Chapter Fifty
Fifty
Six months later
Beverley steps out of the car and peers up at the house. The air is crisp, cut through with a chill, the sun glassy and bright, a sign that spring is coming.
Does it look any different, her home? She doesn’t think so. But what it represents has changed for her now. No longer is it a prison to be barricaded before she goes to sleep each night.
A flock of birds passes overhead, black silhouette curves streaking across the lucid sky. The cool breeze nips at her skin, and she pulls her jacket tightly around her.
Mrs. Akerman, the neighbor, walks by with her dachshund.
“Afternoon,” Beverley calls cheerily.
The woman casts a disgusted glance behind her and hurries along. Some things never change.
Bev shuts the car door and makes her way up the path but stumbles on the heel of her new shoes.
Margot told her these were the very best shoes to wear in court.
She even sourced them for her from a dealer in Golden Point.
Beverley bends to remove them, then walks barefoot toward the trash can at the front of the lawn.
She lifts the lid and tosses them inside. She won’t be needing them again.
Roger seemed so small, so powerless, as he sat in the dock during the trial.
He’d recovered from the gunshot wound, but the injury had left him with a rasp in his chest, which was audible across the courtroom.
Stripped of his uniform and his badge, and with his once-strong hands in cuffs, he looked old, tired.
It was a letdown, really. She’d felt nothing when she saw him there, in his prison uniform.
He had taken a plea deal, agreed to confess to everything to make the proceedings as easy as possible for Enid, the very wife he had kept prisoner in his basement for weeks.
Beverley was disgusted, but she’d expected nothing less.
Even now, Roger is trying to manipulate people’s perceptions of him, to make them see him as a good guy who wanted to spare his wife the shame of what he did.
He was always so very eager to be the hero, whatever the cost.
There are still people, she knows, who believe, with the focus of the righteous, that all you need to do to understand a killer is crack the code, that all that’s needed to foil a murderer is to place things in order, to find the signs and decipher them.
But evil, she has learned, is not order. It is chaos.
She avoided Roger’s glare as she delivered her own evidence, as she told waiting ears the details of her affair with Roger, and Roger’s ruthless desire to prove his own excellence as a cop, to replace Cornwell when he retires.
There was a question that troubled her for months, though.
Why had Roger chosen Peter, just a boy, to frame for the murders?
Why not Hank? Hank would surely have been an easier target.
The answer, it seemed, was testament to Roger’s grandiose pride, his desire for power.
A killer like Hank, he admitted, made sense, but was unoriginal, uninspiring.
A killer like Peter—a troubled, violent teen, a young killer, someone different from the run-of-the-mill Hanks of this world—would garner more attention from the press, more headlines, and the person to catch him would, therefore, get more attention, too.
How differently things could have played out. If it weren’t for her and Elsie and Margot, Peter Farrer could be in a prison cell right now. Roger could have won. No one would have suspected a thing.
Roger had attempted to control it all, thought he was clever enough to dictate the whole narrative—a conductor before an orchestra of fallen bodies. It’s a shame for him that Beverley, Margot and Elsie bested him, that Enid bested him ultimately. Now he’ll spend the rest of his life behind bars.
Beverley told the court how he’d spoken for years about his desire to get his teeth into something meaty. How he felt overlooked at the department. How he would have done anything to change that, to take Tom Cornwell down, replace him—absolutely anything at all.
When the sentence was read out, Beverley did not feel justness or victory, only sadness—sadness for five lives cut short; five girls on the cusp of adulthood who would never get married or have children or have cocktail parties in their fabulous kitchens with their Margots and their Elsies; five families whose lives would forever be marred by fear, by wishing things weren’t as they were.
Enid was there in the courtroom, and that was the first time the women had seen her since it all happened.
They had not spoken to her before that, although Beverley had sent a letter apologizing for everything.
Enid hadn’t replied, but on the first morning of the trial, Beverley received a bunch of flowers—gladioli—and a card with Enid’s signature and only one other word written on it: strength.
Enid gave evidence against her husband, poised and calm and commanding.
She had confronted Roger; that was why he’d attacked her, kept her tied up in the basement.
She’d noticed his elusive behavior for a while, his avoidance, his erratic moods, but when a coat went missing from her closet—a Burberry trench she’d picked up on her last visit to England, the coat she now knows was used to dress Diane Howard Murray’s lifeless body—she’d decided to ask him about it.
She hadn’t expected the fury, the violence, the blood.
Beverley’s eyes met Enid’s on occasion in the courtroom, but Beverley knew it was not her place to smile.
She will forever regret how she dismissed the existence of Roger’s wife because it was convenient for her to do so.
She had convinced herself, in some strange way, that she needed him more—but she didn’t need him. Neither of them did.
Now Beverley lets herself in through the front door and hears laughter coming from the backyard.
Through the open screen door, she can see smoke dwindling upward and into the gauzy early evening.
Elsie and Margot are already there. They have things to celebrate, too—endings to commemorate, new beginnings to mark.
Elsie recently learned that the stories Hunter allowed her to write about Roger’s victims are being turned into a book.
Hunter eventually recognized that her talent extends far beyond stocking spirit cabinets and typing up minutes.
She’s the newest reporter on the Signal’s crime desk—working beneath Patti, who is proving to be a fair and encouraging mentor.
Margot finally succumbed to Beverley and Elsie’s pleas and sought a shrink. She was making real progress on her vulnerability and her fears. She is also seeing a new man. She waited awhile to tell Beverley and Elsie that she had seduced her own therapist, but had they really expected anything less?
Beverley steps through the double doors and joins the women on the patio.
Margot pours her a cocktail from a pitcher, something sweet and orange like the sun.
The kids are tearing about, causing havoc, but Beverley doesn’t blink when they wander out of sight.
She can hear their shrieks and their hollers.
She knows they are safe. She knows that she must let them forge their own paths through life.
Bad things, she now knows, are not the universe’s way of punishing those who have made mistakes.
Bad things don’t happen because we think the wrong thing, make the wrong choice, miss opportunities or misstep.
They are not things that can be predicted, or planned for, or braced against with locked doors and cut-back bushes, and trying to prepare for them will not make them any easier to deal with when they eventually arrive.
Bad things have happened to Beverley and to her children, and it’s likely that bad things will happen to them again—just like good things will happen again.
The sun will rise and the rain will fall.
She cannot stop any of this by doing penance, by attempting every day to atone for the actions of someone she had no control over.
The doorbell rings, and Margot disappears to answer the door, reappearing a short while later with a small, hunched figure in tow.
“Look who it is!” she calls out, beaming.
Christopher Appleton has a cake in his hands. It is slightly lopsided and, from what Beverley can see, rather burned around the edges, but he holds it aloft as proudly as a father holds his newborn. The women cheer.
This is what friendship is, she thinks—not boastful cards from those who can’t trouble themselves to ask after her children, her life, the things that she has nurtured.
Friendship is when someone will knock down a door with you; sit for hours in a car, watching a dangerous man with you; hold your hand in a hospital bed as life-giving fluid is pumped into your wrecked body. Bake you a cake.
Beverley encourages Christopher to sit.
“Oh, I couldn’t possibly interrupt,” he stammers. “I was just dropping this off.”
“We insist.” Margot pushes him down by the shoulders onto a seat and gives them a squeeze. “And I’m making you a margarita.”
“Are you ready?” Elsie asks Beverley, gesturing to the fire crackling in an old ceramic plant pot.
Beverley nods and stands, then retreats to the kitchen and returns with the scrapbook in her hands.
“Feeling good?” Margot asks.
They all watch her, kindness and understanding in their eyes.
She nods.
She takes the book—filled with words of blood and violence and horror; every story she could find that was written about Henry, Albert or Stephen; every story that was written about Roger and the four women who brought him down—and holds it over the fire.
After a second, she tosses it into the flames.
They quickly engulf the pages, warping years of fear and guilt and sending them up into the sky in a twist of silver smoke.
The children’s laughter fills the air again.
Margot, Elsie and Chris Appleton raise their glasses.
Beverley turns to them all, takes a deep, clear breath and smiles.