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I’m going over old ground. We already had this fight a thousand times the first time we were together. But just so you know: after you left, I kept reliving the moment over and over and over again, when you just turned your back and walked out. It was like you didn’t care, Sam. Like you’d never cared, not really. So yeah, that’s where the rage comes from.
I still have flashbacks actually. Pisceans worry too much about everyone else’s happiness, and that’s why people take advantage. Dawn said you might be a… What was the term? Ah, that’s it, I’ve just looked in my therapy notebook from last year, which I keep in my little bedside table. Dawn said you might be a ‘covert passive-aggressive narcissist’. I was like, a what now? That’s why I had to write it down. She explained it all. She said you started to find fault with me towards the end of our relationship because you were in the ‘discard phase’. She had to explain that as well. It means you’d already moved on to your next energy source so it was better for you and the story you were telling yourself if I was the one at fault.
That made a lot of sense when she said that. Joyce was your new energy source, do you see? I mean, she was your old energy source, but basically you wanted to go back to her but you had to make it look like a mercy mission. Good old Sam sort of thing.
Because the thing is, you need to be adored. That’s what Dawn said, in so many words. I mean, that’s what she was getting at. And only your gran can give you the adoration you crave.
‘That’s right,’ I said. To Jo, later, not Dawn. ‘Sam never could stand criticism.’
And Jo agreed.
I know you tried to be kind about leaving, with the flat and everything, and I do appreciate how generous that was. But at the time it felt worse somehow. I can’t explain it. Like you couldn’t even stand owning a flat together if it meant having to deal with me, even in a business arrangement, even for a second. It felt like you just wanted to laser me out of your life like a cancerous mole or something. You were literally throwing money at the problem and that problem was a human being. Me.
That’s what you people do, isn’t it?
‘I need to leave for my health.’ Do you remember saying that to me? Can you imagine how that felt? Like I was a disease or a parasite or something? Like I was an actual mental illness? Then you just disappeared. Literally nothing, no word at all. No texts, no calls to see if I was OK, no WhatsApps. Nothing.
Who does that? Who treats another human being like that? Let alone someone they supposedly loved?
Anyway, we don’t need to stress about this stuff anymore. Joyce is out of the picture and our relationship has two people in it now, not three. Well, three, not four, I should say, if you count Toms. I’ll give him his breakfast and then I’ll be back to play my part.
I hope they’ve taken her away by then. No offence, but I can’t stand the thought of her still in the house, even if she has, you know, passed on or whatever. I was about to make sure of it when we heard you coming in. As I say, I’m not a psychopath, I was building up to it – it’s not an easy thing to do, even when you’re off your head on rage, even when she was most of the way there. And it’s hard to make it look like someone must have bumped their head twice. I was trying to figure it out, hoping she might just go on her own, you know? But we were running so late. We only planned to be in there ten minutes, but we couldn’t find her, could we? We had to lie in wait for her.And then you came back and we were like, holy shit! When we heard you go out the back door, we just legged it down the stairs, out the front door and down through Ware Cliff. We were killing ourselves. It was hysteria, but we didn’t stop running till we reached the car park. By the time you rang, I’d had a nice long shower and was ready to miss your call, so to speak.
So, it’s plain sailing from here. You’ll be upset. I get that. You’ll need your family around you more than ever, and I’m banking on that. Quite literally. Because I’m your family now. Me and Tommy. We’re all you’ve got. I know I said it was too soon to get married, hun. But:
a) reverse psychology always did work well on you, and
b) when I see you hurting the way I know you will, well, I’d have to be cruel not to marry you then, wouldn’t I? I’d have to be cruel not to do whatever you want me to.
Which is great, because basically you’ll be doing everything I want you to.
There’s nothing like a tragedy to make people realise life is short. You have to grab your opportunities with both hands. You have to seize the fucking day. And that’s all I’m doing. We don’t all have wads of cash to inherit, babe. We don’t all have mansions handed to us on a plate.
CHAPTER 44
When I got to that bit of Naomi’s letter, I couldn’t continue reading for a long time. Poor, poor Joyce. Part of me still can’t believe it, still can’t believe it of Naomi, even given what happened later. As Darren said the other day, the Harper sisters always were a menace. Their father too. And this is probably a good time to tell you that Naomi’s father didn’t die of COVID; that was another of Naomi’s lies. He died after he staggered, inebriated, out of his chalet and ended up falling into the harbour at West Bay.
What really winds me up is that even when people found out what Naomi did to Joyce, after it all came to a head, theystilltalked about Sam as if he were the criminal! I mean, I know what he did was wrong, but the headlines were so offensive, the rumours just that – rumours, not one word of truth. He did what he did because he was out of his mind, and anyone who can’t understand that is a psychopath as far as I’m concerned.
After Joyce’s death, Sam and I had limited contact. He was off work obviously, grieving and in shock. I tried to visit, but she – Naomi – answered the door and told me he was resting, that he wasn’t up to seeing visitors, that he’d be in touch. So I called. Over the phone, he’d talk about what had happened, cry down the line sometimes, but then sooner or later he’d always have to ring off, and I just knew in my bones it was because Naomi had caught him talking to me.
I know he gave a recorded statement at the station, and that once Darren and the boys had provided alibis, he returned home.
So, to the facts of the case as known at that time:
An autopsy finds that Joyce died of a heart attack either as a result of the blow to the head or of shock. The head injury is a blunt-force trauma consistent with a common or garden spade or similar, but the spade is still missing, along with the spare keys to the shed and the back door.
A pair of witnesses who claim to have been ‘talking’ late at night in the undergrowth at Ware Cliff – I’ll leave that for you to unpick – say they saw a young skinhead lad dressed in a black hoodie and black jogging bottoms running laughing down the steps of the track that leads from Ware Cliff to the holiday chalets behind Monmouth Beach. The police strongly suspect that this is their killer intruder. They release an E-FIT image of a young lad with a crew cut, his eyes black, soulless.
The intruder tried the shed, took the spade thinking to break a window but then spotted the keys. They weren’t exactly well hidden, and even if they were, under the plant pot would have been the first place anyone would look.
The working theory is an opportunistic burglary gone wrong. There is one set of fingerprints and trainer prints, which don’t match Sam’s, Naomi’s or Joyce’s, which suggests a lone intruder, possibly after drug money, since there is nothing of note missing. The intruder was looking for ready cash or, failing that, cards. You can pay up to a hundred pounds contactless now – enough to buy booze, enough to get cashback at a supermarket till. Finding no trace of intrusion into the cellar, the police conclude that the thief was unaware of the safe and probably didn’t know the house or its occupant.
The story makes the front page of the local news, a smaller article in the later pages of the nationals. A week later, Joyce’s body is released and I help Sam to write her obituary via email. I make posters appealing for information with a beautiful photograph of Joyce that Sam sends me. She is sitting on the bench next to the veggie patch drinking tea, gardening gloves and a trowel on her lap. Me and the lads put the posters up all over town. Sam tells me he cannot read the papers, go online or go out, even to hike. I get the impression he is depressed, or simply holed up with Naomi and the baby. I don’t get as far as him being coercively kept prisoner.
Naomi tells Sam she’s taken another week off and brings Tommy with her every day. She tells Sam she can see how much comfort he takes from his little boy. She cooks, cleans and waits on him as if he were ill with a kindness that astonishes him. She will not, however, stay at the house. She is too spooked, she says. For his part, he cannot leave.
‘Stay here,’ Miranda offers down the phone. ‘Bets’d be thrilled to have you.’
