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TWELVE
We’re tramping about on Parliament Hill. I don’t know why I never moved away from the area, only that I couldn’t. My guilt is a ghost I can’t lay to rest.
‘What did we do, Sophie?’ my mother asks, Bambi eyes brimming. ‘All those women. That poor little girl. . .’
‘How could we have known? He fooled everyone.’
‘Did he, though? Or was the man we knew, the man he was?’
It always comes back to this. What we should have done. How did we not realise we were living with a monster? Which morphs quickly into, Was he a monster?
Did Matty really kill all those women, or did they lock up the wrong guy? The twist in the tale, the serpent’s bite.
And if he is innocent, what does that make me? Guilty. Shameful. A latter-day Judas. Take your pick, they’d all apply.
I long to know the truth, but if I did, would it set me free? Or bury me deeper?
My therapist asks me that question a lot. I’ve never been able to give her an answer.
‘I don’t know who Matty is any more,’ I’ve told her, how many times? ‘I don’t know who I am any more either. It’s like getting halfway through a book only to find what you thought was chick lit is actually a horror novel.’
Janice will lean forward at this point, hands clasped in her lap, head cocked like a bird. This softly spoken woman with wispy tendrils escaping from her bun whom I see every week and who is both an anchor and no help at all.
‘This isn’t his story, Sophie,’ she says. ‘It’s yours. You get to write your own ending, not him.’
I pick at my nails, always bleeding slightly around the edges.
‘You’re wrong,’ I say. ‘It’s his story. It always has been.’
She remonstrates of course, dresses up the same arguments in different coats. But she can never persuade me. Just as the newspapers and book agents who continue to approach me all these years later, have never managed to persuade me to sell my account. My ‘side’, they call it.
‘We want to title it The Serial Killer’s Daughter: My Life with Matty Melgren,’ I was told by a particularly determined tabloid journalist.
‘I wasn’t his daughter,’ I said. ‘Matty wasn’t my dad.’
‘Close enough though.’
‘DNA would disagree.’
I shut the guy down, but he was right of course, and that’s the problem, the reason Matty’s conviction has been so difficult for me to deal with. He wasn’t just my mother’s boyfriend. He was also the closest thing I had to a father.
It’s why I can’t walk away from what happened to those women, can’t shrug it off as having nothing to do with me. I’m infected by what he did or didn’t do just as if I shared his blood.
The path curves around and the capital’s showcase comes into view, the hard edges softened by the mist. An enchanted castle rising through the clouds. The London Eye, Canary Wharf, the dome of St Paul’s where we watched Charles and Diana get married the day Sheryl North’s body was found.
I inhale deeply, focus on the now, the way I’ve been taught. The cool, crisp air, the smell of earth and autumn. Birdsong and leaves on the turn, the sun shining through them, setting them ablaze. Part red, part green as though brushed with blood.
My heart rate returns to a normal rhythm. I walk in the direction of Parliament Hill Fields, Buster trotting at my side, wonky hips tipping him left and right.
We pass another dog walker, exchange a perfunctory ‘Morning’. Keep going. Along the path, past the café, the playground.
Ahead is the running track. There’s no one on it today and yet I see two people. A woman, in her twenties. Dark curls. Slim. A man with hair the colour of gold.
The temperature drops. The hairs on my neck stand up one by one in a Mexican wave.
I pat my flank, quicken my pace.
‘Let’s go,’ I tell Buster.
Twenty years and I’ve never made it to the running track.
