It was held in a dark, wood-panelled room in a town hall and wasn’t at all what I expected. Deep down, I suppose what I needed and wanted was a day in court for Gemma. A reckoning.
But that’s not what I got; not what an inquest is. Both Matthew and DI Sanders tried to prepare me but I didn’t truly understand until I was sitting in the room. I remember this horrible wave of realisation as the coroner explained his remit; that his job was not to rule on Amanda’s crimes but on her death. Only why and how she died.
I sat there and the cruelty of it finally hit me. I wasn’t there, in that dark and horrible room, as the mother of the victim. I was there as the last person to see Amanda alive.
We did at least get more of the story. The police found a nursery set up at her house. A cot with a mobile in place. A nursing chair in the corner. Elephant curtains at the window.
There were diaries too – a huge stack. Mad and angry scribblings filling page after page. Turns out Amanda had an affair with Sam when she first started at the university in her thirties. She fell pregnant but had a termination which she later deeply regretted. Sam said it was ‘the wrong time’。 That his wife was fragile. Not Lily; this was his first wife.
Amanda waited for him. Continued the affair on and off for more than a decade. She genuinely believed that, one day, he would get divorced and they would have a family of their own. But she suffered insomnia and stress and became dependent on sleeping tablets. When her doctor tried to reduce her dose, she went to dealers. And so the drugs spiral began.
When Sam eventually divorced, it wasn’t Amanda he turned to. Instead, he broke it off with her and within two years married the much younger Lily. Amanda never got over it.
And then when Molly caught her using cocaine at work, Amanda saw it as the end. The loss of not just her job, but everything.
I’d not understood the link with Gemma until the inquest. Seems when Amanda found out about Gemma’s pregnancy – Sam the father – she simply became fixated. And deluded. Her last chance for purpose. Happiness. She came up with this fantasy where Amanda would get her final chance to be a mother and Gemma could carry on with her life.
The coroner was told Amanda paid one of her dealers to deliver the dolls. To confuse the inquiry; to frighten the Hartleys and Matthew’s family too. She got the gun from the same dealer. It matched the bullet used on Gemma. Sam too.
Amanda’s diary claimed she never meant to kill Gemma; she actually planned to kill herself at that first graduation. A huge and bloody gesture in front of everyone from the stone balcony above the audience, supposedly to bring shame on the university for getting rid of her so cruelly. She wanted it public. A letter in her pocket pointing everyone to her diaries. My truth.
But when she saw Gemma, so lovely and so young in her robe down below – her whole life ahead of her – carrying the baby Amanda was now too old to have, she was in the moment overwhelmed with jealousy and rage. And made a different choice.
And Sam? Amanda’s diary said she was going to Sam to press him to use his rights as the father. To persuade Gemma when she recovered to let Amanda have the baby after all.
What was so difficult is that Amanda seemed to genuinely see all this as reasonable. Possible.
The coroner nailed it in his summing up. ‘Clearly we all know that she would never have been allowed to parent that child. This was the sad and deluded thinking of someone who’d lost all sense of the real world. We cannot know how that confrontation with Sam Blake went. Only how it so tragically ended.’
The verdict, as expected – suicide. And that was it. Over. Done. Everyone stood up as the coroner left the room but I didn’t. Couldn’t. I remember sitting there and feeling completely numb; that it just wasn’t enough. No full stop.
I started muttering and Matthew had to take me into the corridor to find a glass of water, to calm me down.
But where’s the justice, Matthew? Where’s the justice for Gemma?
I promise that I do try not to dwell. The problem is it’s a bit like a haunting and sometimes when the scenes all swirl in my head – just like the light through those windows in this church – I spiral; find myself muttering out loud all over again. Like some crazy woman.
‘It’s OK, Rachel. It’s really over now.’ Matthew is leaning in and I open my eyes.
‘Sorry. Was I muttering?’ I blush. Don’t want to be this new Rachel.
‘Not muttering but miles away.’
‘Sorry. Sorry.’
‘Don’t be.’ He’s whispering. ‘Look. It’s very hard to cross paths with someone like Amanda. Someone that broken. The trick is to stop trying to make sense of it, Rachel. You have to try to let it go.’