‘Please could you outline for us, Katherine, why your father took you out of school, packed up your things and drove you and your mother to Northumberland, right into the middle of Barret Forest, a place many miles away from your home?’
I nod. This at least isn’t too difficult to answer. ‘It was because of my mother. He didn’t take me out of school, it was mostly in the half-term school holiday. After that, I only missed a week of school, and he just told them I had flu or something. Mum’s mental health had started to deteriorate quite rapidly. I’m not too sure when it began, but steadily, throughout my childhood, her reactions to things started to become disturbing. She’d become frightened by seemingly innocuous coincidences; she’d spot patterns in people’s behaviour and think they were part of a conspiracy to spy on her, like if the milkman came at a different time two days running. She’d accuse him of being one of the devil’s spies.’
DI Cousins nods. She shifts the folder on her desk and I see there are actually two there, bundled together, the one underneath the first looking much older and faded-beige, whereas the one on top looks crisp and new. She opens the newer one and stares down at a page of what looks like bullet points, although it’s tilted away from me, obscuring a full view. ‘We’ll be speaking to your father about this, of course, to get his take on it all, but could you tell us a little about your mother’s delusions, paranoia and hallucinations – did they have a religious dimension to them?’
I nod. ‘Yes, although I wouldn’t say to the point of them making much sense.’
She looks up, lines creasing her forehead. ‘How do you mean?’
I shuffle in my chair, changing my position slightly. ‘Well, I’m no expert, but I think a lot of people who have, say, religious mania or obsessions at least stick to their own set of rules. My mother, on the other hand … she was unpredictable. There was no knowing what would upset her next. She’d always been religious, I think; a lot more so than my dad. My memory doesn’t go back too far beyond her illness, but I can remember her praying and going to church before that and seeming perfectly content with it. It was later when it started to get extreme. She went from occasional references to God and Jesus to more frequent comments about the devil and sins. It all seemed to relate to there being something inside of her. A bad force, a demon, one of “Satan’s offspring”, as she sometimes referred to it. Some other dimension of her psyche, I suppose.’
‘That must have been quite scary to witness,’ DC Malik says. Part of me is relieved he’s spoken. I was finding the penetrating gaze of DI Cousins a bit intimidating, and his words have a soft, sympathetic edge to them.
‘Yes, it was,’ I say. ‘It … it was something that affected me very deeply. I think I’ve only recently come to understand now how much I’ve been affected by it. And why I wanted to write it all down. I felt I couldn’t keep it all buried any longer.’
DI Cousins looks at me for a bit, then continues with a new question. ‘Can you tell us who was in the cottage with you?’
I nod. ‘Well, there was me and my dad and my mum. But we were joined by two others: Amanda, who, as I’m sure you’re now aware, my dad was having an affair with, something I think began when she was living in Essex some months before we went to Northumbria, and an older man – Amanda’s father – that I knew by the name of Father Tobias. Although he rarely stayed over. He used to come and go most days. To do … what they were doing … to Mum. Their sessions.’
I see DC Malik shift in his chair a little, moving his neck as if it were stiff and he was trying to click it. DI Cousins, meanwhile, leans forward and asks, ‘And can you tell me, Katherine, what these sessions were?’
Our eyes meet, then I look away. I try to focus on a little flake of something white – maybe the remnants of a tissue – floating across the corner of the desk, propelled by the collective force of our breaths. ‘You’ve read my book, I presume. You know what they were doing.’
Even though I’m not looking at her, I can still feel DI Cousins’s eyes on me. ‘I’d like to hear it from you, in your own words.’
I pause. Take a deep breath, then answer. ‘Exorcisms. They were performing exorcisms.’