Epilogue
I’m in the garden room, at Saint Helen’s, on a late summer day as the light starts to fade, sitting more or less where that armchair was when Peggy lived here all alone with her treasured possessions.
Some of them are back, anything that could be scrubbed clean of the taint of Lord’s Yard, but no one could face the upholstered furniture, or any of the curtains and cushions.
They looked fine as long as they stayed in situ but even Bunny agreed, when we surveyed them in the cold light of day, that they “didn’t owe us anything.
” And then the new curtains made the walls look dingy, and the new paint made the floors look scruffy so, step by step, Saint Helen’s has been spruced up from the ground to the chimney pots. I even got my en-suite bathroom.
And I got my daydream of four boys having a kickabout on the back lawn too.
They’re out there now, the game moving ever closer to the greenhouse without them noticing.
I don’t really care if they smash the glass.
It only reminds me of Shelley now and I’d be happy if it was gone.
I’d get more upset if they snapped Nelly Moser.
I didn’t think the four of them would have anything in common and I sure as hell didn’t think Eileen Prentiss would let her two anywhere near my nephews.
But I hadn’t thought it through. Sean and Edwin have a murderer for a father, same as Zak and Nicky.
So it’s only when the four of them are together that they can stop bracing themselves for questions and piss taking.
Besides, Eileen’s a snob and, now that Zak and Nicky live in this gorgeous house, they’ve got a lot more to recommend them than when they lived in the chalet bungalow behind the gates of the scrapyard.
But I’m not being fair. She and I talk a lot about how to support them, about school and the future and the fact that Sean and Zak want to go on family access visits and Ed and Nicky have refused to consider it.
It had to be that the boys came here. I couldn’t join them in their home because it’s not there anymore.
None of Lord’s is there anymore: not the containers, not the Portakabin, not the sheds, the trailers, the horseboxes, the carports, the piles of tyres, the rusting bikes .
. . all of it is gone. In its place is a garden to commemorate and honour the people who had their homes stolen by Robert Walker, were kept at the Elms by Eric and Sarah McAllan, were killed by David March, were buried by John Lord.
Shelley might be out before they’re both eighteen, I suppose, but it’s touch and go if she’d get custody.
Until then, and maybe forever, I’ve got two boys to feed and love and help and scold and watch get bad skin and broken hearts and all the rest of it.
Seeing them messing up my grass with sliding tackles is the easy bit.
Someone in a shop assumed I was their mum yesterday.
She must have wondered what the hell was wrong, the way our three faces fell.
And if the thought of their mum is impossible . . .
John’s never getting out of the state hospital, I wouldn’t think. Nicky’s got plenty time to come round to the idea of visiting.
Ed too. Because David March will be very lucky if he sees a far view before he’s an old man.
The prosecutor—not Mr. Minto, because of the conflict of interest, but he kept a close eye on the case—wasn’t moved, and neither was the jury, by the argument David kept on advancing about the difference between killing and letting die.
He sometimes even strayed into claiming that the first six deaths were gentler than the natural ones that were coming, sooner or later.
He had nothing to say about how Peggy scuppered the seventh, about his own stupidity in realising he couldn’t sign off on the death of his mother.
I’ll never stop marvelling at her courage, to keep her body too bruised to let another doctor see it.
And I didn’t believe a word of David’s excuse anyway.
I saw Chloe’s hand in it. Chloe’s planning.
Chloe’s cunning. Speaking of Chloe, I can’t say anything about prison visits to Ed and Nicky really.
I’ve no intention of dropping by to see my oldest friend, no matter how long she’s in there.
Apart from anything else, it would creep me out too much if she started going on about how clever they’d all been, like she did during her trial.
She sounded proud of it, didn’t do herself any favours.
“We moved the victim out of the house, see, with the family’s consent and encouragement, and kept them at the Elms until the sale was through and the dust was settled.
” She seemed to think she had the jury in the palm of her hand.
“Until any long-lost relative or persistent friend who might be troubled by a tale of sudden decline had given up and gone away.” There was a sneer in her voice and on her face.
“If someone insisted on making a fuss,” she explained, “the old person could be produced, frail and fading.” She actually opened her hands and held them out, displaying her cleverness, she thought. Displaying her brokenness.
I had to turn away. Half the jury did the same, men and women—they couldn’t stand the sight of her.
I try so hard not to join in with it, the way the jury and then the press hated Chloe with a different hatred from how they felt about David, Robert, Eric, and John.
They judged Sarah and Shelley more harshly than the men too.
But am I any better, finding it so easy to call my dad a monster and move on, so impossible to accept my mum choosing peace and comfort with the monster and letting John and me pay the price?
Sometimes I think I understand. If I could make myself read that wise and brutal book again, maybe I would get it.
It’s something to do with how my dad only caught us once more, John and me, after we hid in the caravan.
But my mum knowing, and choosing, was over and over again for years.
It’s not fair. I know that. Everyone knows that.
But everyone in that courtroom was a child once and you can’t tell little children what they can survive and what’s going to destroy them.
Hating Chloe while she explained the final bit of the plan that they carried out six times came from deep inside every lawyer, cop, juror, reporter, and even the judge herself.
Six times.
Until Peggy. You could feel the wave of fierce joy and sheer relief all over the court whenever we got to turn our thoughts back to Peggy.
As well as keeping herself visibly injured, she would not learn her lesson.
She refused to settle, whether in the locked room in her house, on that short visit to the junkyard, or at the Elms. She kept raging on about escape, and revenge, and reporting them to . . . well, someone or other.
That was half the problem.
There were four local authorities, each with jurisdiction over just one quarter of the scheme—so a planning department might get involved in a new owner’s vision for their house, and a social care department might wonder about the Elms’ accreditation, but the two women doing the filing would never have lunch in the same canteen and get to wondering.
And John would fill in all the forms to dispose of old fridges with God knows what leaking out of them, while family doctors might be sorry their patients left without saying goodbye, but why would waste services speak to community health across the miles and begin to spin tales for themselves?
Slowly, steadily, and separately, officialdom ground its way to the end of all the forms and fees.
Only when every official body, with any skin in any game, was satisfied, then the victim was “let die” and taken to what turned out not to be their final resting place, but only a short interlude before they were given the honour they deserved.
That nearly derailed the entire plan, we learned, day after day as the details came out in the press. They almost blew it over the question of the bodies. They never considered for one second the scrupulous probity and bone-deep goodness of the funeral homes.
Sarah McAllan waltzed into a place in yet another county—Grangemouth, down in Falkirk—away back in the planning stage, telling a sad tale of a never-married, childless, long-time friend.
She was “just double-checking,” she told the funeral director, to see if she could bring in the death certificate and arrange a private cremation, with no announcement and no attendance.
When the funeral director’s eyes narrowed and his hand twitched towards his phone, she had to fake a forgotten appointment to get out of there quick.
And that was when John became an essential cog in the wheel.
Along with the other three. They did it six times all the way through and nearly made it seven.
Different methods every time, all seven pretty easy.
When someone’s up there in their late eighties and beyond, a bit of work with their meds is all it takes, usually.
I feel sick when I think about how slight and frail Peggy was the night I found her, how reedy her whimpering behind that locked door.
There wasn’t much raging left by then and it took months until she began to rally.
She’s almost back to her old self again now. She’s out in the garden watching the boys playing football, her grandsons and her . . . sons, I suppose. I feel myself start to laugh again.
David March was absolutely bloody livid when we visited him yesterday.
For the last time, Peggy tells me. It takes far too much out of her to expose herself to his vitriol, to his poison, at her age and after everything she’s been through, but she wanted to tell him to his face. She wanted to show him.