Chapter 36
JEMMA
I watch as Dad lays out the photographs – twenty-seven of them – in a grid-like formation on his desk. Simon and Ollie are standing on either side of me.
‘Is this all of them?’ I ask.
‘Yes,’ says Dad.
‘And they’re all from her study?’ As I say it, I notice what’s different about Dad’s home office. The two large portraits of Marianne aren’t here any more. I wonder where he’s moved them to, and why.
‘When she decided to … empty out the room, she took all the photos out of their frames and gave them to me,’ says Dad. ‘“Put them somewhere safe”, she told me. “Somewhere unfindable.” So I did.’
I barely hear him. Ollie did his best to describe these pictures to me last Friday, but it’s different now they’re in front of me. It’s so hard not to run away, scream, grab them and tear them to shreds.
Because they’re it. They’re the big reason Marianne’s study had to be locked for all those years – well, them and the piles of notebooks Ollie’s told me about, the ones she wrote her diaries in: always with flowers on the cover, always wide, faint lines inside.
She loathed notebook pages with lines that were too narrow or too bold, apparently.
I force myself to stand still and keep looking at the pictures, not trusting myself to touch them. I don’t want to go to pieces in a room with three other people. ‘I thought you said you found them?’ I ask Simon eventually.
‘I did,’ he says. ‘I found them in the safe place where your dad put them.’
‘Did you … make them for her, Dad?’ I ask.
‘No, and I don’t know who did,’ he says gently. ‘She and I always kept our financial affairs separate, and she never told me any more than she wanted to, about anything. I assumed she’d paid someone to do it – maybe a graphic design type person.’
‘These pictures always creeped me out,’ Ollie says in a whisper. ‘I couldn’t understand how Marianne was able to … believe in them. For me, all they did was remind me that what I wanted so much was no more than a fantasy. I wanted it for real. Her insisting we had to pretend made it so much worse.’
I reach out and almost touch the photograph closest to me. ‘They’re the scenes from Lottie’s dreams,’ I say.
Family photos, all of them. Sort of.
They are and, at the same time, they are absolutely not photographs of our family: on holiday, in front of crashing waves at Porthgwidden; on a railway station platform nearby – Lelant Station – about to catch a train.
It was high tide and the sea was right there, next to the platform edge.
I remember saying to Lottie, ‘It’s just like being on a beach, isn’t it?
Except the platform’s where the sand should be. ’
And she dreamed about all those places, blending the scenes together to form a surreal landscape that was none of them as much as it was all of them …
I take a deep breath and pick up a photo of the five of us outside a tea shop in North Yorkshire, with a bandstand to our right.
Except it isn’t the five of us – or rather, not the five who were actually there.
It’s a lie, just as all these photographs are lies; Paddy isn’t in any of them.
Everywhere he ought to be – everywhere he was, when we went to those spots and had our picture taken, pictures Paddy was in – Ollie is there in his place.
I’m in most of them too: smiling, looking like the perfect, happy daughter.
Marianne replaced Paddy. With Ollie. Over and over again.
In some of the photos, it’s only the head that’s been replaced, not the body. There are several in which a man of Paddy’s height, wearing Paddy’s clothes and shoes, has Ollie’s head. In others, the whole person is Ollie, tall and wearing Ollie’s clothes.
It takes me around half a minute to realise that I recognise all these faces of Ollie in front of me; I’ve seen them all before. Marianne used the photos she took that week in the Cotswolds in 2005, using the camera Dad bought her as a Christmas present, for her great picture-faking initiative.
How many times did she take Lottie up to her study, show her these photographs, tell her that Ollie was her dad and not Paddy?
‘She used to say, “In this room, everything we want to make happen has already happened. It’s already true.”’ Ollie’s voice pierces my numb shock.
‘There were so many of the Photoshopped pictures, covering every shelf. Why did there need to be so many? I’d have been able to believe so much more in the future happy family we talked so much about if those awful pictures hadn’t been distributed all over the room, looking so obviously like hideous fakes.
Everything else we did and said was real – I didn’t get why there had to be this …
creepy fake stuff too. But Marianne obviously loved the photos, and I didn’t want to …
I don’t know, upset her or spoil anything for her, I suppose. ’
‘Sweetheart?’ says Dad. ‘While we’re on the subject of photographs …’ I feel something against the skin of my hand, and turn. He’s trying to pass me something.
Please, not more twisted, fabricated pictures. I half expect the ones I’m holding to turn out to be all of us replaced – five happy Ollie-faces, each one at the top of a different body, standing underneath a tree in Devey House’s garden.
I gasp when I see what Dad’s given me: the three pictures of Mum I used to keep tucked into my mirror when I was much younger: the ones that disappeared from my bedroom soon after Dad and Marianne got together. I’ve been convinced, all these years, that she stole them.
‘Did you find them in her things somewhere?’ I ask Dad, unable to stop the tears that are rolling down my face. Ollie puts his arm round me, and I allow him to half hold me up. I press the photos against my chest. No one is ever separating me from these again.
‘No,’ says Dad. ‘They were in the same place where I stored all the other photos when Marianne asked me to hide them.’
‘But … are you saying …?’ It’s too much. I can’t trust what I think I’m hearing, in case it turns out to be wrong.
‘Yes, sweetheart. I took your photos of Mum,’ Dad tells me. ‘I know you thought it was Marianne, but it was me. I was worried she might … I don’t know. React badly if she saw them. Destroy them, maybe. So I stashed them away to keep them safe for you.’
‘What do you mean, “for me”? I haven’t had them, Dad. If Marianne hadn’t died, I still wouldn’t have them now.’
‘I know. I’ve handled everything terribly.’ Dad looks down at his feet. ‘I know that. Believe me, I know. I’m trying to make up for it now by telling you everything, if you’ll let me.’
‘There’s more?’ I’m not sure I can take in anything else. I know there are questions I ought to be asking, but I can’t think clearly.
‘There’s a letter,’ says Dad. ‘Marianne wrote you a letter.’
‘I never got it,’ I tell him.
‘No, she didn’t send it. It’s … well, I put it in the same hiding place. She gave it to me.’
‘She wrote Jemma a letter and sent it to you?’ Ollie says, to check Dad hasn’t got mixed up.
‘Yes.’ Dad sounds uncertain now. ‘DC Waterhouse, perhaps you could …?’
‘This hiding place,’ says Simon, looking at me. ‘Where your dad put these … doctored family photos, the photos of your mum that he’d taken from your bedroom, the letter Marianne wrote you. Other things were hidden there too.’
‘What do you mean?’ asks Ollie.
‘It’s where the person who killed Marianne hid the bloody clothes, the murder weapon, their blood-spattered shoes.’
‘They used the same … So they saw what Dad had hidden there?’ I ask.
Simon looks very serious, all of a sudden. ‘Not quite. I mean—’ He’s looking at Dad as if waiting for him to say something.
And he does. ‘I think we all need a little break,’ he says, sounding as nervous as he used to when Marianne was grilling him about something he hadn’t done to her satisfaction, or strictly according to her orders. ‘Who fancies some lunch?’
No one is in the mood for eating, but we sit in the kitchen with our plates and bowls of hard-boiled eggs, salad, sliced ham and cucumber between us for nearly half an hour, drinking from our water glasses and talking about anything we can think of that isn’t Marianne or who killed her.
None of us wants this break to end, except perhaps Simon – but he doesn’t rush us.
Dad apologises for the inadequacies of the meal.
Ollie says, ‘Actually this is a very good lunch,’ and I shoot him a puzzled look.
‘I keep hearing people say it,’ he explains.
‘The healthiest kind of meal is when everything on your plate has only one ingredient. An orange, for instance, or a boiled egg.’
Dad looks so much thinner and older than he did before Marianne died, but Ollie’s praise brings a smile to his face. Another reason I’ll never stop loving Ollie: his kindness.
I’ve decided to stop questioning my love for him – to stop forever.
And I’m aware of it growing bigger and more powerful inside me every day, whether he’s just done something silly or something brilliant.
I love how thoughtful he is, and that he’s quite weird too.
I’ve found out a lot I didn’t know about him since last Friday.
He really does believe that the future is already decided – completely pre-determined – and that nobody has free will.
He’s twice mentioned a book I ought to read that proves it and explains why it’s great news for humanity.
I asked him to summarise the book’s main theory, which he did straight away and at great length, because – and this is a huge difference between him and Paddy – Ollie is someone who loves, wherever possible, to say yes and make people happy.
Paddy feels more comfortable if he’s saying no to something, or he’s not sure, or he doesn’t really think so.
His yeses take a long time to coax out of him, after initial refusals.