Letters To My Daughter's Killer Read online

  The camera pans over our bouquets propped up against the garden wall, the cards and notes in plastic sleeves, the messages of love, our blessings. A voiceover relates our description of Lizzie: Lizzie was a much-loved daughter, wife and mother, a warm and loving person who lived life to the full. Her passion for theatre and the arts . . . The film focuses on Florence’s drawing, a row of kisses at the bottom, on Jack’s note, my love forever; it moves to our signatures, Mum and Dad, beneath the verse from Christina Rossetti’s poem, ‘Echo’, just out of sight.

  Come to me in the silence of the night;

  Come in the speaking silence of a dream;

  Come with soft rounded cheeks and eyes as bright

  As sunlight on a stream;

  Come back in tears,

  O memory, hope, love of finished years.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Friday 18 September 2009

  DI Ferguson was right, it does seem as though nothing is happening. Stasis. We go through the motions of eating and drinking; we wash, though I’m tempted not to bother. As though wearing my dirt on my skin and letting my hair grow greasy and tangled can serve as symbols of my distress and sorrow. It makes sense. I understand now those newscasts from other countries: the rending of clothes, the tearing of hair, the howls of grief. See how I hurt, I will hurt myself to show you.

  But we are British. And there is Florence to think of. It would all be so different without her. I could indulge myself, not beholden to anyone. Rave and rage and lose control.

  Jack signals to me and we move into the hall.

  ‘What do we do about school?’ he says quietly.

  ‘I don’t know. The routine . . .’ I begin thinking perhaps it would help Florence then I falter. I have no idea what is best. She is settling in well there, in reception, moving up from the school’s nursery class, and usually looks forward to going, but I can’t quite imagine a bereaved child returning to school so soon.

  ‘We can ask Kay,’ I say.

  Kay’s advice is to see what Florence wants to do. If she wants to go in, Kay will speak to the school and explain the situation.

  ‘I’ll take her,’ Jack says, ‘if she wants to go. I usually take her.’

  When Jack asks Florence about school, she says no, alarm in her voice.

  ‘Okay,’ Jack agrees, ‘you’ll go another day, maybe.’

  ‘No,’ she says again.

  He glances at me, I shrug. What can we do?

  Tony returns to work. Does that sound heartless? He tells me he is going mad with nothing to do, brooding at home. That he’ll be better occupied, his business won’t run itself, though they could get by on Denise’s income for a few weeks if they had to. There is no way I can face the thought of work, but I force myself to go out of the house once a day. I cannot hide for ever.

  Returning the calls of people who have left messages is really difficult, and I give up trying.

  ‘You’ve not been able to have a funeral yet,’ Kay says. ‘Usually when someone dies you can focus on that, you’re run ragged making arrangements, everything’s leading to saying a very public goodbye. Without that it is hard to move on with grieving.’

  She is right, we are rudderless. ‘People will understand and you can get in touch when you’re ready. Don’t sweat it.’

  Kay has a few Americanisms that make me smile. She spent some time working over there on an exchange programme. In Chicago. She loved it.

  ‘You wouldn’t go back?’

  ‘No chance now, they’re not hiring.’

  The tablets help in one regard: they make it easier for me to avoid dwelling on the scene at Lizzie’s house. It is there at the edge of my mind, a shadow hovering, but like a word that can’t be summoned, or a name forgotten, it stays just out of reach. Sometimes I wake suddenly, full of unease, sweating, and I wonder if I’ve been dreaming about Lizzie, visiting the scene in my slumber. Jack hasn’t taken any medication though I suggest he might. I hear him crying most nights, or pacing about.

  We do everything we are asked. Jack talks to the police again.

  Every day I ask Kay if they’ve had any witnesses come forward, if anyone saw anything, a stranger in the area. If they’ve found Broderick Litton.

  ‘Nothing yet, but it is very early on,’ she keeps saying.

  My neighbours bring more food. We’ve already had to throw some out and I’ve no idea which dishes are whose.

  Jack puts a lasagne in the oven.

  ‘Did the police say anything?’ I ask him.

  He shakes his head, and then stills. ‘Only that they think she let him in.’

  My heart quickens. Another morsel of fact. They are like shots of a drug. Dizzying, addictive. ‘Why do they think that?’ I sit down.

  ‘Because there wasn’t any damage to the door, no sign of him breaking in anywhere else.’

  I absorb this. ‘She would never have let that man in. Litton. Not in a million years. Or anyone else, come to that.’

  ‘I know,’ Jack says. ‘I told them.’

  ‘He might have forced his way in as soon as she opened the door,’ I say.

  We look at each other, Jack tightens his mouth and the dimple in his chin deepens.

  Kay encourages me to talk about Lizzie. About her before all this. I’m not sure at first; it’s painful until I get lost in the stories. Gradually I see that it’s healthy to shift the focus away from Lizzie’s death to the rest of her life, all those twenty-nine years. To take her off the pedestal too: not some alabaster martyr, flawless and sublime, but a person who made mistakes and could be infuriating at times.

  I tell Kay about the colic and the trials of teenage-hood, which I’m sure was normal enough but was a nightmare at the time. About how stubborn Lizzie could be even if she was in the wrong, and the raging rows she’d have particularly with Tony. And I explain how we came through all that. That the good times far outweighed the hard ones and I took such delight in her, her talents and her character and her generous spirit.

  At sixteen she had an abortion after getting pregnant by some boy she had only dated for a month. Of course we’d have supported her whatever she chose to do, but I was relieved when she opted for a termination. She was so young, still a child herself in many ways. I was ready to go with her to the clinic, but she wanted to take her friend Rebecca instead. She was sad after the procedure, naturally – she sat beside me on the sofa and cried, and I rocked her in my arms – but she never regretted the choice.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  17 Brinks Avenue

  Manchester

  M19 6FX

  Perhaps you are ill, mentally ill, I think, as I sit and open more cards and letters. Wouldn’t you have to be to stalk my daughter like you did? To come back and kill her? Though I know about the stereotypes. Most people with a mental illness are more likely to be the victims of violence than the instigators. Or to hurt themselves. The Daily Mail notion of the mad axeman is extremely rare. And these days it’s more likely to be a ceremonial sword.

  At work, our doors are open to everyone, and some of the library users have health problems, mental or physical or both. In past times they’d have been locked up in asylums. I can’t imagine any of them attacking someone. Not Ruby, who is highly educated and speaks half a dozen languages and trembles like a butterfly, anxiety singing in every cell of her body. Or Giles, who lived with bipolar. ‘I’m manic-depressive,’ he announced when I first met him. ‘If I get on your nerves, just tell me to sod off. I do witter on sometimes.’ Giles wrote poetry, sheaves of it. He had romantic stories published in women’s magazines, and when he was well enough, he attended the creative writing group the WEA ran at the library. One summer’s night he lay down on the train tracks outside Levenshulme station and ended his life. He was a lovely man.

  But perhaps you are the exception, the one in a million who won’t take their meds and who runs amok and kills a stranger. The attack on Lizzie was vicious, sustained. Were there voices in your head commanding you to strike? Aga
in and again. Why Lizzie? Why stalk her? Why come and kill her? Are women the enemy? Do you hate all women, or just young, pretty ones?

  The sun shines as I walk up to the park. I avoid the shops, haven’t been in to buy anything. No hurry.

  I am at the duck pond when someone calls my name.

  Squinting into the sun, I see him. Hoodie up, pants halfway down his bum showing his boxers, trainers in some bright electric blue. Doddsy, one of the lads from the basic skills group who used to meet at the library. In his early twenties now. School had failed him but he had enough nous to try a different route when given the opportunity.

  ‘Hello, Doddsy.’

  ‘Sorry about your daughter. It’s really . . . just . . .’ he says, flushing.

  My chest tightens. ‘Thanks. How are you?’

  ‘Good. Got this mentor now and I’m doing a sound production course. Well good.’

  ‘That’s great,’ I say.

  ‘Yeah. If I can help, you know, if there’s anything . . .’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Better go.’ He shrugs, and shuffles his feet. ‘See ya.’

  I smile and nod, touched by his kindness.

  Something shifts as I realize that not only have you taken Lizzie’s life and shattered ours, not only have you turned Lizzie from an ordinary person into a victim, but you have twisted my identity as well. Warped it. For ever more, for most people I will be Ruth, the woman whose daughter was killed. The mother of a murder victim. That’s what people will see first and above everything else; that’s how people will talk about me, will name me.

  What is even more sickening is that it’s a role I’ve embraced in these last four years. Because of my hatred, my thirst for revenge, my greed to see you suffer. My obsession. I have allowed myself to disappear into the role of bereaved parent.

  And that is partly why I’m writing to you. I want to be more than that. Break that typecasting.

  They say no man is an island, they say we’re a construct of all the roles we play, but I am so very, very tired of this one.

  You have brought such bitterness to my door. Filled my veins with such violent animosity and my heart with such hate that I can barely recognize myself any more. I want to find the old Ruth, the Ruth who cursed her screaming baby and rowed with her teenage daughter, the bibliophile who fell in love and copied out poems and learnt to grow vegetables and had a penchant for soul music and chocolate and liked cats.

  You’ve done your level best to kill her too, but she’s not dead yet, not completely.

  Ruth

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  17 Brinks Avenue

  Manchester

  M19 6FX

  Six days. What’s that in hours? I work it out. One hundred and forty-four. It feels longer. Although time is a pretty nebulous concept, the hours and days bleed together. How many seconds? How many heartbeats?

  Had you any idea the police were closing in on you? Or as the days rolled by did you breathe easily, and dare to hope you’d got away with it?

  Florence has not touched the doll since she brought it home. She keeps trying to cuddle Milky, hauling the poor animal up with her arms under his stomach. He’s placid, won’t scratch or bite her, but he thrashes about and runs off.

  Florence and I are alone. Florence is at the table eating some beans on toast. Kay has a meeting with the investigation team, Jack’s having a rest. We are still stumbling through our lives. I’m sorting through some clean clothes left neglected in the basket. Even this simple task seems to require a Herculean effort.

  One of my socks, old grey wool, has a hole in the toe. No point in keeping it. I stick my hand in, wiggle my finger through the hole, put on a funny fluting voice. ‘Hello.’ I make the sock bow.

  ‘What is it?’ says Florence.

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe . . .’ I gather the fabric and narrow it into a windsock shape, ‘maybe it’s a Clanger.’

  ‘What’s a Clanger?’

  ‘They were on the telly a long time ago. Lived on a planet with a soup dragon. They made a noise like this.’ I combine a hum and a whistle.

  ‘I want a Clanger,’ she says. ‘No – I want a sock cat. No – a kitten.’

  ‘A kitten, eh? What would it need?’

  ‘Some ears.’ She scoops up the last of her beans.

  ‘And whiskers?’

  ‘Yes, and paws.’

  My sewing skills are basic. ‘Paws might be tricky. Let’s see . . .’

  The sewing box yields enough black felt scraps to furnish two triangular ears and two round eyes, Florence chooses a brown leather button for a nose.

  ‘Look at Milky’s eyes,’ I say. Milky is sitting on the chair by the radiator. Florence kneels up in front of him and stares. Milky yawns, affecting disdain, but then his ears flatten and I can see he’s preparing for a rapid exit if she makes a lunge. ‘Yellow bits,’ she says.

  ‘What shape?’

  She sketches something unreadable with her hands.

  ‘Great.’

  I have some yellow cotton and use that to stitch a vertical line on the eyes. Plaited brown wool furnishes a tail. There’s nothing stiff enough for the whiskers, so we make do with more lengths of the wool, which hang down like a droopy moustache, but Florence seems happy.

  ‘She needs insides,’ Florence says. ‘She’s all flat.’

  ‘If we leave it empty, it can be a puppet,’ I say.

  ‘I don’t want a puppet,’ she scowls. ‘Not a puppet!’ Suddenly cross.

  ‘Okay.’

  A couple of J Cloths, torn into strips, serve as stuffing. I sew the top of the sock shut, biting the thread to cut it. ‘There we go.’

  Florence bounces the kitten along the table.

  ‘What will you call it?’

  ‘Kitten.’

  ‘Okay, highly original.’

  ‘No, Kit Kat,’ she says.

  ‘Right.’

  ‘No . . .’ She purses her mouth and furrows her brow as she thinks. ‘Matilda.’

  Where’s this come from? Has she had the book? Seen the film? The little girl who is neglected and bullied at home and school but who finds secret powers and blossoms in the love and care of her teacher.

  ‘Yes,’ she says firmly, ‘Matilda.’

  The door opens and I look up, expecting Lizzie, come to collect Florence. Tired from her journey but glad to be working, with stories from her day.

  I have forgotten, which means I have to remember anew. A lance in my heart. Swallowing the cry in my mouth, I fight to smile at Jack.

  Florence is in the living room with Kay, CBBC on the television. There is talk of the BBC moving to Manchester. Jack hopes it will happen; it might provide more work for him.

  ‘We should think about getting her back to school,’ I say.

  ‘I don’t think she’ll wear it,’ Jack says.

  ‘She’ll have to sooner or later, unless you plan to home-school her.’

  He gives me a sceptical look.

  ‘A phased return,’ I say. ‘We can work something out with the staff. Who is it, Mrs Bradshaw?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Even if we have to go and sit in with her for a month. You’ve no work lined up?’ I ask him.

  ‘No,’ he says, ‘I’ve not had an audition since I went up for The History Boys. I should speak to Veronica, tell her the situation.’

  Veronica is his agent. ‘She’ll have heard,’ I say. ‘There’s time.’

  ‘I should get a phone,’ he says. Like Bert the teddy bear, Jack’s phone was in the house and is off limits for now.

  I get a glimpse of all the practicalities Jack will have to face, rearranging work and childcare around Florence, sorting out the house: he will want to move, surely, find somewhere new, neutral, not tainted with Lizzie’s murder. And then all their financial affairs and all the connections of Lizzie’s. All the organizations and individuals she’s linked with. All the arrangements that will need cancelling.

  ‘Use mine whenever you need,�
� I remind him. ‘And if I can help with anything, the school stuff, or looking after Florence when you go back to work, I can reduce my hours. Anything.’

  We decide that Florence can go without a bath. I supervise her getting ready for bed and read her book, then she asks for Jack and he stays with her. Downstairs I nod off myself and come to with a start when he returns.

  It is windy, a storm is forecast. In bed, I lie with the duvet tight around me and listen to the wind, to the bumping of the gate and the sudden rattle of something along the alley at the back when a stronger gust blows through.

  It used to be one thing I relished, being warm and cosy inside while outside the wind prowled and roared. Reminders of ghost stories and adventure yarns. It was a dark and stormy night. That has changed.

  I’m cold, chilled deep inside and I no longer feel safe.

  Ruth

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  17 Brinks Avenue

  Manchester

  M19 6FX

  I wake early. The storm is buffeting the house, heavy rain lashes against the window. Milky, unsettled, starts to wash himself, then freezes, cowering. He won’t even come on to my lap for a stroke.

  Pain in my chest again. Perhaps I need to go back to the GP. I’m fearful that it’s something serious. No, ‘serious’ is the wrong word. Something physical, mechanical, a blockage or a clot, a leak or a tear. That my heart is broken, not just that I am heartbroken.

  Florence and Jack come down together. She has woken him. Before, she used to be happy entertaining herself for a while, able to understand that Mummy and Daddy didn’t want to get up before seven, but now Jack says that as soon as she’s awake she rouses him.

  Jack makes her cereal and goes to have a shower.

  I consider whether to broach returning to school with her but decide it’s best to let Jack take the lead on that. The line between supporting and interfering is very hard to see in the circumstances. But she’s his daughter and he is the sole parent now, and I trust him to judge how best to handle things with her.