By now we’ve reached the café. There’s a party atmosphere in the village today. A busker strums a guitar on the corner, while groups of young people sit outside drinking iced lattes and chatting.
We find a table. Courtney goes off to get some menus and I sit, watching the world go by. Today I refuse to think about Arlo and the girls he killed or the trial date that’s looming. I refuse to be quashed by the guilt of his crimes. Instead I give thanks to the universe for my life, for Courtney and my new family. And for the future, which Una and Jemima and Matilde never got the chance to have.
47
Kathryn
The sun beats down and Kathryn can feel her shoulders starting to burn as she meanders through the grounds of the National Trust’s Tyntesfield, the boys running in front of her and Ed by her side. It warms her heart to see her sons so carefree, particularly Jacob. For once he’s acting like a kid instead of a surly teenager, teasing his brother and not caring what he looks like as he races Harry and pushes him over. They roll around on the grass in a play fight.
‘It’s beautiful here,’ says Ed, taking a deep breath. He grabs her hand and she smiles up at him. Her lovely, dependable, affable Ed. In some ways he reminds her of Huw. Maybe that was why she fell for him when they first met. Huw had made her feel safe, and Ed does too. They are now in a new stage of their marriage, almost like they’re falling in love all over again. After she came back from Weston-super-Mare that evening, she sat Ed down and told him everything – well, nearly everything. About Arlo and Willow, and the part she had played in Viola’s disappearance. She admitted how she’s been feeling overwhelmed by her job and her role as the dutiful daughter. She told Ed that she needed him to step up and stop taking her for granted. He’d been shocked to hear she felt that way, and the next day, after coming home late from work, she noticed he’d cleaned the kitchen and put the dishwasher on. Little things.
She also knows her new-found happiness is because she’s finally let go of her insecurities. She no longer has to feel solely responsible for her mother now that Willow’s on the scene. And she doesn’t have to feel that her inheritance is threatened – even though, ironically, it is, more so now than it ever was with the other girls. After all, Elspeth has a new granddaughter to dote on so she’ll be well cared for after Elspeth dies. But it no longer seems to matter to Kathryn in quite the same way. Maybe because she’s finally grasped that there’s more to life than money. There’s family: Ed and the boys are hers. She was in danger of losing all of that because of her obsession with wealth, always second-guessing what her mother would do with the money. Plus the guilt of thinking she was running the art gallery into the ground, when the drop in profits was down to Arlo and Daisy. Elspeth is a law unto herself. She uses money to control the people around her but Kathryn refuses to play that game. From now on, Ed and the boys come first.
Things have taken an unexpected turn with Willow. Kathryn had always been so fearful that Viola would return and claim her share of the house, or the girls her mother became infatuated with would be left everything after Elspeth died. But with Willow she’s found the opposite is true. She has an ally. Willow is clever, more savvy than she’d thought. She knows exactly what Elspeth is like, and the two of them have decided to stick together against Elspeth’s ludicrous demands. So far it seems to have worked. Willow is her niece but she is everything that Kathryn has always wanted in a sister.
For the first time in years, Kathryn can truly relax. Well, almost.
There’s still one cloud she’s living under. She’ll never be able to tell anyone the truth about that, even Ed.
And that’s about the night Matilde died.
It had been a rainy night in August and Ed was away on a stag do. It was in the midst of all the problems they’d been having with Jacob. The constant running away and the drug-taking. She’d let Jacob go to his friend Wilf’s house, a boy she trusted from school, because they were supposed to be working on a project together. Except when he wasn’t home by eleven – long past his curfew of ten – she began to worry. She rang Wilf’s home, only to be told Jacob had left around nine. Two hours unaccounted for. She was desperate, knowing he must have gone down to the estate to meet up with those druggy mates of his. She didn’t want to wake Harry so she’d slipped out of the house, grabbing her car keys from the dish on the side table in the hall. But when she opened the front door she was puzzled to see the driveway empty. Ed had taken his car to Manchester for the stag do, but where was her Golf? It was at least fifteen years old so she doubted anyone would want to steal it. And then the thought hit her. Had Jacob taken it? She tried ringing his mobile but it went straight to voicemail. And just as she was contemplating calling the police, he rang her. She couldn’t understand what he was saying at first he was crying so much, she only caught bits of the conversation – ‘I hit someone’ … ‘They just walked out into the road’ … ‘What am I going to do?’