‘What do you mean?’ Simon asked.
‘When there was a word she felt was especially relevant, she would sometimes add a comment or … punctuation mark when she sent her score, no doubt designed to make me thinkor do something. Like when the word was “Flirt”, she sent me two exclamation marks. When it was “Dream” she sent the question “Do you still?”. Once I got an angry red-face emoji – that was when the word was “Rival”. She was trying to make me jealous, to remind me that Paddy had Jemma and I didn’t – as if that were something I might forget.’
‘I’d like to see the photos now,’ said Jemma. ‘From Marianne’s locked room. Full disclosure, remember? Have you got them?’
Simon shook his head. ‘They’re at your dad’s: our next port of call. He’s expecting us. Asked me to tell you he’s made lunch. And I did disclose: I told you about the photos this morning, and you said you’d already heard about them from …’ Simon nodded to indicate Mayo.
‘I’m not going to believe they’re real until I’ve seen them with my own eyes,’ said Jemma.
‘I assume you’re also going to tell us who killed Marianne?’ Mayo said.
‘If I have to,’ said Simon, thinking there was a good chance they would both misunderstand him.
36
Tuesday 7 November 2023, 1.35 p.m.
JEMMA
Iwatch as Dad lays out the photographs – twenty-seven of them – in a grid-like formation on his desk. Simon and Ollie are standing on either side of me.
‘Is this all of them?’ I ask.
‘Yes,’ says Dad.
‘And they’re all from her study?’ As I say it, I notice what’s different about Dad’s home office. The two large portraits of Marianne aren’t here any more. I wonder where he’s moved them to, and why.
‘When she decided to … empty out the room, she took all the photos out of their frames and gave them to me,’ says Dad. ‘“Put them somewhere safe”, she told me. “Somewhere unfindable.” So I did.’
I barely hear him. Ollie did his best to describe these pictures to me last Friday, but it’s different now they’re in front of me. It’s so hard not to run away, scream, grab them and tear them to shreds.
Because they’re it. They’re the big reason Marianne’s study had to be locked for all those years – well, them and the piles of notebooks Ollie’s told me about, the ones she wrote herdiaries in: always with flowers on the cover, always wide, faint lines inside. She loathed notebook pages with lines that were too narrow or too bold, apparently.
I force myself to stand still and keep looking at the pictures, not trusting myself to touch them. I don’t want to go to pieces in a room with three other people. ‘I thought you said you found them?’ I ask Simon eventually.
‘I did,’ he says. ‘I found them in the safe place where your dad put them.’
‘Did you … make them for her, Dad?’ I ask.
‘No, and I don’t know who did,’ he says gently. ‘She and I always kept our financial affairs separate, and she never told me any more than she wanted to, about anything. I assumed she’d paid someone to do it – maybe a graphic design type person.’
‘These pictures always creeped me out,’ Ollie says in a whisper. ‘I couldn’t understand how Marianne was able to … believe in them. For me, all they did was remind me that what I wanted so much was no more than a fantasy. I wanted itfor real.Her insisting we had to pretend made it so much worse.’
I reach out and almost touch the photograph closest to me. ‘They’re the scenes from Lottie’s dreams,’ I say.
Family photos, all of them.Sort of.
They are and, at the same time, they are absolutely not photographs of our family: on holiday, in front of crashing waves at Porthgwidden; on a railway station platform nearby – Lelant Station – about to catch a train. It was high tide and the sea was right there, next to the platform edge. I remember saying to Lottie, ‘It’s just like being on a beach, isn’t it? Except the platform’s where the sand should be.’
And she dreamed about all those places, blending the scenes together to form a surreal landscape that was none of them as much as it was all of them …
I take a deep breath and pick up a photo of the five of us outside a tea shop in North Yorkshire, with a bandstand to our right. Except it isn’t the five of us – or rather, not the five who were actually there. It’s a lie, just as all these photographs are lies; Paddy isn’t in any of them. Everywhere he ought to be – everywhere he was, when we went to those spots and had our picture taken, pictures Paddy was in – Ollie is there in his place. I’m in most of them too: smiling, looking like the perfect, happy daughter.
Marianne replaced Paddy. With Ollie. Over and over again.
In some of the photos, it’s only the head that’s been replaced, not the body. There are several in which a man of Paddy’s height, wearing Paddy’s clothes and shoes, has Ollie’s head. In others, the whole person is Ollie, tall and wearing Ollie’s clothes.
It takes me around half a minute to realise that Irecognise all these faces of Ollie in front of me; I’ve seen them all before. Marianne used the photos she took that week in the Cotswolds in 2005, using the camera Dad bought her as a Christmas present, for her great picture-faking initiative.
