Chapter 25
JEMMA
I knock on Lottie’s bedroom door, loud enough to make sure she hears it over her music, then walk in and close the door behind me. I don’t have time to wait for permission. Paddy could be back any second. This conversation needs to happen before he gets home.
‘Hey, Mum.’ Lotts doesn’t seem to mind me barging in.
She’s sitting with her back against the wall, legs up on her bed, phone in her hands.
Her room’s still tidy – has been for the last month.
Ever since she and her friends painted the walls a colour called ‘Sardine’ and we swapped her old faded curtains for white-painted wooden shutters, she’s been keeping it spotless.
I try not to think about the clothes strewn all over the floor in Paddy’s and my bedroom, which has become a junkyard in recent months – since July, when my obsession with Marianne and secrets and murder first took hold.
‘How are you doing?’ I ask. ‘Are you okay?’
‘I’m fine,’ Lottie says in a measured voice, as if she’s anticipated the question and prepared her answer in advance.
‘You sure?’
She nods.
‘Suzanne says you told her something today.’
‘Oh, great. Thanks, Suzanne.’
I walk over to her bed, sit down on the end of it. ‘She says—’
‘Look, Mum—’
We both stop talking at the same time. Then Lottie says, ‘I was talking rubbish, okay. I know Dad’s my dad. I was just being an attention-seeking brat, I guess.’
‘You’ve never been a brat, Lotts. You’re perfection on a stick.’ I smile. I’ve said this to her regularly since she was little. ‘And there’s no question about it: Dad’s definitely your dad. I wouldn’t lie to you about something so important.’
‘Guess I’m the only liar, then,’ she mutters. ‘Suzanne must think I’m a total dick. I’m going to have to apologise to her, aren’t I?’
‘Of course she doesn’t think you’re a dick. Suzanne adores you. You know that. Lotts, how did you know Ollie Mayo’s name?’
‘Heard the police talking about him on Monday, at Grandad’s. But, I mean … that wasn’t the first time I’ve heard his name mentioned, was it?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘Wasn’t it?’
She sighs. ‘No, Mum. You and Suzanne whisper about him all the time.’
Great. No parenting awards coming my way any time soon. I don’t know what to say. I feel not at all like the parent in this moment. Desperately in need of one, more like.
‘I’m going to apologise to Suzanne for lying to her,’ says Lottie. ‘I just wanted to see how she’d react.’
‘She’ll understand. After what you’ve been through—’
‘No.’ Her voice is quiet but hard. ‘I haven’t been through anything. You don’t understand.’
‘Tell me.’ I have to know, though I’m not sure I want to hear it, whatever it is.
It can’t be Lottie. Lottie can’t have done it. You know this.
‘Losing your grandmother’s different when you know she must be evil,’ she says eventually.
‘Like, not as sad. Don’t you think? And she wasn’t even my proper grandmother.
’ Then a flood of words bursts out of her: ‘She was the one who lied. Granny. She told me Ollie Mayo was my real father, not Dad. I didn’t believe her.
Whenever she said it, she sounded like she really, really needed me to believe it, which made me think it had to be a lie.
And she said I could never tell anyone, especially not you.
I know I should have anyway, but … I didn’t want her to do bad things to me like I’d seen her do to Dad. ’
It feels impossible that I’ll ever be able to understand what I’ve just heard, but I have to try. ‘You … you’d seen her …?’
‘And when it first started, I was still little,’ Lottie blurts out. ‘I was scared of what would happen if I didn’t just agree with everything she wanted me to do.’
‘Do?’ My heart thuds.
‘She kept taking me up to her study – her locked room. Never when you were at the house. Only when you were out or at work. Sometimes Dad was there, but he’d be chatting to Grandad and didn’t notice if Granny took me off somewhere.
And whenever we were up there, the same thing would happen: she’d talk about how Ollie was my real dad and how one day I’d be able to have my proper family all together again, and … ’
How could I have been stupid enough to leave Lottie in her care, ever, even once, when I wasn’t there to keep an eye on things?
I sensed what Marianne was capable of on the first day I met her, then spent a little over thirty years trying to talk myself out of what, deep down, I knew.
Why did it take me until July this year to trust my gut instinct?
I realise Lottie’s come to a stop. ‘And what?’ I manage to say.
‘I don’t remember everything,’ she says.
‘Granny stopped taking me up to her study when I was about three or four, I think. Maybe a bit older, I can’t remember exactly when.
Sometimes I’ve wondered if I can trust any of my memories of it.
Like, what if they’re just stories I’ve made up in my head?
But …’ Lottie curls her body away from me, so that I can’t see her face.
‘I do have a memory of her saying you’ve always loved Ollie way more than you love Dad. ’
The pain of hearing those words come out of her mouth is almost unbearable.
I have no idea what I’m supposed to do or say.
I shouldn’t have let Suzanne leave; she’d know what to do.
All I know is, I’m glad Marianne’s dead.
Glad she got murdered, violently. I’ve never been gladder about anything. No one could deserve it more.
Why? Because she told your daughter the truth, and ruined your happy family lie?
But it wasn’t the truth. Not all of it, anyway. Paddy is Lottie’s biological father, not Ollie.
And what about the part that’s true, about loving Ollie more?
‘I used to have dreams about him,’ says Lotts. ‘For quite a while after Granny stopped taking me up to her room. In the dreams, Ollie was always my dad.’ Lottie turns back to face me. ‘You know the hexagon duck pond, where you and Dad used to take me to feed the ducks – by the old bandstand?’
I nod.
‘In the dream I had most often, we were there, except with Ollie Mayo, not Dad. You, me, Granny and Grandad. And every time I’d wake up so sad because I wanted Dad to still be my dad. I loved Dad, not Ollie Mayo.’
I reach for her hand and squeeze it. ‘Dad loves you more than he loves anyone or anything else in the world,’ I tell her. ‘He’s your real dad and he’ll always be your dad. Nothing can ever change that.’
She half smiles. ‘Another dream I used to have was just me, Ollie Mayo and Granny. We were having a tea party with my old tea set, just the three of us – you know, the one with the pattern of fairies with different-coloured wings? There was a round window, like the one in Granny’s study, so I think we were in there in the dream – but we were also on a station platform, because there was a thick yellow line on the platform. And we were also on a beach.’
‘Can you remember anything else Marianne said to you?’ I ask her. ‘Anything she told you not to tell me?’
Lottie nods. ‘She said she knew Ollie was my real dad because she’d had a special test done that proved I was his daughter. Which must have been an outright lie, right?’
‘That wouldn’t have fazed her,’ I say. ‘Marianne didn’t recognise any difference between what she wanted to be true and what was. That’s why she was an effective liar. She always knew what she thought ought to be true, and tried to impose it with sheer force of will.’
‘She lied to you about Dad,’ Lottie says. ‘More than once. And you believed her.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘She used to put drugs in Dad’s coat and trouser pockets. So you’d find them and think he was still a weed-head.’
Oh, my God. This can’t be real. ‘Lottie, even Granny wouldn’t—’
‘She did, Mum. I saw her do it, more than once.’
‘But … did Dad know—’ A loud creaking sound cuts me off. Slowly, Lottie’s bedroom door starts to open.
Paddy is standing there. I didn’t hear the front door. I don’t know how long he’s been listening.
‘Many times, more than once,’ he says. ‘It’s true, Jemm. Maybe you’ll believe it now Lotts has told you. You’d never have believed it if you’d heard it from me.’