‘How are you?’ She doesn’t sound more than politely concerned.
Bel responds as she’s been trained to from earliest childhood. She fixes a bright smile on her face and says, ‘I’m very well, thank you. How are you?’, as she has said to everyone who has asked her since the day of the murder. Lucinda is her first visitor – or the first one she knows personally, anyway – since the trial.
‘Well, I’m glad to hear it,’ says Lucinda. ‘I’m glad to hear you’re very well.’
Bel’s eyes fill with tears.
Lucinda pulls a face. ‘Oh, stop being such a baby,’ she says.
Bel hangs her head and seeks composure. Her mother has never liked displays of emotion; not from Bel, anyway.
‘How is everyone?’ she asks eventually.
‘How do you expect them to be?’ replies Lucinda.
‘I don’t…’ says Bel.
‘Michael almost divorced me,’ says Lucinda. ‘But, thank God, he’s changed his mind. He understands, you see. That I can’t be blamed for what you’ve done.’
‘I’m sorry,’ says Bel, humbly. Looks down at the worn cuffs of her sweater, wonders how much longer this visit will last.
‘Anyway,’ says Lucinda, after a pause. ‘I just came to let you know we’re leaving. Going to Singapore.’
Bel doesn’t answer. It’s already clear to her that it’s all over, on the outside, that the house is locked up and the family fled. No one has made much effort to hide the press coverage from her; she’s seen the boards over the windows, the steel grille on the door, like the burnt-out wastes of Broadwater Farm. The Walkers have been rehoused, their names changed, the younger children taken into care and the eldest scattered to the winds. Her own people – there’s less help from the state if you’ve got bank accounts. Less interference, too.
‘The bank’s transferred him,’ continues Lucinda. ‘Kind of them, really. But then again, he’s good at what he does. Popular, too, though I don’t suppose you’ll appreciate that. Anyway, that’s it. I dare say we won’t come back. So that’s us, condemned to life as international gypsies, thanks to you. I thought I’d tell you. Let you know.’
‘OK,’ says Bel passively. In a way she feels relieved, knowing more clearly what the future holds. They’re not going to fight for her. She’s on her own.
‘Right, well.’ Lucinda starts to root in her bag. For a moment, Bel has a wild thought that she might have brought a gift. A keepsake for the years ahead, some small token that will remind her that she did indeed once have a family. Her mother’s hair, usually immaculate, is unruly, tied back in a ponytail, roots showing among the candystripe blond. She’s developed lines, she notices, around her mouth, in the six months since Bel last saw her. I did that, thinks Bel. It’s all my fault.
Lucinda finds what she is looking for, brings it out: a handkerchief, embroidered: her initials in one corner. She blows her nose delicately; brings her oversized sunglasses down from their perch on her head and covers her eyes.
‘At least your sister’ll get some chance of a normal life,’ says Lucinda. ‘Without people knowing. People looking at her. Wondering.’
‘Yes,’ says Bel.
‘How could you do it, Annabel?’ she asks.
‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘It wasn’t meant. We didn’t mean to – it just happened…’
‘Oh, for God’s sake.’ Lucinda dismisses the crime as though it were some petty gossip, some vandalism, some schoolyard scrap. ‘Not that. For Christ’s sake. I mean those lies. All those lies about Michael.’
‘They weren’t lies,’ she says defiantly. ‘I told you. I told, but you wouldn’t listen. They weren’t lies.’
Lucinda doesn’t want to hear it. Has never wanted to hear it: not about the cellar, or the stables, or the late-night visits when her mother is deep in Valium dreams.
‘I tried to tell you, Mummy,’ she says, ‘but you wouldn’t listen.’
And she won’t listen now. ‘Oh, for God’s sake. He paid for your lawyer, for God’s sake. How could you do something like that to him?’
‘Mummy-’ she tries one more time.
‘Oh, shut up. I just wanted to tell you, that’s all. What I think of you. That man’s brought you up since you were a toddler. He took you on out of the goodness of his heart. He’s given us everything. I can’t believe you’d repay us like that. How did you get to be like this, Annabel?’
You taught me, she thinks. I learned that lying was the best chance I had. She stares and shakes her head. There is nothing to say. Nothing that will be heard, anyway.
In the corner, the corrections officer turns a page of Woman’s Own pointedly. Lucinda glances at her, then gets briskly to her feet. ‘I’m done,’ she commands. ‘I’m ready to go now.’
The woman slowly puts the magazine down and starts to pull her keychain from the pocket of her navy trousers. Her expression is inscrutable; the expression of someone who’s storing every detail for later dissection. Lucinda turns back to Bel, gives her the Look again.
‘Dear God,’ she says. ‘You always were a little liar. From the minute you could talk.’
She wheels on her elegant green heel and marches towards the door. The officer points at Bel’s chair. ‘Stay there,’ she says.
The door bangs to behind them.
A cigarette is at its most delicious in damp sea air. She rests against the station wall and savours every last lungful. Waits as the lights on the front fade to insignificance and Martin releases a final, surrendered sigh. He’s gone, thinks Amber, and Jade is safe. No one to tell, no one to see.
She takes her phone from her pocket, dials 999. Looks at the watery sun as it leaps over the horizon, gets out the last of the cigarettes, crumples the pack and puts it, tidily, in her pocket. ‘Hello,’ she says, calmly, when the operator answers. ‘I need help. I think I’ve killed someone.’
She lights the last of the cigarettes, sits back and waits.
Epilogue
Jim’s mother goes up to bed and they do the washing-up. She’s aged noticeably since their last visit, and seems relieved to hand over the chores, though she has always been one of those old-fashioned women for whom late rising, public displays of emotion and leaving the washing-up are all, if not mortal ones, sins nonetheless. She’ll be eighty in a couple of years, thinks Jim. I wonder how long she can keep this house going for. Maybe we should be talking to her about her plans, before she gets too frail to make them.
Kirsty washes and he, still knowing his way round the kitchen of his childhood, dries and puts away. Kirsty is quiet. Has been all day. She must be exhausted, he thinks. Apart from her nap in the car while I drove us over here, she’s barely slept since the night before last. She stands on one foot as she scrubs; dangles her sandalled other to take the weight off it.
‘How’s the knee?’ he asks.
‘OK,’ she says. ‘A bit hurty.’
‘I’ll get you some ibuprofen,’ he says. ‘I’m sure Mum’s got some in the bathroom.’
‘That would be nice,’ says Kirsty. ‘Thanks, sweetie.’
Jim puts down the dishcloth and makes his way as quietly as he can to the bathroom. It’s all so familiar. Same old Flower Fairies on the hall wall, same old umbrella stand by the front door. At what point in life do you stop buying things? he wonders. He loves the stability of his mother’s domain: the memories in every chair, the china picked out with his father before their wedding and cared for and husbanded so that the service is still intact nearly fifty years later. But he doesn’t remember them ever doing the acquisitive thing that seems to be expected of you these days. By the time he was aware of his surroundings, they’d reached a point where they only went to the shops to replace things when they actively wore out. They never spent their time combing country-house sales looking to upgrade, or threw out curtains simply because they’d tired of the pattern, the way he and Kirsty do.