by Thorne Moore
‘Fingerprints, though, surely.’
‘Not on the knife. She tried to make me touch it, but I wouldn’t. The door handle – I got blood on it, but then I wiped it off. With the towel. So that I could get a grip. I took the towel with me. I wasn’t trying to hide. I just wanted to get away from the blood. If they are looking for a murderer, I’m sure they will find traces of me. But they’re not looking, because it really was an accident. Only Barbara and the others would have any reason to suspect otherwise.’
‘So. Thank God. But my poor, poor Karen, nursing such horror all these years. No wonder…’
I sat down, suddenly weary. ‘No wonder I’m mad as a hatter, you mean.’
‘I mean, no wonder you’ve spent your life trying to escape from it.’ Malcolm started gathering up mugs, the tea barely touched. Then he slammed them down again, shaking his head. ‘All these months, Karen, you’ve been killing yourself trying to track down this angel, and she turns out to be a complete monster. I’m only just realising how easily she could have killed you?’
‘I wonder.’ I curled up on the sofa with a cushion. ‘It’s a nightmare, yes, but I go over it, and I wonder. What game was she playing, even at the end?’
‘The murder game, that’s clear enough!’
‘Maybe. And maybe not. She’d had forty-six years of getting people to do whatever she wanted, and in the end, where did it leave her? Locked in a role she’d have to keep playing forever. Whoever the real Serena Whinn was, somewhere deep down, she could never come out. Even with me, when she knew I’d seen right through the lovely compassionate angel act, she simply put on another role. The heartless, contemptuous bitch act. I think she was trying to goad a violent reaction out of me. She’d got hold of my medical records, somehow. She knew I had it in me.’
‘Because you once gave Dr Pearce a wallop? Rubbish. You think she wanted you to attack her? Then she could finish you off and claim it was self-defence.’
‘Maybe that was all there was to it. Or maybe… I can’t help thinking that she’d just had enough.’
‘And she wanted you to kill her?’
‘While making sure I’d be blamed, of course. I had to be punished for not murdering Janice when she told me to. I don’t know. I’ll never know what demons were driving her.’
‘Look, Karen, I think there’s a bit of you so bewitched by that woman that you’re still trying desperately to think well of her. You want to blame yourself in some way, instead of her. Stop it. See her straight, for what she was. A psychopath.’
I considered the cushion. I began to unpick its threads. ‘I know she lied and twisted things. Probably did it from habit as much as anything. But she was right about children, wasn’t she? We aren’t all born with a sense of good and evil. Or perhaps your Christian teachings say that we are. I think we start with a blank canvas and learn as we go along. It’s what childhood’s supposed to be for. Serena just picked up the wrong lessons. She discovered the key to persuading anyone to do anything, and she used it, just like all children use what they learn.’
Malcolm scratched his head, shaking it. ‘She tried to manipulate you into killing your best friend. That wasn’t a childish learning curve. That was evil.’
‘Did she really plan it, though? If she set out from the start to make me kill Janice, that would really be evil, but I don’t know. She wasn’t nice. She was petty and self-centred, but I think she was just being spiteful – with a smile. She was going to steal Janice’s only friend and it got out of hand. She was only ten or eleven.
‘So were you. So was poor Janice.’
‘We were all just children. Too young to calculate the consequence of everything we did. What really happened with Barbara and the cat? Barbara was besotted with cats, and Serena was probably just jealous of the neighbourhood moggy, so she thought she’d persuade her cat-loving friend to chase it away. I don’t suppose she planned on Barbara actually killing the poor thing.’
‘And it was just a good joke, I suppose, to scare you to death with a fake message from the spirit world.’
‘Except that she did too good a job, and scared herself into the bargain. When she came with us down Sawyer’s Lane, it got too much. I think she killed Janice because, by that point, she was as terrified as we were.’
Malcolm tutted his exasperation. ‘Oh, that’s all right then.’
‘No. No, it wasn’t all right. But it was a child’s terror that made her drop that block. Not premeditated murder. What came after – that was vile. That was really was just plain evil manipulation. She knew she’d done something unforgiveable and all her sweet saintliness wouldn’t save her. There’d be retribution and she couldn’t be doing with that. It wasn’t part of her vision. So she wanted to make sure someone else would get the blame.’
‘You.’
‘Me, or Nigel Knight, or some unknown stranger in a car. Or Black Jack Coke. Just so long as it wasn’t Serena Whinn. I suppose she thought she’d got away with it. She hadn’t, though. It had her forever, after that. She’d crossed the line. If she really was a psychopath, it began that day. Any innocence in her was smashed beyond repair.’
‘I don’t give a toss that she smashed up her own life. It’s all the other lives she damaged on the way. A girl murdered, a young man dead, her friends still screwed up by guilt and neuroses, decades later, and you—’
‘The obstinate cow who wouldn’t do as she was told.’
‘The only one who ever resisted her, by the sounds of it.’
‘Do I get a medal?’
‘You should. But what did you get instead? Years of medication and psychiatric treatment.’
‘I did get to be Éowyn, warrior princess of the Rohirrim. And Jane Eyre and Flora MacDonald and Joan of Arc.’
Malcolm burst out laughing. ‘You never stopped fighting the monster. But don’t joke. It’s way beyond a joke.’
‘Yes. It is.’ I put the cushion down, what was left of it, and sat up. ‘So what do you think I should do now? I am still ready to go to the police, if you think I should.’
He took my hand and squeezed it. ‘No. Sorry I even suggested it. As you say, it was an accident. If you speak up now, it will become a suspicious death. You’ll be facing a police interrogation for God knows how long. Karen, my love, you’ve faced down your monster and you’ve come through, but you’re still—’
‘Nuts.’
‘Fragile. You’re not up to coping with what they’d throw at you. Don’t do it. Serena’s dead. Let it go.’
‘And Janice?’
‘Janice is dead too. Let her rest in peace. You know who the real murderer was. So do I. So do your four friends. She’s not going to get any more justice than that. Not in this life.’
‘She was never going to get that, was she? I should tell someone, though. Maybe not yet. In a while. For now, to be honest, all I want to do is sleep for a fortnight.’
‘A very good idea.’ Malcolm fetched a blanket and tucked me in, like a child.
— 26 —
So here we are, twelve years after Serena’s death, gathering at the Lyford Crematorium, to watch Angela’s coffin rumble slowly through the curtains into oblivion.
The service was short and muddled, which seems wonderfully appropriate for Angela. Mostly humanist, because her brother, Colin, had taken charge of his sister at the end. After Serena’s death, she’d accepted belated counselling for post-traumatic stress. I don’t know if it really worked, but she had started to pull herself together. Her career picked up again, briefly, and she even started to cut down on the alcohol. But it was too late to undo years of determined abuse. A liver can only manage so much self-repair and it got her in the end. When it was obvious there was no saving her, and she grew tired of the struggle, Colin persuaded her to accept a place in a hospice near him in Lyford.
‘To rescue her from Denise,’ suggests Ruth, as we gather outside to slip cheques into in a bowl held by a funereal attendant. ‘No one deserves Denny at their deathbed.’<
br />
Ruth has two of her children with her, quietly, politely in the background. She makes the occasional irritated remark about still being stuck with them, but it’s obvious to everyone else that they’re there for her, to jolly her up if she starts to rant and hug her if she starts to weep, cheerily tolerant of their mother’s sour mutterings. A strange family.
Ruth raises a hand to greet Barbara, who is coming towards us, in full black, every inch the solicitor still, though she’s semi-retired and working for a cat charity.
‘We haven’t changed much, have we?’ says Ruth. ‘Except you, Karen. You look okay. And you’re still together then.’ She nods at Malcolm, who’s emerging from the office – even a crematorium has an office. He’s clutching a piece of paper.
‘Looks like it.’
‘So far. People never stick together, these days.’
‘You and Russell have. Forty years, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, well.’ She shrugged off this small achievement. ‘Inertia, that’s all. Managed to sell the bookshop, in the end, then.’
‘Yes, but not as a bookshop. They’re out of fashion. It’s all internet these days. You know how it is. The shop sells cupcakes now.’
‘Right, now, I think we should all make our way…’ Denise comes up. She’s a nun, at last, but there’s nothing of divine peace about her. She is bustling, desperate to organise us. I’m not sure what she wants us to do. Whatever it is, she stops short at the sight of the cellophane-wrapped bouquet I’m carrying. ‘Oh. Karen. Flowers. Now there were specific instructions – no flowers, by request. Just contributions to the hospice.’
‘We’ve left a cheque,’ I say. ‘Don’t worry. These aren’t for Angela.’ I push the flowers aside to reveal a biscuit tin beneath.
Denise frowns, a sort of deliberate puzzlement. Her breathing begins to quicken.
I open the tin and show her the papers inside. Her hands fly to her mouth as she swallows hard. ‘Oh! Oh!’
‘We agreed.’
‘Yes. Yes we did.’ She clutches her own capacious satchel to her, hugging it like a teddy bear.
‘Angela’s?’
‘Yes, I’ve got hers.’
‘And mine,’ say Barbara and Ruth together, in the same subdued tones.
‘So, do we…?’ Denise looks round vaguely.
I catch Malcolm’s eye. He’s standing on the periphery of our little crowd. He nods.
‘You found it?’ I ask.
He holds up the sheet of paper. ‘It’s three blocks across, over by those purple beeches.’
‘Good. Then let’s go and do this thing.’
The others take deep breaths, preparing themselves, but no one says a word and we walk in procession through faint autumn drizzle, past row upon row of gravestones and markers weathered by age. Further along the vast acres of the cemetery stand the ranks of newer slabs and crosses and rose bowls, among which lies the grave of Serena June Canterbury.
Here in Lyford municipal cemetery. There had been an assumption, when the coroner released her body, that she would be buried at the quaint little church in Thorpeshall, but when advice was sought, it seemed she had no relatives left to arrange it. No husband, no lover, no close friend. Plenty of humble admirers and general well-wishers, who thought her charitable work was wonderful, but no friends. So Barbara, as her executor, took charge and had her quietly interred here. Ruth told me the grave still receives occasional floral tributes from her charity beneficiaries. She’s not having mine, though.
The grave I seek is more neglected. Quite forgotten. No other mourner around in this quarter. No flowers in sight, fresh or withered, among these plots.
Janice Eileen Dexter, beloved daughter and sister, 1955-66. Rest in perfect peace.
And in memory of her brother, Sgt Kenneth Ian Dexter, DCM, 1954-96.
‘Good God,’ says Barbara, blunt as ever. ‘They let him in the army.’
‘Why not?’ I say. ‘He was always strong on defending those he loved.’
‘Yes, well. Even so.’
‘He got the medal in the Falklands, dragging a wounded comrade to safety. And he was killed, protecting some aid workers, when his vehicle crashed, under sniper fire in Bosnia. I tried to trace them all, you know. The Dexters. I thought they should know the truth.’ I felt the stillness relax into relief as I added, ‘But no luck.’
No luck with a single Dexter. The father never rejoined his family after his last spell inside. Whereabouts unknown, like four of his children. Mrs Dexter fell drunk under a bus, two years after Janice’s death, and the younger children had been taken into care. Two of them died of drugs, one died in a knife fight, one in prison, with Aids. And one died in Bosnia. I was six years too late to reveal the truth to Marsh Green’s bad boy, who’d stripped the emperor’s new clothes off Mr Jefferson and got the cane for bumping into Serena Whinn and won the DCM.
But the truth is going to be recorded, about the long-forgotten girl who lies in this grave.
Nothing grows here except some weed, up against the stone, which escaped the last strimming, and a mat of couch grass and moss that has crept across the green stone chippings on the grave. I stoop to pull it clear. The chippings beneath had once been loose, but time has compacted them. Still, they will have to do.
I straighten and open my biscuit box again, offering it to each of them in turn.
With her little mouse squeak, Denise gropes in her satchel and pulls out a small ring-bound pad and a child’s exercise book. She holds them out, obviously expecting me to confirm their contents, so I flick their pages.
The exercise book is full, from start to finish, of Denise’s childish writing, many words heavily underlined. Guilty, wicked, lies, vile, horrible.
The notepad is half-full of Angela’s untidy scrawl, which grows more and more illegible, till, at the end, it’s merely a series of jabs and scratches. I did make out a few phrases. Pathetic little cow. Poor bloody innocent idiot. It had all been her idea, this recording of our confessions. Denise wanted her to speak to a priest at the end, but she’d said no, she’d write it down. So we’d all agreed to do the same. To state the truth and acknowledge our parts in it, for a posterity that might, one day, demand to know, even if the present no longer cares.
Barbara hands her case notes over, neatly typed on legal-looking paper. I catch phrases like notwithstanding and in respect of. Dry and legal, but the truth.
Ruth’s is a small notebook, filled with neat tiny writing, one word, whenever it appears, even smaller than its neighbours. Father.
I add them all to the papers already in the box. My account. The one you’ve read. Then I shut the lid and kneel to scrape a hole in the chippings on Janice’s grave. I have come armed with a trowel, not knowing what to expect, but there is no need. Denise is on her knees beside me, scrabbling into the hardened gravel like a demented dog, bruising her bitten nails and fingers, until she’s excavated a hollow deep enough to take the tin, with a thin scattering of stone to cover it.
I get up off my knees and lay my bouquet against the grey headstone. Nothing exotic or elegant for Janice. Just Michaelmas daisies for the daisy girl.
That’s it. We’ve done what we all agreed to do. One more look at the brittle beech leaves overhead, then we turn back to the well-trodden paths and drift our separate ways.
Finished.
‘Home?’ suggests Malcolm, softly in my ear, as my tears begin to well.
Behind us, the chill breeze rustles round the grave, and the daisies wave at the empty sky.
ABOUT HONNO
Honno Welsh Women’s Press was set up in 1986 by a group of women who felt strongly that women in Wales needed wider opportunities to see their writing in print and to become involved in the publishing process. Our aim is to develop the writing talents of women in Wales, give them new and exciting opportunities to see their work published and often to give them their first ‘break’ as a writer. Honno is registered as a community co-operative. Any profit that Honno makes is invest
ed in the publishing programme. Women from Wales and around the world have expressed their support for Honno. Each supporter has a vote at the Annual General Meeting. For more information and to buy our publications, please write to Honno at the address below, or visit our website: www.honno.co.uk
Honno, 14 Creative Units, Aberystwyth Arts Centre Aberystwyth, Ceredigion SY23 3GL
Honno Friends
We are very grateful for the support of the Honno Friends: Jane Aaron, Annette Ecuyere, Audrey Jones, Gwyneth Tyson Roberts, Beryl Roberts, Jenny Sabine.
For more information on how you can become a Honno Friend, see: http://www.honno.co.uk/friends.php
Also by Thorne Moore and available from Honno Press
A Time for Silence
Motherlove
Copyright
First published by Honno Press in 2016.
‘Ailsa Craig’, Heol y Cawl, Dinas Powys,
South Glamorgan, Wales, CF64 4AH
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
© Thorne Moore, 2016
The right of Thorne Moore to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of the book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
The Author would like to stress that this is a work of fiction and no resemblance to any actual individual or institution is intended or implied.
ISBN 978-1-909983-48-9 (paperback)
ISBN 978-1-909983-49-6 (ebook)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Published with the financial support of the Welsh Books Council.