And what does it say about my dad that his best friend thought him capable of murder?
Not much.
In the end I woke Bob up and started talking.
“I found Violet in a cab office. I didn’t know she had anything to do with Dad when I found her,” I said. “I just wanted to put her somewhere better. It wasn’t a good place for her to be. And then everyone seemed to know who she was – you did and Norman did and Jed did and the dentist did. And she kept popping up everywhere and it was like she was trying to get my attention, trying to tell me something and I didn’t know what it was. And then I found a tape with her name on it so I kept it. It didn’t make it as far as the dump.”
Bob looked up at me then.
“It’s got Violet and Dad on it, talking,” I said. “She asked him, Bob. At the end of the tape she says I am asking you to help me die.”
He put his face in his hands and wept when I said that.
But I didn’t know what to do with it at all.
I didn’t know what to think or how to feel. Was everything better or was everything worse?
If I’d been a proper old-fashioned detective, or if I still had my Usborne How To Be A Private Eye kit, I would have dusted Violet’s urn for fingerprints. There were eight sets of prints on there because eight people handled her after she was dead.
Me,
Martha,
Pansy (probably moved it for dusting),
Norman (maybe working out if it was Pansy),
Mr Soprano from the cab office,
Jawad Saddaoui, the structural engineer from Morocco whose cab Violet got left in,
Mr Francis Macauley at the crematorium in Golders Green,
Pete Swain, missing journalist, angel of mercy and my dad.
At least he had the decency to organise her funeral. If you could call it organise, because him and Bob were the only people there.
Bob said they followed the body to Golders Green and then afterwards they got trashed in a pub around the corner.
My dad picked up her ashes the day after he fought with Bob. It’s on record at the crematorium that they were collected. I checked.
So it was my dad that left her ashes in the back of a cab and vanished, abandoning her as well as his wife, his parents, his daughter and two sons (one unborn) and his best friend.
I’ve decided you can look at it in two ways.
1 Violet asked my dad to help her die and broke his heart. He said no but she persuaded him that it was what she wanted and without him she would have to do it alone. He helped her because he cared about her and the strain of it pushed him to breaking point. Then his best friend accused him of murder and he realised nobody would believe him and he could end up in jail for helping her. So he cracked and had to get out, away from everything, away from us. You read about people doing it for less.In other words, he was a good person who did something brave and selfless and couldn’t handle the consequences.
2 Helping Violet die was his ticket out of here – help an old lady, get a new life. My dad didn’t do it for Violet, he didn’t give a damn about her really. He did it for what she promised him in return (enough money to get a new identity) and his conscience didn’t bat an eyelid.This makes him a self-serving, cold-hearted borderline sociopath.
I can’t decide between them or any of the grey areas in between and in the end I suppose it doesn’t matter either way.
He did what he did. She got what she wanted. He left.
Those are the things that count.
Violet was waiting when I got home from Bob’s. It was maybe four in the morning and I let myself in and didn’t make too much noise on the stairs and even my breathing sounded too loud and I locked my bedroom door behind me and got her out from under the bed. Her urn was so beautiful. The grain in the wood was intricate and clear, the polish was smooth and flawless in my hands. Did my dad think the same thing when he chose it? Or did he pick the cheapest thing in the brochure and never noticed how it shone?
I sat with her on the floor while the birds woke up and the sky turned a watery grey and people got in their cars and tried to start them.
Violet had spent five years in that urn for a reason. I’d started off wondering why she picked me to help her, what she wanted. I’d thought about her funeral, her will, about finding her the right resting place. I’d thought she wanted to me to solve something for her. I didn’t know she was doing something for me. I hadn’t expected for a minute that she was going to lead me to my dad.
I was sorry that she’d decided to have enough of living.
I hugged her in her exquisite, cold, wooden container and I wished that I’d been able to know her when she was still alive.
We flung her ashes in the Thames. I remembered what she said on the tape, that when she was homesick she imagined the water flowing all the way back home, and I thought she could go home that way if she wanted, or really anywhere if she didn’t. The wind threw most of her back in our faces, me and Martha and Bob. We got a cab to Westminster Bridge, behind a car full of builders. All their hard hats were on the back shelf and they looked like eggs nestled there, jostling together over the speed bumps.
On the way home I felt sad and tired and empty, like she’d only just died. The urn was so different without her in it.
I hope she ended up where she wanted. I hope she found what she came back for.
I hope I was some help, walking into that cab office out of my mind.
And I suppose that’s why I had to tell somebody, why I had to write things down.
I wanted to add to what she’d left behind – a handful of movies, a portrait, a contact sheet and a tape.
Violet changed my life and I wanted to stop hers from turning to nothing.
Bob said something to me the other day.
He said that if Dad did it for the money, I could take comfort in the fact that she didn’t leave him everything after all.
I said, “What do you mean?” or “How do you know?” or something, and I was thinking about the portrait she left
