The Lies We Told(82)
All the colour and light drained from Rose’s face. ‘No …’ she shook her head. ‘No … I don’t believe you. You’re lying, I know you are.’
Hannah laughed. ‘I said I’d meet her up on the cliffs at Dunwich. Told her I wanted to go and remember my mother.’ She smiled mockingly. ‘She thought she was so noble, going there with me, standing by the poor abandoned sister she never knew she had, cutting off her parents and striking out on her own to prove a point. My God, she was full of it – such a tedious sanctimonious bitch! I was doing the world a favour, to be honest. But anyway, now you know. Beautiful, isn’t it?’ She looked at Rose and Oliver. ‘Your daughter and my mother had the same resting place. Kind of poetic, don’t you think?’
Rose stared at her in horror. ‘No,’ she whispered. ‘It’s not true.’
Oliver, who until then had been watching in stunned silence, suddenly cried, ‘There was no body! If you were telling the truth, her body would have washed up sooner or later.’
Rose looked round at him hopefully. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, that’s right. There was no body. There would have been, wouldn’t there? There would have been a body!’
Hannah laughed. ‘Yeah well, maybe there’s a little pile of Emily bones on a faraway beach somewhere. Fuck knows, who cares?’
‘I don’t believe you!’ Rose shouted again. ‘You’re lying. There would have been a body. There would have!’
Hannah stared at her thoughtfully. ‘She cried out for you, you know. Just as she fell, just as she realized she was going to die. She cried out for her mummy, like a baby. Did I cry, Rose, when you killed my mother? Did I cry too?’
Oliver’s face was full of hatred and despair. ‘She jumped. Your mother jumped!’ He broke down in tears then, doubled over in pain, as Tom pulled out his phone and called the police.
32
The Lake District, 2017
I live in a quiet village, more a hamlet really, not far from Windermere. A remote and peaceful place, somewhere my past could not follow me, or so I thought. I moved here from Cambridgeshire after Doug and Toby died to be near my elderly parents, and when they died too, I stayed. I’ve built a simple, solitary life for myself, just me and my little dog Rufus, and if the other inhabitants of this tiny community know my story, if they remember the grim details of my murdered family from the newspapers before I came to live amidst them, they’ve kept it to themselves, and for that I’ve been grateful.
But now Hannah’s face is once more front-page news, her trial a media circus, a tabloid editor’s dream. It has everything, after all: two beautiful teenage girls, an affluent successful family torn apart by adultery, kidnap, suicide and murder – and not one of us who played a part in the whole awful business has escaped without blame. Each of our actions another scrutinized detail in the story that has had the nation gripped these past six weeks.
Who knows what the outcome will be? Hannah will almost certainly be sent back to prison – there’ll be no wriggling her way out of this one. How she kidnapped Luke, how she confessed to Emily’s murder – though she’s denying that now, of course. But what of the rest of us? Oliver’s affair with Nadia, her death, the abduction of baby Lana. Such a tangled, complicated web.
It’s become clear that Hannah’s allegations about her mother’s murder can’t be substantiated. After all, who would believe the desperate rantings of a proven liar, killer and kidnapper, over someone like Rose, who’s presented herself so well throughout this trial? A retired surgeon in her late sixties now, responsible for saving the lives of countless children, years of charity work to her name, beloved by her colleagues and community. A dignified, gentle soul. Yes, there’s a lot of public sympathy for Rose, a feeling that she’s suffered enough. That will please her, I’m sure – it always was so important for her to be liked.
Oliver hasn’t come out of it quite so well. Because there were others, apparently, and plenty of them, all ex-students of his, before, during and even long after his affair with Nadia, most of whom have come out of the woodwork telling their stories about how they too were victims of ‘Cheating sex-pest prof’, providing the perfect combination of titillation and schadenfreude the British public so enjoy.
As for my part in it all, my involvement in baby Lana’s story, the general feeling is I’ll get off lightly. I too have suffered enough will be the view: my murdered husband, my murdered child. Yet I should be punished, I want to be. I have carried the guilt for decades for what I did to Nadia’s grieving family. Her parents died without ever knowing the truth and for that I think I should pay.
Still, by hook or by crook, the mess will be made sense of, people will be punished while others will go free, the feeding frenzy will eventually die away until someone else’s tragedy replaces it. Of course, what almost nobody knows, what they will never know, is what Rose confessed to me the night of Nadia’s death, the night they brought little Lana to our door. They don’t know that when Doug took Oliver to the kitchen to make up the bottle of formula, Rose turned to me, her eyes wide with panic.
‘Beth,’ she said, ‘Beth, I have to tell you something.’
I looked at her stricken face in surprise. ‘What’s the matter? What is it, Rose?’