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‘Let’s see, shall we. Fran Brown confessed to having had two abortions without telling her husband. Who does that? A liar. Lucy Holden left a teenage boy paralysed in a hit and run when she drove home drunk after her sister’s wedding. What kind of selfish bitch behaves like that? I’ll tell you again. A liar. Alice McKenzie paid her mortgage with charity money raised to help a neighbour’s daughter who needed cancer treatment in California. Why? Because she’s a liar. Eliza Holmes? Well, she was a delight. Turned a blind eye to her boyfriend abusing her daughters for years. She was lying to herself.’
‘But they make things up,’ I reply. ‘People with advanced Alzheimer’s and dementia don’t always know what they’re saying. Gwen told me she was a bronze canoeing medallist in the 1980 Russian Olympics. I’ve yet to find proof of that.’
‘Ah, your beloved Gwen.’
‘She was a kind soul who didn’t deserve either of us.’
‘If you believe that you’re as gullible as she was. She absolutelydeservedthe both of us.’
‘I’d have killed for a mother like her.’
His response is more of a cackle than a laugh. ‘Then you’d have been very well matched.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
Paul ignores my question. ‘Each one of my girls lied to protect their bad decisions and poor judgement. Without tongues, they cannot talk, and therefore they cannot lie.’
I pause to think on this for a moment. He’s keeping something from me. I shake my head slowly. ‘No,’ I say. ‘I don’t believe you. There’s more to it than that. They were already dead when you cut them out, and dead people don’t talk.’
The images of Paul muttering to himself at Gwen’s house, and then again, today, in the waiting room, return. And the penny drops.
‘Except they talk to you, don’t they?’ I gasp. ‘Your victims follow you around after you kill them. They haunt you, they pick away at your conscience, reminding you of what you are and what you did to them, and the only way you can make them stop is to cut out their tongues.’
Paul’s eyes lock on to mine. I’m expecting him to argue, but he doesn’t. So I continue.
‘You hear their voices right up until the moment you visit them in their funeral homes that one last time and remove their tongues. Walter was the exception, because by the time you killed him, the police had opened their investigation into you. It wasn’t going to be long before their bodies were exhumed and tested. So you had nothing to lose doing it there and then in his bedroom.’ Now I’m thinking out loud. ‘But when I saw you at Gwen’s house talking toyourself, you’d already removed Eliza, Lucy and Alice’s tongues, and it was before you’d even met Fran Brown ...’ And then it hits me.
‘Shit!’ I say a little too loudly. Heads turn in our direction. ‘Those women ... they weren’t the first, were they? You’ve been doing it for years.’
CHAPTER 66
CONNIE
Paul doesn’t need to admit to anything for me to know I have him bang to rights. His face doesn’t flinch, his body doesn’t move. His once impenetrable stare is now transparent. I need to keep up the momentum.
‘So there are more victims out there who you’ve murdered that nobody knows about,’ I say. ‘But for whatever reason, you weren’t able to silence them like you did the others. And now you’re in here, you’ll never be able to do it. For the rest of your life, you’re going to have to live with their voices haunting you for what you did to them.’
Only now do I notice he has started clenching his fists so tightly that his knuckles are ashen. I sit back a little, half expecting him to launch himself across the table and finish the job he started when he dragged me off that train.
‘And what about your mum?’ I persist. ‘Why did you dump her in that awful care home? You must hate her more than any of your “girls” to leave her there. Because I know you can afford better.’
‘You wouldn’t understand what a woman like her deserves,’ he says slowly.
‘Understand what? Bad parenting? If you’ve researched me like I think you have, you know better than that.’ He shakes his head dismissively. ‘Come on,’ I say.
He clears his throat as if something is caught in it. ‘What would you like me to tell you about my mum, Rachel? Should I start with how she cheated on my dad relentlessly with many, many men and women? That she’d lie to him and make him believe it was all in his imagination until it literally drove him insane? How, when he finally cracked, to punish her, he took my brother and sister with him to a multi-storey car park, threw them over the edge and then himself? Do you want me to tell you that she blamed me for what he did, telling me it was because I was such an awful son and brother, the rest of my family would rather die than be around me? What about how she’d drive me to the same car park, make me stand on that ledge and beg me to jump too? That she’d pull on my tongue and threaten to cut it off with garden shears because she believed everything that came out of my mouth was a lie? I could always tell you how it turned out my father wasn’t actually my father after all. And even though she knew who he was, she refused to give me his name. Or do you want to hear how she slammed her own head into the garage wall over and over again and accused me of attacking her, all so that social services removed me from our home and put me in care forhersafety? Are these the sorts of confessions you want from me?’
In an instant, I recognise segments of myself in him. In the pitch of his voice, the tilt of his head, the fear and loathing etched into every pore of skin on his face. In this moment, I see it. He was right, wearealike, and I hate him for it. We share an entrenched pain that will never heal. I’m convinced this is the first time he has admitted to anyone how badly he was wronged by the person hewas supposed to trust. The good side of me, the decent side, wants to tell him that what she did to him wasn’t his fault, that we are the products of our environments and that while others escape and soar high, there will be people like us who remain with one foot anchored to the past, forever struggling to leave the ground. However, I can’t offer him my sympathy, not even the tiniest shred. Because I don’t want him to know how similar we are. I don’t want him to know that in spirit, we are linked. I don’t want him to know that finally, I understand who Paul is.
‘You are no better than your mum,’ I goad. ‘You think you have the right to punish people for their mistakes like you’re judge, jury and executioner, when the truth is that you have no idea if those women were being honest with their confessions or if their minds were playing tricks on them. They might have made up those stories on the spot or they could’ve mixed them up with the plot of a book they once read. You were just looking for an excuse to punish and kill women that reminded you of Sue and her dementia diagnosis because it was easier to murder them than your own flesh and blood.’
I watch in awe as his cheeks hollow and he tries to suppress the urge to swallow his regret for exposing his truth. He quickly regains his composure and we both know that I am the first person to have reached his core. He begins to clap at me, slowly, his hands making large, exaggerated movements. Heads once again turn towards us and a prison guard makes his way in our direction until Paul stops. Silence follows, one that’s left for me to fill.
‘I assume you heard that we moved Gwen into the plot next to Bill’s?’ I recall. ‘It was a lovely funeral, by the way. The kind she was supposed to have had.’
‘Do you dream about me?’ he asks suddenly. ‘That night? How often do you think about it? Every minute, every hour, every day?’
I want to tell him that I don’t dwell on it at all, but he’d know that would be a lie. ‘What do you think?’ I ask.
