Let Me Lie(15)

‘Shall we start again?’ Mark suggested. ‘Last night was fantastic, but … maybe we could have another first date. Get to know each other.’

It was another five weeks before we went to bed again. I didn’t know it then, but I was already pregnant.

‘Should I take it to the papers?’ I ask Laura now.

‘You might be jumping ahead a bit.’ She winces at her poor turn of phrase. ‘Sorry.’

‘They wrote an article when Mum died. They might do a follow-up. Appeal for information.’ I picture the card.

Suicide? Think again.

‘No one came forward at the time, but if Mum was with someone that day – someone who pushed her off the cliff – they must have come across other people.’

‘Anna, the chaplain saw your mum.’

I fall silent.

‘He talked her back from the edge. She said she wanted to kill herself.’

I want to put my fingers in my ears. La la la la la. ‘He wasn’t there when she actually went over, though, was he? He didn’t see if she was alone when she came back.’

There’s a pause before Laura speaks. ‘So, Caroline’s on Beachy Head. She’s ready to jump. The chaplain talks her down, then, an hour later, someone murders her?’

She doesn’t have to point out how absurd it sounds.

‘She could have been trying to get away from someone. Thought that killing herself was better than being killed. Only she couldn’t go through with it, and when the chaplain thought he was taking her to safety he was actually delivering her to …’ I tail off, the pity in Laura’s eyes too much to take.

‘To who?’

Ella’s awake. She’s making tiny mewing sounds and pushing her bunched fist into her mouth.

‘Who killed her, Anna? Who would have wanted Caroline dead?’

I chew my bottom lip. ‘I don’t know – one of those idiots who blame everyone else when their car breaks down?’

‘Like the idiots who sent the anonymous letters after your dad died?’

‘Exactly!’ I’m triumphant, thinking she’s proved my point, then I see her face and somehow, it’s me who’s proved hers. The mews become full-blown wails. I take Ella from her bouncy chair and start to feed her.

‘Look at you – quite the pro now.’ Laura smiles.

In the early days, I could only breastfeed in one particular chair, with a precise arrangement of cushions around me, and no one else in the room to distract Ella from latching on. Nowadays I feed one-handed. Standing up, if I need to.

I don’t let Laura change the subject. Her question is an important one. Who would have wanted Mum dead? Some of the car dealers my parents and Billy crossed paths with made no attempts to hide their shady practices. Could Mum and Dad’s deaths have been the result of a bad business deal?

‘Will you help me go through Mum and Dad’s study?’

‘Now?’

‘Is it a problem? Do you need to go?’ If Laura can’t help, I’ll do it on my own. I’m wondering if Mum’s campaigning is the key. When I was in my teens she got involved in protests against animal testing at the University of Brighton, earning herself a smattering of hate mail from employees and their families as a result. I don’t recall her campaigning against anything more contentious than planning applications and cycle lanes in recent years, but maybe I’ll find something in the study that suggests otherwise.

‘I don’t mean that – I just meant … are you sure you want to do it now?’

‘Laura, you’ve spent the best part of a year nagging me to do it!’

‘Only because it’s ludicrous to have been working at the kitchen table when you could have been using that lovely study. And I wasn’t nagging. Although I do think it would have been cathartic, whatever Mark said.’

I keep my response light. ‘He does do this sort of thing for a living, you know.’

‘What’s healthy about shutting everything away and pretending it isn’t there?’

‘He didn’t tell me to pretend it wasn’t there, just that I should deal with it when I felt ready.’

‘When he said you were ready?’

‘No. When I felt ready.’ Firmer now. I know Laura’s loyalties – like Uncle Billy’s – lie with me, first and foremost, but I wish they were less protective.

It was too fast, that was the problem. Mark and I haven’t even been together a year, and our baby is eight weeks old. We’re still finding out each other’s favourite foods, movies, books. I’ve only met his mother twice. We’re like teenagers, caught out the first time they have sex, except that I’m twenty-six and Mark’s forty.

That’s part of it, too.

‘He’s old enough to be your father,’ Billy said when I’d got all the announcements over in one go. I’ve met someone, he’s moving in with me, oh and by the way our baby’s due in October.

‘Barely. And Dad was ten years older than Mum.’

‘And look how that turned out.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

But he wouldn’t be drawn, and I was secretly glad. I didn’t want to know. I’d never wanted to know. When you’re young you think your parents are perfect. Perhaps they shout at you a bit too often, or withhold pocket money till your room’s been tidied, but they’re your parents. They love you. You love them.