Kind of Cruel

by Sophie Hannah

  ‘If Amber and Luke have got their hands full with Sharon’s girls when Pam dies, there’ll be no question of them taking Quentin in as well. Their spare room’s taken, it’s Dinah and Nonie’s bedroom. You, on the other hand, can put your boys in together and provide a bedroom for Quentin. Once you’ve got Quentin and a full house, how could anyone expect you to provide a home for Kirsty when Hilary carks it? Why shouldn’t Ritchie do it? He’s a man, true, and not an obviously capable carer, but it isn’t as if he’s got anything else to do, is it? You made sure of that: supporting him financially, telling him not to take any old job, to wait for something important to come along, something that’ll give his life meaning. Something like looking after his handicapped sister. If you can persuade Hilary to write you out of her will and leave her house to Ritchie alone, all the better. The solution starts to look even more obvious: your unoccupied brother, with a big house all to himself, no children. Except it wouldn’t have worked. You’d have seen that if you hadn’t been desperate. Ritchie couldn’t look after Kirsty. He can barely look after himself. You’d have had to think of something else, but what? Hiring a full-time professional wouldn’t have been an option – you couldn’t have done that without being seen to do it. Hilary would turn in her grave. Shall I tell you what would have happened, assuming you haven’t already worked it out? A pillow over Kirsty’s face, the only solution in the long run. Or an accident. As long as no one suspected you, the devoted sister, you could have made it work. Hilary-from-beyond-the-grave wouldn’t have known any more than the world knew. No one has the power to get inside your mind and read your thoughts, not even a ghost. Especially not your mother’s ghost. Alive, all Hilary’s ever cared about is how you appear in the eyes of the world. That’s how she sees you – she just looks at the surface, doesn’t she? She doesn’t want to delve any deeper. She doesn’t care how you feel, doesn’t even try to imagine. She tells you how you should feel. Isn’t that right? Why should her spirit, after death, be any different?’

  ‘Seems someone does have the power to get inside her mind,’ Jo’s solicitor muttered.

  ‘You think about your dead mother a lot,’ Simon said. ‘Even though she’s not dead yet. In 2003, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. They caught it early. You knew there was a good chance she’d be okay, but it focused your mind, forced you to confront a truth you hadn’t faced before: maybe Hilary wasn’t about to die imminently, but one day she would, and you’d be expected to make good your promise to her. To look after Kirsty, provide a home for her. You panicked – hence your apparently selfless suggestion that Hilary alter her will in Ritchie’s favour. Her saying no must have been a shock. She told you and Ritchie it was out of the question, it was important to her to treat her children equally. But that wasn’t the whole story, was it?’

  Simon imagined himself grabbing Jo’s hair, yanking her head back. He wanted to do it, but couldn’t. ‘I’ve spoken to Hilary,’ he said. Jo’s shoulders jerked. ‘After Ritchie went to bed, Hilary told you the truth: she couldn’t leave her house to Ritchie because you’d need the proceeds from selling your share of it to buy a bigger house for you and your family, one that could accommodate Kirsty. If Ritchie got the whole house, you wouldn’t be able to afford to do that, or so Hilary believed. Kirsty would have to go and live with Ritchie, and Hilary didn’t trust him to be able to look after her properly. She hadn’t wanted to say so in front of him because it would have sounded like a vote of no confidence. But Ritchie knows Hilary doesn’t think he’s up to much. You’re the dependable one, he’s the disappointment. The failure.’

  Jo had stopped moaning and fallen silent. She sat with her head tilted forward at an angle that looked painful, as if her neck was broken.

  ‘Except that wasn’t how it felt, was it?’ Simon said. ‘You felt like the failure. Your plan hadn’t worked. Hilary wasn’t changing her will. Kirsty was still coming to you. What did you do, when you saw that running away in the middle of the night wasn’t going to work? Push it to the back of your mind? Tell yourself Hilary wasn’t going anywhere for the time being, hope you’d think of something else in the meantime? And you did, didn’t you? When Pam was diagnosed with liver cancer, you thought of plan B. Was Ritchie really so hopeless that he couldn’t be trained to look after Kirsty? Surely Hilary would think about this, once she saw that you and Neil had had no choice but to take Quentin in. Surely she’d come to you then and tell you she’d decided your suggestion was a good one: Ritchie must have her house and responsibility for Kirsty’s day-to-day care after her death, since you were already up to your limit. You needed your mother to transfer responsibility from you to Ritchie, officially. Ginny would say you couldn’t allow yourself to have a need that Hilary hadn’t allocated to you. No, what’s the right psycho word?’ Psychotherapeutic, he meant, not psychopathic. Assuming there was a difference. ‘Validate, that’s right. Hilary had to validate your need to say, “I’ve reached my limit” – your right to say it. She never did, though, did she? Why would she? She saw you cheerfully providing accommodation and food for the whole world and assumed you could cope with anything. Yesterday she told me she was never in any doubt about your wanting to look after Kirsty, you’d been that convincing: her saintly daughter who wanted her little brother to have a big house for purely altruistic reasons.’

  Jo made a noise that subsided after a few seconds. Ginny had been wrong to say she wouldn’t be able to maintain her act. The low energy version was easy. Anyone could do it.

  ‘Transitive and intransitive relationships,’ Simon said. ‘I’d call this one transitive, though William might disagree. Amber stands to gain from Sharon’s death: Dinah and Nonie. Her fully occupied spare room and emotional resources ensure that Jo gains from Pam’s death – the dubious gain being Quentin, and no more room at the inn. With Hilary’s blessing, Ritchie could then potentially have gained from Hilary’s death: a big house, and full-time care of his sister. See how it’s transitive? Follow the chain of causation back and we see that Ritchie gains from Sharon’s death, and so does Jo, who gains from Ritchie’s gain. Her gain is the loss of the burden of her sister. If Sharon hadn’t died, Quentin might have gone to Amber and Luke, who would still have had a spare room in their house when Pam died.’ Simon bent down, put his face as close to Jo’s as he could stand to. ‘A room Quentin would never have ended up in, as you found out on Wednesday 1 December. Unlike you, Amber wouldn’t rather kill innocent people than say no to an unreasonable demand from an abusive mother.’

  Jo’s mouth tightened, then went slack again. Or was Simon seeing what he wanted to see?

  ‘That’s right: abusive,’ he said. ‘That’s what Ginny reckons, and she’s the expert. It’s abusive to make one of your children feel that she has to look after another to earn your love and approval.’

  ‘Hang on a minute.’ Jo’s solicitor hauled herself out of her chair, but stayed in the corner of the room. ‘Is this a game you’re playing that I’m not clever enough to understand, or are you seriously suggesting her motive for killing Sharon Lendrim was to fill the spare room of the only other person who might have offered a home to her father-in-law?’

  ‘Never been more serious,’ Simon told her. ‘When Pam Utting’s liver cancer was first diagnosed, Neil and his brother Luke, Amber’s husband, had a conversation that Jo got to hear about and Amber didn’t – because Luke was too scared of her reaction to tell her. Neil and Luke agreed that if Pam were to die, Luke would be the one to offer Quentin a home. Luke wasn’t happy about it, but felt it was his duty. He had the room, Neil didn’t. And Neil had two kids. Luke told Neil that Amber wouldn’t be happy, but he thought he’d be able to talk her round. I don’t know if he would have been able to or not. She says not. But Jo knew nothing about Amber’s reluctance. All Neil told her was that she didn’t need to worry, Luke had promised to take care of Quentin. Jo could relax, knowing her father-in-law would never be her responsibility.’

  ‘So, according to your theory, she d
id the opposite of relax?’ the solicitor asked.

  ‘That being murder, yeah,’ Simon said. ‘Jo needed to be responsible for Quentin to be in with a chance of avoiding responsibility for Kirsty. When Sharon died and Amber decided she needed a bigger house for her, Luke and the girls, your client did everything she could to talk her out of it.’

  The lawyer sighed and shook her head. ‘Did she succeed?’

  ‘No. It didn’t matter, as it turned out.’ He looked at Jo. ‘You must have thought you’d got away with it. When Pam died, no one said anything about Amber and Luke having a house twice the size of yours. Luke’s promise to look after his dad was never mentioned again – by you, Neil, Luke himself or anyone. Everyone knew how hard it was for Luke and Amber, adjusting to life with Dinah and Nonie. You made sure to draw the whole family’s attention to how much they had on their plate. Poor, stressed Luke and Amber.’

  ‘Why kill Sharon, though?’ the solicitor asked. ‘If you’re right, wouldn’t it have been simpler for her to kill Amber and Luke? They can’t take Quentin in if they’re dead.’

  ‘If anything had happened to Amber and Luke, Jo would have automatically come under suspicion. If she kills Sharon – a stranger – who’s going to suspect her? It looks to the world as if she gets nothing out of Sharon’s death. And she’s been indoctrinated by her mother so that she believes family’s all that matters. To Jo, Sharon wasn’t family; her life wasn’t important.’

  Jo’s solicitor sighed. ‘Look, there’s no ambiguity about my client’s actions, but everything you’re saying that relates to motive is unprovable.’

  ‘I’ve proved it,’ Simon told her.

  ‘You’ve said it. Saying’s not the same as proving.’

  ‘She’s got photographs in her second home of every single member of her family apart from her sister. What does that tell you?’

  ‘That Kirsty’s not photogenic, and that you’re clutching at straws.’ Jo’s lawyer took her by the arm. ‘Interview terminated, an hour after it should have been. We’re out of here.’

  Jo stood.

  ‘See that? She did what you told her.’ Simon blocked their path to the door. To Jo, he said, ‘You’re going to be proved to be a liar and sent to prison.’ He spat the words in her face. ‘If you drop this act, you can talk to your children, explain to them why you did it. You can explain in court the pressure you were under. Ginny’ll testify for you – mitigating circumstances.’

  ‘What you mean is, if she drops her act, she’ll be able to prove you right,’ Jo’s solicitor said. ‘Clearly, that’s not enough of an incentive for her.’

  Jo yelped, moved her mouth as if she was struggling to make her lips meet.

  ‘I can help you,’ Simon shouted after her as her lawyer guided her out of the room, aware that he’d brought his stunted inner good cop into play far too late. ‘I want to help you.’

  ‘Help yourself,’ the lawyer advised. ‘Stop wasting your time.’

  They were gone. He was alone in the room with the echo of a slammed door.

  15

  Friday 10 December 2010

  ‘You’re drinking wine,’ Dinah tells me. She, Nonie, Luke and I are having dinner at Ferrazzano’s in Silsford, our favourite Italian restaurant.

  ‘I know I’m drinking wine.’

  ‘If it’s bad for Mrs Truscott to give parents glasses of wine at school shows, then it’s bad for you to drink it.’

  ‘No, it’s fine for me to drink it,’ I say. ‘It’s wrong for Mrs Truscott to sell wine at school shows and pretend to be giving it away. And actually . . .’

  ‘Actually what?’ Dinah asks.

  ‘Nothing.’ Luke and I exchange a look. We are both thinking that Mrs Truscott can do whatever she likes from now on, and we will continue to think she’s a hero. Without the efforts of the headmistress I have endlessly derided, I don’t believe Dinah and Nonie would be alive today. Jo wasn’t the only one who had the idea of shopping in Rawndesley on the afternoon of Friday 3 December. Mrs Truscott spotted her with the girls in John Lewis and noticed that Nonie was crying, noticed that Jo seemed unresponsive to her distress. When Nonie spotted her headteacher, she ran over to her, ignoring Jo’s loud orders to come back immediately, and said that she wanted to go home but Jo wouldn’t let her. She was scared: Jo and Dinah were hatching a plan to go and play in the snow in Silsford Woods, and Nonie didn’t want to.

  Mrs Truscott went over to speak to Jo, who at first snapped at her to mind her own business, then changed her demeanour entirely and became almost sycophantically reassuring. Mrs Truscott told the police later that she’d found Jo’s behaviour so alarming that she’d insisted on taking Dinah and Nonie away from her and driving them home to Luke.

  Silsford Woods is about half a mile from Blantyre Gap. The council recently announced a plan to put a barrier there, to make it harder for people to drive their cars off the edge.

  ‘Let’s not argue about wine,’ Luke says. ‘Let’s talk about the brilliant school show we’ve just seen, the brilliant play by brilliant new playwrights Dinah and Nonie Lendrim.’ In the end, Nonie succeeded in intervening on behalf of Hector’s ten sisters. Their final fate was less gruesome thanks to her: covered in mud rather than dead.

  ‘So you liked it?’ Dinah asks us for what must be the twentieth time. ‘Really?’

  ‘Really,’ I tell her. ‘We loved it. Everybody loved it – you heard the applause. You’re both incredibly talented.’

  ‘You would say that,’ says Nonie. ‘You’re our parents.’

  Luke squeezes my knee under the table.

  ‘You are our parents,’ Dinah insists.

  ‘Tell them,’ Nonie whispers to her across the table.

  I force myself to swallow the food that’s in my mouth. Last time Nonie ordered Dinah to tell me something, it was Kind, Cruel, Kind of Cruel. It wasn’t something I wanted to hear. When she told me how scared she’d been when Jo had tried to force her to go to Silsford Woods in the snow, how she very nearly hadn’t had the courage to approach Mrs Truscott in John Lewis, I didn’t want to hear that either – it upset me too much. Please let this be something good.

  ‘We’ve made a decision,’ Dinah says, putting down her knife and fork. ‘You don’t need to adopt us. We’re already a family, you’re already our parents. We don’t need a piece of paper to make it true.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Luke says. ‘And we’ll be a family whether we adopt you officially or not.’

  ‘But if you stop trying to, nothing bad can happen,’ says Dinah. ‘No one will say you’re not allowed to.’

  Nonie nods her agreement.

  Luke looks at me, a question in his eyes. I transmit one back to him: is it up to me? I don’t want it to be up to me. Or maybe I do, because there’s no way I’m giving up, whatever Luke says. Whatever anyone says. ‘If you knew for sure that we’d definitely be able to adopt you legally, would you want us to?’ I ask the girls.

  ‘But we don’t know for sure,’ says Nonie.

  ‘She said “if”. Don’t you know what “if” means?’ Dinah snaps.

  ‘You would, wouldn’t you?’ says Luke. ‘You’re scared, like we are, that it’s not going to go our way. That’s why you want us to stop trying.’

  Both girls nod.

  ‘We can’t do that,’ I tell them. ‘Luke and I are as frightened as you are, but if we all want it to happen then we have to try. And . . . it might be fine.’

  ‘It probably will be,’ says Luke.

  ‘Amber?’

  ‘What, Nones?’

  ‘What will happen to Jo?’

  ‘I don’t know, love. No one knows at the moment. But . . . she won’t hurt anyone else.’

  ‘I feel sorry for William and Barney,’ Nonie says.

  ‘If things aren’t fine, they’ll still be fine,’ says Dinah. ‘We’ll still be a family.’

  We will be, from now on, a family whose members tell each other the truth without fear, knowing we will always be forgiven.
When I said this to Luke last night, he laughed and said, ‘That’s a great policy for you and me, but the girls are going to be teenagers. Don’t be too disappointed when you find lager cans and tattooed boyfriends hidden in the airing cupboard.’

  ‘Yes,’ he says now to Dinah. ‘We’ll still be a family.’

  Thank you for coming to see me. It must have taken a lot of courage. I wasn’t expecting you to agree, or even to respond to my letter, so that’s great. It’s great that you’ve got courage because you’re going to need plenty of it to help the boys to survive . . . well, I don’t want to say ‘losing their mother’, because that makes it sound as if Jo is dead. You know what I mean.

  First of all, I want to tell you that in my one proper encounter with Jo – I tried to talk to her again at the police station, but she was unresponsive – when she came to see me here, voluntarily, we talked properly and it was clear to me that she adores you and the boys. She genuinely loves you, Neil. And William and Barney. I know she’s . . . inaccessible at the moment – she’s shut herself down in order to be able to survive the ordeal ahead – but I strongly believe she still loves you. You, William and Barney are the people in her life that she can love non-strategically, without calculation or complication. In a way that she can’t love Hilary, Ritchie and Kirsty, because she sees them all as in some way responsible for her problems.