Let Me Lie(107)

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 work alone. They promised to be right outside, in the corridor, if 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.





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 pavement and he takes back his hand to tip the pram wheels up and over the kerb.

‘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 cellophaned 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 negates the daily harassment.

‘You’re on private property,’ Mark says.

The journalist looks down. One scuffed brown boot is half on the pavement, half on the gravel that covers our driveway. He moves it. Only a few inches, 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.

‘A chance to put your side of the story forward.’

‘Anna! This way!’

‘What was your mother like growing up, Anna? Was she violent towards 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 pegged 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.’