by Rebecca Wait
But Tommy walked on for some time without speaking, and Malcolm started to fear he wouldn’t be able to bring himself to say it after all. He wondered if Tommy had been mulling this confession over, whatever it was, all night.
“What is it, Tommy?” he said at last.
Tommy said quickly, as though he’d been waiting to be prompted, “It’s about Nicky.” He was walking faster and faster, and Malcolm had to increase his own pace again to keep up.
“O.K.”
“It was my fault he died,” Tommy said in a rush.
“No it wasn’t,” Malcolm said reflexively.
“No, Malcolm, listen,” Tommy said, and now he did pause and turn to look at Malcolm. Malcolm stopped beside him, out of breath. Tommy said, “I know it was my dad, I know he did it and I know I couldn’t have stopped him. I know I was just a child. I know all that, even if I don’t always believe it. But there’s something else.”
“All right,” Malcolm said. “Tell me.”
Tommy finally met his eye. “I don’t know how.”
“Just try to say the words.”
“It’s something terrible.” He played with the sleeve of his jacket.
“I’ve heard terrible things before,” Malcolm said. “I think I’m unshockable now.”
“You’ll hate me,” Tommy said, looking up again. There was something pleading in his expression.
“I doubt it,” Malcolm said. “Just tell me, Tommy.”
“All right,” Tommy said. “All right.” He took a long, shuddering breath and began. “You know the night it happened, how I survived.”
As if by mutual agreement, they began to walk again, side by side. Malcolm knew better than to interrupt Tommy now he’d started.
“I hid in the wardrobe in my parents’ bedroom,” Tommy said. “While my father was killing everyone. And he came into the room, but he didn’t look in the wardrobe.”
Malcolm was aware of this already, but he sensed that Tommy needed to say the words, to say it all. Malcolm waited.
“I hid,” Tommy said, “and stayed there the whole time, all through the night and the next day until the police came in and got me.”
When he didn’t immediately speak again, Malcolm said gently, “That’s right.”
“There’s something else,” Tommy said. “Another part I never told.”
Once more he tailed off, and didn’t speak for so long that at last Malcolm had to prompt him again. “What is it, Tommy?”
“It’s the worst thing I ever did. I still don’t understand how I could have done it. Except that I was so frightened. That’s not an excuse.”
Again Malcolm waited.
And at last, Tommy brought it out. “Nicky came in,” he said. “Nicky came into the room. But I suppose you know that part too. The part you don’t know is that there was a pause before my father came in. He didn’t chase Nicky in there and kill him. Nicky came in alone. And he was looking around for somewhere to hide. And he was obviously in a panic and couldn’t think of anywhere. He wasn’t thinking straight. He must have seen my mother and Beth killed. And I was hiding in the wardrobe and I could see him through the slats and I didn’t say anything.” Now he’d started, the words were coming fast, almost running together. “I watched him looking for a place to hide and I kept quiet because I was so afraid, and then a moment later my father came in and shot Nicky dead. I watched him die. And if I’d said something, Nicky could have hidden with me in the wardrobe, and either we’d both have lived or we’d have died together.”
At some point during Tommy’s speech they had stopped walking, and now they stood motionless on the cliffs, looking out to sea. Malcolm opened his mouth to speak, but Tommy interrupted him. “I know what you’ll say. I know it all already. You’ll say that he would have found us both, that he wouldn’t have let us both live, he would have searched and found us. You’ll say Nicky would have died anyway, and the only difference would have been that I’d have died too. But I’d rather that. I always thought I was glad I survived, but now I’m certain it would have been better to have died with Nicky than to have survived all alone, knowing that I let him die, that I let him die to save my own life.”
Tommy came at last to a shaky stop. He rubbed his hands across his face and turned to look at Malcolm, as if readying himself for his uncle’s fury.
Malcolm waited a moment to make sure there was nothing else Tommy wanted to add, then he said softly, “It’s understandable, the way you acted, if that is what you did. You were a terrified child.” Pity swelled up so strongly in his chest and his throat that he found it difficult to speak. He put out his hand and took hold of Tommy’s arm. “It’s understandable,” he repeated. “But Tommy, I don’t think that can be right. Not exactly the way you remember it. Nicky didn’t die in the bedroom. He died on the landing. You couldn’t have seen it happen.”
He watched as his nephew frowned.
“No, Malcolm,” Tommy said. “I know what I saw.”
“I think you must be mistaken.” Malcolm forced himself to speak calmly and clearly. “Your mum and Beth died in the kitchen. Nicky died on the landing, at the top of the stairs. Your dad’s body was there too, next to Nicky’s.”
“You’re wrong. I saw it.”
Malcolm shook his head. “It’s all there in the fiscal’s report. It’s in the letter I had off him, too. It summarizes everything the police found.”
“Well, even if it’s true that Nicky was found on the landing, all that means is that my dad must have carried him there afterwards.”
“Do you remember that part?” Malcolm said.
He watched as uncertainty creased his nephew’s face. “No. But . . . I was in shock. Things are hazy.”
“I think your mind’s been playing tricks on you,” Malcolm said. “The police, the forensics team—they can tell where someone was killed. There are things like—” he made himself say it—“blood spatter. Blood patterning. There was hardly any blood in the bedroom. Hardly any at all. Just . . . footprints. From where your father had walked.”
Tommy was shaking his head, over and over. “So . . . I couldn’t have seen him die.”
“No.”
“But then . . . the rest of it? The rest of it, Malcolm. He must have come into the bedroom and then run out again.”
“I don’t know. Maybe. But it was at the other end of the landing, your parents’ room. Wasn’t it? Not right at the top of the stairs. Would he have run along the corridor and then back again?”
“He must have,” Tommy said. “I remember seeing him looking around the room. I remember watching him through the slats. He must have come into the room.”
“Maybe he did,” Malcolm said. “He might have done.”
“I must have seen him,” Tommy said. He balled his hands into fists and pressed them to his forehead. “But everything is just so . . . I don’t know what’s real and what isn’t.”
Malcolm was silent, unsure what comfort he could give.
Tommy turned suddenly on his heel and began to walk back in the direction they’d come. Malcolm struggled to catch up with him. Out of breath, he drew level with Tommy at last.
“It feels true.” Tommy spoke without looking round. Malcolm could see there were tears in his eyes. “Whatever happened, it feels true that I betrayed him.”
“I know.” Malcolm understood this better than he wished: that the truth was what we felt, not what we knew. He forced himself to look it in the face, the mistake he and Heather had made. They had tried to distract Tommy in the aftermath, tried to take his mind off it, to help him move on. How ill equipped they had been to deal with a traumatized child. They had got everything wrong. If they had only talked about it properly, if they had only made space for Tommy to say the words, he wouldn’t have been forced to carry this guilt alone for twenty-three years. Malcolm would never forgive himsel
f.
“But whether Nicky came into the room or not, you didn’t betray him,” he said to Tommy. “Whatever happened, you were just a child. Eight years old. Think of that.”
Tommy shook his head. He came to a stop again and furiously wiped the tears from his face. “He died while I hid. They all died while I hid. That part will always be true.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Malcolm said. “You didn’t do anything wrong, Tommy. You only survived.”
Tommy didn’t answer. At last they turned together and made for home.
Back at the cottage, Tommy went straight up to his room. Malcolm heard the door close and decided to leave him be. There was no further reassurance he could give that Tommy would accept. Malcolm couldn’t tell him exactly what had happened that appalling night. But whatever the truth was, nobody on earth would blame Tommy—nobody except Tommy himself.
Malcolm was sitting at the kitchen table reading the paper when Tommy reappeared a few hours later. He heard him on the stairs and just had time to ready himself before Tommy came into the room.
“Hi,” Tommy said briefly, then went straight to the kettle and busied himself making tea. “Would you like some?” he said.
“Yes please.”
“Wind’s up again.”
“Aye.”
Malcolm wondered if they were really going to revert to small talk, then he thought, No. Not now. He wouldn’t allow it. He said, “How are you feeling?”
“O.K.,” Tommy said. He glanced over his shoulder at Malcolm, then added, “Well. Not great.”
“No.”
Tommy returned to his task, fetching the box of tea bags and two mugs from the cupboard.
Malcolm looked for the right thing to say. There didn’t seem to be a right thing. “I’m glad you told me,” he said.
Tommy paused on his way to the fridge. “Yeah. Me too. But . . . ”
“But what?”
“I wish I knew what happened. How can I bear not knowing? I’ve been going over and over it in my head, and I just can’t get the facts straight. I don’t trust myself.”
“What happened was that your father killed the others, and you lived. It doesn’t matter how.”
“It does.”
“But no way of surviving would feel all right to you, Tommy,” Malcolm said gently. “Isn’t that where the problem is?”
Tommy didn’t reply. He finished making the tea and brought their mugs over to the table. Neither of them spoke for a while. Malcolm sipped his tea and looked across at Tommy, who was staring out of the window at the darkening sky.
“I wish we could have told you when you were eight that it wasn’t your fault,” he said.
Tommy shrugged. “I wouldn’t have listened.”
“We should have moved. After it happened. Heather suggested it, and I said no. But I was wrong. We should have taken you away from here.”
“It would have come with us,” Tommy said.
Malcolm again searched for the words he needed to help Tommy and couldn’t find them. No apology for the past would be sufficient now. At last he said, “I do know what guilt feels like, Tommy.”
“You’ve no reason to feel guilty.”
“I should have protected you,” Malcolm said. “He was my brother.”
“You didn’t know.”
“Because I never tried to.” He stopped, trying to arrange his thoughts. “There was something . . . off there. I should have seen it. It was there to see.”
Tommy shook his head. “You need to let that go.”
“Maybe. But it’s hard, isn’t it?”
Tommy rubbed his eyes wearily. “Yeah.” After a pause, he said, “Did you read all of the fiscal’s report?”
“He took me through it, over in Oban,” Malcolm said. “And I still have the letter that summarizes it all. If you’d like to see it.”
“No. I don’t think so.” Tommy waited a moment. “What does it say?”
“Just the facts of it. How they were killed and where. The results of the post-mortems. What the police concluded, and so on. That your father killed your mum and Beth and Nicky, and then himself. It doesn’t say why, though it does talk a bit about the money problems.”
“That’s not a reason,” Tommy said.
“I know.”
Tommy pushed his cooling tea away from him. “There is no reason really. Except for him. He was the reason.”
“Yes.”
“I keep thinking of how calm he was, that whole evening. Before it happened. We had chicken for tea.” Tommy stopped. “But who knows if even that memory’s real? Only I’m sure I remember him being calm. There was no warning, or none that seemed obvious at the time. I think he must have planned it all out very carefully. Way in advance.”
Malcolm nodded. That was the kind of man John was.
Neither of them spoke for a while.
“I hid,” Tommy repeated at last. “I hid while they were killed.”
“Aye,” Malcolm said. “And thank God you did.”
6
When John came into the kitchen with the shotgun, Katrina was surprised at her own reaction: she was not shocked. Perhaps for some time she had known, without knowing, that it would come to this. Of course he would kill her.
“You bitch,” he was saying, and his voice was very quiet to be saying such savage words. But Katrina was grateful he wasn’t shouting. Beth was in her arms, Nicky was watching television in the living room and Tommy was upstairs. She didn’t want them to be frightened.
“You fucking bitch,” her husband said. “You think you can just leave? You whore. Take my kids away? You bitch.”
Oh, Katrina thought, feeling oddly calm. I should have been more careful. She wondered how long he had known. Days, perhaps, or even weeks. He’d given nothing away, not even at tea half an hour before. That was so like him.
She said, “Let me go and give Beth to Nicky.”
“Stay where you are, you fucking whore.”
All right then. Katrina placed Beth down very gently on the floor. “There you go, my love,” she said. “Sit there for now.”
She had thought Beth would protest, but she did not. She did not even use the cupboard doors to pull herself to her feet, but sat where she was, eyes wide, only reaching out gently to touch her mother’s leg.
John did not look crazed as she might have imagined he would. He looked like himself. His hands, holding the gun up in front of him, were steady. Katrina knew that her own strange composure was the product of extreme terror. As soon as she had seen the gun, she had moved beyond ordinary fear into a half-world she had never experienced before; it was like an out-of-body experience.
She said, “John, please will you put the gun down? Whatever I’ve done, I’m sorry. I’d never leave you. You’re my husband.”
“Liar! You won’t leave because I won’t give you the chance, you fucking bitch.”
It was no good. Katrina knew that. She saw the whole course of their relationship in an instant, how she had been deceived about him, but how she was to blame too; she had wanted something from him, and had seen only what fitted her idea of him, an idea she had plucked out of thin air. She had wanted strength and so she had seen it in him, where in fact there was only terrible weakness. The man she had married had been a figment of her desperate imagination. But most of all it had been John’s doing. He had lured her in carefully, and she believed there had been real calculation in this. He had seen her, and he had seen what he could make her; he had seen so much further than Katrina herself. But if she had been deceived, it was only because she had wanted to be deceived.
He would kill her and still believe he was a decent man. He would kill her because he believed he had a right to.
If I could go back, she thought. If I could live my life again.
But there w
as no going back, and in any case there were her children. My darlings, she thought. She would not unwind time and make them vanish even if she could. Or perhaps she would. She did not want to die. She loved how the light moved over the heather in the late afternoons. The sea was shockingly cold even in summer, but so refreshing it made your blood sing. There was a novel by her bed she hadn’t finished. She wanted to see Glasgow again.
She did not want to leave all of this.
John was still pointing the shotgun at her and now he had raised his voice to a shout. Katrina wasn’t sure she’d heard him shout before. She thought that perhaps, at this last moment, his courage had failed him and so now he needed to work himself up to it. She didn’t bother to listen to what he was saying. It didn’t matter now. What mattered was the glimmer of what else she thought he might do.
She would not plead for them, because she knew him too well for that. So she said, composed in the face of his yelling, “I’m bad, John. I know that. But the children aren’t. They’re your children. They take after you.”
He would not hurt the children, she thought. She was almost certain.
She said for good measure, “They look like you. Especially Tommy.” She had always known Tommy was his least loved child. “But the others too. Everybody says so.”
She hoped Malcolm and Heather would take them when it was all over. If not, there was Jill. She trusted Jill not to let them near her mother. Whatever happened, at least they’d have each other.
She looked down at Beth, at the soft wisps of hair on her head. It was golden now, but Katrina wondered if it would darken as Beth got older, if it would be unruly like Nicky’s or lie flat like Tommy’s. She thought, I would so much have liked to live.
7
Tom woke feeling shattered. He’d slept more deeply than he had in years, but it didn’t feel like there was enough sleep in the world to take the edge off this kind of exhaustion.
When he finally stumbled downstairs, he found Malcolm in the kitchen, cleaning the surfaces.
“Did you sleep O.K.?” Malcolm said.