That part did make sense, and although Penrose still recoiled from the idea that a twelve-year-old girl – a girl he had cared for – could be a murderer, he was experienced enough to know that history suggested otherwise. ‘Do you know why she did it?’ he asked, wanting at least an explanation if he had to accept the fact.
‘Because she found out that the family was going to be split up. Ma could only afford to take the little ones with her, and we were old enough to stay behind and work. She hadn’t told us everything because she didn’t want to spoil Christmas.’
Such a natural thing for a mother to do, Penrose thought: keeping a painful secret to protect the last Christmas they would share as a family. He tried to imagine the grief and horror that Mollie Naylor must have felt when she saw what her daughter had done, and realised why she had done it; had she been there to testify, he wondered if she would have thanked her young son for unwittingly putting her out of her misery. ‘People always said that violence was in our family,’ Naylor added. ‘My dad used to knock us around, so they thought it ran in the genes. Perhaps they were right, but they blamed the wrong kid – and Alex let them go on thinking it.’
‘And she destroyed your love for your mother,’ Penrose said. ‘You’ve spent your life hating her for things she hadn’t done, things she would never have done.’
Jack nodded, grateful for his understanding. ‘I clung to Alex because she was the only person who could possibly know how it felt to have your family snatched away from you, the only person left alive who knew what I’d done and understood why, but even she wasn’t who I thought she was. It was all a lie.’
‘So you killed her in the heat of the moment?’ Penrose said, wishing it to be true.
‘No, not then, but I told her I was going to come here and tell you the truth – you and Hartley. She just laughed.’
‘She didn’t believe you?’
‘She said that Hartley knew already. Apparently she told him all those years ago while we were staying at the vicarage, and he promised to protect her. It would be impossible for me to tell you how much I hated her in that moment – how much I hated them both. I’ve spent my whole life resenting something I didn’t understand, but I’ve never felt a rage like that.’
Could it really be true that Richard Hartley had conspired to keep the truth of that day a secret? Penrose wondered. It was hard to contemplate, and the vicar’s comments the night before had seemed genuine enough, yet he also knew how difficult it would have been for him to betray the girl’s trust if he had been put in that impossible position; he would have done it, but it would have destroyed him, and the Hartleys had known both children much better than he had. In fact, he had always wondered why they didn’t adopt the orphans themselves; perhaps now he knew the answer. ‘When did you confront Richard Hartley?’ he asked. ‘You were obviously the past that he hadn’t expected to see. Did he recognise you?’
‘No, not at all. I think she did, though.’
‘Mrs Hartley?’
Naylor nodded. ‘She kept looking at me over dinner, like she knew me and couldn’t place me, but nobody took any notice. She obviously didn’t say anything to him, because it came as a shock when I told him. I did it as we were leaving the smoking room together, when you’d gone off to find Marlene. He’d just been telling us that he was going to preach a sermon about love, if you remember, so I thought I’d show him what love was really capable of.’
‘You asked to meet him in the church?’
‘Yes. After all that talk about the chair and St Michael, it seemed right that someone should judge him at the end. He spent his life deciding who to damn and who to save …’
‘Not consciously,’ Penrose argued. ‘He was trying to do his best. He didn’t deserve to die, especially not like that.’
He could see that his words had disappointed Jack. ‘Neither did my mother,’ he retaliated angrily, ‘and she certainly didn’t deserve to be blamed for it – so who gets to decide what’s right and what’s wrong? Whose secrets are kept and whose reputations are destroyed? Whose lives are worth protecting, and whose can be thrown away? Everybody passed a judgement that day, including you, and some of us are still living with it.’
And some are not, Penrose thought. ‘Did Richard Hartley admit that he knew what Alex had done?’
‘No. He swore she’d never said a word to him, but he’d have said anything last night. He was begging for his life.’
A note of doubt had crept into his voice. ‘You could hardly bear to look at him this morning, when I asked you to photograph his body,’ Penrose said.
‘Of course I couldn’t. I thought it was a trap.’
‘There was more to it than that. You were worried that he’d been telling the truth, weren’t you? The more you thought about it, the more you began to suspect that Alex had fooled you into killing for her all over again.’
‘No! Why would she tell me that Hartley knew if he didn’t?’
‘To stop you coming here. To protect herself. She’d been lying for years to do that, so why baulk at it now? Richard’s was a horrific death, Jack. You didn’t just kill him. You tormented and humiliated him – a good man, who had always tried to do his best. How could you let yourself be manipulated like that?’ Penrose heard the fury in his own voice and knew that he had overstepped the mark; Naylor’s devastation was obvious, and nothing he said could make the man’s remorse any more profound than it was already. In truth, it was himself that he was angry with, not Jack Naylor: they should all have asked more questions about what happened that Christmas, and he should have got to the truth eighteen years ago – not now, when it was far too late.
Naylor picked up the snowman from the table and looked at the bloodstained cotton. ‘I thought of myself differently after Alex told me the truth,’ he said. ‘Does that make sense? Until then, I’d killed but I wasn’t a killer. There was a reason for it, and I could always tell myself that it was for the best, no matter how terrible it seemed at the time. All that changed last week. I killed my mother, the person I loved most in all the world, who loved me. Nothing else mattered after that, or at least I thought it didn’t. By the time I got here, it was just the end.’
‘You didn’t kill Mrs Soper, though, did you?’ Penrose asked, and Naylor shook his head.
He got up and walked over to the Christmas tree that stood in the corner, and Penrose watched as he rubbed the pine needles between his finger and thumb and smelt their scent. ‘My mother loved Christmas, did I ever tell you that?’
‘I don’t think so, but I remember the tree you had and how much love had gone into it. I remember the presents.’
‘We never opened them because of what we thought she’d done. She worked so hard to get them for us, and they were just thrown away. It’s funny, isn’t it, the things that haunt you. After Alex told me what had happened, all I could think about was how ungrateful that was, and how hurt Ma would have been if she’d known.’ He brushed a hand across his cheek and turned to Penrose. ‘Every year it comes back, you know. Every year, when the music starts and the lights go up, I can’t wait for Christmas to be over. It’s actually quite a comfort to know I’ll never see another one.’