid; he mustn’t feel alone.
And then they left him.
And Murray rested his head on the pillow beside the woman he had loved for half his life. He watched her chest rise and fall with a movement so slight he could barely see it.
Until it wasn’t there at all.
CHAPTER
SEVENTY
ANNA
“Anna! Over here!”
“How do you feel about your mother’s death?”
Mark puts a hand in the small of my back and steers me across the street, all the while talking to me in a low voice. “Don’t make eye contact . . . keep looking forward . . . nearly there . . .” We reach the sidewalk and he takes back his hand to tip the pram wheels up and over the curb.
“Mr. Hemmings—what first attracted you to the millionairess Anna Johnson?”
There is a ripple of laughter.
Mark takes a key from his pocket and unlocks the gates. Someone has tied a cellophane-wrapped bunch of flowers to the bars. For Dad? My mother? For me? As Mark slides the gates open—just wide enough for me to push the pram through—a man from the Sun steps in front of us. I know he’s from the Sun because he has told me so, every day for the last seven days, and because he has a dog-eared identity card dangling from the zip of his fleece, as though this hint of professionalism could negate the daily harassment.
“You’re on private property,” Mark says.
The journalist looks down. One scuffed brown boot is half on the sidewalk, half on the gravel that covers our driveway. He moves it. Less than an inch, but he is no longer trespassing. He thrusts an iPhone in my face.
“Just a quick quote, Anna, then all this will go away.” Behind him stands his sidekick. Two cameras lie like machine guns across the older man’s body, the sagging pockets of his parka stuffed with lenses, flashes, batteries.
“Leave me alone.”
It’s a mistake. Instantly there’s a rustle of notebooks, another phone. The small crowd of hacks surges forward, taking my broken silence as invitation.
“It’s a chance to put your side of the story forward.”
“Anna! This way!”
“What was your mother like growing up, Anna? Was she violent toward you?” This last with a raised voice, and now they’re all shouting. All trying to be heard; all desperate for the scoop.
Robert’s front door opens, and he comes down the steps in a pair of leather slippers. He nods briefly to us, but his eyes are fixed on the reporters. “Why don’t you just fuck off?”
“Why don’t you fuck off?”
“Who is he, anyway?”
“Nobody.”
It’s enough of a distraction. I shoot Robert a grateful look, feel Mark’s hand on my back again, pushing me forward. The pram wheels crunch on gravel, and then Mark’s pulling the gates closed, turning the key. There are two, three, four flashes.
More photos.
More photos of me looking pale and anxious; more photos of Ella’s pram with a privacy blanket clipped to the hood. More photos of Mark, grimly escorting us in and out of the drive when necessity demands that we leave the safety of the house.
Only the local paper still has us on the front page (the nationals have already relegated us to page five), with a photograph taken through the railings, as though we were the ones behind bars.
Inside, Mark makes coffee.
They wanted us to stay somewhere else.
“Just for a few days,” Detective Sergeant Kennedy said.
I had just finished giving my statement, the result of almost eight hours in a windowless room with a female detective who looked like she’d rather be anywhere but there. She wasn’t the only one.
Back home, the kitchen—the scene of my dad’s murder—had been cordoned off, white-suited forensic officers swabbing every inch of it.
“It’s my house,” I said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
They found traces of Dad’s blood in the grout between the tiles, despite the bleach poured on the floor by Laura and Mum. Blood beneath my feet, for all those months. I feel like I should have seen; should have known.
It was three days before we were allowed full use of the kitchen again; another twenty-four hours before they finished in the garden. Mark has pulled the curtains across the glass doors from the kitchen, so I can’t see the piles of earth that now pass for our lawn, and closed the shutters at the front of the house, to avoid the telescopic lenses of the headline hunters in the road.
“There aren’t as many today,” he says now. “They’ll be gone by the end of the week.”
“They’ll be back for the trial.”
“Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it.” He hands me a steaming mug of coffee, and we sit at the table. I’ve moved things around; repositioned the table and switched the two armchairs. Small changes that I hope—in time—will stop me remembering; stop me picturing what happened here.
Mark sifts through the post, leaving most of it unopened and putting it in a pile for the recycling, along with the notes from reporters that litter the driveway until Mark picks them up.
Cash waiting in exchange for exclusive rights to your story.
There have been offers from publishers and literary agents. Approaches from film companies and reality TV shows. Sympathy cards, funeral leaflets, cards from Eastbourne residents shocked to discover that Caroline Johnson—campaigner, fund-raiser, committee member—had murdered her husband.
They all go in the trash.
“It’ll die down soon.”
“I know.” The hacks will move on to the next juicy story, and one day I’ll be able to walk through Eastbourne without people whispering to their friends. That’s her—the Johnson daughter.
One day.
Mark clears his throat. “I need to tell you something.”
I see his face and my stomach lurches, a lift dropping to the ground floor without buttons pressed for pause. I cannot take any more announcements, any more surprises. I would like to live the rest of my life knowing exactly what is happening each hour, each day.
“When the police asked about the appointment Caroline made with me . . .” He stares into his coffee; falls silent for a while.
I say nothing, my heartbeat a drumroll in my ears.
“I lied.”
I feel that shift again, the ground beneath me cracking, splitting, moving. Life, changing with a single word.
A single lie.
“I never met your mother.” He looks up, his eyes searching mine. “But I did speak to her.”
I swallow, hard.
“I didn’t make the connection, not until after your first session with me. I looked through my datebook and there it was: your mother’s name. And I remembered her phone call; remembered her telling me her husband had died, and that she needed help working through it. Only, she never showed up, and it didn’t enter my head again until that moment.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Mark
lets out a breath as if he’s just run a marathon. “Patient confidentiality?” There’s a question mark in his voice, as though he knows it sounds absurd. “And because I didn’t want you to leave.”
“Why not?” I say, although I already know the answer.
He takes my hand and rubs his thumb across the inside of my wrist. Beneath his gentle pressure the skin pales, blue-green veins just visible, like the tributaries of a river. “Because I was already falling in love with you.”
He leans forward, and I do the same. We meet in the middle, awkwardly bent across the corner of the kitchen table. I close my eyes and feel the softness of his lips, the warmth of his breath on me.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers.
“It doesn’t matter.”
I understand why he did it. He’s right: I would have gone somewhere else. It would have felt too strange to unburden myself to a man my mother had chosen for her own confessions. And if I’d gone elsewhere, Ella would never have been born.
“No more secrets, though.”
“No more secrets,” Mark says. “A fresh start.” He hesitates, and I think for a second there’s something else he wants to get off his chest, but instead he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a small, velvet-covered box.
He holds my gaze as he slips off his chair and onto one knee.
CHAPTER
SEVENTY-ONE
MURRAY
“One more, please.”
It was an awkward pose for the camera, standing side by side with their hands midshake and Murray’s framed commendation held between them.
“All done.”
The photographer finished, the chief constable shook Murray’s hand again and smiled with genuine warmth. “Celebrating tonight?”
“Just a few friends, ma’am.”
“You deserve it. Good work, Murray.”
The chief stepped to one side and allowed Murray a moment in the limelight. There were no speeches, but Murray put his shoulders back and held his commendation in front of him, and as the chief began to clap, the room filled with applause. A few tables back, Nish gave him a double thumbs-up, a beam on her face, before resuming her wild clapping. From near the door, someone cheered. Even dour John from the front counter at Lower Meads was applauding.