‘I’m sorry to tell you that Susan Morden has been formally identified, by her daughter, as the woman your wife ploughed into and killed on Monday night.’
‘I see. That’s very sad.’ He coughed. How should he react? What was the acceptable level of distress and shock? Of course he already knew as much. Becky had called him the minute she left the morgue. When he first heard the news, he had been shocked, extremely so. And concerned. Sad. Sad for Becky, really, not himself. He’d heard Becky cry before, often. Rage, too. But nothing could have prepared him for her response to her mother’s death. She’d roared. Howled like an animal. He’d been taken aback at her utter collapse, her guttural grief. She hadn’t made sense, she kept talking about things ‘going too far’, ‘not turning out as expected’. Obviously this wasn’t what anyone had planned but accidents did happen. He’d told her she had to get a grip.
She’d begged him to let her come to Woodview, said she just wanted him to hold her. That she needed him. She rarely said she needed him. ‘I’m on my own. I’m on my own now,’ she kept repeating. He’d had to say she couldn’t, of course. It was too risky. Emma’s friends might pop to the house at any point before or after they visited the hospital; how would he explain Becky’s presence?
‘Well if they do, don’t be too hospitable. We don’t want to encourage people dropping in,’ she’d retorted, adding, ‘You’re a fucking animal, my mum is on a slab.’ He’d told her to go back to her mum’s flat; there would be people at the pub who could comfort her. He promised he’d get there as soon as he could.
‘When Susan Morden was in your employ, were you aware that she had a criminal record?’ the policewoman asked.
‘I’m sorry, what?’
‘Can you answer the question, please, Mr Charlton?’
He sighed. ‘No, I was not,’ he lied. The fat fella was taking notes. Matthew thought to add, ‘Although my wife may have been. Susan was employed by Emma quite a long time before we met. She will have checked her references, I imagine.’
‘Well, yes, that is something we’ll need to talk to your wife about when she wakes up. Susan Morden had served sixteen years in prison.’
‘Goodness, sixteen years. That’s a stiff sentence. Can I ask what for?’ He hoped he was hitting the right note. A man mostly concerned for his wife, but compassionately interested in the woman who had met a tragic end too, of course. He was the proper sort. Decent, borderline posh. He liked playing this role. He had been doing so since he started his relationship with Emma. It suited him.
‘Murder.’
‘Gosh.’
‘She murdered your wife’s parents.’
41
The room bloated up underneath him. Morphed about him.
‘What? No. That doesn’t ma—’ He snapped his mouth shut. He felt sweat prickle on his upper lip. That wasn’t true. That wasn’t right. Susan had killed her husband. Becky’s abusive father. But he couldn’t set them straight without revealing his connection to Susan, to Becky, to so much more. Why were they lying to him? Was this a trap?
The policewoman started to explain how thirty-five years ago, Susan Morden had been convicted of tampering with James and Helen Westly’s car in order to make it unsafe to drive. The interference led directly to their deaths. There was conclusive evidence that that had been the aim.
There was a ringing in his ears. An alarm going off somewhere. He asked the police officers whether they could hear it too. Was it a fire drill, perhaps? They looked confused. They couldn’t hear anything. He slapped his hand against his ear to make the ringing stop. The policewoman continued to talk. There were fingerprints, a locking wheel nut key had been found at Susan’s house, there was even a friend who had testified that Susan had bragged about wanting to kill the Westlys. It was conclusive. The jury had reached a unanimous verdict in just under an hour.
Matthew stared at the table. It would be a mistake to meet their gazes. The police had all sorts of training, didn’t they? In psychology and body language and stuff. They could read a person’s expression. He couldn’t get his head around it. They had to have it wrong. Didn’t they? But no, they seemed certain. They had the files. The facts. Bloody hell, even before the shock had a chance to slow and settle, a surge of annoyance ran through his core. Why was it that with everything to do with Becky he was left feeling like he was playing catch-up? She had lied to him. Again. Bitch.
He did know that Susan had been inside. Becky hadn’t kept that from him. It was one of the first things she’d told him, way back when they first met. He remembered her glaring at him, eyes shining, a defiant jut of the chin, daring him to be shocked, expecting him to walk away when she told him she’d been brought up in care because her mother was in jail. Even then he had understood it was a test. Becky had abandonment issues. No surprise. She was seeing if he was shocked, whether he would shrug her off. He didn’t. There had been times, over the years since, when he wondered what his life might have been like if he had walked away from her, then or at any point. Those thoughts didn’t often go very far. He didn’t really have the imagination to conjure up a life without Becky. She made the plans, set the path. Paid most of the bills. She was always reminding him of that.
He never had been able to walk away from her. He had been transfixed by her from the get-go. He was twenty and mesmerised by her looks: her face, her body, her hips, eyes, bone structure, arse. They were all amazing. She was so utterly beautiful that when he looked at her, he would get a hard-on like some thirteen-year-old boy stumbling across porn for the first time. Just looking at her. He was sort of powerless. And that, he reasoned, was falling in love. Wanting her all the time. Back then, he hadn’t been even the slightest bit aware that there was anything else needed beyond physical attraction (which led to great sex) and having a laugh together (which also led to great sex) to add up to them being a thing. Without it being discussed, they were in a relationship. It was very straightforward.
He hadn’t been bothered about the fact her mother was in prison. In fact, he secretly thought it was quite cool. It added a much-needed edgy vibe to his own credentials. His family were so boring in comparison. His father worked as a sales rep for a company that supplied dental equipment. He’d reached the dizzy heights of area sales manager and drove a company Volvo. His mother was a classroom assistant to Year 2 children. They lived quiet, law-abiding lives. They paid their taxes, washed the car every Sunday and took the caravan to Cornwall every July. They picked up litter, even that belonging to other people. His mother wouldn’t dream of folding the corner of a page in a book; she always used a home-made, hand-stitched bookmark. He was embarrassed by their acquiescence to the accepted norms, their ability to be content with very ordinary things, and he was horrified at the idea of becoming like them. But luckily – because he had good cheekbones and had twice been given the main part in the school play – suddenly there had been chances and choices, and girls like Becky.
Although there were no other girls like Becky. Not really. He came to understand that.
She’d told him that her dad was a nasty bastard and had hurt them. Or did she say he had just hurt her mother? He wasn’t absolutely sure now; she had told him the story such a very long time ago. It was one of the nights when they were high on something or other and then suddenly low. Laughs, sex, alcohol, tears. Confessions, drama, revelations, fears. They’d had a lot of nights like that back then. Becky had told him some really difficult stuff about her life. It sometimes seemed like there had only been difficult stuff. It was horrible to listen to and hard to keep track of. One horror story merged into the next. There were creeps in the care and foster homes who tried to get in her room at night. Some succeeded. She told him what it was like having to visit her mum in a high-security prison as a little girl because Susan had requested it, and then what it was like not to visit because Susan had got bored of the idea and didn’t want to see Becky any more. She spoke of casting couches, lechy married men, boyfriends who told her she was ugly. None of it was good.
The day after these confessions, she was always awkward with him. Unsure as to whether he’d wake up thinking it was all a bit much. He usually just woke up with a hangover and a head full of bruised brain cells that couldn’t quite recall the details she’d given him. He never asked for clarity; he didn’t want to appear ghoulishly interested in her traumas. She was hot and that was enough. Then time passed and they moved on, got further away from her intensely difficult start in life, his boringly suburban one. They found their own shared space. It was OK.
Or it had been.
He could not remember whether Becky had said her father was physically or mentally cruel. He thought it was an accidental death, an impetuous crime of passion or self-defence, but maybe he’d just made that assumption. The details were fuzzy, but the story had definitely been that Susan had killed Becky’s father in a domestic and that was why she had gone to prison. A domestic. He’d thought she must have pushed the bastard down the stairs or maybe hit him with something surprisingly fatal. He hadn’t thought what. OK, he hadn’t thought about it much at all. It wasn’t nice to think about, was it?
He was absolutely certain, however, that there had never been any mention of a premeditated double murder of strangers. He’d have recalled that. What the actual fuck?
So it was a lie. Whose lie?
It might have been a lie that was told to Becky. Perhaps a well-meaning foster parent couldn’t quite bring themselves to tell the little tot that her mother was a cold-blooded killer and so made up something to protect her; salvage the mother’s memory so the child could develop some self-respect. Matthew didn’t know. He had to consider the possibility that Becky knew the truth and this was her lie. A lie she had told him.
Susan was a convicted murderer. Convicted for the premeditated killing of two people. Not just any two people, Emma’s parents. That was a total mind-fuck and obviously not a coincidence. Matthew thought Becky might have wanted to mention that. The sarcasm flipped into his head. A defence mechanism against the horror. It was, as usual, difficult to know what to think about Becky. He had always thought Susan was a sly bitch. He knew that conventional wisdom had it that you weren’t supposed to think ill of the dead, but facts were facts. He had never liked Becky’s mother. She’d scared him. She had a grim power about her; despite being only five foot four, she had always seemed threatening, evil.
‘It’s a lot to process,’ he said carefully. That much was true. Because it wasn’t just Susan and/or Becky who had lied to him, was it? He had to consider the possibility that Emma hadn’t been one hundred per cent truthful either. She’d said her parents’ deaths had been an accident. He sighed. Maybe she’d thought she was telling the truth. Maybe her grandparents had lied to her. Fuck, did anyone ever tell the truth about anything? Becky was always calling him naive. It was a diss, he knew it. ‘So let me get this straight. You’re saying that this Susan woman, Emma’s ex-cleaner, had a criminal record. She murdered Emma’s parents?’ He tapped the photo with his forefinger.
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘She’s not here to tell us, is she?’ said the policeman with a wide yawn.
‘That’s not really the question I’m focusing on,’ added the policewoman. ‘What I need to establish next is the why behind this case.’
‘You can’t think Emma knew what Susan Morden had done,’ Matthew spluttered. Neither officer answered nor moved a muscle. They stared at him, their eyes boring into him. It was obvious what they were thinking. This incident was no longer being viewed as an accident. This was not a question of the casualty being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Everything had shifted. Susan Morden had been a criminal, but now she was a victim. Emma had been a patient, involved in a terrible tragic accident. Now she was a suspect with a compelling motive.
All change.
‘You might want to consider getting your wife a lawyer, Mr Charlton, just so you’re not on the back foot. Because if we can prove that she knew Susan Morden was responsible for her parents’ deaths, well then …’ The female officer shrugged. ‘I’m not a big believer in coincidences.’
42
