The cameras were all there by the time they found her body. Lights flashing, drones buzzing over the house, even a helicopter. It’s all online, if you want to find it. I couldn’t stop watching, for a while. The drilling had taken several hours, I read. Then the money shot that they had all been waiting for. Four white-suited men, like astronauts, carrying the stretcher through my front door, so carefully, like something so fragile, so precious. It occurred to me that no one had ever been careful with Rachel before.
Katie is shaking now. Tears in her eyes.
‘How dare he write these things? About Rachel, about the blood. How dare he haunt you with them? Oh, Helen, you ought to burn it. And for him to talk about Leo!’ Her voice is cracking now, and I feel the stir of a lump in my own throat. ‘How can he think you’ll let him see Leo, after what he did? After what you were put through?’
I try not to think too much about those early days. When I’d woken up in hospital, I’d tried to scream, but no sound had come out. I couldn’t work my mouth, couldn’t work my lungs. My head hurt, something pulling tight above my eye. When I’d put my hand to my head, there had been the sting of ripped flesh, raised contours, lumps of stitches. But then my hands had gone to my stomach. A hot, searing pain across my belly. And my baby was gone. And I was alone, all alone.
The nurse had come, then. Explained some things, avoided others. She explained I’d had a head injury, that the paramedics had found me unconscious. That they’d had to operate straight away to save the baby.
He was small, much smaller than he should have been at full term, and floppy, refusing to feed. They didn’t know why he’d stopped growing in the final month. Was I sure I hadn’t taken any medications? Anything at all? Any benzodiazepines? I’d shaken my head. Of course not. I would never have taken pills. Never. The doctors had glanced at each other, but they hadn’t asked again.
In the end, they said it might just be one of those things. They gave him oxygen, steroid injections to help his lungs to grow. But he was here, he was alive. And then later that day, they’d taken me in a wheelchair, to see him. His little head, all squashed and puffy. His tiny hands. His perfect, sleeping face. He didn’t know anything about what had happened. I had tried not to think about the two police officers, lurking outside the swing doors to the ward. Waiting to ask me questions. I just looked at Leo, and I felt I could hold on to that. He got me through, in the end. He got me through everything.
Katie has pulled her chair closer to me now, her hands on top of mine. ‘I don’t know how you can be so calm.’
I smile. Maybe it’s lucky I’m so tired. Leo is difficult at night, always has been. He has nightmares, or at least I think that’s what they are. I’ll find him screaming, inconsolable, his little face contorted, even though he’s not really awake. Sometimes, I have to hold him for a long time before he will go back to sleep.
‘It was horrible when I first read it. But – I don’t know. At least it explains some things.’
‘Does it? That’s what I’m trying to work out.’
I fold the letter back into its envelope. ‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s just … I know this explains some of it. Like why she pretended to be pregnant.’
I can still hardly believe that part. The lengths she’d gone to. It came up in the trial, the device she had been wearing whenever she saw us, the website she had ordered it from. The papers had gone mad for that part of the story, of course.
‘I suppose it also explains the money – why she always had so much cash,’ Katie goes on. ‘But it doesn’t explain other things. Like, what about all the other stuff you told me about? The notes you found in Rory’s house? What were they all about?’
I shake my head. ‘Oh, Katie, who knows what I thought I found? Some old scrap of paper from years ago – it could have been anything.’
‘I suppose,’ she says gently, ‘they could have been … from Lisa?’
It was Lisa, the secretary, who’d saved Rory in the end. She’d been having an affair with him for months, she admitted – and could give him an alibi for the night of the bonfire party when he’d left the house at 9pm, as well as most of the other gaps he’d disappeared for. Once Daniel confessed to the whole thing – including that he’d been the one wearing Rory’s coat – the case against Rory had fallen away.
Not that they didn’t fight it. Daniel said he had acted alone. But DCI Betsky wouldn’t have it. She just couldn’t drop the idea that someone else was involved. According to Rory’s lawyer, they dragged it on for far longer than they should have done, talking endlessly about fibres on Rachel’s body that they thought could have been from Rory’s house, and about the phone triangulation data that placed her phone at Rory’s the next day, when that text was sent.