He put Harry’s memoir back on the table. He patted the pocket of his jeans, pulled out the car keys.
She dug deep for the most glittering pieces of vitriol she could find. ‘I was the one who made Delaneys a success. Everyone knows it. If it wasn’t for me, you’d have nothing, you’d be nothing but a washed-up, useless . . . nothing!’
The words bounced off him. He turned to walk away and she could not stand it. It was not fair that he got to leave. It had never been fair. It had never been right. And yet she’d endured it, over and over again, and her children had endured it, and it was unacceptable, inexcusable behaviour and she would no longer accept, she would no longer excuse. This time he would stay.
She ran after him, and even as she ran, part of herself registered the shame and indignity and inappropriateness of her actions. She floated up to the skylight and observed herself: a small sweaty senior citizen running out of her nice kitchen and down the hallway towards the front door after her husband, shouting incoherently, alongside an old dog, barking confusedly, trying to work out where the danger lay because there were no strangers in the house, so what could there be to fear?
Joy reached for the back of her husband’s checked blue and white shirt, the shirt she’d ironed, to wrench him back, to make him stay. Steffi ran in crazed panting circles around them. Stan swung around and the dog tripped him. He lurched forward, nearly falling. One hand grabbed at the wall, causing the framed photo of Brooke with her Under 8s regional trophy to swing and bang and crack. Joy’s outstretched hand, clawing for his shirt, instead raked down Stan’s cheek, drawing instant blood with her vicious broken nails.
He grabbed her, his fingers painful on her shoulders.
She froze because his face was no longer his. It was an unfamiliar mask of ugly rage.
Her heart stopped. The world stopped.
For the first time in her sixty-nine years she felt the fear: the fear every woman knows is always waiting for her, the possibility that lurks and scuttles in the shadows of her mind, even if she’s spent her entire life being so tenderly loved and protected by good men.
chapter fifty-four
Now
‘Let’s see it one last time,’ said Christina.
Ethan pressed play and they sat, side by side at his desk, transfixed by the jerky but clear colour footage from the CCTV provided by the neighbours who lived two doors away in the same cul-de-sac as the Delaneys. The camera had been smashed by a hailstone in the big storm two days after Joy had disappeared and Caro Azinovic’s son, who had installed the camera for his widowed mother, had been getting it fixed. He was the one who had brought police this damning video revealing a fish-eye view of the front of his mother’s house. It captured, accidentally, a pie-shaped sliver of the Delaneys’ driveway.
Christina and Ethan watched Stan Delaney emerge from the front door of his home, at two minutes past midnight on the day after his wife disappeared, struggling to carry an unwieldy, floppy object wrapped in a blanket to his car.
He opened the boot of his car, dumped the object, leaned in to rearrange it, reached up with both hands to slam the boot shut, and then he stood – for exactly three minutes and forty-seven seconds – both hands flat on the car, his head bowed, like a man in solemn, reverent prayer, before he finally lifted his head and walked off camera.
It was eerie and powerful to watch.
‘Jesus,’ said Ethan. ‘The way he stands there, for all that time. It’s so . . . my God.’
‘I know it is,’ said Christina. She would get her confession today. She could feel it. She would play this footage to Stan Delaney and she would not say a word or make a sound for the entire length of the video. She would watch him watch himself bow his head over his wife’s body. She knew he was not a churchgoer, but she knew he’d been brought up Catholic, as had she, and she recognised the stance of a man in prayer, a man who longs to confess his sins.
Tonight she and Nico would go to meet their parish priest to discuss the holy sacrament of marriage and she would try not to think about the fact that Joy and Stan Delaney had once made the same vows that she and Nico would make next spring. She would not think about a young Joy Delaney or Polly Perkins promising their husbands to have and to hold, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and health, until death do us part, until you carry my body out to the car in the dead of the night and dispose of it somewhere it will never be found, until I speak too loudly, until I spend too much money on a new iron, until I hold back your career for the sake of our family, until I kiss another man at a party, until I displease you in some way I cannot yet imagine.