‘It really did feel like … not self-defence exactly, but defence of you.’ Dad sends another pleading look my way. ‘The thing is, she’d never have given up. She’d decided she wanted and needed it done, and she’d have made it happen. She spoke about it like a military general planning a world-saving campaign. She said it was the only way she’d ever have true peace of mind, and of course in her eyes it was fully justified because she’d read your diary, the one on your computer.’
I nod to let Dad know I’m listening carefully.
‘She knew about your … plan,’ he says. ‘Didn’t seem to care that you’d thought better of it. “Don’t be naive”, she said when I tried to reason with her. “Jemma could revive the plan at any moment, find a different method, set herself up with a nice alibi—”’
‘I’d never have done it once I’d been to the police,’ I say.
Ollie – whose arm around my shoulders has been holdingme upright all this time, or at least that’s how it feels – gives me an encouraging squeeze.
‘Everything was my fault, sweetheart,’ Dad says. ‘That you needed to make a plan like that in the first place … In all the years since Marianne joined our family, I’d never once disagreed with her or stood up to her. That’s the only reason she told me what she intended to do. Why would she imagine I’d suddenly start objecting to her behaviour now?’
‘She thought she had you fully under control,’ I say.
‘Well, she did. She was right about that.’ Dad sounds angry. ‘I’d have lived happily under her … regime for ever, if she hadn’t threatened you. When she did, I knew I had to do something. I … I started to have dreams about your mum. My late first wife, Nancy,’ Dad tells Simon. ‘The same dream over and over: her begging me to save Jemma’s life. And … well, you know the rest.’
‘I only know some of the rest,’ said Simon. ‘Do you mind if I ask you a few questions? So that I can understand everything properly?’
‘I’m hardly in a position to mind anything,’ Dad says. ‘I have some questions for you as well. The main one is: how did you know I was the guilty party? You said this morning you’ve known for some time.’
‘It was the white trainers that first started me off down the right track,’ says Simon. ‘I was in Cornwall, talking to an ex-Cambridge college chaplain. Yes, that one,’ he tells Ollie. ‘Belynda Simmonds’ bit on the side. He was wearing bright white trainers, and I realised I’d seen some that looked brand spanking new like that somewhere else recently. Then I got it: Marianne was wearing trainers like that, in the background of your Zoom work meeting, the one I’d watched with my team that supposedly proved beyond doubt you couldn’t have killedher. Her trainers were clearly visible, which means she can’t have been in the room with you – she had to have been much further away if we could see her feet, when we could only see your top half, sitting at your desk. Plus, she was dusting things in the video and putting them back on shelves, and there aren’t any shelves in your home office, are there? There’s very little in there – just computers of every possible size. Some huge.’
‘Some huge,’ Dad repeats.
‘So Marianne must have been in her study, across the landing,’ says Simon. ‘Now, you might think, so what? So what if she wasn’t in your office with you? So what if she was in her study? She was still there, wasn’t she? In the video, demonstrably alive at 5.10 p.m.? Here’s the thing: Marianne had stripped that room of all of its contents long before Monday 30 October.On 7 July, she showed Jemma the completely bare, empty room.’
‘What a fool I am,’ Dad says, and it sounds as if he’s reminiscing fondly about a complete failure whom he loves in spite of everything.
I hope he does. I hope he can go through the rest of his life liking himself, feeling okay about himself. If I need to spend the next however many years convincing him of all the reasons why he should love himself, I’m ready to do it.
He saved your life. You only succeeded in saving the life of Marianne – the woman who’d have killed you. He saved yours. Don’t be too hard on him, Jemm.
Tears fill my eyes as I realise that wasn’t my inner voice talking to me: it was Mum.
‘To plan what you really believe is the perfect murder and neglect such a fundamental detail …’ Dad shakes his head.
‘You’re not the first,’ Simon told him.
‘I didn’t think of her study and whether it was full or empty, or whether it would be visible, or noticed – not for a second.I was too busy counting myself lucky that she wore the same outfit every Monday to go to her yoga class.’
‘You had a lot on your mind,’ says Simon. ‘Planning a killing is stressful. And if it’s any consolation, I’d begun to suspect you even before I saw those white trainers in Cornwall and made the connection. You were the only one on the list whose alibi was a Zoom, not an in-person encounter. Everyone else had been seen in the flesh by another person at the relevant time, in a place that meant they couldn’t have been here killing Marianne: Jemma, Paddy, Lottie, Suzanne Lacy, Oliver Mayo – much as I wanted it to be you for a while,’ Simon tells Ollie with an apologetic half smile.
The mention of Suzanne’s name gives me a heavy feeling in my stomach. Will she ever speak to me again? She promised she would. ‘Hey,’ she said, ‘if our friendship can survive you marrying one man I disapprove of, then why not two? You’re off into the sunset with a guy who claims to love you, having withheld the truth from you for seventeen years? Great! If you’re happy, if he makes you happy, I promise not to keep saying inconvenient things like this.’
Still, I’m worried about me and Suzanne. I don’t want to have to feel ashamed whenever I think about her, and don’t know how to forget that I’ve lied to her for the first time in our decades-long friendship. I told her it wasn’t Ollie who attacked Marianne in November 2012. The rest of the truth I was happy to share with her, but not that. And I won’t tell her about Dad either. For the same reason Ollie didn’t tell me all the secrets for so many years: fear. I can’t be sure Suzanne wouldn’t go straight to the police.
‘Even Tom Tulloch had an alibi provided by real people, albeit biased and unreliable-seeming ones,’ Simon tells Dad. ‘And the other day Charlie and I – that’s my wife – we werearguing about whether I could have saved myself a drive to Cornwall by just Zooming with the people I went there to see. I said to her: “Talking to someone on Zoom isn’treallytalking to someone”, or words to that effect. Which is true – seeing someone on a Zoom isn’t actually seeing that person. It’s seeing an image of them. When I watched your Zoom meeting with my team …’ Simon shakes his head.
‘Image quality?’ Dad grimaces. ‘It was inconsistent, wasn’t it? The trouble is, the recordings sent out after those meetings are made by different people, with different Wi-Fi connections, on different machines—’
‘That was one clue among many,’ says Simon. ‘Your face was all fuzz and stripes, but no one else’s was. One guy had a vase behind him. You could see every movement that man’s face made, as well as the initials of the pottery maker at the bottom of the vase: TKC. I thought: why would Gareth Upton have so much worse video quality than everyone else? I mean, it could have been your Wi-Fi signal, but again …’
‘Someone in my line of work would make sure he always has a fully functional internet connection,’ Dad says.
‘That’s exactly what I thought,’ said Simon. ‘Which led to me wondering how hard it would be for someone with your tech expertise to … I don’t know, get a massive screen, much bigger than the one that’s doing the recording of the Zoom, and set it up so that it’s positioned in the one and only spot that’d make it look like he’s sitting there in his room. The screen playing the video would need to be quite a bit bigger than the one recording it, I reckon. I know I couldn’t make it work myself, but I didn’t doubt that you could. And you could arrange it so that it looked like Marianne came in and spoke to you at the moment you wanted, and rang you at the moment you wanted – because that all happened, didn’t it? Just not onMonday 30 October. But you remembered a previous Zoom work meeting, same people, in which all of that happened.’
‘It was a Zoom call from several months ago,’ says Dad. ‘The physical set up was easy enough to do. I’ve got several computers in the house with larger screens. Well, I did have, until your team and their helpers carted them off.’ He smiles at Simon to show he’s not trying to be critical. ‘And I’ve never once said a word, or been called upon to do so, in any of those pointless, interminable meetings, so I reckoned I was safe enough from that point of view.’
‘You must have killed Marianne long before 5.25, right?’ Simon asks him.
