‘It wasn’t my choice,’ Penrose said, compelled to explain himself by the guilt he had always felt for making promises that he could never keep.
‘No, I’m sure it wasn’t, but Alex hoped for a while that you’d take us in.’
‘I could never have done that.’
‘It doesn’t stop kids wishing, though, does it? We were split up not long after that. Alex was luckier than I was. The Fieldings were a nice family. Ordinary, but kind. They treated her well, and worked hard to give her what she wanted.’ It was what he didn’t say about his own fate that brought tears to Penrose’s eyes, that and the idea of two young, grieving children nursing secret hopes that a stranger would save them just because he had been kind. The regret was so sudden and so powerful that he had to look away, but not before Naylor had noticed. ‘Do you remember what I asked you when you found us?’
‘Yes,’ Penrose said immediately, the sadness of the question seared permanently into his memories of that day. ‘You asked me why you weren’t special enough to die with the others.’ The boy had been sent on an errand that fateful Christmas Eve, and Penrose could easily understand why the question would always haunt him: why, on the day that his mother chose to remove herself and everything she loved from the world, had he been sent away? ‘I couldn’t give you an answer then,’ he admitted, ‘and I can’t now.’
‘It’s all right. I have my answer.’
‘Go on.’
‘It was going to be a special Christmas for us,’ Naylor said. ‘The vicar had found my mother a position – did he ever tell you that?’ Penrose nodded. ‘It was something to do with his wife and one of her charities. We were moving away, leaving that terrible place behind and starting again, outside London.’
‘Hence the note and the settled bills.’
He nodded eagerly, still the child at Christmas that every adult yearned to be. ‘I was so excited. She sent me to pay the bread bill, and it seemed significant, like she’d trusted me with something that was symbolic of a new start. I remember running home that evening and thinking to myself that I wouldn’t want to be anyone else in the world. That was a change for me. Normally, I’d have been ready to swap places with anybody, and just for an hour or two I understood what it was to be happy.’ His face darkened and Penrose waited impatiently for him to continue, sensing that the narrative wasn’t going to be the one he had most feared. ‘I heard my ma screaming and shouting halfway down the street, and as I got closer, I heard Alex, too. She was crying, and I couldn’t get upstairs fast enough. All I could think about was how Maisie and Emily could possibly be sleeping so soundly with such a racket coming from the next room. Then I saw that they weren’t asleep.’ Perhaps it was because Penrose had seen the aftermath of the tragedy for himself, but the pictures were so clear that he felt as if he were there at the boy’s shoulder, watching the scene unfold. ‘When I went next door, Tommy and Alfie were already dead and Ma and Alex were fighting over the knife. She had it at Alex’s throat and Alex was trying to push it away. If I’d have been a couple of minutes later, that would have been it.’
‘So you did rescue your sister,’ he said, resisting the temptation to ask why you would save a life, only to take it years later.
‘Somehow I pulled her away. She was hysterical, they both were, and I was so frightened but I managed to get in between them. Ma just kept coming, though. She tried to get at Alex again, and I knew she was going to kill her.’
He looked at Penrose, pleading with him to finish the story and say the words he couldn’t bring himself to speak. ‘Did you kill your mother, Jack?’
Naylor nodded. ‘I didn’t mean to. I just wanted her to stop, so I grabbed her hand and pushed her against the wall. The next thing I knew, the knife was in her neck and everything was quiet. I couldn’t believe what I’d done. It all happened so quickly.’
‘But it was self-defence,’ Penrose insisted, trying to reconcile the remorse that was so evident in Naylor’s face with the ruthlessness it must have taken to kill Richard Hartley. ‘People would have understood. I would have understood.’
‘Really?’ He shook his head, unconvinced. ‘As it was, some people thought I’d killed all of them. You were thinking that just now, when you brought me in here. I could see it in your face – you didn’t want to believe it, but you did.’
It was pointless trying to deny it. ‘I still don’t understand, though,’ Penrose said. ‘If your mother had a new life to look forward to, why would she do something so terrible?’ Naylor said nothing, challenging him to find the answer to his own question. ‘Tell me, Jack. Please.’
‘If I’d had the choice, I’d have died on the spot rather than be left behind. I remember thinking that on the day of the funeral.’ Penrose closed his eyes, remembering that bleak January day – hundreds of people crowded round a double grave as four tiny coffins were laid next to their mother, each with a bunch of snowdrops placed on top. ‘I’ve spent my whole life feeling guilty for what I did, wondering if that’s the reason Ma treated me differently that day. Perhaps there was always something bad in me, and she could see it. Alex did her best to heal that over the years …’
‘So why punish her?’
‘Because she didn’t tell me the truth, not until this week. She could have taken all that pain away, but she didn’t. She made me live with it, and rely on her to make it bearable.’ Again he waited for Penrose to catch up, then continued half impatiently. ‘You don’t have to be a photographer to know that your eyes can play tricks on you. When I went into that bedroom, I saw my mother trying to kill my sister, but perhaps that’s what I wanted to see. Perhaps it was better than the alternative.’
‘Which was?’ There was a long silence as the answer finally dawned on Penrose. ‘You mean that Alex killed the other children?’ he asked. Naylor nodded. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes, she admitted it.’
‘Why now, after all this time?’
‘Because I drove her to it. She didn’t mean to say anything, but we were having a row and she said something in the heat of the moment that she couldn’t take back.’
‘What was the row about?’
‘Christmas, of course. What else, at this time of year? It’s a terrible time for us, for obvious reasons, but we’ve always got through it together.’
‘And this year she was going away.’
‘Yes, but it wasn’t that. Alex was looking forward to the weekend, and I was pleased for her – she’d let me into the secret about Marlene Dietrich, and I knew how important it was for her career. And if I’m honest, I was quite looking forward to being on my own for once – just an ordinary bloke on Christmas Day. I think I’d even kidded myself that the memories might go away if Alex wasn’t there to remind me.’
‘So what changed?’
‘I found out the truth. I heard your name by accident when I was in the editor’s office, and I knew straight away that it wasn’t Marlene she was excited about seeing. It was you. There was an old list of guests in the bin, so I read it to make sure that I hadn’t got it wrong, and there you were – you and the Hartleys. Alex kept all that from me, and I didn’t know why, so I confronted her with it when I got home. I asked her to take me with her, but she refused, and all those old insecurities came back. I was still the one left out in the cold, the one who wasn’t wanted. I’d always be the kid who was sent away, and suddenly that made me angry rather than sad. I told Alex that she owed it to me after what I’d done for her – one weekend didn’t seem too much to ask for saving her life. I wouldn’t let it go, and in the end she just turned round and screamed at me that she didn’t owe me anything because all I’d done was finish what she started.’ He closed his eyes and screwed his hands into fists, digging his nails into the palms of his hands to stave off the tears. ‘I couldn’t believe what she was saying at first, but then it all made sense. That’s why Ma turned on her – because of what she’d done to the others.’