Here, memories were filtered through rose-tinted glasses. You selected the things you wanted to remember and put aside those you would rather forget. You left bright bunches of flowers to disguise the fact that all around you was death, your loved ones just a small pile of milky ashes in an ugly pot that Gabe was pretty sure Jenny would have stuffed at the back of a cupboard or “accidentally” dropped if she had received it as a present.
He smiled. A real memory. Jenny was a woman of taste and limited tact. She knew what she liked and what she didn’t and wasn’t afraid to say so.
He sat down on a bench and stared at her small headstone, beneath which the offensive pot was buried:
JENNIFER MARY FORMAN
13 AUGUST 1981–11 APRIL 2016
WIFE. BELOVED DAUGHTER. DEVOTED MUMMY.
IN OUR HEARTS, MINDS AND MEMORIES ALWAYS.
“Wife.” That was all they had given him. The tiniest of gestures. He hadn’t been involved in choosing the headstone. Just like he had been excluded from most of the funeral arrangements. At the time, he was relieved. And, of course, at the time, he was still under suspicion of murder.
“Gabriel?”
He started, looked around. Harry stood beside the bench. Always a well-preserved, fit-looking man (a respected doctor and surgeon in his day), today he looked every one of his seventy-nine years. The thick white hair was still perfectly styled, combed back from a face bronzed by regular winter sun. But there was a slight sagginess around his jaw and eyes. The lines on his forehead carved deeper. One hand leaned heavily on a stick. In the other, he held flowers. Two bouquets.
As Gabe watched, he bent and placed one in the vase beside Jenny’s headstone. Then he turned. To the other headstone. The one Gabe had carefully avoided looking at since he arrived. Because, despite what he believed, despite what he had discovered, the sight of it still filled him with a grief that was almost too much to bear. A black, swollen tide that threatened to drag him down and engulf him.
ISABELLA JANE FORMAN
5 APRIL 2011–11 APRIL 2016
CHERISHED DAUGHTER AND GRANDDAUGHTER.
BORROWED FROM HEAVEN, RETURNED TO THE ARMS OF ANGELS.
Jenny. Izzy.
“It’s about your wife…and your daughter.”
Harry sat down heavily next to him. “So what do you want to talk about?”
The estate where Lou lived was a cramped quadrangle of pebbledashed houses on the outskirts of Barton Marsh village. Sustainable, affordable housing. Translate as: cheap, small, ugly.
Katie squeezed into a space a few doors down from her sister’s mid-terrace. The small square of grass outside was uncut. A trike lay on its side, weeds poking through the spokes. The rubbish bin by the front door overflowed with bulging black sacks. She tried not to tut.
She loved Lou. God knows what she would do if she couldn’t have Sam and Gracie overnight. But she hated that she had to leave her children with her. She hated how she couldn’t be sure that Lou would put them back to bed if they woke up in the night, rather than letting them stay up and watch TV. She hated that Lou’s own little girl, Mia, always looked a bit dirty and hastily dressed, often wandering around in just a T-shirt and a nappy.
She knew it wasn’t up to her to tell her sister how to live her life. She knew that, as the youngest, she had been hit hard by what had happened. But then they all had. You couldn’t use that as an excuse for the rest of your life. Eventually, you had to grow up, take responsibility. Lou didn’t seem to want to try. She was only twenty-seven and it felt like she had already given up on life.
Katie walked up the short front path, stepping over an empty McDonald’s wrapper and a packet of half-used wet wipes. She let herself into the hall with the key Lou had given her. It smelled of stale food and dirty nappies.
“Hello?” she called quietly.
No sounds from upstairs. She wondered what time they went to bed. Waking up grumpy, tired children when she was feeling grumpy and tired herself was the last thing she needed.
“Sam? Gracie?”
She traipsed upstairs, shoved open the door to their bedroom. Sam and Gracie were already sitting up sleepily in the bed they shared. Mia rolled over and blinked at her from her cot bed, a pacifier hanging out of her mouth.
Sam yawned. “Did we sleep late?”
“No, no. It’s okay. I just wanted to come in and surprise you!”
From next door, she heard her sister’s sleepy grumble: “For God’s sake.”
She smiled grimly.
“Okay, well, up you get. I’ll start breakfast.”
* * *
—
LOU EMERGED DOWNSTAIRS just as Katie was dishing up toast and cereal. She managed to clear a space at the cluttered table for Sam, Gracie and Mia. She had stuck the television on to keep them happy, although there had been a brief dispute over whether they should watch Clone Wars or PJ Masks.
“Christ—can you turn that down a bit?” Lou yawned.
Her blonde hair was a tangled haystack, makeup smudged beneath her eyes. She wore a grubby dressing gown knotted loosely at the waist.
Katie picked up the remote and deliberately nudged the volume up. Then she gathered up the pile of rubbish she had picked up from the floor and went to stick it in the bin. She flipped open the lid and paused. The bin was crammed with Guinness cans.
“Has Steve been round?”
“Oh yeah. Just for a bit, last night.”
Steve. The latest in a long line of useless boyfriends that Lou seemed to pick up like other people pick up chewing gum on the soles of their shoes. The only difference being that Lou’s boyfriends didn’t stick around as long.
It was probably giving Steve too much credit to even call him a boyfriend, really. The relationship seemed more off than on. He wouldn’t call for weeks on end, then he’d turn up, out of the blue, whenever he felt like it. And it was pretty obvious what he felt like. Katie knew that he was just using her sister. But Lou refused to see it, trotting out all the usual excuses: he worked shifts, he was busy, he had a demanding job.
Katie supposed that at least he had a job, which was more than could be said for some of the walking disasters Lou had dated, like Mia’s dad, who had disappeared faster than you could say “unpaid child support” once he knew she was pregnant. But ultimately, none of that really mattered. Steve could have been a millionaire entrepreneur or a saint. The point was that Katie had one firm ground rule in the babysitting arrangement with her sister: no boyfriends stopping over when her children were here.