Caught half-awake, half-dreaming. A half-dream where I rise from bed, voices in the hallway; I come out onto the landing and see him. My father, pulling on his coat. He’s leaving. He sees me standing bleary at the top of the stairs.Where are you going, Dad?I ask.Nowhere, honey. Go back to bed,he tells me, smiling softly.But I don’t feel well,I tell him.It’s okay, baby. You’ll feel better in the morning,he reassures me, and he blows me a kiss. And I smile back for Daddy and I go to bed.
I wake up when the helicopter roars overhead again. Louder this time. Lower. I sit bolt upright, a terror crystallizing in my adolescent brain: something is wrong.
Joe scrambles back into my room, skidding over to the bedroom window and disappearing behind the thick silk of the curtains, only his feet visible below.
“What is it, Joe?” I rasp, my throat dry. I really don’t feel well.
The rhythmic thud of helicopter blades thumps through the night air. No answer from my brother.
My curiosity piqued, I race into the gap between the curtains, to join him as the big machine hovers overhead a third time. I catch the flash of its floodlight as it sweeps low over our wet roof. Blinding light and sound, the wordPOLICEemblazoned across its underbelly.
Transfixed, my brother and I watch as it slowly lowers and touches down in our top field, the long grass around it whipping with the downforce of the blades.
We stare out the rain-speckled window as the helicopter doors burst open, and uniformed officers jump out and run toward our house.
And then it comes from downstairs. The noise.
CRACK.
A rip of sound. A gunshot, loud and horrifically distinct, cracking through the silent house. My breath catches in my throat and I drop straight to the floor as if somehow I’m the one who’s been shot. Terror coursing through me, pure animalistic fear.
Real gunshots aren’t like the ones on TV. You feel the sound in your body. It hits you. It’s a sound you’d recognize even if you hadn’t grown up around it. A sound and a meaning in one. An instant understanding of events.
No further shots, just ringing silence through the house, and the knowledge of what that might mean.
Outside, we hear shouts getting closer to the house. I look across to Joe, crouched next to me on the carpet, his head buried, his pajamas and the floor around him wet with urine, his body quivering.
I make the first move. The animal instinct, to find my dad. I scrabble as fast as I can, low, on all fours across the bedroom floor and onto the thick carpet of the landing. A light on downstairs. Through the banisters I see Mum leaning on the study doorframe, her hand to her mouth. She is staring at something.
The burst of breaking glass from the front of the house, voices shouting.
I don’t know why but I run. I run to him, down the stairs, past Mum’s outstretched grasping hands, through a doorway I won’t ever be able to come back through.
And I find him there in his study. His face and the back of his skull gone. Or rather displaced, pieces of it, of him, stuck in the curtains, hot globules and bone chips on the window’s latticework, wet drips and chunks in and on his precious books. His whole life broken open across the upholstery. On his desk four cream envelopes, spattered. Thick watermarked paper—his letters to us inside. One addressed to Marty Fenshaw, Dad’s solicitor, one to Joe, one to Mum. And one to me. I don’t know why he wrote them. Guilt maybe.
Either way, I wouldn’t read mine for another two years.
I stand and stare at what he’s done, dizzy, my head pounding and the sound of Mum’s gasping breath behind me. The shotgun now propped between two lifeless thighs. His dark blood creeping slow and steady across the oak floorboards toward us.
The room spins around us and I can no longer stop the nausea from rising. I vomit hot sharp bile forward onto the floor.
And suddenly there are police everywhere, swarming into the house, through the front and back. Later I will see the squad cars filling our drive, the riot van, next to Mum’s 4x4. They’re shouting but we don’t hear their words as they pour in, fully armed.
We’d find out later they’d come to seize Dad’s hard drive, his papers, before he’d destroyed them; they’d come to take him in, but he’d beaten them to it. He’d destroyed everything and he was already gone.
We’d find out later that he’d embezzled hundreds of thousands of pounds from charitable funds, that he misappropriated funds meant for survivors of the London bombings. Other people’s money. Victims’ money. And we’d never find that money.
We’d find out in the emergency room that the headaches and the vomiting we were all experiencing were due to gas poisoning. Dad had disabled the pilot light on the oven, he’d put out the flame and the house had slowly been filling with gas for hours while we slept. The bitter smell of it permeating every room of the house.
They said at the inquest he meant to take us all with him. A last-minute idea, they speculated—otherwise why would he have bothered to write us all notes? Why indeed? After two years of waiting, I found that mine had said only:
Marni-marn,
I love you. I hope one day you’ll be able to understand.
Your Dad
He thought we’d be better off dead than without him, that was what he had decided for us. That we were his property to dispose of in any way he liked. We weren’t meant to read those letters; he wrote them to our dead bodies. We were all meant to go in our sleep but he ran out of time and shot himself first.
