‘4.25,’ says Dad. ‘Pretended I’d found a problem with the car and asked her to come outside so I could show it to her. Earlier that day I’d hidden my change of clothes – same ones I’d worn for the Zoom I was planning to pass off as me in real time – in the woods near where we park our cars. I … did the unthinkable, then got changed and carried the plastic bag full of bloodstained clothes and shoes and the knife I’d bought back to the house.’
‘And hid them where you’d previously hidden the pictures Marianne gave you from her study,’ says Simon. ‘The doctored family photos with Paddy taken out and Oliver added in.’
Dad nods. ‘And the three pictures I stole from Jemm’s bedroom many years ago, so that Marianne couldn’t destroy them. Yes.’
‘Where did you hide so many things, Dad?’ I ask. ‘Must have been somewhere pretty spacious, for clothes and shoes and everything. In the house? How come DS Kombothekra and the others didn’t find them? I thought you said they searched the entire house and grounds.’
‘They did,’ says Dad.
‘I thought exactly the way you’re thinking,’ Simon tells me. ‘Yeah, everywhere had been searched, so if your Dad was the one who’d done it, which by then I knew he was, where had he put all the evidence? I felt pretty pleased with myself when I worked it out.’
‘What did you work out?’ Ollie asks, as desperate as I am to know.
‘It seemed obvious once I thought of it,’ says Simon. ‘The massive computers our SOCOs had removed from this house – from your home office, Gareth – and taken to the nick in Spilling.’
‘You can hide a lot in a full tower case if you take out all the other components,’ Dad says. His face twists, as if at a sudden spasm of pain. ‘Isn’t it funny how you can think you’re being so clever while being a fool of the first order? I thought it was perfect. Foolproof! No one would ever convict me of a crime someone else was confessing to wanting to commit at the very moment I was supposedly doing it. I knew about the diary file on your computer, Jemm. Marianne had read it and told me all about it, so I knew that on Monday between five and six you’d be at the police station. “Perfect”, I thought. “Jemma can’t be blamed. She’ll have the most solid alibi imaginable: vouched for by the police.” And I thought my clever Zoom recording plan would work just as well for me.’
‘And you didn’t think about the conspiracy to murder charge that would almost definitely have been coming Jemma’s way,’ Simon says, with a small shake of his head at Dad’s reckless stupidity.
‘How can we be sure that won’t still happen?’ Ollie asks him. ‘The conspiracy charges.’
‘We can be sure because …’ Simon reaches for a slice of cucumber from the bowl in the middle of the table. Instead ofeating it, he starts to pull it apart with his fingers. ‘What murder plan?’ he says. ‘What laptop diary? Is anyone going to step forward and say they’ve seen such a thing, or read it, or even heard of it? No. They’re not.’
‘I see,’ says Ollie. ‘Thank you so much.’
Thank you.
I’m too overwhelmed to speak. I don’t care if Simon’s doing all this for me and my family or for his own strange reasons, but I don’t care. I’ll be grateful to him for the rest of my life.
‘I want to make it very clear …’ Dad starts to say, and for a second I nearly laugh, imagining he might be about to complain about Simon’s bad table manners and the shredding of the cucumber, but of course he doesn’t. Instead he says, ‘After today and … everything we’ve all done, after all of this …’ He gestures around the table. ‘You’re not the only one who’s going to be doing everything by the book from now on, Simon.’
‘No. You are,’ Simon tells him. ‘The only one out of you and me, anyway.’
‘What do you mean?’ Ollie asks.
‘I don’t know,’ our strange police detective friend says. ‘I just … I don’t have it in me to live by anyone else’s rules, even if it means keeping a job I need. Never have and never will. That won’t change.’
‘I thought you said your wife wanted the two of you to make a deal with … gods you don’t believe in,’ Dad says.
‘True, and well remembered,’ Simon smiles. ‘But she’s about to find out, along with everyone else who knows me, that unfortunately for them, I’m still Simon Waterhouse.’ He reaches for another piece of cucumber. ‘To be honest, I can’t see myself stopping being Simon Waterhouse any time soon.’
23rd October 2023
Dear Jemma
You won’t ever read this letter. Very soon, I hope, I’m going to do to you what you planned to do to me, but chickened out of doing.
I won’t be chickening out. I’ll be going through with it – or someone acting on my behalf will – and you will deserve it. In due course, you’ll be a body, not a person any more, and your father and I will bury you in the grounds of Devey House with a great fanfare. Your wake will, of course, be the party to end all parties. And this letter will be buried alongside you, because that’s the closest I can get to what I want.
What I’d ideally like is for you to be able to read this before you die, but that can’t happen. No, that’s wrong. What I’d like even more, but know is impossible, is for you to see the light in time to save yourself. (A woman can dream, can’t she?) If only you could promise to change and start loving me … God, you’ve no idea how often that passionate wish has passed through my mind over the years.
I’m not perfect, Jemma, but I did want to be your mum. I was the only mum you had, and you rejected me over and over again. I loved you and was ready to carry on loving you forever. You were the one who ruined that with your endless, ongoing, year-after-year refusal to show me any affection or loyalty whatsoever. You did one good thing, though: you found Ollie and brought him to ourhome, our family. Then you stupidly ditched him in favour of Useless Paddy, but I forgave you for that – because I saw a different way forward. Ollie and I would sort it all out, I thought, and you’d love it once you had what I knew you truly wanted deep down. And once we were all together and everything was as it was supposed to be, you’d start to love me then – I was sure of it. Why? Because Ollie did. That’s right, Jemm – Ollie really loved me, like the best possible son loves his mother. He’d have persuaded you round to his point of view about me, given the chance.
Remember the brilliant time we had in the Cotswolds, Christmas 2005? It really crushed me when you spoke so harshly about Ollie afterwards – him ringing to say we might be late when there was no need – because we were all so happy that week, you as much as anyone. Later, I realised why you were so determined to trash Ollie in the immediate aftermath of you dumping him: you were trying to brainwash yourself, weren’t you? You were already starting to worry you’d made the wrong choice, and it was you that needed propagandising as much as me.
Because you loved Ollie, and I did too, and that’s what would have made you love me too, eventually. Except I messed it all up. I lied to Ollie about the DNA test, told him Lottie was his when I knew she was Paddy’s. I shouldn’t have done any of that. I should have been completely honest with him and trusted him. Most of all, I should never have assumed he’d be willing to kill Paddy. It’s to his credit that he wasn’t, and I saw with blinding clarity, as I lay bleeding on my kitchen floor, that I should never have been willing to take it that far either.
I did everything I could to put right the catastrophic mistakes I’d made: wrote Ollie a long letter of apology, told the police I’d made a mistake when I’d named him, assured them it wasn’t him. They would have charged him with attempted murder, which would have been too stupid for me to bear. The whole awful mess hadonly happened because Ollie was so against the plan I’d made for him to kill Paddy. What he did to me was a protest against murder – as I said to DC Brodigan, it was the opposite of murder. (I had some fun, winding the police up with my cryptic comments.)
