emerged already. Not only had Valerie not left a will, neither had William, and to top that, there was no evidence that William Porter was actually dead. When Peter had heard from the solicitor that no death certificate was in evidence he had been incredulous until he had discovered that there was no grave either. No funeral had taken place; no notice had been in the papers. William Porter had simply disappeared into the ether.
The only will that had ever decreed ownership of the house was that made by Stella’s birth mother. Technically William still owned the property. For Peter, it was a nightmare situation – one that was costing him eighty-five pounds an hour every time their solicitor even thought about resolving it. If just one of the bodies found had been William, it would have been far more simple. Distasteful, but simple.
Now that he thought about it, the whole thing had been a sham. In selecting him as a husband, Frances had achieved respectability and had managed to disguise herself and her family so that they couldn’t be recognised for what they were. He’d been duped, all his assumptions now proved wrong.
Stella, the single most ineffectual example of the human condition he’d ever encountered, had been someone to be pitied. Valerie, with all her apparent her pride in Frances, had been nothing but guise and guile, all designed to ensnare him and link him to a family of felons and sycophants. As for Rachel, he’d been fortunate enough to never have met her. From what he’d heard it had been a lucky escape.
He couldn’t even bear to look at Frances lying there seeming so peaceful and oblivious. She had nothing worse than a head wound whilst his whole life had been torn apart by her lies. In a fit of pique and disgust he took the flowers he had bought for her and rammed them into the waste bin. He was a decent man, a good man – honourable and upright. He hadn’t been equipped for this deceit. Without a backward glance at his wife he stalked from the ward.
***
Amy was well and truly pissed off. Sent home from her nurse-training placement early, she had caught a train home and had been desperately trying to phone her dad since. Only he wasn’t answering his phone, and now she would have to catch a bus from the station. She hated buses, especially late buses. They were full of drunks, gobshites, and people with hygiene problems. Some had passengers that combined all three traits – they were the ones who always wanted to sit next to Amy.
She had never come home to an empty house, had never been turned down when she had asked for a lift, had never opened the fridge and found it empty of food. Dad was always there, always had been, and now he wasn’t she was more annoyed with him than she wanted to admit.
It was his fault she was now standing at a freezing bus stop next to a person who obviously had failed to see the relevance of the ‘i’ in iTunes. Tinny music was leaking from his earphones and intruding into her already abrasive mood. Where the fuck was her dad?
They needed to talk. About what was in the papers. About why he was in the papers.
She had been in the office writing up patient notes before handover, when the other student, that supercilious wanker Nick Gribble, had slapped a newspaper down on the desk. Everyone had looked up as he’d said, ‘Never told us your dad was a criminal, Amy.’
Mortification hadn’t been the word for it. She’d told him to fuck off and had got a bollocking from her supervisor and sent home. The prospect of bouncing off the walls in the nurse’s home hadn’t appealed, so she’d come ‘home’ home, and no one was going to be there. What made her most angry was the fact that if something like a bank had gone out of business and money was at stake, the fucking papers wouldn’t have even thought about raking something up that had happened over thirty years ago! Money always trumped people in a news story.
There was a photograph of Charlie taking up half the page. Because a woman who’d gone missing, and who had probably killed her husband and kid, had been a witness at her dad’s trial. Didn’t put a photograph of her in there, did they? How fair was that?
Neither he nor Gran had ever talked about why he’d been in prison. She’d always known he had been, ever since her second day at school when Lee Price, a noxious kid who always had dried snot on his jumper sleeve had said, ‘My mum said your dad is a murderer. He chopped your mum into little pieces.’
She’d stared at him in disbelief, trying to equate what he had said with her big, strong lovely dad. She’d been horrified and angry and had yelled, ‘At least I’ve got a hanky! I don’t wipe bogeys on my clothes.’
She still felt stupid when she thought about it.
Gran had picked her up from school that day, and had been shocked to see a bandage on her hand. Lee Price had stabbed her with a pencil over the snot jibe. The story had come out in a tearful torrent and Gran had told her that it was true that her dad had gone to prison, but that it wasn’t true that he’d killed anyone. His first wife had been killed, but not by him. Amy had taken this on her five-year-old chin, because if Gran said it, the ‘it’ was gospel.
She had never since questioned his innocence. Even though on occasion (mostly when she was pissed off with him, like now) she had been haunted by the thought that he did seem to have a habit of marrying people who had suffered untimely deaths.
After that Gran wouldn’t discuss it, and Amy had been warned on pain of death to ask her father about it. Even so, the story ate at her. The dead first wife became the antagonist in her nightmares and she’d had no choice but to find out what had happened.
When she was thirteen, she’d gone to the library and had mastered the mysteries of the microfiche machine and had read the reports of what her father was supposed to have done. It didn’t stand up in her mind: the words ‘frenzied attack’ in the same sentence as her father’s name were so incongruent she had laughed. Still did. In her imagination she had packed the whole thing away in the same box as her mother’s death. It was all in the mental filing cabinet labelled ‘Romantic Tragedies’ along with other things that were too difficult to think about very often.
As far as Amy was concerned, the fact that bodies had been found at The Limes proved that her dad was innocent beyond doubt. Whoever had been killing people in that house, it hadn’t been him. Whoever the killer was, they had more than likely framed him. Simple.
At least that’s what she believed on good days. That’s what she would tell someone if they asked. On not so good days, when the world felt full of impending doom, she saw it differently. She was torn then. Between what she wanted to believe and what her logical mind suggested to her. The conviction that her father was incapable of being a frenzied murderer was absolute, but the suspicion that he might be capable of great passion, immense rage and deep hurt created a worm of doubt that wriggled in her brain from time to time. She knew for a fact that he’d done anger management courses over the years. Yet he’d never once lost it with her.
All she could base her darker thoughts on were the facts that her father loved her with a devotion that bordered on obsession, and he still loved her mother. If Gran didn’t stay him, he would have locked his child in the house for life just so he could keep her safe. She wouldn’t just be wrapped in cotton wool; she would be buried in it.
He never had curbed her freedom but she could tell he wanted to. Only the voice of reason stopped him taking her to a desert island where she would be safe for ever. She knew he still loved her mother because he never talked about her, and if anyone asked him his face would cloud with hurt so intensely that no one dared ask him again. That couldn’t be anything else but love, could it?
If he had loved the first wife as much, would he have killed her rather than lose her to someone else? Amy knew for a fact that he would kill anyone who threatened her
