He couldn’t believe it. Even now. After all these years. He was still shocked and horrified by what he’d done.
She was still warm, but he knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that she was dead.
So he laid her carefully at the bottom of the slide, and he remembered thinking that the night was getting colder, so he put her school blazer over the top of her, and he had his mum’s rosary beads in his pocket because he’d done an exam that day and he always took them for luck. So he carefully placed them in Janie’s hands. It was his way of saying sorry, to Janie and to God. And then he ran. He ran and ran until he couldn’t breathe.
He thought for sure he would be caught. He kept waiting for the heavy weight of a policeman’s hand to drop on his shoulder.
But he was never even questioned. He and Janie weren’t at the same school, or in the same youth group. Neither of their parents or friends had known about it. It seemed that nobody had ever seen them together. It was like it had never happened.
He said that if the police had ever questioned him, he would have confessed immediately. He said that if someone else had been accused of the murder, he would have given himself up. He wouldn’t have let anyone else take the fall for it. He wasn’t that evil.
It was just that nobody asked the question, so he never gave the answer.
During the nineties he started hearing news reports about crimes being solved through DNA evidence, and he wondered if he’d left a minuscule vestige of himself behind: a single hair, for example. But even if he had, they’d been together for such a short time and they’d played their undercover game so effectively. Nobody knew he knew Janie. He could almost convince himself that he hadn’t known her, that it had never happened.
And then the years had just gone by, layers and layers of years piled on top of the memory of what he’d done. Sometimes, he whispered, he could go for months feeling relatively normal, and then other times he could think of nothing else except what he’d done and he thought he’d go crazy.
“It’s like a monster trapped in my mind,” he rasped into Cecilia’s ear. “And sometimes it gets free and it goes rampaging about, and then I get it under control again. I chain it up. You know what I mean?”
No, thought Cecilia. No, actually, I don’t.
“And then I met you,” said John-Paul. “And I sensed something about you. A deep-down goodness. I fell in love with your goodness. It was like looking at a beautiful lake. It was like you were somehow purifying me.”
Cecilia was appalled. I’m not good, she thought. I smoked marijuana once! We used to get drunk together! I thought you fell in love with my figure, my sparkling company, my sense of humor, not my goodness, for God’s sake!
He kept talking, seemingly desperate for her to know every tiny detail.
When Isabel was born and he became a parent, he suddenly had a new and terrible understanding of exactly what he’d done to Rachel and Ed Crowley.
“When we were living on Bell Avenue, I used to drive by Janie’s father walking his dog on my way to work,” he said. “And his face—it looked . . . I don’t know how to describe it. Like he was in such physical pain that he should have been rolling about on the floor, except he wasn’t, he was walking the dog. And I’d think, I did that to him. I’m responsible for that pain. I kept trying to leave the house at different times, or drive different ways, but I kept seeing him.”
They’d lived in the house on Bell Avenue when Isabel was a baby. Cecilia’s memories of Bell Avenue smelled of baby shampoo and nappy cream and mashed pear and banana. She and John-Paul had been besotted by their new baby. Sometimes he’d go in late to work so he could spend longer lying on the bed with Isabel in her little white all-in-one suit, nuzzling her plump, firm tummy. Except that wasn’t the case. He was trying to avoid seeing the father of the girl he’d murdered.