Kind of Cruel

by Sophie Hannah

  ‘You went to Jo for advice,’ says Simon.

  I laugh through my tears. ‘The worst mistake of my life. She’s used it against me ever since. She can’t bring herself to admit that it hasn’t caused a problem between Luke and me. He was brilliant when Sharon died. He loved the girls as much as I did by that point. He was happy to take them on, we both were. We agreed that we wouldn’t have kids of our own; Dinah and Nonie became our children. But Jo couldn’t let it lie. She’d go weeks without mentioning it, then, out of the blue, she’d say, “You know, one day Luke’s going to find out that you knew about Sharon’s will several years before he did. How’s he going to feel about you deliberately keeping it from him?” She still mentions it sometimes. Often. Luke’s no fool, she says: he’s clever enough to work out that he’d have loved his own children as much as if not more than he loves Dinah and Nonie, if I hadn’t deviously deprived him of the opportunity to choose to have them; I’m the fool if I imagine he won’t see that as the ultimate betrayal.’

  ‘Sounds like she managed to convince you,’ says Simon.

  I nod. ‘When I say Luke won’t find out unless she tells him, she says she won’t, but I must. And that “these things have a way of coming out”, one of her favourite lines for trying to scare me. All I’ve ever wanted her to say is, “Don’t worry, everything’ll be fine.” Even if it won’t be. Like now. Say it anyway.’

  ‘Now?’ Simon looks over his shoulder as if he’s expecting to find Jo here in the room with us. I’m not talking about her any more.

  ‘Say that Sharon didn’t die because I told Jo about her will. Tell me that’s not why she was murdered.’

  Simon closes the window. I wipe my eyes. I understand without his having to tell me that, on this occasion, I can’t have what I want.

  ‘You should tell Luke,’ he says. ‘He won’t be angry. He’ll understand.’

  ‘You’ve never met him.’

  ‘I don’t need to. I know the truth. That’s enough.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘You handled it badly, but it’s worked out okay. You, Luke and the girls are a happy family.’ Simon shrugs. ‘Some truths are nowhere near as bad as you think they are.’

  This makes me feel better for a few seconds. Until he says, ‘Others are worse.’

  I hear a muffled ringing. Simon pulls his phone out of his pocket. ‘Sam,’ he says. He listens for a long time, glancing at me at first, then making a point of avoiding my eye. His posture is rigid. He’s worried. ‘What’s being done about finding them?’ he asks.

  Them. It might not mean anything.

  ‘Get everyone on it – nothing else matters.’

  I’m on my feet. ‘Are Dinah and Nonie all right?’ Luke wouldn’t let me talk to them when I rang. Why wouldn’t he? However angry he was, he would let me speak to the girls.

  ‘Your husband’s been in touch with my sergeant,’ says Simon, putting his phone back in his pocket.

  No. Please, God, no.

  ‘When you rang him before and told him not to let Dinah and Nonie out of his sight, it was too late. Jo had already met them off the school bus and taken them out shopping and for dinner, to help him out. Luke was scared to tell you because you sounded worried enough already, and he was pretty sure whatever you were afraid of wouldn’t include a shopping trip with Aunt Jo, but he also couldn’t understand why she’d be so keen to take the girls shopping in the snow, and why William and Barney weren’t going too.’

  I feel myself falling. Simon catches me, holds me up. ‘Don’t assume the worst,’ he says. ‘The girls are going to be okay. My skipper Sam’s the best there is. He’ll find them.’

  From: ginny@greathollinghypnotherapy.co.uk

  To: Charlie Zailer

  Sent: Friday, December 3, 2010 9.51 PM

  Subject: Re: Next week’s appointment

  Dear Charlie,

  Will tackle your question v. briefly, as don’t believe I can really help much at a distance – you always need to meet a person and hear what they have to say. But . . . if his childhood contained no physical or sexual abuse, the first thing that springs to mind is what we therapists call ‘emotional incest’ or ‘covert incest’. It’s a controversial idea that we’re careful not to bandy about. Many people object to the use of the word ‘incest’ when no physical act has taken place, and some deny existence of emotional incest altogether, but personally I believe it’s a justifiable term to use. Emotional incest can be as psychologically damaging as overt incest, and certainly the symptoms for adult survivors are similar. From what you say about this man’s sexual attitudes and behaviour, it sounds as if he could well be an emotional incest survivor. You should encourage him to seek therapeutic help, but only if you’re prepared to be met with furious denial.

  It’s often single parents who commit emotional incest against their children, though not always. Frequently the abusing parent is addicted to alcohol or drugs – though, again, not always. An emotionally incestuous parent can be married (often the marriage is one in which feelings are not openly expressed and nobody’s needs are met) or single, a substance-addict or not, but the important thing to remember is that parents who commit covert incest are emotional children. Their own needs weren’t met in childhood and they’ve never properly faced this fact or dealt with the damage. They are needy, frightened, codependent. These parents do not know how to ensure that their needs are met in appropriate ways by appropriate people, i.e. other adults, so those needs spill out all over their children in a variety of ways: excessive worry and control, enforced lack of privacy (‘No closed doors in this house’, etc), inappropriate confidences – telling children things they’re too young to hear, confiding about feelings to a child in the way that you might to a partner (therapists call this emotionally ‘dumping’ on a child). Sometimes there’s an almost romantic adoration that puts the child on a pedestal, sometimes there’s offensive nudity, i.e. opposite sex parent parades round house naked in front of child, who feels uncomfortable but cannot say so because has been told there’s nothing shameful about nakedness. In fact, for a parent to inflict his or her nudity on a child older than three or four is severely inappropriate and can be very damaging. Equally (sorry if this sounds confusing), making a child feel guilty about his or her nudity or sexual feelings, or reacting with anger or shock if the child happens to walk in and see parent naked, is a violation of the child from the opposite direction. What the two have in common is that, in both cases, the parent’s need, be that to ‘flash’ at his/her child or to believe that child would never feel something as dirty and shameful as sexual arousal, is the only one taken into account, and the child is forced to adapt, crippling his or her budding sense of self in the process.

  Going back to your man, I’d guess it was his mother who did the damage, though in some cases it can be the same-sex parent. Did his mother impose on him the burden of meeting her emotional needs? To the outside world – and to the confused child, who feels deeply uncomfortable and ‘invaded’ without understanding why – the emotionally incestuous mother is easily mistaken for a good mother: attentive and devoted, loving, would do anything for child, spends a lot of time with child (often needs child to fill huge hole in her inadequate life). Smothering with love is one way to describe it – inappropriate love, because it’s all in the service of meeting the parent’s emotional needs and not the child’s. These are the girls who are ‘Daddy’s little princess’, the boys who hear, constantly, ‘What would Mummy do without her special boy?’. These are the parents who kiss, cuddle and insist on sitting next to their children on the sofa because they, the parents, want that physical closeness, not because they sense the child wants or needs it. They are the parents who want their children at home all the time because, ‘There are dangerous strangers out there’. If challenged (I’ll show you my collection of battle scars some time!), these parents vehemently insist there’s nothing wrong with hugging and kissing their children as much as they want to, or fearing for their
safety – it’s their way of showing their kids how much they love them. For ‘love’, read ‘need’. Emotionally, the parent is overly involved with the child, overly invested in him, insufficiently respectful of his autonomy and independence, and unconsciously trying to create a neediness in the child equal to the parent’s own, to guarantee that she will always be needed. The child knows he’s the answer to her prayers, the cure for her loneliness, her protector, her confidante. It’s far too great a responsibility, and to fulfil this obligation he never asked for, the child must deny his own needs entirely. It’s incredibly damaging. This syndrome is so normal in our society that we assume these kinds of close relationships are healthy, but they’re deeply dysfunctional. The best person I’ve read on this is Marion Woodman, who calls it ‘psychic incest’. She describes it as ‘unboundaried bonding’, where parents use their children as a mirror to support their needs instead of what parents should do, which is reflect children’s own selves back to them, as a way of supporting their development towards independence.

  Healthy love from a parent to a child is love that meets the child’s needs and always respects the child’s boundaries. Meanwhile, the parent has his or her emotional needs met by spouse, friends, other sources, and demonstrates that she has her own healthy boundaries in place. Emotionally incestuous parents have damaged or, in severe cases, nonexistent boundaries, and are dishonest with themselves. They say, ‘My child is the most important thing in the world to me,’ and then instill in that child the belief that he must feel, think or behave in certain ways in order not to devastate his adoring parent. The child has to shut down parts of his true self in order to keep the parent happy. He experiences a loss of identity, and veers between feeling infallible and feeling worthless. And he has enormous problems with intimacy and sustaining a fulfilling relationship. He might put up huge walls, fearing being engulfed by his partner’s emotional needs as he once was by his abusive parent’s. Survivors of emotional incest often feel more comfortable being sexual with those they don’t care about, or even those they actively dislike. Being sexual with someone they love feels wrong and taboo to them.

  The adult child’s feelings towards the parent who ‘covertly incested’ him (as we say, though we probably shouldn’t) are normally a mixture of helpless rage and extreme guilt. Often, the adult children of emotionally incestuous parents are genuinely at a loss to understand why they so loathe, detest and fear the parent who gave up everything for them and claims to love them so much.

  Hope this helps!

  V best, and sorry that my ‘briefly’ wasn’t so brief after all, but it’s brief compared to the reams I might have written. Plenty more on internet if you’re interested!

  Ginny

  14

  9/12/2010

  ‘The only thing I’m uncertain about is how you got hold of a key to Sharon Lendrim’s house,’ Simon told Jo Utting, who appeared to be present in the interview room in body only. Her eyes stared blankly ahead, empty. Occasionally the lids flickered.

  ‘You’re not going to get an answer from her,’ said her solicitor, a young black woman who for the past half hour had been hectoring Simon in a tone that came across as more personal than professional; the two of them might have been exhausted parents, and Jo Utting their uncooperative toddler. ‘She won’t say a word to me and I’m on her side.’ The underlined lack of enthusiasm gave the lie to her words. ‘You’ve got your evidence and her confession from yesterday. Since when she’s taken a vow of silence.’

  ‘Amber didn’t like the idea of you and Sharon meeting,’ Simon continued as if he and Jo were alone in the room. ‘She did everything she could to make sure it didn’t happen. She was afraid you’d tell Sharon that Luke knew nothing about inheriting Dinah and Nonie, in the event of her death. She needn’t have worried.’

  He enjoyed interviews like this, the sort Sam Kombothekra hated: you direct all your questions and statements to a suspect who’s pretending you don’t exist, while blanking out the comments of the irate brief whose existence you’re intent on ignoring. Enough obstacles inherent in the situation to keep you sharp, and no danger of anyone meeting the eyes of the person looking at them.

  ‘There’s no way you’d have told Sharon that Amber had let her down. What if Sharon had been angry enough to change her will? You needed those girls to be going to Amber if Sharon died. Without that, your whole plan fell apart.’

  Was that a flicker of expression in Jo’s eyes? How impatient was she to find out if Simon knew her secret? When he’d arrested her, she’d made it clear that his knowing she had murdered two people and attempted to murder four more was neither here nor there. In Jo Utting’s mind, that wasn’t ‘it’; the crimes she had committed, everything that could be proved against her – that was the part she was willing, in an emergency, to concede. She had to be desperate, beneath that immobile exterior, to know if the truth she was determined to conceal, even on her way to multiple life sentences, was under threat of exposure. Simon decided to stall, make her suffer.

  ‘Let’s go back to how you got a key to Sharon’s house,’ he said. ‘Amber says you used to try to persuade her to bring Sharon round for lunch, dinner. You couldn’t stand the thought of Amber having a best friend you hadn’t met. Unaware of anyone’s needs and feelings but your own, you wouldn’t have understood Amber’s wish to keep you and Sharon apart. You knew there was no danger you’d tell Sharon that Amber had let her down by failing to talk to Luke about guardianship of Dinah and Nonie. It didn’t occur to you that Amber might worry about that. You knew it wasn’t going to happen.’

  ‘What’s this achieving, DC Waterhouse?’ Jo’s solicitor asked. Simon ignored her. He’d been told her name and chosen to forget it.

  ‘I think you went round to Sharon’s one day when you knew her girls wouldn’t be there. You knew Amber had them for the day, was that it? You introduced yourself to Sharon as someone else – was it Veronique Coudert? Or did you only think of using her name when you got Amber’s email about booking Little Orchard? Either way, you used a false name. You couldn’t risk Sharon knowing your real name. You knew if your plan worked, the police’d want to talk to anyone she’d had contact with. You’d decided how you’d do it: like a coward, without direct physical contact and in disguise. Using a false name, you got yourself invited into Sharon’s house on a pretext. Something to do with the residents’ association, I’m guessing, and the ongoing saga of Terry Bond’s pub. Maybe you said you were a new neighbour, you’d just moved in down the road and wanted to know what was going on. Or did you say you were from the council? Environmental health?’

  A heavy sigh from the solicitor. ‘I hope you’re not taking my client’s silence as tacit agreement,’ she said. ‘Silence is silence. It means nothing, and gets us nowhere.’

  ‘You weren’t worried. You knew Sharon wouldn’t recognise you, since she’d never clapped eyes on you. You weren’t at Amber and Luke’s wedding and neither was she. They got married abroad, thousands of miles from everyone they know, because of you, your attempts to make decisions about the wedding that weren’t yours to make. And you didn’t worry that Sharon might have seen a photograph of you at Amber’s because there aren’t any, are there? Just as there are no photos of Kirsty in your second home, Little Orchard. For the same reason.’

  No response from Jo.

  ‘You stole one of Sharon’s spare keys. Amber says you’d have seen them if you went into the kitchen. DS Ursula Shearer who led the original investigation says so too. Mixed in with the fruit in the fruit bowl, weren’t they? Six or seven loose keys, all exactly the same. Sharon had lots of spares. She tended to misplace them, leave them at work and in other people’s houses, throw them out with the old papers. Did Amber tell you that about her best friend, not knowing how you’d use the information? She can’t remember if she did or not. I think she did. Must have been easy for you to nick a key while Sharon was making you a cup of tea. You had your cosy chat with Sharon and then you left, with
one of the many spare keys to her house and a feeling of infallibility. Don’t tell me it didn’t make you feel powerful, being with Amber’s best friend without her permission, knowing you were going to kill her.’

  ‘It’s surely counterproductive to start sentences with “Don’t tell me”,’ Jo’s brief muttered.

  ‘You waited. Whenever you saw Amber, you asked her about Sharon, the residents’ association, the Four Fountains pub – just showing a friendly interest, or so Amber thought. She was upset, more reliant on you than usual. She and Sharon had fallen out. Over the pub, ostensibly, but Amber’s guilt about lying to Sharon was the real cause, the guilt you stoked by telling her she’d betrayed her best friend. Amber couldn’t handle it. She and Sharon went through a phase of not speaking, but Amber quickly realised that without Sharon in her life, she felt worse. They made up. You got to hear all the details, and still Amber said nothing about Sharon having had a visit from someone who lied about who she was, nothing about a key going missing. You’d got away with it. You were satisfied that no one but you knew you and Sharon had ever met. The next step was the fire. Where did you park? Not too near Sharon’s. You wouldn’t have risked your car being seen. And you’d have taken the fireman’s uniform with you in a bag, changed into it only when you were inside Sharon’s house.’

  If a woman called Jo arrives at a house and a nameless fireman leaves, which of them is responsible for the crime committed in between? What was it Ginny Saxon had said: the house represents the self? Jo Utting owned two houses. Simon wondered how hard it was for her to locate and communicate with her true self after so many years of playing a part. He had the uncomfortable sensation that he was talking less to a person than to a survival instinct with a human face.