The Wife Before Me(41)
Billy’s house was about six hundred metres away and he was already on the road, his torch splaying over the darkness. ‘We should check the side roads in case he wandered off-track,’ he said. His expression was hidden beyond the beam of his torch but Amelia heard his trepidation. The network of narrow roads and lanes around Kilfarran all looked the same with their dense hedgerows and overhanging trees, but John knew this labyrinth like the back of his hand.
‘No, he didn’t.’ She shook her head. ‘He could walk home blindfolded from the Inn.’ Her dread increased when Billy nodded in agreement. She ran to the edge of the grass and shone a light on the stagnant leaves clogging the water. She staggered and cried out, terrified she would topple into the ditch.
‘The guards should be here soon.’ Billy put a steadying arm round her waist. ‘You check this side of the road and I’ll check the other.’
A squad car arrived shortly afterwards but it was Billy who found him. Billy who held Amelia back when she, forgetting her fear of water, tried to clamber into the ditch to hold her father in her arms. Billy whose wide, soft shoulders absorbed her cries when the police cordoned off the ditch and erected a white tent around her father’s body.
She was still being comforted by him when Nicholas arrived. Unable to drive past the police cordon, he abandoned his car and ran towards her. His arms were strong enough to lower her gently to the ground when she fainted. His face was the first one she saw when she recovered consciousness.
A hit-and-run, she was told by a policewoman. The crime committed by someone who was, probably, drunk or unfamiliar with the bends in the road. The driver, with visibility distorted by the rain, must have noticed John only at the last moment, then swerved and lost control. If there had been skid marks from the tyres they had been washed away, but a full-scale search for clues would begin at first light.
Death, Amelia was told, when the autopsy was performed, would have been instantaneous.
* * *
Days and weeks blurred. A searing regret, like pincers around her heart. Sorrow that seemed unassailable. Nicholas carried her through it all. He moved into Woodbine and held her at night when she was unable to sleep. He was patient with her when she turned away from him, incapable of desire, uninterested in food or leaving the house. Even rising from her bed was a struggle. He supported her when she broke down in tears during the reading of her father’s will. Apart from a contribution to a horse shelter, Amelia had inherited his whole estate. His solicitor, David Smithson, who had known her since she was born, stood aside when Nicholas took her in his arms to console her.
She allowed him to clear her father’s possessions from Woodbine and distribute them to charity outlets. But the house she loved so much still breathed with reproach. She considered putting it up for sale. She could move into Nicholas’s bright, brash apartment, where she would not be haunted by the knowledge that she had wounded her father so grievously. Nicholas explained that this was not possible; he had sold his apartment and invested the money he’d received into a junior partnership with the company. Henceforth, it would be known as KHM Investments.
She had always known that Nicholas was ambitious. He had been impatient with the slow progress of his career and now, as a junior partner, he could change the company and drag it into the twenty-first century. He needed her by his side as his wife. She refused at first. She did not deserve happiness.
‘These feelings will pass,’ Nicholas assured her. ‘No one deserves happiness more than you do. Please, Amelia, make me the happiest man in the world.’
Once again, he proposed, down on one knee among the bluebells in Kilfarran Woods, a glittering solitaire in his hand. Clouds spiralled around the sun and the countryside, bathed in its brilliance, took Amelia’s breath away.
John seemed very close at that moment. She could see into the dark eyes that had watched over her so carefully, their sadness never allowing her to forget the tragedy she had visited upon him. She willed him away, stemmed the blame that had stunted her growth. Nicholas made her forget. He made her whole again.
Leanne flew in from New York and was her bridesmaid. Jay came from California with his fiancée Hailey, and Mark, who had moved to Dublin, came with Graham, his partner. All of them celebrated with Amelia when, two months after her father’s death, she married Nicholas and signed her name on the register as Amelia Madison.
Twenty-Three
My father told me once that I’d murdered my mother. I was five years old at the time. Old enough to understand the pressure of responsibility but not to understand the fantasising mind of the alcoholic. He never repeated his accusation. I doubt he even remembered making it. If he did ever have a sudden, hazed recollection of my scared face, the duvet clutched to my shoulders, and wished to apologise for his loaded accusation, it was too late. The damage was done.
When his alcoholism became too pronounced for his superiors in the civil service to ignore, he was then transferred to deal with nondescript responsibilities in the back room of Kilfarran’s council office. Moving from a Dublin suburb to Kilfarran with its narrow streets, scattered houses and outlying farms was never going to be easy for either of us as we orbited each other in our separate capsules. I had been so influenced by his illusions that when, in secondary school, the new girl in a one-horse town, I became fodder for the class bully and her sycophants, I believed it was only natural that such punishment should be meted out to a mother-killer.