Stone Cold Red Hot - [58]

Mrs Pickering was shaking her head as if to ward off a troublesome wasp. She refused to look at me.

“What did he do? Demand to know who the father was? Did she tell? That won’t have helped matters; he was a black boy she’d been seeing. Your husband would have found that hard to stomach, with his racist beliefs. The relationship had finished so marriage would have been out of the question for Jennifer. Did he threaten to disinherit her, denounce her? Or maybe he told her a secret of his own. That she was no daughter of his, that she’d been illegitimate. Bad blood will out. Something like that?”

Her head jerked back at this but still she kept her counsel. I kept right on. “He was shouting, her lack of decency, her shameless behaviour. Probably used a few choice words from the scriptures. There’s plenty in there isn’t there? Whores of Babylon and the like. But Jennifer had discovered something about Frank, a secret of her own. Maybe she flung that back at him. Knocked him off the moral high ground. Or was that what started the row? Did she tell you about his sins before she got onto hers? You know what I’m talking about?”

Mrs Pickering was completely still, her hands gripping each other, here mouth pressed into a line.

“He’d been having an affair with Marjorie Shuttle.”

“No. No.” Her hoarse denial rang out.

“I’ve been to see Mrs Shuttle, she told me all about it. So, he tried to silence Jennifer, to stop her saying all those vile things. Perhaps he pushed her, punched her. He was a big man.”

“No,” she began to moan, a guttural sound from deep inside.

I thought uneasily of her frail health. Was I hounding her to total collapse? But I was so near; her silence and her reactions told me that my story was close enough to the events of that fateful summer. I wanted her to own the truth.

“He killed her,” I said baldly, “and then he buried her in the garden. He put a new shed over the grave.”

“No, no,” she kept repeating, rocking forward slightly in her chair.

“The ground was hard as iron, it’d been baking for months. All that effort; the digging, building, it made him ill. That and the guilt. It broke his heart, shredded his nerves. I’m right.”

“No,” she said violently, twisting my way but avoiding my eyes.

“Why are you protecting him?” I leant forward. “He’s dead too. Nothing can hurt him now. He’s dead. Jennifer is dead and he is dead and he killed her.”

She looked then. Her face naked with emotion, her eyes wounded and the scales fell from my own. I was astonished. A shudder of realisation ran up my spine.

“You did it.”

There was no denial.

“He was protecting you, not the other way round.”

She turned to the window. “It…” she faltered.

I stayed completely still. The hairs on my arms and the back of my neck prickled. I waited. It was quieter outside, playtime over. Just the to and fro of traffic and a dog barking in the distance.

“Accident,” she whispered.

Another silence. I didn’t speak, didn’t break the spell. She might clam up. I was so close. But if the silence stretched too far the moment may be lost. I counted to five.

“An accident,” I prompted.

“The things she said. Hurtful, sinful lies. He was a good man. The filth…I was ironing. I didn’t mean to…it was in my hand. I told her to stop it. Stop it. Stop it. She wouldn’t. I hit her with it. On the head, in the face. I only meant her to be quiet.” She raised her palms and pressed her fingertips to her mouth, closed her eyes. I felt some compassion for her then. The burden of her secret held for years, the loss of her daughter and then her husband. How strong she must have been to carry on, to never weaken. Never allowing herself to grieve for Jennifer, twisting her memory into that of a feckless girl who had jettisoned her family. Had she loved her? Had she ever defended her bright, young daughter to her husband? Or had Jennifer always been the cuckoo child, a reminder of hidden sin, of bad blood? Her independent spirit seen as waywardness, her presence a cross to bear not a precious gift? Had either of them ever given her a hug in those awkward teenage years, ever pulled her close with affection? Oh, Jennifer.

She straightened up, returned her hands to her lap. her eyes were dry. “She did it to spite us, you know. Going with a coloured boy. It made me feel sick.”

She pursed her lips and I was reminded of the look on Caroline Cunningham’s face when she discussed Lisa MacNeice’s lesbianism.

“My daughter in bed with a nigger, carrying his child. Dirty. Loathsome. She had to spoil everything. After all Frank had done, taking us in, giving her his name. We moved here so people wouldn’t talk. She grew up and she was a snake in the grass. He had to put up with her bad manners and her cheap ideas. She had no respect. She was a slut. And then to tell such terrible lies about him, foul-mouthed lies.”

“It was an accident,” I said. “Why didn’t you get an ambulance?”

“We couldn’t tell anyone,” she shook her head. “All the fuss. With Frank at the Church and his firm. It would have ruined him.”

It did anyway.