weeks and you’ll be an auntie.’ An auntie at eight years old! How important and grown-up and wonderful that felt. She would love this baby with all her heart; she did already.
But she never got to meet her sister’s child, never had a chance to call him by the name Ruby had so carefully chosen. Noah. Her nephew would have been called Noah. Because almost two weeks later, a few days before her due date, Ruby would be dead, and Noah with her.
Now, walking along the dark street with her own child, a passing motorbike rouses her from her thoughts. Seeing that they’ve nearly reached their gate she swallows back the shards of pain that have risen to her throat. ‘Come on,’ she says to Cleo, opening the door. ‘Go and get changed and I’ll make dinner, then we’ll watch something on Netflix, shall we?’
Alone in the kitchen, she puts the radio on and pours herself a glass of wine. She hates it when this mood descends upon her. It’s the anniversary of Ruby’s death on Monday and it always upsets her, no matter how prepared for it she is. Noah would have turned thirty-two this year, and as she has done every single year since it happened, she imagines the person he might have become – from toddler, to schoolboy, to teenager and young man – a sadness gathering inside her that’s hard to shake off. ‘Come on, Viv, get a grip,’ she tells herself and, tuning the radio to a music station, she turns the volume up, then starts to put together the ingredients for spaghetti bolognese.
There’s so much of that day that she doesn’t remember. She knows that she was the only other person in the house when Ruby was killed. That it was she who found her sister’s body, hugely pregnant, splayed out across her bedroom floor. She knows that it was her evidence that helped put Ruby’s murderer away. But though Viv knows what she said she saw, she cannot link those words to any clear, concrete images, as though the details are locked inside a box she has no access to. She’s been told that this is common; the mind’s way of protecting her from the trauma of that day, but still those buried memories won’t let her be, tapping and scratching at the box’s lid, as though willing her to relent and let them back out.
Even the time before the murder is hazy, her life in that little white cottage only returning to her in flashes. They were very poor, she remembers that. Viv and Ruby, eight years between them, each had different fathers; men who were bad and made their mother sad and who they learned never to ask about because they were gone and that was all. The house was down a narrow lane with four other cottages. She sees the patio tiles outside it, dandelions poking through the cracks, an old, abandoned swing set on the patchy lawn, the fields stretching out beyond. Inside, the rooms were sparsely furnished, the panes loose in the casement windows, the wind whistling through the gaps. In her bedroom under the eaves a pattern of pink and red roses crept across the walls. Her sister’s identical one was across a narrow corridor, a quilt on the bed of orange and turquoise and green.
And what does she remember of Ruby, before it happened? She knows that she loved her sister more than anyone or anything, that Ruby would take Viv into her bed to comfort her at night when she was sad or frightened. She remembers Ruby’s collection of china pigs lined up on her dressing table, the posters of handsome pop stars on her walls, the sweet floral perfume she used to wear, how she’d throw her head back and laugh wholeheartedly, her green eyes dancing. All those things he took from her; all her spirit and love and smell and warmth and kindness, Jack Delaney took them all.
Everything changed when Jack came into their lives. Overnight, Ruby seemed to become someone else; someone else’s. From the moment she met him her sister glowed, her eyes dreamy and lit with something Viv couldn’t guess at, her thoughts seemingly always filled with him. Ruby would wait for Jack at the window, ignoring Viv, staring eagerly down the lane for his car to appear, or else sit next to the phone, willing it to ring. Ruby told her that they’d met at the pub where she worked on Saturdays collecting and washing glasses. Jack had been sitting at the bar with the three other Delaney brothers, and Viv would picture him with his cigarette and his black hair and his thin-lipped smile and his stupid car parked outside, and feel a hard knot of dislike grow ever tighter in her belly.
Until then Vivienne’s experience of men had been confined to the ghostly, forbidden spectres of her and Ruby’s unmentionable fathers, her teacher Mr Kendal, or the kindly dads of her friends, or even Morris Dryden, the butcher’s grown-up son whom everyone said was soft in the head but whom Viv liked best of all. But Jack was different. Even at eighteen he oozed a complicated, threatening thing that was linked somehow to that new light in Ruby’s eyes, and the time Viv caught them kissing, Jack’s hands up her jumper as though rummaging for change. Slowly, however, Ruby began to alter, her usual glow and happiness seeming to ebb away until bit by bit it had disappeared completely.
Their mother hated Jack, she remembers that too; how she’d hear her and Ruby argue, Stella saying he was a thief and a troublemaker and that everyone in the village knew what he was like, what he and his brothers got up to, fighting and stealing and causing trouble. And Viv would think that her mother didn’t know the half of it, that when she went out to work Jack’s oily smile and fake politeness vanished and the real him would appear, like worms slithering from under rocks. She would see how he would change, a black mood creeping over him like the sun had gone in, how Ruby’s voice would turn pleading and tearful at his meanness and his temper. He was always cross with her about something: about how she’d looked at one of his friends or spoken in a way he didn’t like. And yet Ruby loved him, wanted to make him happy, her voice appeasing, cajoling, desperate to the end.
When Ruby got pregnant their mum said Jack Delaney was never to set foot in her house again, but as soon as Stella went off to the care home she worked at, there he’d be, Vivienne sworn to secrecy. He seemed to get worse, the bigger Ruby’s belly got. Viv would sit in the living room in front of the black-and-white TV and listen to their arguing; his rough, bullying voice, her sister’s tearful apologies, and her little hands would ball into fists, willing it to stop.
And what does she remember of that day, the day of Ruby’s murder? She remembers her sister waiting for Jack upstairs at her bedroom window as usual, running down to answer his knock and calling, ‘Don’t tell Mum, Vivi, OK? Don’t tell Mum that Jack was here.’ How she’d heard the disappointment in Ruby’s voice when she discovered it was only sweet, daft Morris Dryden, come to drop off some chops for their mum. A few minutes later, after Morris had left, she heard the second knock at the door, Jack’s voice this time, Ruby’s high, anxious one after she’d returned downstairs to let him in.
Viv had stayed in the living room, keeping out of his way, but still she heard when they’d begun to argue, heard Ruby’s desperate tears, Jack’s relentless, mocking cruelty. That day there’d been something different about their fight though, something terrible and out of control that made Viv’s heart hammer, made her chew her lip until it nearly bled. And then a scream, a heavy thud, followed by the worst, deepest silence she’d ever known. She’d waited, scarcely breathing, until she heard his tread on the stairs then the front door swinging shut behind him and as soon as she’d dared, she’d crept from the room and tiptoed up to Ruby’s. She’d known she was dead, felt it deep inside of herself, a scream of horror trapped in her throat as she stood at the door, gazing down at her sister’s lifeless body, her poor, bleeding head where she’d hit it as she fell, her green, sightless eyes.
It was the police who found Vivienne eventually; navy blue arms plucking her from the safe darkness of Stella’s wardrobe where she’d gone to hide, clothes brushing against her cheek as she was pulled into the cold brightness where the rooms were full of police and the air full of her mother’s sobs at what she’d found when she’d returned home from work.
Later, Vivienne would be told that she’d said nothing when they found her, that she’d
