Chapter 102 Sally #2
She looked around the room until she found his phone propped up against a bottle of shampoo in a soap dish and partially obscured by a shower curtain.
It was pointed at an angle Sally suspected captured the whole room.
The dead battery meant it wasn’t recording her.
She carried it with her back into the car, plugged it into a charger, waited a few minutes until there was enough power, then deleted two of the emails Damon had sent her.
Then she deleted them from the cloud so they were gone for good.
Finally, she turned the phone off and handed it to Carolina, who went back upstairs to replace it after both sets of fingerprints had been wiped off with Sally’s handkerchief.
All that was left to do was for Addo to call for help and wait.
The police arrived soon after the paramedics, swarming across the area, shutting off parts of the street with blue-and-white tape as forensic tents were erected.
Statements were taken by scenes-of-crime officers, with details of how Sally, her aunt and uncle could be contacted again to arrange formal statements.
Detectives were told of the friendship between Helena and Damon, but the family didn’t admit to the biological link between the half-brother and sister.
And, as Carolina had suggested, the police had no reason to search for one.
Helena and Ralf had always kept their relationship under wraps.
Laura Murray – by a coincidence no one could explain – was a volunteer worker at Sally’s mum’s nursing home.
She was tracked down through a combination of methods: screengrabbed images of their messages Damon had taken found on his phone; neighbours’ Ring doorbell footage of her leaving Helena’s house; an IP address given to them by the message board operators for the general area where Laura lived; cell tower triangulation recording her movements; and bank statements of the train and London Underground stations her Oyster card tapped in and out of on the day Damon died.
The deaths of Melissa and Adrienne were harder to pin on her.
As Carolina had predicted, an internet frenzy began almost immediately, with amateur TikTok sleuths recording hundreds of videos broadcasting their theories as to how the ex-wife and girlfriend of a murder victim – and son of a convicted killer – had all ended up in the same house.
Sally spent hours at a time scrolling from one clip to another, fascinated by the speculation.
Meanwhile, Laura had been charged with – and had of course denied – all three killings, despite the overwhelming video evidence against her for Damon’s death.
During her trial, the defence tried to paint Laura as a mere fantasist, claiming she thought she was involved in a role-playing game gone awry, and that she hadn’t intended to kill him.
When she realised he was dead, she’d given him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
And when it failed, she panicked and fled without calling for help.
But Damon was far from innocent too, as it turned out.
Police found footage on her phone of him killing a man who appeared to be attacking him in a car park, then dumping his body in a waste bin.
Laura refused to explain where the clip came from or who the dead man was.
He was later identified when investigators found his vehicle still in the car park.
However, despite extensive searches of the Cambridge landfill site, Garry’s body was never recovered.
Damon was identified by the housekeeper of a Dr Fernandez-Jones, who had been attacked in his home office and left for dead. He’d spent eleven months in a coma before sepsis killed him. No records of his involvement with Damon were discovered. More fuel to add to the fires of conspiracy theorists.
Then, midway through the trial, Laura unexpectedly confessed to Damon’s manslaughter.
However, she was adamant she had played no part in Melissa and Adrienne’s killings.
The only evidence linking her to their deaths were her fingerprints on the plastic sheeting wrapped around both women’s heads, which had been partially opened to reveal their mouths.
Additionally, faint traces of Laura’s saliva were discovered on both Melissa and Adrienne’s lips.
She didn’t offer an explanation as to how it had got there.
After three days of deliberation, a jury found her guilty of the two murders by a majority of ten to two.
Months later now, here in the cemetery, Sally becomes aware of the cold and pulls at the zip of her coat to keep the wind from her neck.
‘Here we are then,’ Carolina says as they reach their destination.
Sally takes in the three small, brown wooden crosses, each with a brass plaque attached containing a different name: Helena Obugachu, Ralf Lister, and Maisy Lister, Ralf’s mother.
They visit West Norwood Cemetery every so often.
Helena and Ralf were never reunited in life, but they were in death when her ashes were buried next to his.
It was Carolina who contacted Ralf’s mother and asked for permission to do that.
Sally considered visiting her grandmother to explain who she was, but her aunt talked her out of it.
She feared Sally might be put in a position where she would be asked to help prove her father’s innocence and outed as his daughter.
Then, three months later, they read online her grandmother had succumbed to heart failure.
With no known living relatives, Carolina and Sally organised the funeral and for her ashes to be interred next to her son’s.
Damon, however, was given a public-health funeral, one funded by the local council when no one else is willing or able to pay.
Sally has no idea what, if anything, happened to his ashes.
Carolina uses her water bottle to fill three small vases, and Sally adds the flowers.
She is arranging the second bunch when a figure catches her eye beyond the cemetery wall.
A man with dark hair and an angular face is sitting midway back inside a bus.
His head is turned towards her, his face expressionless.
For a fraction of a second, she forgets Damon has died.
He is there before her. Then the vehicle pulls away and he vanishes.
However, she knows for certain it’s only her mind playing tricks on her. Damon is most certainly dead.
Because it was she who killed him, not Laura.