Letters To My Daughter's Killer (4 page)

‘No, thanks.’ I shake my head. ‘It’s crazy.’

‘What can I do?’ she says. ‘Anything, anything at all?’

My mind is blank, woolly. My mobile phone rings. It’s been going repeatedly; each time I check the display in case it’s Tony. He’s the only person I can entertain.

‘Ring round people,’ I say to Bea. ‘Tell them we don’t know anything at the moment. When we do, I’ll let you know.’

‘And I can pass it on.’ She’s trying so hard not to cry, it tears me up. We’re only fit for nods and clenched mouths by way of farewell.

It makes me think of the deaf people Lizzie works with. When tragedy strikes them, do their signs fail, their fingers falter in the same way that words fail the hearing? Lizzie would know. There’s a split in my head: part of my brain thinking I must ask her, see what she says, and the other part saying, don’t be so bloody stupid, Lizzie’s not here any more. And she’s never coming back. I think it, I shape the words, but they don’t add up. Computer says no. You can’t get there from here. My heart cannot keep up with my head and I continually find myself imagining how I will describe all this to Lizzie.

We play the messages on the answerphone at the end of the day. It’s agonizing to listen to people’s shock and grief and compassion. We make a note of who has rung. There’s a message from Rebecca, Lizzie’s oldest friend.

‘I just heard about Lizzie,’ she says. ‘Oh Ruth, I am so sorry. If there’s anything I can do . . .’ She starts crying. As a graphic designer, the only job she’s found since graduating is in London. She can’t afford to rent anywhere in the capital so she’s staying with friends, sleeping on their sofa.

I steel myself and ring her back. ‘Rebecca, it’s Ruth.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ she says.

‘I know. Oh Rebecca.’

‘What happened?’

‘We don’t really know anything yet.’ I have learnt that I’m not the only one wanting answers; it’s natural to seek understanding, comprehension for something so hard to believe. ‘Nothing will happen for a while, with the funeral,’ I tell her. ‘They, erm . . . they have to wait so an independent post-mortem can be done if there’s going to be a trial.’

There has to be a trial, doesn’t there? What purgatory would it be to never know who’d hurt Lizzie, to never know the truth?

You were a bogeyman back then. I reinvented you time and again during that long day. The vicious stalker with a fatal obsession, back to carry out your threats. Those sick letters, awful warnings preyed on us all for months. We should have acted, protected her.

Or I pictured you as the prowler, a blurred photofit with dead eyes and jail tattoos, peering in through the windows, sizing up the house, or Lizzie. Watching. Perhaps waiting for Jack to leave. To do what? What were your intentions? Did you plan to take her life, or did something go so terribly wrong that you beat her to keep her quiet?

I wondered if you slept. If you curled up somewhere, safe and warm, muscles relaxing, breath becoming shallow, thoughts fading. Of course I preferred to think of you as frantic, sickened, haunted, like Raskolnikov in
Crime and Punishment.
I had glimpses of you ‘coming to your senses’, the guilt and horror at what you’d done growing so large as to be unbearable, so you would have to confess. Turn yourself in and beg for forgiveness.

Even then, part of needing to know who you were was because I needed someone to blame. Someone to hate.

Ruth

Sunday 13 September 2009

Tony comes back about nine. He comes back and I’m relieved he comes alone. And he and Jack and I drink and talk about Lizzie. An impromptu wake, I suppose.

Our anecdotes are punctuated by expressions of disbelief and sudden urgent questions as we pick over the few stark facts we have. Time and again we are brought up short, confronted by her death. Almost a rhythm to it, waves breaking over us, cold and salty, a merciless tide.

Jack listens intently to the reminiscences that Tony and I share of Lizzie’s childhood. The birth was a nightmare, with the baby in distress and me being rushed for an emergency C-section. And it turned our world upside down, not necessarily in a good way at first. The operation left me very weak and it took a long time for me to regain any strength and energy. Which Lizzie snatched from me. She had colic and screamed for hours on end, she kept me marooned in the house, exhausted and weepy and slightly mad. Whenever I managed to get us both up and out, wherever we went, she cried the place down. She failed to thrive, which made me feel like a failure, and I gave up trying to breastfeed, but the formula only seemed to aggravate her colic. We spent money we didn’t have trying every possible solution: cranial massage, homeopathy, Reiki healing. Nothing helped.

One night Tony got in late from the salvage yard to find me weeping in the kitchen and Lizzie screaming in the lounge. The oven had broken, just conked out halfway through baking some potatoes. It was a bitter winter’s day, and even with the heating on, the house was chilly. No double glazing or decent insulation back then.

‘I’ll fix it,’ Tony said. He can fix just about anything.

‘It’ll still take another hour even if you can,’ I shouted. ‘It’s seven already.’ Lizzie was still screaming.

‘Does she need changing?’ Tony said.

‘No idea. Why don’t you have a look? I’m not doing anything else today. I’m sick of it. Sick of it all.’

He disappeared into the living room. I heard him pick her up, jig her about. The screaming halted for a moment, then resumed.

I lit a cigarette, went outside and smoked it in the perishing wind. I felt cheated: it wasn’t meant to be like this.

When I came back in, my eyes watering and my fingers numb, Tony said, ‘Get ready, we’ll go out to eat.’

‘The baby,’ I said scornfully.

‘My mum’s coming round.’

‘I don’t know if that’s—’

‘Get ready,’ he said, his eyes snapping at me.

‘Fine!’ I flung back.

I left him mixing formula, Lizzie grizzling in her bouncy chair, and went to change. I felt ugly, lumpen and sullen. My hair greasy and in need of a trim. But I made myself halfway presentable with clothes that didn’t reek of baby sick, and when his mother arrived we left her to it.

We went to Rusholme and stuffed ourselves full of curry. The food, the warm buzz of the restaurant, the change of scene worked on me like a tonic. My frustration, my unhappiness ebbed away and I determined to ignore the whisper of anxiety at being away from the baby. We even managed to talk about something other than Lizzie. Tony had been running the architectural salvage business on his own for two years after taking it over from his uncle. He was specializing in interior features: stained glass, wood balustrades, tiles and fire surrounds, cornices and dado rails. In the wholesale rush to convert and modernize, these were being ripped out of old villas and terraces. But some people still valued traditional items, and Tony’s business was steadily growing.

From the curry house we went to the pub. We hadn’t been out for a drink together since Lizzie was born. After a couple of halves of Guinness, I told him that I definitely wanted to go back to work after my six months’ leave, but part time if we could possibly manage it. And I also announced that I didn’t want to have any more children. ‘I know everyone says that at first,’ I told him, ‘but I really can’t do this again.’

‘It’s bound to be different,’ he said.

‘No,’ I said, ‘because it isn’t going to happen. I mean it.’ What I was saying was serious and he needed to realize it. ‘If you want more kids, you need to be honest with me, and not go along with it thinking I might change my mind. Because I won’t.’

‘No,’ he said, ‘I wanted to be a dad, I wanted a child. We’ve got a child. That’s fine.’

I stared at him, into those blue-green eyes, and he met my gaze. He meant what he said.

Florence was so different from Lizzie. Polar opposites. As long as she was fed and clean and warm enough, she was happy. She cried if she needed something but not those raging, painful howls her mother had made, the sort that clawed inside your skull and scraped at your nerves.

‘When Lizzie met you,’ I say to Jack, ‘when you started going out. She was so . . . giddy.’

I remember her bursting to tell us: ‘The one who played Cassius, the one with the dark hair.’

Lizzie had been sign-language interpreting at the Royal Exchange. One of her first big jobs and she was petrified. We were worried at first; Jack was living with someone, but Lizzie insisted that he was an honourable man. He would tell his partner. Of course I fretted: if he could be fickle once . . . But Lizzie knew he was the great love of her life. She never doubted they’d be together.

And she was right. Jack left his girlfriend in London and moved to Manchester.

‘And your proposal!’ We laugh with delight and another wave of shame runs through me. Lizzie is dead. I ought never to laugh again.

The men catch my mood.

‘It’s all right,’ Tony says, his eyes on me.

‘She was embarrassed,’ Jack says after a pause.

‘But she loved it,’ I say. ‘The romance of it.’ Several months after their first meeting, Jack was playing in
What the Butler Saw
at the Birmingham Rep, and Lizzie was doing the signed performances.

At the end of the show, after the curtain call, Jack remained on stage, and the technician, who’d been primed, played a drum roll, alerting the audience, who were already on their feet ready to leave. Lizzie was sitting at the side of the stage, near the wings.

Jack had practised his message and began to sign to her. At first she did nothing, just went bright red. ‘I was too surprised,’ she told me. Jack repeated the signs:
Lizzie, I love you. I want to spend the rest of my life with you. Will you marry me?

Blushing furiously, she stood up and translated to the audience.

A hush of expectation fell over the theatre, broken only by a couple of wolf whistles and someone yelling, ‘Say yes.’ And answering laughter. Then Lizzie in turn signed to Jack.
Yes, I will. I love you.
And said it aloud. The place erupted with applause and cheers and catcalls.

No one wants to break up our little circle, but eventually at almost two in the morning Tony calls a cab and Jack says good night.

Lizzie was heartbroken when we split up. Is it different for any children? Are there those who find relief in the separation, in the cessation of hostilities? Perhaps.

Lizzie was only fifteen when the mayhem of our troubles clashed with her own teenage trauma. Sometimes it felt like we were three adolescents competing as to who could slam the door hardest, stay silent longest, shout the loudest.

In my memory, that period lasted for years. In reality, it was no more than three or four months. We weren’t complete idiots, and even mired in our own pain, we could see how it was hurting Lizzie.

It was the greatest shock of my life.

Before this.

Tony stayed home from work one day. I was doing the late shift at the library and Lizzie had left for school.

‘Don’t you need to open up?’ I said. He had been working all hours, making the most of the lighter nights and a fresh wave of property development in the region.

‘I need to talk to you,’ he said, a peculiar shifty look on his face.

I had no idea.

We sat at the kitchen table. I swallowed. I couldn’t imagine what it was about; my mind alighted on possibilities: financial trouble, a health scare, another discussion about moving house (every few years we’d go through the rigmarole of considering a move, of looking for some wreck and doing it up and selling it on as another way to make some money. But we’d never finally bitten the bullet).

‘I’ve met someone else,’ he said.

I stared at him. Clutching at the possibility that I’d misheard, misunderstood. Waiting in case there was something more to come, a punchline, another phrase to set me straight and allow me to breathe again.

When I didn’t speak, he cleared his throat. ‘It’s serious,’ he said. His hands, big, brawny hands, clenched together, one nail tugging at a scab.

‘Who is it?’ I found my voice.

He blinked, his sea-green eyes glittering with something: shame, or embarrassment?

My throat was dry, I stood quickly, went and poured myself a glass of water, took a drink. Turned to him, repeating my question.

‘Her name’s Denise.’

I didn’t know any Denise.

‘Where did you meet her, who is she?’ My face felt odd, as though I couldn’t control my muscles, little tremors flickering through my cheeks, plucking at my lips.

‘At physio, she works there.’ Tony had hurt his shoulder lifting stuff at work. When it didn’t heal, I pestered him until he went to the GP, who referred him on.

I laughed, feeling sick.

‘She was looking for a fireplace.’

And got a lover into the bargain.

He exhaled slowly and pulled a face.

‘Look, if this is just some fling—’ I was ready to forgive, to forget, to retreat. Something was breaking inside me at the prospect that he might leave.

‘It’s not,’ he interrupted. ‘I can’t stop seeing her, I don’t want to stop.’

I turned to look out of the window. I couldn’t bear to witness it, what he was saying, the strength of his feeling. ‘You bastard,’ I said.

‘Ruth—’

‘Fuck off!’ I threw the glass across the room, relishing the sound as it smashed against the wall and water splashed on to the shelves and the floor. ‘Get out,’ I screeched at him.

He tried to speak, something about sorting things out and Lizzie, but I was incandescent.

That day I called in sick, and I was. Heartsick, wounded. Retreating to my bed, I wept and cursed, all but tore my hair out. What had happened? Obviously he didn’t love me as I still did him, but where had it gone? Nineteen years we’d been together. Nineteen.

Lizzie shared my hurt and outrage when Tony and I finally told her what was going on. It would have been easy to form a little cabal, the two of us, to ostracize him, close ranks and sit together picking over his betrayal for our entertainment. Or to force him to choose between Denise and his daughter. But I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to be the stereotype of the cuckolded wife, cold and acerbic and unforgiving. Nor did I want Lizzie to be damaged in the fallout from the split.