The flight to Glasgow, though short, is hellish. It is pouring with rain when I wake that morning, and by the time I’ve got to Gatwick on the train the temperature has dropped and the rain has turned to fast-falling sleet, landing on nearly-frozen ground. While I am having a McDonald’s breakfast, the sleet turns to snow, carpeting the ground outside the airport. I sit there next to the floor-to-ceiling windows, watching it fall, waiting for them to cancel my flight, but they don’t. I’m not an overly nervous flyer, but I have become used to all modes of transport grinding to a halt if the word ‘snow’ is even mentioned, so I am a bit concerned nobody seems to be sounding alarms and evacuating the airport. As I trudge up the steps to the aircraft, I feel like tapping someone on the shoulder and asking if they’ve noticed the weather and if there has been some sort of mistake.
On the plane, I’m seated next to a teenage boy who looks like he’s just walked out of one of those American high school movies where they have jocks and prom queens. He appears to be on his own and takes one look in my direction, as if identifying me as ‘non-threatening’, before burying his head in a book entitled The Rise of Domestic Terrorism. What a thing to bring on a flight, I think, as I familiarise myself with the safety procedure leaflet.
I’m starving again once we touch down at Glasgow International, so I go through baggage collection and immediately locate an Upper Crust, buying a baguette so large you could probably use it as a weapon. I stare at my phone. It’s 11.30 a.m. – four and a half hours to go. I’ve never been to Glasgow before, but I’m not in the right frame of mind to seek out the tourist landmarks. Instead, I pass the time by drifting around the city, looking in shops, buying a phone case I don’t need from a street seller, then finally taking refuge in a pub with a bowl of chips and the sound of some sporting game nobody seems interested in emanating from the TVs on the wall.
At 3.20 I get in a taxi, which makes its way slowly through a new downfall of snow to Dennistoun. Some of the buildings I pass look like they could have been ripped out of the London council estates I’m so familiar with, but the street the taxi turns into – my final destination – looks more upmarket and affluent. I pay the driver and, unsure of how I’m going to make my way back to the airport in all this snow, watch him disappear off, driving carefully into the ever-thickening winter wonderland that stretches out before me.
3.55. Does it matter I’m early, I think as I stuff my hands into my coat for warmth? I should have brought gloves. But before I have much time to think about it, the door opens and a woman stands there, looking at me. She must be in her mid-sixties. Her short hair is still so deep-black I realise she must be wearing a wig. The lines on her face tell a different story. All she says is ‘come in’, so I do, dusting off the snow on the doormat.
The house isn’t huge, but it’s very tidy and clean, and although one wouldn’t describe it as a home for the ultra-wealthy, there is a gentle note of money about the cream-coloured hallway and chic lounge design. I feel the same sense of surprise I had when I first heard her voice. None of this was how I had imagined it. ‘Sit,’ she says, when I reach the sofa, and she perches herself opposite me. ‘Would you like anything to drink?’ she asks, although now she’s settled it seems bad to ask her to get up and make me something. Maybe that was on purpose, similar to the chilly welcome I’d been given by my own father earlier in the week. She probably doesn’t want me feeling too comfortable.
‘Terrible weather,’ I say, a little brighter than I’d planned.
She lowers her head slightly and looks at me impassively. After a few seconds of painful silence, she gets up and walks to the bookshelf on the far side of the lounge and takes one, separate from the others, off the middle shelf. After sitting back down, her eyes focus on me. She pulls out a small pair of reading glasses from an invisible pocket, opens the book to a page number she’s apparently memorised and reads aloud.
‘My aunt can be so mean. Sometimes she throws bottles at my head. Glass ones. They never hit me, of course. She’s too drunk to be able to aim properly. But once one smashed just above my head and one of the pieces cut me quite badly.’
I wince. She looks up from the page, staring at me over the rim of her glasses. She pauses, perhaps to see what reaction this extract might provoke in me, then speaks slowly and firmly. ‘You painted me as an abusive drunkard.’
I can’t hold her gaze for very long. I start fiddling with the zip of my coat. ‘It’s fiction,’ I say in a small voice. ‘I made it all up.’
She closes the book carefully. ‘No you didn’t. That’s the problem. You fictionalised the truth. You took an incident that happened; an incident that has reverberated throughout the lives of the people involved – in some ways ruined the lives of the people involved – and you manipulated it.’ She’s still talking in her calm, firm voice. It reminds me of a newsreader on Radio 4 – traditionally middle-class English; educated, one might say, although of course such a description is unfair to the many people with an education who have retained a regional accent.
While I’m thinking about this, she reopens the book, straightens her glasses and begins reading aloud another passage: ‘I’m a waste of space. I ran away once to a big city. She didn’t come to look for me. I stayed away for a night. I slept in a disabled toilet in the park.’ She glances up at me, then continues. ‘I did wonder if the police would come looking for me, but nobody seemed to care. The next morning I felt too cold, so I went home. My aunt was in the lounge watching TV and just said “Christ, I thought I was fucking shot of you.”’
She closes the book again. ‘Adah did run away once. She was too much of a free spirit at times. But I never spoke to her like that. I always went looking for her. So tell me: did she actually say those things to you? Or is this part of your breathtaking use of creative licence?’
I shake my head, trying not to cry. ‘It’s … it’s not actually Adah. I just … made her up.’
‘Then why did you use her name?’
The last word is emphasised in a way that makes it crash down upon me. She’s right. I didn’t have to use her name. ‘There were probably a thousand occasions when I was going to change it,’ I say croakily, clearing my throat. ‘I deliberated over it for a long time. But for some reason I couldn’t bear the thought of calling her something else. It felt like a final insult – to strip her of her identity.’
She straightens up, and I see her fingers tense around the book, holding it tightly in her lap. ‘She was stripped of her identity when she died. She no longer has an identity. The one thing I promised my sister when she herself passed away was that I would take care of her daughter. I was a mother to her. I did everything I could. Yes, I probably shouldn’t have let her roam the forest alone. It was a bit different back then. But don’t think a moment goes by when I don’t feel guilty about her death. It’s with me every second of every day.’
I hang my head. There’s nothing I can say to that.
‘And on the subject of her death …’
This is what I’ve been waiting for. I watch as she opens the book again, turning to the back pages. Then she stops and closes it, moving her hand to her eye to catch a tear that’s rolled down. When she speaks, she’s quieter, as if the words are causing her physical pain.
‘If you needed to write it all down – put it all into a story in order to help you make sense of what happened – why did you have to have her die in such a strange … such a bizarre … It’s horrible. Horrible. To make her out to be some sort of human sacrifice. A sick little detail in a warped exorcism your parents were a part of. I don’t know what sort of thing you witnessed when living there, and if this book is anything to go by it was certainly far from normal, but to drag Adah’s memory into something so horrific? And to do that to your family? I don’t know how they’ll ever forgive you.’
I’m crying now. I feel a tear escape from the corner of my eye and drop with a tap onto my coat sleeve. ‘I’m not sure they ever will,’ I say, in not much more than a whisper. ‘But it’s not all lies. They were doing … trying to do … an exorcism. On my mother. They didn’t really believe in God, Hell, the devil – or at least I don’t think they did. They thought it would have … I don’t know … some sort of placebo effect on her. And it did, for a time.’
‘Before she killed herself,’ Andrea says.
So she knows about that. I briefly wonder how, but I’m in a hurry to get across my strong opinions of my father and stepmother. ‘I do hold them responsible. I know Amanda and the man I knew as Father Tobias had backgrounds in psychology, but they weren’t experts or operating ethically. She was a woman my dad was having an affair with – infatuated with – and she used him to be part of some messed-up project she wanted to try out. She probably thought she’d be able to write a thesis on it or something. What they did to my mother – the rituals … the ceremonies. It’s no wonder she never got properly better.’
Andrea now has a tissue in her hand and has taken her glasses off to dab at her eyes. ‘Your father is still with Amanda, I understand,’ she says. ‘She was how I found out about the book. She sent it to me. It took her a while to find me, apparently, but after a little bit of Google-assisted detective work, she did it.’
I have to stop myself exclaiming out loud. How could she have done this? Stirring and manipulating and working against me, even now, even after she’s got everything she wanted; she still can’t resist playing God behind the scenes. Andrea notices me tensing and continues.
‘She seemed to think we could maybe form some kind of collaborative force against you, with a view to consulting lawyers.’
This makes me even more enraged. With a trembling hand I wipe my eyes, then scrabble in my pocket for a crumpled pack of Kleenex. ‘She is nothing but a murderer,’ I say through clenched teeth.
Andrea fixes me with her stern, steely gaze. ‘No, she isn’t. She didn’t murder my niece, like you allege. She didn’t murder your mother, although I can understand why you hold her responsible.’ My skin prickles, like a current of electricity is running through it. I stare back into her eyes as she continues. ‘But the truth remains that, if there is a murderer amidst this whole sordid mess, that person would have to be you. Because Adah never did come out of the water that day. As you well know.’