Chapter Twenty-Four
With traffic, it was after seven by the time Judith reached Katy’s house.
She’d stopped on the way to buy a bottle of wine.
She parked outside the house, then sat on her bike for a long moment, hesitating.
Which wasn’t like her. She felt utterly at home with Katy, with Oliver, with the kids.
She spent a lot of time at the house, and never once had she questioned whether or not she was welcome. It wasn’t that that made her hesitate.
Oliver was the one to answer the door.
‘Jude! Great timing. We’d run out of booze. Come in, come in.’
‘I only brought one bottle. If I’d known—’
‘One’s plenty. Plenty! If I’m desperate I can always have a G & T.’
She followed him into the kitchen. Katy was standing at the hob, stirring something into a big pot of what looked like pasta sauce. Nico was at the kitchen table, his schoolbooks spread out in front of him.
‘I shouldn’t have to do homework on a Thursday,’ he was saying. ‘My teacher says that we should take a break on Thursday. I’ve had a tough week.’
Katy wiped her hands on a kitchen towel, kissed Judith on the cheek, and rolled her eyes at Nico.
‘Your teacher isn’t aware that you’ll spend half of Saturday on the cricket oval, and the other half attached to your computer.
That Sunday morning you’ll be right back on the computer and I’ll have to pry you off with a crowbar.
Do forty minutes now and there’s a chance we’ll all actually enjoy our weekend.
’ As she spoke, Katy took two wine glasses from the cupboard.
She kissed her husband on the cheek. ‘Are you good to take over?’ She didn’t wait for a reply, but threw a ‘Come on, Jude,’ over her shoulder, as she opened one of the double doors that led onto the back porch.
Outside, it was chilly. The sun had gone down hours earlier.
The Cirillos’ little garden wasn’t much—just a square of lawn that was probably more weed than grass, and a rusting set of swings.
But the house was built on top of a hill, and so the porch had a view out over trees and rooftops.
After dark that view was a sea of lights from distant houses.
The porch also had a large table, big enough for eight chairs.
Judith had spent many a night there with Katy and Oliver, drinking and talking.
There was a gas heater next to the table. Katy turned it on.
‘Thank god you came,’ Katy said, taking a seat and opening the bottle. ‘Nico is in full-on whinge mode and my feet are killing me.’ She poured a glass for Judith, and one for herself.
‘Are you sure it’s okay? That I’m here, I mean?’
Katy gave her a look. ‘Did you bump your head?’
Judith took her glass, and sank gratefully into the chair. ‘It’s been a day.’
‘Spill,’ Katy said. ‘I could do with the distraction.’
Judith wasn’t sure where to begin. ‘Well, you were right about Miriam Hall, that her file was sealed because of something high profile. She was once Margaux Palmer.’
Katy’s brow furrowed. ‘Palmer.’
‘Daughter of Charlie Palmer.’
‘Oh Christ. The guy who killed his wife, right? The one they suspected of killing a bunch of young girls.’
‘That’s the one. Margaux would have been twelve when all of that happened. And she had a little sister, Renée, who was eight. Renée was given a new name too. Ruth.’
‘How did you find all of this out?’ Katy asked. ‘Did you get the files?’
Judith shook her head. ‘Not yet. I’ve put in a formal request, but it won’t be processed until tomorrow, at the earliest. I spoke to the Giffords. They confirmed it. The girls went to them for a couple of weeks after it all went down.’
‘Fuuuck,’ Katy said slowly. For a minute or two, they sipped their wine in silence, looking out over the city. ‘So. You think Ruth went back to the Giffords’ place and stole the guns?’
‘I think that’s probably what happened.’
‘And you think she killed that guy, Walker?’
Judith grimaced. ‘Rocky still thinks Jack Miller did it, but I think he’s wrong. I think it was Ruth.’
They were silent for a moment.
‘What’s bothering you about it?’ Katy asked eventually. ‘Apart from the obvious. Something’s getting to you, I can feel it.’
Judith was slow to respond. This was why she’d come. It was just so hard to say.
‘It’s Miriam. Rocky thinks that Jack Miller—he was Miriam’s partner, did I tell you?
Well, Rocky thinks Jack killed Robert Walker because Miriam went to see Walker before she died.
Rocky’s theory is that Jack feels that Walker let her down, that he didn’t give her proper treatment, because of course she went on to commit suicide. ’
‘Okay.’
Judith took a deep breath. ‘He doesn’t know the whole story. No one does, except me. Miriam did go to see Walker, that much is right. She only saw him once, because he assaulted her during the session. Felt her up. She came right to us, to the station, and I was the one to interview her.’
Katy said nothing. She knew Judith well, knew that something else was coming.
‘I told her to let it go.’
Katy’s eyebrows flew up. ‘You told her to let it go? To let an assault go? Why?’
‘Because I’d just come off a bloody awful case.
A case where two sisters were raped by their dad’s best friend.
Those girls trusted us, we did everything right and that bastard still got off.
We had no proof. It was another he-said, she-said.
All those girls got out of the process was eighteen months of waiting, and then hours on the stand where they were ripped to shreds by a defence barrister.
After the case was dismissed, later that night, I got a call from their mother to tell me that the older girl had to be sedated. She never went back to college.’
Katy sighed. She looked down at her wine.
‘It would have been Miriam’s word against Walker’s,’ Judith said.
‘And she was a total mess. Fragile. You know the kind of woman I mean. I thought she’d get crushed by the process so I warned her off.
I thought I was doing her a favour, but she ended up killing herself, so I protected her from nothing. ’
Katy was silent. Her gaze was still averted, and Judith felt a moment of uncertainty, followed swiftly by irritation.
She’d wanted Katy to absolve her, she realised—to tell her that she’d done the right thing, that the legal process really was brutal, that she couldn’t have known how Miriam would react.
Judging by the look on Katy’s face, that was not what was coming.
‘What?’ Judith said.
Katy shook her head.
‘What, Katy?’
‘This is about your mother.’
‘My mother? Are you joking? Can we not do therapy, please?’
‘Fine.’ Still Katy wasn’t looking at her.
Judith wanted to leave. To drive to the nearest bar and sink some shots and call up a friend with benefits and bring him home.
She’d come for company and conversation and friendship, not analysis and bullshit.
They were silent for a while. Someone inside the house turned on some music, and they heard the faint early notes of REM’s ‘Shiny Happy People’.
Judith shifted her weight in her seat and looked out over the view.
‘Just say it, Katy. You won’t be happy until you get it off your chest.’
‘Piss off,’ Katy said. ‘Don’t do me any favours.’
They were quiet again, both of them wound up now, but then Katy—who’d always been the kinder, the more mature of the two of them—took a breath and started to talk, her voice steady as a metronome.
‘What happened to you when you were a kid was wrong. Your mother failed you. It was her job to protect you, and she didn’t.’
‘This has nothing to do with—’
Katy held up a hand. ‘I’m not finished. Your mother, as you see it, allowed your stepfather to beat the shit out of her, and then, when you were fifteen, to beat the shit out of you.’
‘It’s not about how I see it, or don’t see it,’ Judith said, suddenly feeling heated. ‘It’s a matter of fact. She could have left at any time.’
‘Fine,’ Katy said. ‘I’d say it’s a little more complicated than that, but for the sake of this conversation, let’s just both accept that as true, okay?’
Judith nodded stiffly. She resented the conversation, resented it deeply.
‘You were fifteen when that happened, Jude. Now you’re forty.
Of course you should tell Rocky what happened with Miriam.
You don’t need me to tell you that. But, you know, keep it to yourself if you want to.
If you want to, you can spend the rest of your life making bad decisions and blaming those decisions on your shitty childhood.
You decide to do that and I guarantee you, you’ll find a hell of a lot of people who will cheer you on.
You can go online and surround yourself with people who will tell you that you’re right to pity yourself, that you’re right to be angry, and that every shitty decision you make is justified because once upon a time, you were a victim. ’
Judith’s cheeks were burning. She was angry, so bloody angry.
‘Or you can look in the mirror and recognise that you have been making your own decisions since you were eighteen years old. That’s more than half your life, Jude.
More than half the time you’ve spent on this earth, you’ve been the only one in charge.
You can own that, and then you can decide to leave your baggage here, and decide what kind of person you want to be in the world.
Someone who makes the world better, not worse. ’
‘That’s all beautifully put, but I don’t know what my shitty childhood has to do with anything.’
Katy picked up her glass of wine, finished it in one long swallow, then put her glass down on the table. She folded her arms, and her face settled into a fixed expression. She looked like she was bracing herself for more blowback. But after a moment she started speaking again.