Chapter 24
Rhiannon Madeleine Lambert—Ree for short—is my sister.
I haven’t been able to mention her until now (or her contribution to various scenes and discussions) because I wanted you to assume I was her and that these parts of the story were her handiwork.
Perhaps you even wondered if this entire book was written by Ree.
It’s not inconceivable that she might have chosen to present some sections from Mum’s close third-person perspective.
That’s what it’s called when it’s she instead of I but the reader nevertheless has access to that character’s innermost thoughts—though Ree would never start a sentence with It’s not inconceivable…
Now that you know I’m not her, you can wonder all these things about me too, I suppose. Am I the sole author of this account of our war with the Gaveys, or one of two? One of several, maybe? Or perhaps someone else is writing about me and it’s a lie that the I is me, if you see what I mean.
So. Now you should all know who I am, if I tell you that Sally and Mark Lambert are my mum and dad and Ree, Toby, and Champ Lambert are my brothers and sister.
I couldn’t risk revealing my true identity before, for four reasons:
1. There are prejudiced people who wouldn’t want to read a book written or cowritten by the likes of me. If you’re one of those people, all I can say is: Read on, and don’t assume you know anything at all, because you really don’t.
2. There are unimaginative people who wouldn’t believe my sort could ever write a book. (Remember what I said at the beginning about most people being unwilling to think that anything they don’t know for a fact is true?).
3. Technically, you’d have to say I’m a ghostwriter, and I know what people think about those.
I’ve seen—online, when I’ve looked with Mum at those writing community forums she joined after she’d recovered from the Lambert-Gavey War—so much antagonism and derision directed at other writing collaborations involving a ghostwriter that I was determined not to get mixed up in all of that.
Especially since Mum might be viewed by some as a “celebrity” (especially after the latest two glossy, multipage spreads: “At Home with Sally Lambert, Hoomum of the Furry Fugitive” and “‘Gone Dog’ Is Back; Family Speaks Openly about Ordeal for the First Time”).
It’s when celebrities collaborate with ghostwriters that unghostly writers turn vicious.
My final main reason, 4, also explains why, even now, I’m telling you who I am without telling you.
You might have noticed I’m not loudly and proudly stating my name for the record—first name, middle name, surname—even though I love my name.
Mum thinks of it as a “tiny little poem” and I agree.
Yet I’m leaving it out as a way of trying to get round the absurdity impediment.
I can’t give you any excuse to say, “Oh, come on, that’s absurd!
” and dismiss my story. People who aren’t me need to know the truth about me—the role I played in what happened—and I don’t want to risk shattering all the trust I’ve built up over many chapters of mature, authoritative narration by stating my name, which, shall we say, doesn’t have quite so much gravitas about it.
I feel like I need to try and explain the absurdity impediment, though it’s something those in Level 3 might find hard to understand. It’s kind of a Level 2 concept, and here it has a different name, one that wouldn’t make sense in the place where you’re reading these words.
The absurdity impediment is what’s at play whenever we fail to notice a situation’s moral significance on account of there being a strong element of absurdity involved.
The Agatha Christie Book Club War is a perfect example: It’s dangerously easy to laugh and call it ridiculous when previously friendly neighbors suddenly hate each other because they can’t agree about whether every book written by Agatha Christie should qualify for the label of “Agatha Christie book.” You might chortle and roll your eyes and say, “Oh, come on, you must be kidding!” and in doing so, you convince yourself there’s nothing important here to notice.
As a wise person once said (I can’t remember who, sorry), “There’s no view from nowhere.
” When you’re stuck in Level 3, you assume anything that’s hilariously ludicrous is as far away from serious and deserving of weighty consideration as it’s possible to be.
The truth is the opposite of that. It’s one of the first things we learn when we move up to Level 2: All too often, Evil wears a cloak of absurdity in order to be underestimated until it’s too late for Good to win.
Why do you think most people in Swaffham Tilney—all but her tiny band of fervent supporters, the likes of Maureen Gledhill—now think of Deryn Dickinson as “a few sandwiches short of a picnic”?
And it’s no coincidence that there’s almost a fondness to these kinds of insults—an underlying affection that implies relative harmlessness.
Yet think of what Deryn Dickinson set in motion when she could so easily have done otherwise: the heart-poisoning to extinction of the reading group she loved.
It would have been both easier and more pleasant to compromise and include just one novel of the non-murder-mystery sort that Deryn, who only cares if there are corpses strewn across every page, didn’t fancy reading.
(Remember also that, according to Corinne, The Rose and the Yew Tree is as much a murder mystery as any of Dame Agatha’s other works, albeit in a subtle way and with no clear solution at the end.
Corinne likes it all the more for that reason.
She cannot bear mystery books in which the right answer is handed to the reader on a platter, having not gotten where she is today by relying on others to problem-solve for her.)
All Evil needs to do is wear a cloak of absurdity and no one will believe it’s happening.
Champ’s case proves that. There were at least a thousand social media posts in June 2024 from people who argued that what the Lamberts’ supporters were claiming Tess Gavey had done was just absurd—too preposterous to be believed.
“What, so a seventeen-year-old girl wakes up one day and lies for no reason? Pretends a dog savagely bit her, just because she wants to get that dog put to death? Even though he’s never harmed her at all?
I don’t buy it. No one would do that. Why not, like, feed the dog some rat poison if you want to kill it?
Much easier!” (*big sigh* No, it isn’t. Not if you want desperately to be a victim, and it seems most people do these days.)
Strangely, those very same doubters, without stopping to ponder the inconsistency involved, were also the ones declaring authoritatively that no one would do what the Lamberts had done: go on the run as a family to save their dog, leaving behind homes, jobs, phones, friends, entire lives—“Not for the sake of a ****ing dog. I mean, come on! I don’t buy it. ”
I swear, as long as I live (that’s forever, by the way; the best bit of Level 2 is when you find that out), I’ll never understand how even a mind in Level 3 could be so dysfunctional.
All those fools who confidently bashed out their “No-one-would-do” twaddle with angry fingers and broadcast it to the world while knowing it wasn’t true.
What they were loudly proclaiming no one would do, the Lamberts of Swaffham Tilney, Cambridgeshire, had demonstrably done.
And, what’s more, we couldn’t have done it to any greater degree or a single jot more comprehensively than we had.
This was a known and proven fact in Level 3 at the time, yet the absurdity impediment prevented so many from being able to avail themselves of the truth, just as it prevented Mum from realizing that Champ could swiftly be exonerated without any more driving around the country under cover of darkness.
If Mum had only contacted Auntie Vicky as soon as she found out Auntie Vicky was repeatedly sending messages saying, “Ring me!!,” she could have spared herself a lot of mental suffering and saved us all a lot of time.
Why was she so determined to ignore Auntie Vicky?
Well, because in her ideal world—the one she firmly believed should exist, instead of the actual reality in which she was embedded—nobody she trusted would have been engaging in unsanctioned, illicit communications with all kinds of people, therefore nobody would have (also secretly) given Auntie Vicky the numbers of all the Lamberts’ burner phones.
An attempted communication that should never have been possible in the first place deserves to be ignored: That was Mum’s belief.
Besides, she found it all too easy to convince herself that whatever her sister wanted was bound to be absurd—not worthy of her attention if Auntie Vicky deemed it vital.
Why had she decided this? Because of the Facebook business…
About a week prior to the first anniversary of the peach-stone munching that moved me up to Level 2, Mum started working on a Facebook post about how much she loved and missed me and also the strength of her hunch that I was totally still with her (I was: sitting next to her on the sofa in Shukes’s lounge and, unbeknownst to her, helping choose all the best photos of me, me and her, all of us Lamberts together), when her phone rang.
It was Auntie Vicky, who wasted no time on small talk. “Listen,” she said, “I know the twenty-fourth of August is coming up, and I just wanted to check: Are you planning on doing some kind of…death anniversary Facebook post?”
“Yes.” Mum winced at her sister’s phrasing. “We must be telepathic. I’m just picking some photos for it now. Don’t worry, you’re in one of them. Mum is too.” (By “Mum,” she meant Granny. My mum was busy making sure no one would feel left out of her planned commemoration of my awesome life.)