The Flavours of Love (11 page)

‘I still don’t understand why they let that man go,’ Mum says. ‘If they thought he did it, why did they let him go so easily?’

‘Because he can prove where he was at the time it happened. For the whole day it happened, in fact. He didn’t tell them straight away because he was somewhere he shouldn’t have been.’

‘But—’

‘He was innocent, Mum! OK? He didn’t do it.’

Mum’s entire body bristles and she sits back in her seat, lifts her chin slightly and fractionally purses her lips into a pout. I’ve upset her. She has been virtually no help preparing Christmas dinner, instead sitting around expecting us to serve her. She’s told me that I should still be wearing black but not near my face as it drains me. She’s explained at length – and in their hearing – that I shouldn’t let the children stay up so late, even if it is the school holidays and they are often scared to go to bed because it’s the time they cry and sometimes they simply don’t want to cry. She has told me that I should think about moving my wedding ring to my right hand because I’m not married any more. But this, my raising my voice a little because once again she isn’t listening to me, has offended and upset her. Joel made this possible. He made seeing my parents bearable.

‘Sorry,’ I mumble. I can say that because it’ll make the next two days of their visit easier on all of us. I can say that because she’s not coming back to stay again. Without Joel, there’s no way I’m going to allow this to happen again. ‘It’s been a long few days. I’m a bit tired.’

‘You look tired. And you’ve lost so much weight. It doesn’t suit you at all.’

My mouth bends into a smile. ‘You always used to say I … Never mind.’
You always used to say I needed to lose weight
, I complete in my head.
I was always too large for you, I was always eating too much even though I always had to clear my plate or I was a bad girl who didn’t care about all the starving people in the world. I’d have thought at least this would make you happy
.

My mother doesn’t notice that I stopped mid-sentence, she continues to speak: ‘How you look you now isn’t good at all. You need to eat. You need to put on weight.’

‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘You’re probably right.’

I focus on the tinsel-surrounded photo of Joel and the children that stands on the mantelpiece. It’s of our first Christmas as a foursome. Phoebe is four, Zane is nine months and the four of us had the best time together. That photo, that snapshot of who we were, has sat there since our first new year together. I focus on the picture, on what we did that day, and tune out everything else around me.

‘Mum?’ Phoebe’s voice is so quiet, so fragile-sounding, it is almost drowned out by the noise that is raging inside me.

‘Yes?’ I say. I’d had my head resting on the table, staring at the purple bruise on the kitchen floor but now I sit up as though I wasn’t doing that at all. Phoebe doesn’t turn on the light as she moves into the room.

I blink a few times, clearing my vision so I can look at her properly, clearing my head to allow myself to speak. I’d sat outside her bedroom until she’d stopped sobbing by slipping into sleep, the same with Zane. I’d been in and checked they were both asleep, both still where they were meant to be. Fynn had been and gone, and I’d come down here because I couldn’t face another night up in the attic, going through papers and filling in forms.

Phoebe’s walk is slow, cautious, like a girl approaching the gallows, like a twelve-year-old with a heavy burden on her shoulders. I open my arms to her and she comes to me, allows me to pull her onto my lap and wrap myself around her. She smells of sleep, and of Phoebe – that unique mixture of aloe vera conditioner, shea butter hair cream, mint toothpaste, and fresh air.

‘I have to tell you something,’ she says, gravely. The last time she said that in that tone, she’d been seven and had gone on to inform me that one day she was going to have to leave home and live somewhere else, but I mustn’t be sad because she would still love me.

‘What is it?’ I ask. I could do with a laugh, something that would lift the heaviness from my heart.

‘Please,’ she says inside a sob. ‘Please don’t be cross with me. Please.’

‘I won’t,’ I say without thinking. I clasp her closer to me to reassure her that whatever it is, I will understand. And I say it because my ravaged heart can’t bear to have her cry about something else when we all have so much to sob about already.

‘I know something about what happened to Dad,’ she says.

I am silent, terrified suddenly. What she is about to say will change how I feel about her, I know it will. It will damage us all over again and I don’t want that. I almost ask her not to tell me. I don’t want anything else to batter our family.

‘I didn’t tell the police about it because I was too scared.’

‘Tell me,’ I say to her.

She shakes her head, breathless sobs falling from her lips. ‘Please don’t be cross with me. Please don’t shout at me. Please don’t hate me.’

‘I won’t,’ I reply. ‘Whatever it is, just tell me, Phoebe.’

And she does.

‘Are you going to tell the police?’ she asks afterwards.

‘I think I have to,’ I say. My mouth is dry, my mind is racing to so many different places and thoughts and decisions all at once, I can’t keep up. I can’t hold a single thought in my head for too long
because another dashes into its place. Air keeps snagging itself on the way in and out of my lungs so I haven’t taken a proper breath since my daughter started to speak, and my heart is running cold with the knowledge of who it was that killed my husband. And why.

I have to tell the police this, of course I do.

‘Please don’t, Mum.’

‘But, Phoebe—’

‘Please don’t, Mum. Please. Please. Please.’ Her twelve-year-old body, nestled on my lap, shakes with fretful sobs. ‘Please. Please. Please. I’m scared. I’m really scared.’

‘Phoebe, we can’t—’

‘Please, Mum. I’m really sorry, but please, don’t.’

‘Shhh, shhhhh,’ I say, rocking her, trying to hush her. This isn’t fair. None of this is fair. ‘Let’s not talk about it now. It’ll be OK, I’ll make it all OK.’

‘Do you know if your husband ever used prostitutes?’

I stare at the he one who is my FLO for long, uncertain seconds, then rise from my seat and go to shut the living room door. The children don’t need to hear this. No one needs to hear this, but certainly not Phoebe and Zane.

‘No, he didn’t,’ I reply. I stand behind the door, needing the solidity of the wood to keep me upright. My body is simultaneously hot and cold, I’m trembling. What is he about to tell me? Is he going to take Joel away from me all over again?

The FLO sits back in his seat, looks uncomfortable. He lowers his voice, makes it soothing and caring. ‘It’s just there were long blonde hairs found on his clothing from the time of his death, but no way of knowing who they belong to because they didn’t have the bulb at the end with the DNA.’ His tone doesn’t fit with what he is saying – he sounds concerned while he is being accusatory.

‘Why immediately assume prostitutes? Why not an affair or a
female friend or colleague, why straight to a prostitute? Why would you try and hurt me like that?’

‘I’m sorry if this has upset you, but we do have to follow all lines of enquiry.’

‘He’d had sex just before he’d died, then?’ I ask. The cold-hot-cold feeling siphons itself from my heart to my feet, from my feet to my head and back to my heart.

‘No.’

‘You found out that he’d likely kissed someone?’

‘No.’

‘Someone had gone down on him?’ I am desperate to understand why this man would say this to me if there was nothing more than blonde hairs on his clothing.

‘No.’

‘He’d had a shower right before he died, meaning he was maybe trying to hide something?’

‘No.’

I am suddenly aware of every muscle in my body, I am aware of them tensing, contracting, adrenalin pumping through like drivers on a Formula One circuit.

I say nothing, so he does: ‘You just mentioned an affair, do you think your husband might have been seeing someone else?’

‘No. I was just … You know what I meant. And, anyway, wouldn’t his phone records tell you if he was calling one number more than any other?’

‘Men who have affairs or have some other kind of secret life involving drugs, prostitutes, gangs and the like often have more than one phone.’

‘Do they? I wouldn’t know.’

‘It wouldn’t be entirely surprising if you had no idea what your husband was up to. We thought we’d ask in case …’

‘You’re not searching my house for another phone,’ I state.

‘Mrs Mack-el-roy—’

‘Like I said, wouldn’t you have found something else – known
prostitutes who recognised him, secret bank accounts, maybe drug dealers who … you’ve talked to all those types of people and no one has even vaguely recognised him, have they?’

The FLO says nothing because he doesn’t want to say no again, because for some reason I’m the one now conducting the interrogation. We stare at each other across the room – me the sudden investigator, he the potential criminal.

In the seconds that slide by in silence, I know with a clear certainty I haven’t had since this all began that I can’t tell them what Phoebe told me. She’s right to panic about them not understanding. They
will
twist it, they
will
sully Joel’s name. Not even intentionally, they’ll simply want to ‘cover all angles’, not realising what that is doing to the people who loved him in the process. Phoebe won’t be able to cope, either. Not if they’re like this with her. Not if they start asking questions that imply Joel was someone other than who he was. I can’t protect her if they’ll say things like this to her.

‘Please don’t come back here again,’ I say, even-tempered despite the adrenalin that is fluttering rapidly and fiercely in my chest. ‘I can’t answer your questions because you’re not taking this seriously.’

‘We are taking this very seriously,’ he protests.

‘All right, let me put it this way: my husband didn’t take drugs – he tried them once in his late teens and hated it. He didn’t go with prostitutes or go to lap-dancing clubs no matter what his mates did because he had a brain of his own and he hated those places. He drank too much occasionally but no more than anyone else. He didn’t gamble. He didn’t sleep around. He wasn’t part of a gang. He got one parking ticket in his whole life. He paid his bills, he paid his tax, he visited his parents at least once a month, he visited his elderly aunt the same amount. He occasionally gave other people the wrong impression because he was so friendly he didn’t realise they thought he was flirting. Those are all the things I can tell you.

‘Don’t come back here. If you do come back here, I will not let you in nor speak to you.’ I stand aside and open the living room door. ‘Please leave now.’

‘Mrs Mack-el-roy, I’m you’re FLO, I’m here for you. I’m sorry this is so upsetting, but all we want to do is get to the truth.’

‘It’s Mack-
le
-roy. And go now, please, just go away and leave us alone.’

The letter sits on my kitchen table, placid and deadly.

I inhale as much as I can and my body moves. I am no longer frozen as I relive the past, I am in the present and I can move.

I take a step back. I take another step back. And another step. And another. Until I step back and I am on the other side of the room. I have the solidity of a wall behind me. I have the ability to press my body against it, the coolness of the painted plaster, a welcoming, shocking reminder that I am back in the present. I let myself go, slide to the ground and stare at the letter.

If I touch that letter again, if I read any more of those words, I’ll end up back there, I’ll end up re-experiencing the moments of what it was like to be
her
again.

Right now, I am the woman whose husband was murdered, the woman who the world thinks is successfully ‘moving on’ and ‘coping’. If I read the letter, even touch it again, I will be her all over again. I will be the woman stuck in the loop of dropping a bowl of blackberries and being told her life is over again and again and again.

Tuesday, 16 April
(For Wednesday, 17th)

Dear Saffron.

I’m not sure how to start this letter because I think you probably know who I am even though we have never met. I feel like I know you, too. I knew your husband, Joel. He was my friend. That’s why this next thing I’m going to say may shock you, and I hope you’re sitting down as you read this.

I need you to know I didn’t murder him.

It really wasn’t like that.

Murder means you plan something, but I didn’t plan it. It happened. It was fast and it was immediate and it was deeply shocking for both of us. He was my friend so I felt the pain too, when he was hurt.

I’m telling you this now, eighteen months later, because it has stayed with me. What happened is in my thoughts every day and I want to share it with the one person I thought might understand? Also, I think it is only fair for you to know how it really was, not how they described it on the news and not in the way the police probably told you. It wasn’t a callous, malicious act. It was nothing like that. I did not want him to suffer and no one can feel as traumatised as I was when I had to leave him on the side of the road. I did not simply dump him there, like they said on the news and in the papers, I had no choice but to leave him. Even he understood that. I don’t think he’d hate me for it if he had lived.

It’s a sad truth that you’ve probably had letters like this before, that people claiming to have killed him will have contacted you and said all these terrible things. How are you supposed to
know if this is another letter like that or if this is genuine? I can assure that I am 100 per cent the real deal.

No one ever mentioned this in the papers or on the news, not even in the coroner’s court but he died with his phone near him. Not beside him, it was out of reach. And it had an unsent text message to you that read: Love you xxxxx