“What makes you so sure?”
“I saw what he wrote in those letters.”
“Oh my goodness, Mr Icy Cold has a heart after all.” She smiled and my heart melted at the sight. She really was adorable. “Have you ever been in love?” she asked.
“Once,” I replied, lapsing into silence.
“Do tell.”
“I’m not sure you want to hear it.”
“I do, I really do.”
I sighed. Could I tell her? I’d never told anyone since it happened. “Fuck it,” I said out loud. “Why not? I loved my daughter.”
“You have a daughter? How old is she?”
“She was six when she died.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry. You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”
“It’s fine.” She was in my mind already, her face just as it had looked that day, cold, lifeless. “I came home to find my wife telling me there’d been an accident. Abigail was at the bottom of the stairs, not moving.”
It all came back to me as if it had happened seconds before. My Abbey, stone cold. She’d clearly been there for hours. “What happened? Where’s the ambulance?”
“I didn’t know what to do. She’s dead, Jake.” Sarah not even sounding upset.
“What? No, she can’t be.”
It all became snapshots after that. Me calling the ambulance. The trip to the hospital. The doctor pronouncing her dead. Me heartbroken and raging as if it was his fault when he was only confirming what was obvious. The police arriving. The questions they asked me, so many questions. Me in handcuffs, taken to the station.
The interviews that seemed to go on for days, finding out Sarah had told them I’d done it, being unable to prove I’d found her there. Them asking me again and again, why did you do it? Like they’d already made their minds up.
Being locked up and not even being allowed out for the funeral. That was what broke me. I could have handled everything, all the lies she told, the fact that she was completely insane and I hadn’t noticed a thing, the trial, the conviction, the sentence. I could have handled it all if I’d only been allowed to say goodbye.
It was years before I was allowed out. They’d got the truth out of her at last but it was too late for me. Everyone we knew still believed her, thought I’d coerced her into confessing somehow, into lying to get me out. I couldn’t stay around there any longer so I vanished, moved somewhere no one knew me and ended up on the streets with a bottle for a companion. A lot of bottles.
“If Tony Matteo hadn’t given me a job, I’d probably be dead now,” I said, looking up at Isabel to see her face pale, a tear rolling down her cheek. “I owe him that, at least.”
“Oh, my God,” she said. “I’m so sorry, Jake.”
“Forget it,” I said, refusing to let the emotion build in me. I swallowed it back down as I’d done so many times before. “It’s in the past.”
“How could she do that to you?”
I shrugged. “I’ve asked that question so many times. I don’t think I’m ever going to get an answer.
“Where is she now?”
“Psychiatric Institute on the edge of London. I’m glad she’s not in prison.”
“Wow, really? Aren’t you angry that she’s not been punished?”
“No. She’d have been paroled eventually but she’ll be in the hospital forever. And that’s for the best because if they ever let her out, I might kill her.”
Neither of us said another word until the bus pulled in. I was lost in my own thoughts, remembering so many things at once it was almost overwhelming. “Here it is,” I said, standing up and nodding my head towards it.
“What do we do?” she asked.
“We go together,” I replied, making a decision that although I didn’t know it at the time, turned out to change the entire course of the rest of my life.
TWENTY
ISABEL
I felt so sorry for him, sat next to me on the bus, looking for all the world as if he’d said nothing at all. He looked straight ahead, his hands on his thighs, ready to leap upwards like the Terminator at any moment. I was quiet for a while, not wanting to disturb him. In the car park, he’d looked vulnerable for the first time since I’d met him.
The signs were subtle, flicks of the eyes, the way his lips narrowed as he talked about the past, his brow furrowed. You had to be paying attention to notice it.
I was more than shocked by the story he told me, I was appalled. How anyone could do something like that to another person, I had no idea. I couldn’t imagine how angry he must have been, I’d have raged against the world for the rest of my life.