The Couple at No. 9(81)

‘You think?’

Her face crumples. ‘Everything is so foggy … my memories. They aren’t always clear.’

‘I know,’ I say gently. ‘I know, Gran.’ Her eyes fill with tears and mine immediately follow suit. ‘It’s okay,’ I say. ‘It’s okay.’

‘It’s not,’ she says, as a tear falls from her eye and snakes down her crinkly cheek. ‘Even after all these years I miss her.’

My heart aches. ‘Miss who, Gran?’

‘I miss her.’

I wonder if she’s talking about Daphne. ‘What happened to her?’ I ask, although I’m not sure I want the answer. What if she confesses to me right now that she killed her and buried her in the garden alongside Neil? What would I do with that information? She’s an old woman now and I love her. I want to protect her. What good could come out of a confession? For the first time since all this began I’m not sure I want to get to the truth. Maybe secrets really are best buried.

‘Did Victor hurt her, Gran?’

She nods, tears on her cheeks. ‘Yes, he did. He’s not a nice man.’

‘I know,’ I say. ‘He doesn’t sound it.’

‘He tricked her,’ she says now.

‘Tricked Daphne?’

She shakes her head. ‘No, no.’

‘He tricked you?’

She looks at me and blinks. Then she reaches out and cups my hair behind my ears. ‘I love you,’ she says.

‘Oh, Gran, I love you too.’

‘And I love Lolly. Don’t let Victor find her,’ she says, closing her eyes again. ‘Keep her safe.’

‘Gran, Victor is an old man now. He won’t hurt her.’

When she opens her eyes I can tell that the Gran I know has gone, replaced by a stranger. ‘Who are you?’ she says, as though the conversation we’ve just had has never taken place.

So I sit patiently and repeat everything I said earlier, hoping she’ll come back to me.

As I’m walking to my car later I receive a phone call from DS Barnes.

They’ve found Glen Davies. He’s been arrested.





44


Rose



Summer 1980


It was getting worse, my fear and paranoia. Every time there was a noise I’d think it was the police at the door, coming to arrest me. Every time I walked into the village I worried people were talking about me, that they somehow knew. An article had appeared in the newspaper about Neil Lewisham’s disappearance, and when I saw his face staring out from the pages I had to walk out of the shop, panic engulfing me. I wasn’t coping well, mentally, with the fact I had killed a man. Even if I tried to convince myself I had done it for good reason.

Daphne was amazing. Over the next few months she became my rock. She had some paving slabs delivered from a local stonemason and told me she was going to ‘make over’ the garden. But I knew what she was really doing. She was lengthening the patio so that it covered the area where Neil’s body was buried. So that I no longer had to look at the patch in the grass that didn’t match the rest of the lawn.

‘Where did you learn how to do all this stuff?’ I asked one day, when she came into the kitchen after laying the slabs, a smudge of dirt on her cheek.

She glanced around to make sure you weren’t in earshot. ‘I learnt a lot in prison,’ she said, her cheeks reddening, and she looked vulnerable then. ‘I was there for a long time.’

‘Oh, Daphne.’

I tried to remain strong, for her and for you.

But the nightmares continued and I would wake up during the night covered in a film of sweat. Neil’s face morphed into Victor’s and I was convinced he would find us. After all, Neil had.

I still hadn’t told Daphne about Victor, but the deeper in love we fell, the harder it was not to talk about my past. Not that she ever asked, or pushed. She didn’t talk about her time as Jean either. It was as though we both just wanted to live in the here and now. As though we didn’t exist before we found each other.

‘You must stop torturing yourself over Neil,’ said Daphne, on the many occasions when I had gone to her, shaking and crying, guilt and fear taking me over. She’d pull me into her arms and kiss me and reassure me that it would all be okay. ‘Nobody will ever know,’ she said, but that just made me feel worse. Out of control and vulnerable.

It puzzled me how Daphne didn’t seem to worry about Neil and the fact his rotting remains were buried in our garden. His disappearance had made the papers, after all. He had been married with a young son. The guilt of that ate away at me. Even with the new paving slabs I hated going out there, and every time I did, the memories of that night flooded back. It was hard, especially during that hot summer as you wanted to be in the garden all the time. ‘I’ll go with her,’ Daphne would say, touching my arm gently. And I’d watch, like a prisoner, from the kitchen window as she sat with you as you dug your little spade into the soil and made a small rockery, trying not to wince that the body of the man I had killed lay less than twenty feet away. At night I’d dream of going downstairs and seeing the paving slabs taken up to reveal the hole in the ground, empty, his body gone. Other times I worried that we hadn’t dug deep enough and something, a neighbouring dog or fox, might accidentally dig it up, exposing the corpse. Or that he was still alive, he’d survived the stabbing and was intent on revenge, still wearing his bloodstained T-shirt.