Chapter 4
JEMMA
‘Killing Marianne was an obsession from the second it occurred to me,’ I tell DC Waterhouse.
‘But it had nothing attached to it at first, nothing practical that linked it to the real world. It was like this … sinister backing track to my life that I couldn’t switch off, always playing beneath the surface.
I could handle it, though. Hoped it’d go away.
It didn’t. And then I thought of how exactly I’d do it.
And one word kept popping up in my mind: “foolproof”.
I know nothing ever is, really, but … even if I’d been suspected, there would have been no evidence, given the solid-seeming alibis involved. ’
Waterhouse says nothing. I get it: why add to the barrage of words, when it’s all pouring out anyway?
I haven’t stopped talking since we sat down, and he’s barely looked in my direction.
It’s lucky I came here ready to tell the whole story.
These conditions would discourage all but the most determined from saying anything at all.
I wonder if Interview Rooms One, Two or Three are any more plush or welcoming.
Probably not. Or maybe they ran out of comfortable furniture and paint that wasn’t a hideous bright blue before they got round to doing up number Four.
I thought I liked the colour blue until I walked in here.
There are no armchairs, rugs or pictures, nothing to soften the hard edges – only shouty signs about various things we all need to beware of or report, as if reminders of all the bad things that aren’t in the room might distract from what is: this dead-eyed detective, the horrid, pock-marked table between us, the long, high window that must have been positioned to make it as hard as possible for anyone to see anything.
My only view is of a slice of beige brick wall.
‘It’s not matricide,’ I say. That’s got to be the worst of all crimes: killing your own mother.
‘I mean, it wouldn’t be, if I did it. Marianne and I aren’t blood relations.
Though any mention of that was banned from the word go.
I was instructed to call her “Mum”. First time Dad introduced her to me, she told me she was my mother from now on.
I was seven years old. My mum had died less than three months earlier.
Dad knew how devastated I was by her death, yet he nodded along enthusiastically as if Marianne was saying something welcoming and lovely.
I remember thinking, “No, you’re not my mum.
I don’t have a mum any more. You’re a stranger, telling me lies.
” It all just felt so wrong, especially because Dad didn’t seem remotely bothered by any of what she was saying.
‘He smiled and beamed and did everything short of jumping up and down with joy, as if Marianne’s arrival in our lives was a wonderful treat for both of us. Just … so, so oblivious and deluded!’
I knew I’d be whacked by guilt for saying that, and that’s how it feels – like a deserved blow – but I’m still glad I said it out loud.
Why didn’t Dad flinch at the wrongness of what Marianne was asking me to do?
And there was more wrongness to come, none of which he raised so much as the slightest objection to: the ragged gasps Marianne made sure to produce whenever I mentioned Mum – and each time the air would stiffen around me, so that I soon learned not to do it; the three photos I had of me and Mum together that disappeared from my bedroom.
I’d pushed them into three of the four corners of my mirror frame.
Later that same day, I came back from school and they weren’t there.
Dad shushed me when I told him, and jerked his head towards the door as if to say, Not now.
Too risky. Except later never came. He didn’t return to the subject and neither did I.
I understood, somehow, that something frightening might happen if I did, something that could cause a lot of problems for Dad.
Then a week before the second anniversary of Mum’s death, he asked me if I’d mind if we didn’t make what he called ‘a big song and dance’ about it.
According to Marianne, that was what we’d done for the first anniversary, and it had made her feel unappreciated, insulted, unloved and a range of other painful emotions she had no wish to experience again.
It was clear Dad needed me to cooperate, so I did, because I was eight years old, he was the only parent I had left, and I could feel his desperation for a happy ending pressing down on me like one of those machines they use to crush old cars.
The most painful thought in the world, the one I’m so used to pushing away, fills my mind before I can stop it: Once a child has lost her mother, happy endings aren’t possible.
That’s why Lottie can’t lose me, ever. I need to get this over with, quickly, so that I can get back to her.
What will Paddy have told her? All I said in the text I sent him was that I was going to the police station and I’d be back as soon as I could.
Nothing else, no explanation. Should I have added, ‘Don’t tell Lottie where I am’?
It didn’t feel necessary at the time; I assumed it would be obvious to Paddy that he shouldn’t tell our thirteen-year-old I’d gone to the police without knowing the full story.
I have to stop doing this: taking for granted that he’ll behave like a responsible adult.
‘Shouldn’t you be taking notes?’ I ask Waterhouse.
‘I’m not.’
Right. I could have told him that. I did, except in the form of a question.
I’d expected him to start with the formalities – taking down my full name and address – but he didn’t produce a pen and paper or any sort of recording device when we came in here.
That part must come later. Maybe he’s going to listen first, then make me go over it all again while he writes it down.
That’s how the police know you’re telling the truth, if none of the details of your story change when you repeat it.
‘Foolproof,’ he murmurs.
‘That’s how it felt at first, yes. It landed kind of fully formed in my mind a few hours after I’d been to see my ex-boyfriend Ollie in July.
It felt like a gift from something outside of me.
Like it was meant to be, you know? Decreed by fate – and yes, I know how crazy that sounds.
I think that’s partly why I’ve got this deep-down dread that there’s nothing I can do to stop it happening.
But that’s not true,’ I add quickly. ‘What I’m doing now – telling you – will stop me. ’
Waterhouse looks no more curious than he did a minute ago. There’s something oddly soothing about his unresponsiveness.
‘Ollie and Marianne had been – have been – keeping something from me, ever since he and I broke up in 2006. In July when I went to see him, I asked him to tell me what that thing was. He wouldn’t.
Though he did admit eventually that he was withholding something, which at least proved to me that I wasn’t going mad. ’
A different kind of confession is pushing to come out, one that has nothing to do with murder.
‘For a long time, I thought Ollie was the one,’ I tell Waterhouse.
‘You know, the one I’m meant to be with, if you believe in that kind of thing.
In a way, I still think that, even though he won’t tell me the truth.
He’s also not the one I have a child with, which matters.
Paddy – that’s my husband – might not be perfect, but he loves Lottie, and she adores him.
I’m not going to deprive her of her dad if I don’t have to.
And I don’t, which suits Marianne down to the ground.
She’s determined to keep me and Paddy together. God knows why.’
‘That why you want to kill her?’
Finally, a question. ‘I don’t. I want the opposite,’ I say. He can’t be listening properly. ‘To stop myself from doing a terrible thing that can never be undone. She’s my daughter’s grandmother. I think Lottie probably loves her.’
All the things that have made me loathe and fear Marianne are things she’s said and done to me. As far as I’m aware, she’s only ever been kind and generous to Lottie.
Waterhouse amends his question: ‘Why did you want to kill her enough to make a plan to do it? Can’t just be because there’s something she and your ex aren’t telling you.’
I see the stripped-bare study as clearly as if I were still inside it: walls like wrecked human skin, the top layer peeled off; grey fuzz underfoot.
‘She orchestrated a nice little torture scene, with me as the victim. It wasn’t physical, the torture. She put on a sequinned evening dress to do it, not plastic overalls, Dexter-style – but that’s still what it was. That’s what pushed me to the point where I just … snapped.’
Stepping things up a level. Letting me know I was in danger.
Which meant Lottie was in danger of losing her mother.
I say none of this, because I can’t prove it.
I’m here because I want to make it impossible for me to kill Marianne – that’s the official line, and it’s part of the truth, for sure.
A big part. No one needs to know that I’m equally afraid she might kill me, or arrange for someone else to do it, or that I’m certain the little scene she orchestrated on 7 July – her sequinned dress, the stripped study, the mention of N.P. Pelphrey – was a death threat.
How can Waterhouse want to ask nothing at this point? He’s not even looking at me.
‘You know who Dexter is, right?’ I say, mainly in the hope of keeping the conversation going. ‘Fictional serial killer on telly?’
‘You’re talking as if you’ve killed Marianne Upton already.’ Waterhouse sounds bored. ‘You say you snapped, but you haven’t. If you had, she’d be dead.’