The year had passed and a new year had begun.
Anne had returned from her travels in October, having gone to America after her holiday in the outback with David. She spent the final months of the year cataloguing all her information and turning it into a draft book called “Lost Girls”. By Christmas she had a good draft with her editors for review. She felt in great need of a rest from a gruelling year.
She had lived an emotional roller coaster as she found out story after story, small parts happy, but in totality a trail of appalling tragedy.
She felt profoundly sorry for all the girls and their wasted lives, Susan especially. But for Susan’s chance meeting with Mark, that had thrown her off the rails, her future had seemed so bright.
But most of all she felt profound sympathy for the man at the centre, the man whose own life had been a series of ever increasing horrors. In the end he was perpetrator as much as a victim and part of her felt it was fitting that there was a closure with his death.
Having walked so many miles in his shoes she could not find it in her to blame him, despite his final remorseless murders. She only wished it could have been otherwise, particularly before he had met Susan.
She thought that Vic’s Mum had got closest to the truth; Mark had lost a mother and her love. It seemed that what had followed as he had gone through so many relationships was an increasingly desperate and demented search for another love, a new queen.
So many times he could have found her but fate intervened. The final outcome, a an act in a classic Shakespearian tragedy where the death of the villain was preordained; but to get there he destroyed all he touched, with hindsight seemed inevitable.
Anne wished there was a way to wind back the clock and make it otherwise, if only Elin had lived, his first fairy queen, if only Belle lived, she seemed the nearest in this story to a simple love, if only Josie, but for jealousy perhaps she would have had Mark’s measure, if only Amanda had not tried to wrest control from his soul. The final two deaths were much darker but it did not appear that Mark formed a premeditated plan to harm them, more it was that they were broken inside too and had failed to understand he was even more broken than them and how dangerous that made him.
Cathy was the strangest; in a way she was the most broken of all. But yet, for the first time, there appeared to be a person with a power to heal and be healed, perhaps it was her need that had brought goodness from him. But, before that had run any natural course, she too was gone. Still the Mark that came after her seemed a less damaged person, the poem of the new queen seemed to be something he had taken to heart, seeking a new beginning.
Then along came Susan; the way Mark described her she had fulfilled the new queen prophecy, first described by him as a Greek goddess. And she had the look, that ineffable look shared with Belle and Cathy, the dark hair and searching eyes but something more, a mix of mischief and joie de vie, perhaps love of life was the best way to say it. It seemed to reach into Mark’s soul and connect with him, was it a look, glimpsed as a child, of his long lost mother.
Anne had seen a photo of Mark’s mother, taken on her wedding day, but this was a posed photo without life. While her hair and face were similar she could not judge if she too had that look, but perhaps. She knew that Sandy had other family photos from Mark’s past, but she had not viewed them, perhaps they would show something if she did.
So when Susan had come along she too had a look, common to Belle and Cathy which caught Mark’s attention and made him arrange to meet her. It did seem he was seeking to start afresh and not damage this one. He begged her not to seek his past. But yet it could not be, she needed to know the man and the truth was uncovered. Then, under pressure, he reverted to type; professing love but tying her up like a dangerous animal, unable to reconcile his two parts.
Then that final place of clarity where he realised he could not kill what he loved this time, but yet he could not stand by and let his history come out. He saw that to impart to Susan the knowledge of who he was would inevitably sow the seeds of future destruction, that the knowledge would tear her apart, little by little.
And so he had chosen. Anne had no doubt that, if Susan had not acted first, he would have swam to join the crocodiles, the outcome would have been the same but without Susan having his blood on her hands.
But then, as Anne thought further, even that alternate place seemed no solution; for Susan to watch her doomed lover being torn apart would most likely have damaged her equally to her own act. So Susan was in a trap of circumstances too; she saw no way out either. At last Anne felt she was in a place to understand the hopeless desperation that consumed her friend’s soul, emptiness feeding on yet more emptiness, without escape.
So here she was now at the end of her own search, seeking a solution but there was none. Sometimes life just dealt shit cards giving no solution. And this story had a whole royal flush of them.
By the end of the year Anne was totally numb from living this human storm, day after day, week after week. It was a relief to be alone with only David and his family, to be in a place where no one talked further about this last year. As she sat in the sun watching David’s family at work and at play she felt normalcy gradually return to her life.