Meier spoke first.
MEIER: ‘There might be legal ramifications to consider later, about how you can or cannot use this recording, but I’m sure you’re already aware of that.’
CONNOR: ‘We are, although without knowing what you’re going to say …’
MEIER: ‘All of it will be the truth, and that’s all that needs to concern us here, today.’
His eyes came to Cristy’s, and as she met them, she thought she now had a better understanding of why he’d invited her to Vevey. For whatever reason, he’d decided to unburden what he’d been carrying for years, but before completely opening up, he’d wanted to be sure he was putting his trust in the hands of someone he could trust in return.
Apparently, she had passed the test.
Once again, he spoke without being prompted, this time going straight to the heart of why they were there.
MEIER: ‘Nicole has always found it hard to accept what happened … It has affected her profoundly and in ways that …’
He took a breath, seeming to fail at the first hurdle. He swallowed hard, and his unfocused gaze drifted to the churchyard, as though a part of him was still there, beside the grave.
MEIER: ‘When the twins were alive, she was a wild and beautiful spirit with no reason to hate herself or to doubt her love as a mother … It’s true, she felt frustrated at times, impatient, confused – she was still young, and having two babies was … not always easy, but that doesn’t mean she wished them harm …’
He wiped a hand over his mouth, almost as if he was trying to stop it from trembling.
MEIER: ‘She will tell you herself, maybe …’
He gave a dry, sad sort of laugh.
MEIER: ‘I’m afraid it is never certain what Nicole will say … She has lost a normal sense of reasoning … Notcompletely, but occasionally, she will admit to things that have not happened, or she will tell you a lie that she believes in her heart to be true.
‘For example, she might tell you one day that she always regretted going through with her pregnancy, but the next, she is likely to say something entirely different. She has always been … erratic, unpredictable; it was a part of what made me fall in love with her, but since we lost the twins, and over time, things have become much worse.’
He stopped, clearly needing another moment to collect himself, and Cristy allowed the silence to run. She didn’t doubt he was going to tell them everything; he simply had to do it in his own way, his own time.
In the end, he looked at her and nodded, as if to encourage a question.
CRISTY: ‘Did you always know the twins were yours?’
MEIER: ‘No, not always. I didn’t find out until much later, but I will come to that, if you don’t mind. During their very short lives, she was afraid to do a test. She thought if I knew for certain that I was not the father, I would no longer care about them or her. I believe she understands now how wrong she was to think that.
‘Perhaps you will not see my actions as proof of my love – in fact, I am sure you will not – but whatever your judgement, it will not change the fact that I did what I did to protect her.’
Cristy could sense the emotions building inside him and as he looked away, across the meadow towards a distant wood, probably back to the past, she wondered what he was seeing? Thinking? Feeling? He started to speak, but nothing came. He swallowed and forced himself on.
MEIER: ‘I will tell you what happened on the morning of 4th July 2005. You understand I was in Switzerland at the time, so the first I knew of anything being wrong was when Nicole called me. It was hard to make out what she was saying. She was panicking, hardly able to get the words out, but eventually the horror of what she was saying got through to me. She had killed them, she kept telling me, and she didn’t know what to do. She repeated it over and over … “I’ve killed them! Make them come back, Claude. Tell me what to do …”
‘Eventually, I got her to explain why she was saying this … I didn’t believe it – of course I didn’t. She had made a mistake, misunderstood something … She told me she had put them into the bath, and because she’d had a lot to drink the night before, was hungover and sleep-deprived, she felt exhausted … She sat down on the floor next to the bath and played with them, splashing and making bubbles … She didn’t remember falling asleep, only waking up and finding they …’
He turned away sharply, as if escaping the words, and Cristy found herself wanting to escape them too. The images, the horror of those two dear souls floating amongst toys, no longer breathing …
MEIER: ‘She told me she had tried to revive them … She slapped and shook them, but she hardly knew what she was doing, so she ran downstairs for her mobile phone and called me. She needed me to tell her what to do. I said she must check again, that she had to be wrong, but she tried everything I guided her through …
‘I was terrified for her. She kept shouting that they were going to say she’d done it on purpose … It was hard to make her stop so that I could think straight, but I confess I was panicking too. I could see how shewould end up being accused of something she hadn’t intended to do. So I took a decision that was crazy then and remains so now, but my only thought at the time was to protect her … I told her she needed to stay on the line with me while I used another phone to make a call.
‘She was still very agitated. I could hear her wailing and sobbing … She begged me to come, and I would have if I had not been so far away. I kept assuring her someone was on the way … I thought, hoped that the friends I had called would find she was mistaken …
‘Before they arrived, I told her she must go out of the house for a while … She refused to leave without them, but in the end, I made her understand what she had to do – and why.
‘I had told the friends to take the twins away, if there was no mistake, so that it might look as though someone had stolen them while Nicole was not at home. Leaving them unattended would be terrible – she would receive much condemnation for that – but to us then, the fear of the authorities believing she had deliberately drowned them was so much worse.
‘I didn’t know about the cat until she started sobbing that everything around her was dying. She told me it had choked to death in the night and was still in the kitchen, wrapped in a towel. The idea of going down to the woods to bury it was hers. It would give her an excuse, she said, to be out of the house when the friends came. I told her to do that, and I would let her know when she could return – and then, if the babies had gone, she would need to raise the alarm.
