I’m digging around upstairs trying to find my father’s diary, where I made him admit his crimes, when I hear Heidi call my name. She sounds almost hysterical, so I abandon my search and run down the stairs to find her pacing the living room.
Heidi is shaking her head. ‘No,’ she says. ‘You’re not making any sense, Alex. Why would you say that?’
‘Say what?’ I ask.
Alex looks at me, his face pale. ‘I did it,’ he says. ‘It was me.’
I feel dizzy, then I look at him again. Alex. Gentle, quiet Alex. I’m supposed to believe he was a killer? It just doesn’t ring true.
He speaks, tells me his story, and I try to absorb what he has said. He sat and watched Joe die. He could have, maybe, helped and he didn’t.
‘But you didn’t kill him?’ Heidi says. ‘You didn’t kill him. He was just sick and he passed away, and that means no one is guilty.’
‘But I didn’t get help,’ Alex says and he looks wretched. ‘I was so angry. I’d read those words and I was so enraged. I’d wanted to kill him. I was happy to watch him die. I never thought it would end up like this. All this hurt and pain and a murder investigation, and the further it went, the less I felt I could speak up.’
I’m stunned. It seems Alex, who I’d written off as wet and pathetic, had a backbone after all. He’d watched my father die. But at the same time, he didn’t have enough of a backbone to speak up about what really happened and to save us all from the nightmare we’ve been going through over the last few days. The topic of every over-the-garden-fence conversation in Derry, police interviews, newspaper reports, existing together in a virtual ticking time-bomb of tension.
‘I want to talk to the police now,’ he says, nodding. ‘This has all gone too far. I can’t run from it any more, Heidi. None of us can. We have to be honest. We can’t keep going on like this. None of us can,’ and he glances in my direction.
Heidi looks as if she’s trapped in the glare of oncoming headlights. Except the headlights are coming from all directions and no matter where she turns, where any of us turn, there is no way out of this. She is shaking her head.
‘But you didn’t do anything wrong, not really wrong. He was very ill. He was dying. We don’t have to tell the police. There is no way they could ever know. We just keep it quiet. It might go away.’
She is pleading with him and she looks at me and I see desperation in her eyes.
Alex shakes his head, defeated. ‘It would always haunt me. The guilt. It’s already destroying me, Heidi. Whatever happens, I have to tell the police. I’ll not be able to live with myself if I don’t.’
Heidi is crying. Silent tears running in rivulets down her cheeks. They both look so broken and I think of the little baby upstairs, the baby who curled her hand around my fingers not that long ago. Who trusted me to rock her back and forth. Those big, innocent eyes that had looked at me with such trust. And I realise that no one is really guilty here at all. Except for Joe.
And Joe, now dead and buried, holds the key to all this.
‘It was his diary that I was looking for,’ I interject. ‘The one Alex saw. It will help back up Alex’s story, won’t it? It’s not where I left it, but it has to be here somewhere. We just have to keep looking.’
‘Then we’ll do just that, we’ll keep looking,’ Heidi says, squeezing Alex’s hands tightly.
She stands up and starts sorting through the drawers in the sideboard in the living room – pulling out old paperwork and shuffling through it. My father was nothing if not fastidious about keeping his affairs in order and it soon becomes obvious there’s no diary of any kind hidden in the back of a drawer or under mounds of old bank statements.
I look in the drawer of the console table in the hall. Again, there is nothing of note. It’s neat and organised. A book of stamps. Some pens held together with an elastic band. A packet of envelopes and a small address book, in which Dad had painstakingly written the names of his friends and colleagues in block capitals and always in black ink.
We both go together into the bedroom. I double-check the wardrobe, as does Heidi.
‘It was there,’ she says, pointing to the far left corner of the wardrobe, which is now just an empty shelf. ‘That is where you put it. Remember?’
‘Yes, but I looked and it’s definitely not there any more.’
She pulls aside the rail of pressed shirts and trousers and looks down at the floor of the wardrobe. ‘They’re all gone,’ she says, looking up at me.
‘All what?’
‘All his diaries and notebooks. He kept them there, in shoeboxes. A diary for every year. There were at least twenty of them here.’
‘Would the police have taken them?’ I ask. ‘Those SOCO guys were quite thorough. It’s the only logical explanation.’
It strikes me that Heidi was able to open the wardrobe door without using a key – a key I knew I had. I run my finger to the lock, noticing that it has been broken.
‘Someone’s been in here. They used force,’ I tell her, pointing to the door.
‘Would the police have busted a lock? They left everything else just as it was,’ Heidi says.
I shrug. I only know what I see in front of me.
‘And if they had the diaries, and he’d written his confession of sorts, wouldn’t they have found it? DI Bradley seems very thorough.’
‘I don’t know, Heidi.’
I can hear a harsh, frustrated tone to my voice. I was just angry that it was gone. I wanted to have proof. I wanted to have his apology to look at. It was the only thing I wanted from that man.
She winces at my tone and I apologise. Sincerely. Explain that I’m stressed. She nods. She understands. She feels it too.
‘I’ll call DI Bradley,’ I tell her. ‘Ask him outright. Tell him where to look if he has the diary to see what Joe wrote.’
‘You’re okay about all of this – what he did – becoming public?’ Heidi asks.
I see the worry, the fear in her eyes.
‘I’m not okay with it,’ I tell her truthfully, ‘but it’s the right thing to do. For me. For you and for Alex. We’ve nothing to be ashamed of, Heidi. We never asked to be abused.’
Her bottom lip is trembling and I watch tears spill over from her eyes and run down her cheeks.
I reach out my hand to her, a gesture that would have seemed insane just an hour ago, and to my surprise she reaches back.
‘My phone’s downstairs. Let’s go phone DI Bradley and get this all sorted once and for all.’
‘But what about all their evidence? Injuries and suffocation and whatever? Won’t they say Alex is lying?’
She looks frightened. Vulnerable. I feel so very sorry for her. Her life has been lacking in any real security for so long.
I wish I could reassure her, but I can’t. I can only give her hand a squeeze.
‘We have to trust that the truth will be enough. Something else must’ve happened to make him take so ill.’
‘Or someone else hurt him first,’ Heidi says.
But I can’t help but feel she is grasping at straws. I suppose I’d do the same if it was Stella in the frame.
Unable to speak, I just shrug at Heidi and lead her downstairs. The first step is to call DI Bradley, I think. Get him to come here.
We go back downstairs to fetch my phone. Alex is still in the living room, his head in his hands. He looks up at us expectantly, and sags again when Heidi shakes her head.
‘Alex, we’re going to call DI Bradley now. We’re going to tell him everything,’ I say as calmly as I can.
He nods and Heidi sits beside him and holds him to her as he cries.
I pick up the phone and call the number DI Bradley had given me.
This is all such a mess.