‘Look, I think I should talk to your mother as soon as possible,’ he said suddenly.
My face – my whole body – contracted with the fear of this.
He saw and, sighing, said, ‘Look, Verity, I just need to talk to her. It won’t be awful, I’ll just ask her about that time and ask her to consider going to the police, admitting what she did.’
‘But how do you know she did anything?’ I said.
I was talking like this was all reasonable and normal, like it was something I could just bring up with my mum. I’d wanted to, several times since I’d met Logan Carlisle last week, but seriously, how was I going to say, ‘Mum, were you screwing your teacher? Did you kill him? Cos some guy wants to have a word with you about it.’
There was no scenario where I could say something like this and it would end well. But I had to do it because it’d be so much worse if Logan Carlisle marched up to her and laid it all down.
‘How do I know?’ he spat. ‘You don’t think any of it is true, do you? You don’t think she did anything, right?’
Logan Carlisle was angry all the time. Not just a bit grumpy or cross, he had a deep, unremitting rage that gushed through his veins. It tensed up every muscle in his body, tautened the skin around his lips and his eyes. And the fury flashed in his eyes whenever he wasn’t looking directly at me. I couldn’t let him rock up to my parents’ house and confront Mum when he was like that. It was bad enough to be around it, imagine being the focus of it?
‘Do you have any idea what he did to them?’ he snapped when I didn’t immediately reply.
Of course I didn’t. From what it said in the papers, it was bad, though. They both suffered, or so we were supposed to believe. I never believed what was written in the papers, I always, always questioned articles, checking for things that didn’t add up. For example, they said he was abusive, but the people the reporters spoke to about Marcus Halnsley had nothing but good things to say about him. They weren’t all the same people, either. They were from the various schools he’d taught at, the different pupils he’d worked with, the neighbours who knew him well. No one had a bad word to say about him apart from the two people accused of his murder. Either the papers were missing something, or all the people who knew him were colluding in presenting a false image of him, or Mum was lying . . . But Mum wouldn’t lie about that, and I got the impression that Logan Carlisle didn’t believe his sister had made it up, either. I shook my head at my coffee companion, clamping my lips together to stop myself running off my mouth.
‘The papers weren’t even close to revealing what he did to them. He completely brutalised them. From what my sister hinted at and has said a couple of times, Serena had it worse. He was with her longer so he had time to refine what he did to her.’
My eyes widened at the thought of it.
‘She’s not that forthcoming, but if I press her, she will tell me things. Except about that day of the picture, the day when they got the name “The Ice Cream Girls”. No matter what I ask her, Poppy won’t talk about it at all. At all. I think it was awful. The worst of it . . .’ For the first time since we’d met, the anger dissipated a little. ‘I’m not going to retraumatise your mother. I wouldn’t do that. I know she’s as much a victim as my sister was. I just want to talk to her, I want to say I understand, that Poppy went through the same hell. And that I understand why she did it, but can she just come forward now, tell them it was an accident or something. Clear Poppy’s name.’
Logan Carlisle picked up his coffee cup, clearing the cappuccino-foamed sides by swirling its contents around, then returned the cup to its saucer. ‘I can imagine that after everything that happened, she went back. She probably still loved him because I’m pretty sure Poppy did, even after everything he put her through. But I can imagine she went back to help him and then he probably started on her again and she grabbed the knife to protect herself and accidentally killed him. She probably knew that no one would believe her so she ran.
‘I can understand that. Poppy would probably understand that, too. I just need your mum to admit to it. The police will understand. They understand abuse and its effects so much more now than they did then. I bet she won’t even get jail time, and Poppy will be free. We can tell our parents it was a misunderstanding. Our family can start to heal again.’
I was sure it wasn’t that simple. Pretty sure Logan Carlisle knew it wasn’t that simple as well. He was just telling himself – and therefore me – that it was that straightforward. And I had to do something to stop him crashing into my parents’ lives and ruining things again.
Con and I never talked about it, but we hadn’t forgotten the time Mum moved out. None of us ever talked about it, but it was there. A rut in the road of our family’s story, a pothole that almost derailed everything. I couldn’t imagine what having this man rock up into their lives would do to my parents’ relationship.
‘We don’t know what happened, though, Logan, do we?’ I began, trying to be placatory while heading him away from going directly to Mum. ‘Everything you’ve just said could be as equally true of Poppy, couldn’t it? She might have gone back to help, she might have been in danger from him, she might have been the one who accidentally killed him in self-defence but couldn’t say that because she knew how it would seem.’
Angry Man Logan Carlisle was back, but he’d brought some add-ons – indignation and utter disgust – with him.
‘What I’m saying is,’ I rushed on before he unleashed his temper on me. ‘We don’t know anything beyond what your sister has told you – which you admit is not very much – and the stuff in the papers, which we don’t know how much was embellished.’ I had no clue where I was headed with this, all I knew was I had to keep talking, had to stop him from going to Mum with this. I probably wouldn’t be able to put him off for ever, but I had to stall him. Stall him until I could work out what the best thing to do was. ‘What would be helpful would be having a time machine so we could go back and see what happened for ourselves.’
‘Really? You think that might be helpful? I’ll get right on it.’
‘If you had any knowledge of quantum science, you’d know time travel isn’t as unlikely a proposition as you might think. It’s just not currently possible, or so people want you to think.’
‘You’re not going to distract me with this kooky science-geek thing you’re trying to pull,’ Logan Carlisle snarled. ‘I. Need. To. Speak. To. Your. Mother.’
Time travel. I was being silly, but it had sparked off something in my head. What if we could time travel? ‘I wasn’t trying to distract you, I was actually working up to an idea. Look, I’m a solicitor – well, training to be one – and I’ve just realised: what if you – and I – could actually talk to my mum and your sister from back then? Find out from them what they say happened, piece together their story from what we know and what we can find out? That would be better, wouldn’t it? If nothing else, it’ll put you on a much better footing when you talk to my mother, rather than using fading newspaper clippings and half-told stories from someone who has been traumatised her whole adult life?’