A Game For All The Family (44 page)

I know the story you’ve told your family about your life as Lisette Ingrey, before you changed your name. I know you have files full of information about me—all my friends and old work contacts that you’ve pulled from Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn—and I know you’ve chosen my coffin and my gravestone inscription. I found the relevant files when I broke into your house. (Yes, I smashed your living room window. Feel free to tell the police if you want to.)

Usually when you pay that much attention to someone, part of you hopes they will reciprocate, so here I am. I’m not sure if you’ll be pleased or displeased to learn that you’ve succeeded in making me as interested in you as you are in me.

I would love to know if you genuinely believe that you were once called Lisette Ingrey and that you grew up in Speedwell House, the eldest daughter of Bascom and Sorrel Ingrey, with two sisters: Allisande the life-threatener and Perrine the murderer. I’m not sure if you know on every level that none of this is true, and it’s just a barefaced lie you’ve been telling your husband and children. Maybe you know deep down that it’s not true, but you’ve persuaded most of your conscious mind to believe it anyway? The third possibility is that you believe the Ingrey story completely and are genuinely unaware that you invented it.

It’s not true, Anne. You were born Anne Offord, eldest child of Martin and Denise Offord. You have one younger sister, Sarah. I’ve met her once and spoken to her twice.

Here are some of the things I’ve Googled since I started to take an interest in you: pathological lying, compulsive lying, pretending to come from a different family. You might suffer from something called mythomania or pseudologia fantastica, explained here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudologia_fantastica. Anne, you need to seek urgent psychological help. Also, have you heard of Freud’s “family romance” theory, about the delusion of belonging to a different family? Here’s a link if not: http://www.answers.com/topic/family-romance.

I can’t pretend to care about you, so don’t let the advice I’ve just given you mislead you on that score. If you died in a ditch tomorrow, I wouldn’t be sorry. Every time I think about what you’re doing to your children, I feel the urge to beat the crap out of you. That’s why I’m writing this letter—for Fleur and George’s sake, not yours. They’re the ones I want to help. You’ve told them their aunt was an evil triple murderer as well as a murder victim, without a care or a thought for how it might feel for Fleur and George to carry around this heavy burden of family guilt and harm. You have, additionally, made them believe that their other aunt would kill them, and you and Stephen, if she succeeded in tracking the four of you down. You have used this pretend danger to cripple Fleur and George’s lives in the name of safety, and prevent them from having a normal childhood. Interestingly, George—while apparently having fallen for your lies about your and his family’s history—doesn’t seem remotely afraid of anyone outside of his family. He understandably seems to prefer strangers to his close relatives. He very evidently doesn’t for a moment believe that I’m Allisande Ingrey, his psycho-murderous aunt. Did you not tell him that part, about you making me Allisande?

I think what you’ve done to your family is unforgivable. Or rather, it’s only forgivable if you’re crazy and not responsible for your actions, but when we met, I had the impression that you knew exactly what you were about. If you’re sane, clever and in control, then your lies are evil.

Your name is not and never was Lisette Ingrey. It’s important that you face up to that. And my name isn’t Allisande Ingrey, nor was it, ever. My name is and always has been Justine Michelle Merrison. I grew up in Northenden, Manchester. I am not your sister who threatened to kill you if you didn’t leave Devon, or if you told the truth about Perrine’s murder—a murder that didn’t happen, since Perrine is a figment of your imagination. And, just to avoid any ambiguity, Allisande/Sandie is also someone you invented. Speedwell House was never the home of anyone called Ingrey. The last two owners, before my husband and I bought it, were called Ainscough and Rutherford. Before that, the house belonged to the Deller family, having been passed down through the generations since 1765. No Ingreys. This has been checked and double-checked. (I hired a private detective—if you look at the email I’m sending this letter from, you’ll see I’m writing to you from an address that begins “Justine4PI”—this isn’t my normal email, it’s an account I set up solely in order to correspond with a private investigator.)

Before I sat down to write this letter, I had a long telephone conversation with your mother, Denise Offord. She said she didn’t see much of you these days, and sounded strangely unemotional about it. Also weirdly incurious. She wasn’t eager to find out why I was interrogating her. It was as if I were asking about some glove or sock she’d mislaid in the late 1980s and not thought about since.

Maybe she’s not particularly imaginative. From the Ingrey story you created, it appears that you’re the opposite. I would guess that part of your reason for drifting away from your parents might have had something to do with this. They weren’t on the same wavelength or intellectual level as you. But what about your sister, Sarah? When I met her, she seemed bright and interesting. I think you don’t see much of her for a different reason. You’re holding a grudge from childhood—against her and your parents.

The first time I spoke to Sarah, she said an interesting thing without realizing it. I asked her if she could think of anything in her and your childhood that might have turned you against her, or against Martin and Denise, and she couldn’t think of anything. She described your family life as “building-society-advert dull.” She said the most dramatic thing to happen was when she came down with what appeared to be some sort of respiratory illness, which later turned out to be an allergy: to the family dog.

I thought nothing of it at the time. It was only afterward that I put the pieces together. What would happen, I asked myself, if a child were allergic to the family pet? It’s not the kind of allergy that’s curable, and one can hardly evict the child from the family home. I also can’t imagine that many families would force a child with such an allergy to continue to live with the dog in question.

The dog would obviously have to go. Where? To be put down? Or would a new home be found for it? In either scenario, how would the other child feel, the older of the two sisters, who wasn’t allergic to dogs but who was nevertheless forced to say goodbye to her beloved pet?

I think she might blame her younger sister, while simultaneously knowing it wasn’t her fault. I think she might fabricate a life story to substitute for her real one, in which her little sister was a cold-hearted killer.

But here’s the interesting part: instead of two sisters in the fictional biography, there are three. Why?

I have a theory. You can tell me if I’m right.

After Perrine’s murder, Lisette argues in favor of doing the right thing and telling the police the truth. She is shocked when Allisande suggests that perhaps they ought to kill Perrine. Even someone as awful as Perrine doesn’t deserve to be murdered, Lisette believes. Allisande, meanwhile, would rather protect Perrine’s killer and doesn’t seem to give a toss about securing justice for her dead sister. Allisande ends up threatening Lisette’s life more than once. And—though you might not include this detail in your version of the story, Anne—Lisette also goes on to threaten Allisande’s life in return—by which I mean that you, Professor Anne Donbavand, plague me, Justine Merrison, with anonymous phone calls because you’ve decided I’m “Sandie” and we’re sisters, and we’re so at odds over the murder of Perrine that our once unbreakable bond is now in tatters. We are plotting one another’s downfall. Well, you’ll be glad to hear that I agree with that last part at least: we
are
plotting each other’s downfall, but under our own names. It seems we don’t need to be called Lisette and Allisande Ingrey in order to do battle.

I think you created Lisette and Allisande to represent two sides of you that were, and still are, at war: the one that hated your sister Sarah and wished her dead because if it weren’t for her, the dog could have stayed, and the one that knew Sarah wasn’t to blame and that she couldn’t help having an allergy.

Was that where your hatred of your family started, with the loss of the pet you adored? Your dog was part of the family, and when your parents said he had to be given away I can imagine you thinking, “They pretend that we’re a loving family, but what kind of loving family banishes its most defenseless member when he’s done nothing wrong?” Maybe you thought that if you had been the one with the allergy, you’d have endured the runny nose and weepy eyes without complaint.

Does all this sound like the wildest of guesses? Did you notice that in the paragraph above this one, I referred to your dog as “he”? I began with guesswork and deduction, but as soon as I started to suspect what I now know to be true, I contacted your sister Sarah again and asked her for more details about the dog.

So now I know he was male. I also know his name, and what happened to him after he left the Offord family home. Happily, he was not put to sleep. He went to live with another family, didn’t he? The Dodds.

His name was Malachy. He was a Sealyham terrier.

When you told Stephen, Fleur and George your elaborate fake life story, you missed out a crucial detail, didn’t you? You didn’t tell them that Malachy—the Malachy who was murdered by Perrine—was a dog. Why not? I know George doesn’t know, because if he did, Ellen would know too, and she doesn’t. She assumed Malachy was a boy, as I did for a long time.

I know that pets are forbidden in your house. Lachlan Fisher from Beaconwood told me Fleur wanted a cat and came to school crying one day because she’d been told she couldn’t have one.

You lost a pet you loved, and now you can’t bear to be around animals.

How did you feel when you attached the medallion with the threatening inscription to my dog’s collar? Was that hard to do? You couldn’t miss the opportunity, though, could you? You knew I’d panic at the thought of anything happening to my puppy because you’d experienced it as a child—wouldn’t I do anything to keep him safe, including move far away from Devon and take my daughter away from your son, leaving him wholly in your clutches?

Did it make you feel better, scaring me in the same way that you were scared as a child? Did you feel powerful at the moment when you hooked the silver tag onto the metal ring?

I’m surprised Stephen and your children haven’t yet guessed that Malachy Dodd was a dog. They must have heard the Ingrey story countless times. Frankly, I’m surprised
I
didn’t cotton on much sooner. There were so many clues, but I only realized when I was inside your house, Anne. I found myself looking at a bedroom window and noticing how low off the ground it was compared to the windows in my house. That’s when I knew there was something wrong with what I’d read about Malachy Dodd’s murder.

I remembered the day I’d stood in Ellen’s bedroom and had a sense of something nagging at the back of my mind, something I couldn’t grasp hold of—an element of a half-formed thought that jarred. It had been no more than a tiny flicker across my brain, too quick for me to pin down.

Suddenly, sitting on your bed, Anne, and looking out through the window, I knew exactly what it was that had bothered me that day in Ellen’s bedroom. Our new puppy was with us at the time—he was so little and helpless, and Ellen has a huge sash window in her room. I think my subconscious put those two things together, and in your bedroom—a different room, as I stared at a different window—it finally clicked. I knew what was wrong with the Malachy Dodd death story: it was the detail about it being impossible for Malachy to have fallen from the window accidentally because his center of gravity was too low. In other words, he was too short to fall out by mistake. But in which case, how could Perrine have been tall enough to eject him? Was there that much of a difference between their heights? The impression I had—admittedly, I might have been wrong—was of two children of roughly the same age.

A little later, after examining the story in more detail, I discovered that my suspicions were spot-on: Malachy was thirteen at the time of his murder, and Perrine was the same age. Yet she was tall enough, and with a sufficiently high center of gravity, not to
throw
Malachy or
push
him out of the very same window that he was too short to fall out of, but to
drop
him out?

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the word “drop” was used in the version of the story that reached me.

If Perrine and Malachy were both thirteen-year-old human teenagers, there would not have been such a difference in their heights that one could have dropped the other out of a window.

Let’s talk about the meaning of “drop.” It’s not synonymous with “push” or “shove” or “throw.” If Perrine had thrown Malachy out of the window, she would have had first to pick him up and then to hurl his body out. Could a thirteen-year-old girl do that to a thirteen-year-old boy? I’m not sure. Maybe. Pushing him out would have been easier: there’s no picking-up requirement first—you simply stand behind and propel forward. But if Malachy wasn’t tall enough to fall, I’m fairly sure that must mean he wasn’t tall enough to be pushed either.

“Drop” implies that you first hold something, then let it go. Think about it using an egg as a test object. You can throw an egg out of a window without first holding the egg outside the window. Now think about dropping an egg out of a window. That suggests an outstretched arm protruding from the window, with the egg still held in the closed hand, and then . . . the hand drops the egg.