When You Are Mine(118)
The school bell rings. Small excited voices spill from classrooms and fill the corridors.
‘I’m sorry you were arrested,’ says Alison. ‘I didn’t mean for that to happen. I thought they’d charge me, but they chose you instead.’
I am silent for a long while, still putting the pieces together. Alison didn’t set out to incriminate anyone. She didn’t plant my DNA in the house or lie to me about Imogen Croker’s sapphire ring.
‘How did you know?’ she asks.
‘Lydia Croker came to see me. You sent her Imogen’s ring.’
For a moment, Alison looks puzzled.
‘I know it was in the suitcase,’ I say. ‘But when the police found Darren’s body, the ring had gone. It had to be the killer. Who else knew it was there; and who it belonged to?’
Alison doesn’t answer, yet seems to accept the truth.
‘Why did you stay in the room while it burned?’ I ask.
‘I didn’t want to live.’
I glance at Chloe. Alison follows my eyes. ‘Mum and Dad would have looked after them.’
Ahead of us, children have begun streaming through the gates. Alison looks for Nathan, her face bright with expectancy. When she sees him, it is like witnessing pure joy distilled into a single smile. I wish I could bottle that sort of joy and drink from it every time I feel sad.
‘Hello, Nathan, do you remember me?’
‘You’re the police officer.’
I smile and think, yes, once, maybe again, hopefully. Chloe raises her arms and Nathan bends to hug her.
‘What are you going to do?’ asks Alison, terrified of what I might say.
‘I’m going to get married.’
She waits, expecting more. Tony is standing beside the Range Rover. He taps his wrist, which doesn’t have a watch, but I know we’re running late.
There is another long pause. Nathan is pulling at his mum’s hand, wanting to go home. Alison is still gazing at me fretfully, aware that I hold her future in my hands.
‘You have a nice life,’ I say, as I turn to leave, walking back to the car, where Tony holds the door open.
‘Everything all right?’ he asks.
‘Perfect.’
We drive away and pass Alison and her kids as she walks along Kempe Road. Chloe is kicking her legs in the stroller and Nathan is skipping ahead of her, jumping between cracks in the pavement. They look like any other family on their way home from school. There will be baths, dinner and bedtime stories. Prayers and kisses goodnight.
When I joined the London Metropolitan Police I was taught about justice and what it means. The word comes from the Latin jus, meaning right or law, and is defined as being the quality of being fair and reasonable. Would it be fair and reasonable for Alison Goodall to be charged with murder? Would it be fair and reasonable for her children to lose a mother, having already lost a father? Others might answer yes, but I can’t agree because this family has been punished enough.
That’s why I’m going to leave Alison, Nathan and Chloe to get on with their lives. Occasionally I’ll look in on them to learn their news. I’ll watch their school concerts, graduations, recitals, performances and milestones. I will see two beautiful children grow up in a loving environment, and I will not add them to my nightmares. I have enough of those already.
Summer has ended and the air is growing cooler as the days shorten. I am not the same person I was four months ago, or even a week ago, or even this morning. An innocent woman is dead. If I could change that, if I could pull the lever and save everyone, I would; but that’s not how the trolley dilemma works. An innocent has to die, and I will have to live with Tempe’s death for the rest of my life.
Pushing those thoughts away, I picture my future husband, waiting at the house, straightening Archie’s bow tie and leaning down to wipe a speck of dust from his shoes. I picture my uncles, uncomfortable in their suits, shepherding guests to their seats in the marquee on the lawn. I picture my mother with a fixed smile being impossibly polite to Constance, while secretly appraising her hair, and her dress and her shoes.
Finally, I see my father, standing nervously outside, waiting for me to arrive. I thought I knew this man; that I understood his motives and his instincts. I was wrong. I have spent a decade denying his existence, steering away from anything that might link me to my family, but that is no longer possible. We are complicit. Bound by blood with bloody hands. Guilty but uncharged.
It is sheer vanity to believe that I can change my father. I will not make apologies for him, but neither will I let him control my life. I will fight to hold on to my values, dented as they are, and will not let him drag me down to his level, not again. Perhaps that’s the best way to ward off my demons – to have one of them at home.
Acknowledgements
It is a wonderful thing, after two decades of writing fiction, to come to the blank page with all the same excitement and wonder as when I penned the first chapters of The Suspect in 2001. With each subsequent novel, I have always strived to push myself as a writer, using different tenses, new voices, or dual narratives. This is also one of the reasons that I write occasional standalone novels like When You Are Mine because it challenges me to come up with new characters and to explore new lives.
This is a novel about domestic abuse, toxic friendships and the baggage that all families carry with them. Three women a day are killed by an intimate partner in America. Two women a week die from domestic violence in the UK, and one woman dies every week in Australia. If this were terrorism, we would have done something by now.