I’m afraid to speak, afraid to ask questions. I watch the door as if someone will walk in with answers. I watch my phone. I do my best to stay out of Ciara’s way, but I hear the rumblings of a heated conversation between her and Stella behind the closed door of the kitchen. I look out into the street, to where the light is already fading, and I wonder if people are peeking out from behind their own curtains to see what is going on here. Surely they must be wondering why his remains haven’t been returned yet, why the official period of mourning has yet to start. Did they notice the unmarked police car earlier?
I try not to think about the ‘unexplained marks’ that DI Bradley spoke about. Try not to think about how police are looking at all lines of inquiry or however he worded it. I definitely try, unsuccessfully, not to think about ‘foul play’ that may or may not be suspected or what that might mean. Except that someone else may have been so angry with Joe that they may have done the one thing I have spent my whole life wanting to be brave enough to do.
I push those as far to the back of my mind as I can. That way madness lies.
I go back to hovering. Waiting. Ignoring any phone call that isn’t from the police or the undertaker. Ignoring text messages asking what the arrangements are.
People are talking.
Gossip spreading.
There’s nothing we can do to control it.
I think about the postmortem. Try to imagine at what stage in the macabre proceedings things may be at now. Marie has gone to Belfast. None of us could face it. A friend has driven her because she is much too distraught to have driven herself. I have long suspected she still harboured some feelings for her ex-husband. God knows why.
When she’d heard none of us were planning to go to Belfast, she’d insisted on going, determined that Joe should not make the journey alone – as if he hasn’t gone way past being able to care. ‘He deserves to have his family with him,’ she had said. There was no hint of judgement in her voice – just sadness.
They’ll definitely be in Belfast now. This could be the moment that first incision is made. A straight line, diagonal, under his collarbone. Like you see on TV. Is it like it is in the movies? Solemn and respectful. Or is it all in a day’s work? Another body on a slab to be carved and dissected. Another set of lungs to examine. Mottled skin to be sliced, blood and tissue removed and tested.
Thinking about it is making me sick. My stomach gurgles. I don’t know if I need to eat something or throw up. Perhaps a lungful of air will help.
I make a cup of milky tea, which I’m not sure I can stomach, and walk around the frost-covered back garden. In the dusk the frost sparkles, a reflection of the glow of the lights on in the kitchen. I try to focus on that while I wish I hadn’t given up smoking when I was pregnant with Lily. A cigarette would be perfect just now.
I hear footsteps and turn. Alex is at the door, his own cup in his hand. It will be a black coffee. Extra strong. He drinks too much caffeine, I think in passing. Wondering how fast it makes his heart beat. Would they be able to see his addiction if they carved out his heart in a postmortem and examined it?
‘How’re you holding up?’ he asks, putting two cushions on the patio chairs so that we can sit down more comfortably.
I pull a face. One I hope conveys that I don’t have the first notion in the world how I’m holding up.
‘It’s scary,’ he says. ‘That they think someone might’ve hurt him.’
I nod.
‘He wasn’t a very good man, was he?’ Alex asks.
I look at him and he is staring at the grass. He needs a shave and a decent sleep. Probably something to eat.
‘No, he wasn’t,’ I say. ‘He wasn’t what people think he was.’
I feel shaky. This is a conversation I suppose I need to have, but don’t want to.
‘What was he like, Heidi? I mean, what was he really like?’
Alex’s eyes are on me now, looking into my eyes. And there’s this place inside of me that is so filled with pain and so in need of healing that I almost tell him. I almost explain how Joe hurt me. Abused me. Raped me. Yes, raped me. That word – that experience. How he messed up every sense in my head of what love and family meant. How he broke me and then couldn’t understand why I was broken. It’s the same place that wants me to stand up and applaud that he is dead.
But I see sadness in my husband’s eyes, and fear. It strikes me that maybe, just maybe, he thinks I was the person who left the unexplained marks. That he should have seen it coming. And once he thinks that, and once people start looking – because they will start looking, and they will find out just what happened on that Christmas ten years ago – they will conclude, without question, that I killed Joe McKee.
I’m the most likely suspect. And it terrifies me to consider that my husband may realise this.
I keep Alex’s gaze. ‘He didn’t know how to be a father. Not to Ciara and not to me. He was cruel and selfish. I’d have been better off in care than in this house. It breaks me to think things would’ve been so different if only my grandparents had been well enough to take care of me. Or if my mother had known what he was really like before she died.
‘They were together two years and he never dropped his perfect persona with her. It was only after she died that he showed himself for what he was. It destroys me that she trusted him to take care of me. It even made me really angry with her for a long time. I wondered how could she have been so blind and so irresponsible? And then I was angry with my grandparents for not taking me in anyway. Even with their problems. I’m not saying I was perfect, Alex. I was an angry teenager. Mixed up. But he? He was evil.’
Alex nods. I can see his eyes fill with unshed tears. I’ve said more to him than I ever have before. Before I’d just say we were never close. That we never really bonded. That Joe was strict and, at times, controlling. All of which had been true. And it had been enough for him not to question me when I told him I preferred a wedding away on a beach in Italy, just the two of us and some friends. That I had no need to have a father figure walk me down the aisle. That I made my duty visits to Joe, but no more. Until he became sick and it all changed.
‘I’m so sorry,’ he says.
‘What for?’ I ask him.
He opens his mouth to speak, but we hear the back door open and Ciara steps out – a mug of tea or coffee in one hand and her e-cig in the other.
‘I’m not disturbing anything?’ she asks.
Alex shakes his head. ‘No. No, of course not. Actually, I was just going to go and check on Lily.’
‘Might be a good idea. I think I heard her crying a few minutes ago.’
I bristle. ‘Could you not have told us?’
‘I am now,’ she says matter-of-factly as she draws on her e-cig and releases billows of steam into the cool air. ‘It doesn’t do babies any harm to cry it out now and again. They have to learn to self-soothe,’ she says.
‘I think that’s for us, as her parents, to decide,’ I say as we rush back to the house.
‘Well, I didn’t know where you were. For all I knew you were upstairs with her.’
She steps out of the way to allow us to walk back into the house, but not far enough that my throat doesn’t catch with the rancid smell of whatever it is she has been vaping.
‘Heidi,’ she calls my name and I shoo Alex on, even though I can’t hear Lily crying now.
I turn to look at her. She looks like she has the weight of the world on her shoulders and she’s about to unload some of it in my direction.
‘What do you think they’ll find?’ she asks.
‘I have no idea,’ I reply.
‘Don’t you? I mean trouble in this house seems to follow you around.’
I don’t like her tone. I don’t like where this conversation could go. I certainly wasn’t prepared to help her go there.
‘As I said,’ I repeated, walking past her, ‘I have no idea what they might or could find and I’m not really in the mood to discuss it with you further. We’re not children any more, Ciara. I’m not some wee girl desperate for you to like me, or treat me with an ounce of decency. I can walk away from you at any time I choose and I’m choosing to do that right now. My child needs me.’
I don’t wait to see if she has anything else to say, but as I climb the stairs to find Alex and Lily, I feel my nerve go a little and some old demons swoop in.