The Family Remains(87)

‘I’m not sure what I can tell you. It was such a long time ago.’

‘Well, for example, maybe you could tell me about David Thomsen. About what sort of man he was.’

Lucy feels her insides compress, empty of every atom of air, collapse.

David Thomsen.

Dark interference swarms around her peripheral vision. She grips the underside of her chair and breathes in hard.

‘Are you OK, Miss Lamb?’

‘Mm-hm.’ She nods. ‘Yup.’ Then she says, ‘Should I have a lawyer present for this? I mean, am I under arrest? Or—?’

‘No, Miss Lamb. No. You are not under arrest. We’re merely trying to find our way through the tangled web of Birdie’s history in your childhood home and how she might have met her end there. Unless – maybe you already know the answer to the question? Maybe you could tell us, right now? Then you will be free to leave and enjoy the rest of your time in Chicago with your children.’

‘I don’t know what happened to Birdie.’

This was almost true. She was pretty sure that Henry had hit her with the elephant tusk. But then again, she’d been holding Libby, the baby, she’d been crying, everything had happened so quickly, she didn’t know, she really didn’t know.

‘She was evil,’ she says now, the words tumbling from her outside her control. ‘Birdie was pure evil.’

She watches the detective’s face on the screen. Nothing moves, apart from one eyebrow.

‘In what way was she evil?’

‘She groomed me to have sex with her lover when I was thirteen.’

‘Her lover?’

‘David Thomsen. He was forty-six. Maybe older. She wanted me to get pregnant by him because she wasn’t able to. So she groomed me. She left me alone with him. Made out it was romantic. Made out I was doing something noble and beautiful. And then …’

Tears form in the back of her throat and threaten to spill down her cheeks. She chokes them back, compelled now, desperately compelled, to tell someone about this thing that happened to her when she was just a child, to throw it at someone, to hurl it hard, to make it land somewhere and for someone to see it, to recognise this thing that she has never told anyone about, not even Libby.

‘They stole my baby when she was weaned, and they didn’t let me touch her. They kept her, Birdie and David, they kept her, they called her “their baby”. I could hear her cry, but I wasn’t allowed to go to her. And it was Birdie, she was the one. She had this way of looking at you, with those eyes she had, they were so pale, they almost weren’t blue, they were almost like chips of glass. Her hands, they were always cold. She would never touch you softly, only hard. When she taught us the violin – her hands around our wrists, like metal clamps.’ She subconsciously forms her hands into cuffs around her own wrists as she speaks. ‘The smell, she had this smell. Of sex. Often. Of hair. She had so much hair. She never washed it. She never smiled. She took my baby and pretended she was hers. I should have killed her. If I had killed her, I would have been proud.’

Lucy’s heart pumps hard with adrenaline and she takes a deep breath to try to control it.

The detective stares at her for a second and then says, ‘So, you are telling me that even though you wanted to kill Birdie Dunlop-Evers, you did not.’

‘Yes. That’s what I’m telling you.’

‘So, who did kill her?’

‘I don’t know.’ She flinches with the lie and hopes that the detective in London will miss it on the screen.

‘Did you see her die?’

Lucy swallows. An image flashes through her mind. The elephant tusk in Henry’s hand. Birdie on the floor. But the bit in between is blank, voided. She looks up at the detective and says, quite firmly, ‘No.’

‘What happened that night, Miss Lamb? What happened when the adults died and your baby was left behind?’

‘I don’t know. They died. They killed themselves. Probably because they knew they were evil.’

‘But Birdie did not kill herself.’

‘No. They probably killed her. David probably killed her. And then killed himself. And took my poor stupid parents along with him.’

‘That would indeed be the obvious explanation, Miss Lamb. I agree. But it’s much more complicated than that, you see. Because someone has tried to dispose of the remains. Has taken them from the roof of the property and thrown them in the Thames. And this within the last year. It could not have been David Thomsen covering his tracks because he is dead. So, it is someone else. Covering their own tracks.’

Lucy flinches. Fucking Henry. He said he’d got rid of them, that no one would ever find them. What was he thinking, dumping something that incriminating in the River fucking Thames? Did he honestly think that they would never be found? But she can’t let this unravel so easily. She straightens her neck and says, ‘If you found the bones in the Thames then she could have been killed anywhere. What makes you think she was killed in our house?’

‘A small thing called forensics, Miss Lamb.’ The detective smiles benignly as he says this, and Lucy nods, tersely. Of course.

‘So, the person who removed the bones from the roof of the house in Cheyne Walk, this person needed to have had access to the house in the past few months to a year. And we know that Libby took ownership of the house around a year ago and that thus, it could only have been you, Henry, Libby Jones, Miller Roe, or the solicitors. Libby tells me that Phineas Thomsen is currently there in Chicago but that he works as a game ranger in Botswana, and we have spoken with his employers, who confirm that he was in Botswana every day for the previous two years. So you see, don’t you, that – unless it was Libby who moved the bones, which seems unlikely as she didn’t know they were there – something else is at play here. Something beyond a suicide pact. That a crime has been committed and that really, in all reasonable probability, Birdie’s bones were moved and disposed of by either your brother or yourself. So if it wasn’t you, Miss Lamb, then please, can you tell me where will we find your brother?’