the following days and weeks, a kind and patient lady with thick round glasses, a turquoise jumper and a gentle voice had, while Stella held her hand, coaxed from her the evidence they’d needed to put Jack Delaney away for good. She’d told how she’d heard him in the house that morning, had heard him shouting at her sister, then Ruby’s terrible cry, the thump as her body hit the floor. Of course Jack had killed Ruby; who else could it have been? There was Morris Dryden’s account too; the butcher’s son telling how he’d passed Jack in the lane after he’d dropped off his delivery. And Declan Fairbanks, their neighbour, who’d seen Jack running from the house ten minutes later, and all the other locals who’d witnessed his bullying behaviour towards his pregnant girlfriend in the months leading up to her death.
Jack Delaney was responsible. There could be no mistake.
After the trial, Stella would sit immobile at the kitchen table for hour after hour, week after week, steeped in grief. It seemed to Vivienne as though all the darkness in Jack had poured into her mother: when Viv looked into her eyes she saw the same dull fury that had once burned in his.
The letters began to arrive soon after. Folded pieces of paper deposited like petrol bombs through the letter box during the night. At first she would bring them to Stella, who would turn away without looking at them, so Vivienne would go to Ruby’s room, where the row of china pigs still stood on the dressing table, where the handsome pop stars still grinned their 100-watt smiles, and she would sit on the bed and wrap the orange and turquoise quilt around herself and begin to read.
They were all from the Delaney family, from Jack’s mother or uncle or brothers. Those from his mother were pleading, desperate. You’ve made a mistake. Please please tell the truth. He’s only 18. He never did it. You know he never did it. He’d never kill no one, please, please make them see. But the ones from his brothers and his uncles were angry, threatening; written in thick black capitals that all but tore through the page: Your daughter’s a lying little bitch. Make her tell the truth. And, You and your brat are fucking liars. Watch your back. She would read them with terror rising inside her. At night she’d lie in her bed and tremble, listening for the letter box to rattle. But Viv hadn’t lied. She had heard him that day. She had told the police she did, so it must have been true.
In a matter of months, the life Viv had always known would be gone forever, though she didn’t know then the changes that were to come. Meanwhile, neighbours and kindly villagers helped take care of her. They looked at her with misty-eyed pity, picking her up from the village primary and taking her home with their own kids; to warm, busy, noisy houses with Danger Mouse on the telly and fish fingers in the oven. Your mum just needs a bit of time, they’d say. She’ll be all right, you’ll see. Later, Viv would be taken back home, to where the temperature seemed to drop twenty degrees and the silence pressed against the walls, to where Stella hadn’t seemed to move from her position at the kitchen table in weeks.
Stella never went back to her job at the care home. The letters from the letting agency piled up on the doormat amongst brown ones with ‘Final Demand’ stamped upon them. When bailiffs pounded on their door Stella behaved as though she couldn’t hear them and Viv was too afraid to let them in herself. Similarly, she learned not to pick up the phone when, relentlessly, it rang, and neither of them noticed when the line was finally cut off.
Only one day stands out from the grinding darkness of those weeks. On an April morning five months after Ruby’s death, Vivienne came downstairs in her uniform ready for school to find a surprising sight. Her mother, up and dressed and ready to go out. ‘Put your coat on, Vivienne,’ she said without looking at her.
Viv hadn’t moved. ‘Where are we going?’
The reply had been astonishing. ‘To see your grandparents,’ Stella had said.
The journey had been a long one, taken first by train then coach to a faraway rain-drenched city and followed by another journey by bus to a small village. She could tell by the look in her mother’s eye that it wasn’t the time for questions, so she’d sat quietly next to her, holding her hand, trying not to worry. She’d never met her grandparents before and she wondered what they might be like. Her mother had only ever told her that they lived far away, and that she hadn’t seen them for a long time, and something had made Viv know not to push for more.
When they’d arrived, the house had been very large and beautiful, surrounded by rolling countryside. Vivienne, told to wait at the gate, had watched as her mother traipsed up the long drive, approached the door and knocked. A grey-haired man had answered, and Viv never knew what was spoken between them, only that minutes later the door had slammed shut, Stella had returned to where she waited and said in a voice as heavy as stones, ‘Get up, Vivienne. There’s nothing for us here.’
They’d made the return journey mostly in silence, her mother lost in thought and unreachable. It was late when they got back to their cottage and for some time they had stood staring at the front door, the moonlight revealing what was painted there in vicious foot-high letters: LIARS.
It was a few weeks after that when Vivienne’s life in Essex came to an abrupt end. Viv had returned home from school one day to find Stella packing their one and only suitcase. ‘We’re moving to London,’ she’d said as Viv watched her, wide-eyed. ‘Take that uniform off and throw it in the bin.’ Then she’d tossed her Ruby’s little green rucksack. ‘Put whatever you can fit in there, the rest we’ll leave. Let that pig of a landlord deal with it.’
They left there and then, taking a bus to the nearest station to catch a train to a new life. She had sat across from her mother, her bag of belongings on her lap, and tried to make sense of it all. Were they leaving because of Jack’s family? Or because they had no money left to pay the rent? She had sneaked a glance at her mum, and thought she understood: Ruby’s death was too sad, too terrible, to do anything else but run from.
For the first few months of their new London life they’d moved from place to place, to the spare beds or sofas belonging to ‘friends of friends’, or the sister of someone Stella used to work with. Sometimes Viv thought about the toys and bedroom she’d left behind, she thought of her friends and the people she knew in their village, but then she remembered the cold dragging misery of Ruby’s funeral, the cross bearing her and Noah’s names, the mound of earth covered in irises, her sister’s favourite flower, and she knew she never wanted to go back there again.
Stella never said how she found the commune in Nunhead and Vivienne didn’t ask, it was just another surprising turn in this constantly twisting new life of theirs. It was 1985, Nunhead a grubby pocket of south-east London tucked between New Cross and Peckham. The occasional small and dusty pub filled with small and dusty old men; clusters of council estates, Afro-Caribbean barber shops that stayed open half the night, lights and music and laughter spilling out across the pavement, narrow streets of dirty-bricked terraces, punctuated here and there by a greasy spoon, a bookies, a launderette. It was as far away from their rural Essex lives as Mexico or the moon.
Unity House had been on the border of New Cross, along a wide street lined with tall Victorian houses with steep steps to the door, from where you could look down at the barred windows of the cool dark basement area far below. Viv and her mother had arrived there one rainy Tuesday afternoon. They’d stood staring up at its yellow front door, they and their bags growing steadily damper in the drizzle.
Suddenly the door had opened and a young, pretty woman with a mass of black curls tied back with a red bandana and huge silver hoops in her ears had said, ‘Hello! You must be the new recruits. I’m Jo. Looks like you
