Letters To My Daughter's Killer - [63]

If my meeting with you has achieved anything, it is a sort of settling. Lizzie’s death was obscene, a horrible tragedy, but now every element of it is known to me, now the ghastly steps of it have been laid out for me in full view, now I have retold it to myself endlessly, rehearsing it, memorizing it until I know every beat off by heart. So the chasm of ignorance that was filled with fantasy has gone. I have the truth. Stark and gruesome and cruel.

I pick my moment to talk to Florence about seeing you. We are at the park, having a picnic of cucumber sandwiches and cheese straws. Near enough to retreat home if she takes it badly.

We sit in the shade of a large oak at the edge of the field. Florence has collected some old acorns, missed by the squirrels, to take home. We will plant them and see if anything grows.

To help Florence I must constantly redraw you as a flawed man but not a monster. As someone who did something terribly wrong but knows it was wrong. Someone who had free will, who is sorry. She needs to know that you accept your guilt and are full of remorse.

‘I went to see Daddy, in prison.’

She looks surprised.

‘He’s really sorry he hurt Mummy, he wishes he hadn’t. He wants me to tell you he’s really, really sorry. He knows he made everyone sad, that we all miss Mummy, and he’s sad about that too. You were good. It’s not your fault. You were just a little girl and couldn’t help Mummy. What Daddy did was wrong and he is very, very sorry.’

‘All her blood came out.’

I swallow. ‘Did it?’ My heart aches in my chest. ‘Did you peep?’

‘Yes,’ she says.

‘I bet that was a bit scary.’

She looks crestfallen. She dips her head. ‘Is he coming home?’

‘No. You’re going to stay with me.’

‘For ever?

‘Yes, until you grow up and want a house of your own.’

‘I don’t want a house on my own, I want to stay in your house for ever and ever and ever.’

‘Fine.’

Of course I worry about her future. When Florence is eighteen, I’ll be seventy-one. What will happen if, or should I say when, my health falters? It is physically hard, the lifting and carrying, running around after her. I thought my child-rearing days were long gone. There will be more emotional challenges too. How could there not be? We will do our best. It’s all we can do. That and love.

Her speech is better, she’s a little more sociable, a little less clingy now. We no longer make those visits to London, but to be honest, I don’t think she will ever truly be free of the impact of your actions. She will have to live with that knowledge and hopefully accept it. Her life will go differently because of Lizzie’s murder. It will affect her on the deepest level. To expect her to rise above that, to be unaffected, is unrealistic and unfair. But she will know love and security and happiness with me. I will endeavour to the best of my ability to give her the stability and the reassurance she craves.

Do your parents visit you? I imagine they will, but I don’t care much. We have not seen them since that awful time during the trial. Perhaps there wasn’t a strong bond there between them and your daughter in the first place, or maybe they decided it was best to stay away. I’m glad: it would have been very difficult for me and an added pressure on Florence, who finds it so hard to trust people.

We’re staying put in Manchester. I can’t see us anywhere else. A lovely Russian student rents my spare room. I’m looking for work. Most of the time I don’t get any response to my applications. I have yet to have an interview. There are so many people competing for so few vacancies. And I have my bus pass now, which is not seen as an advantage by prospective employers. On my CV I have to account for that break in employment, those lost months. I keep changing it from sabbatical to family bereavement and back. I claim all the benefits I can for Florence, but it amounts to a pittance. Like my pension. We live a very frugal life, and Tony contributes. There won’t be any foreign holidays or iPhones for Florence.

Slowly, slowly, all those thousands of other memories I have of Lizzie are getting stronger. Gradually replacing that bloody black night of her death. I am winning her back. Reclaiming her. And as I do, the love of her, the joy in her is diluting the bitterness and anger I feel for you. It’s fair to say that I no longer crave vengeance, no longer get drunk on imagining your pain, your destruction. I am no longer buried in my grief, no longer on the pyre day and night. It is resolving into something simpler, without the complication of that gnawing lust for vengeance.

I will never forget.

And I know now that it is beyond me to forgive. But having the truth from you has made it possible for me to at least comprehend what you have done. Alien though your actions were, they are no longer unfathomable. Just terribly sad. Such a terrible waste.

I do not know how those other people, the ones who do forgive, reach that point. I do not think you deserve my forgiveness, actually. And I am not sure it is a gift in my power. I think perhaps the only person who can truly forgive you is yourself.