Kind of Cruel (21 page)

‘We didn’t exchange names or personal details,’ Ormston said. ‘There was very little chat of any kind, even during the breaks. People kept their heads down, communicated with the outside world via their mobile phones. None of us really wanted to be there. We were all mildly embarrassed and wanted to get it over with and get out of there as quickly as we could.’

‘Amber remembered you. She called you “Ed”.’

‘Ah. I think I can explain that. Perhaps I can help you a little after all.’ He smiled. ‘You see, the facilitator asked me my name, in front of the group. I’m Ed to anybody that knows me – never Edward – so that was what I said. Everyone in the room heard me say it. I’d have preferred it if he hadn’t drawn attention to me by asking for my name and no one else’s, but I didn’t hold it against him. I understood why he’d done it. It was his rather clumsy way of trying to relate to me as a human being, once his relating to me as a course participant had landed him in what he felt was an awkward situation. And to be fair, I’d already drawn attention to myself.’

‘You’d told the group about your daughter dying,’ Simon said.

Ormston’s eyebrows shot up. ‘You know about that?’

‘Amber mentioned it.’

‘Bless her,’ said Ormston.

Simon wondered if he was religious. Then he wondered why he’d never heard his own devoutly Catholic parents bless anybody. He had always assumed they excelled at being godly, though they were incompetent in every other area of life; perhaps he’d been wrong and they were rubbish even at being religious. That, Simon realised, would leave them with no redeeming features. It was a depressing thought.

‘Is that your daughter?’ He gestured towards the framed picture on the wall.

‘Yes. Louise. Isn’t she beautiful?’

‘It must be unbearable to lose a child.’

‘Nothing is unbearable,’ said Ormston, staring at the photograph. ‘That I can promise you. We bear everything. What choice do we have?’

‘This has nothing to do with my case, but . . . why did you tell them? On the course, about Louise’s death. You could have kept quiet. No one would have known.’

Ormston nodded. ‘I considered it. I thought that very thing to myself: there’s no need to tell them. Then I thought, why shouldn’t I tell them? It was the true answer to a question I’d been asked. I wouldn’t have volunteered it, had we not been asked specifically if any of us had personal experience of a traffic accident, but I didn’t see why I should go to the trouble of concealing it, either.’

Simon understood completely; it was how he’d felt when Charlie had told him about meeting Amber Hewerdine outside Ginny Saxon’s clinic and begged him to waste time making up unnecessary lies. ‘Telling the truth might not be the best thing for the people having to hear it,’ he said, ‘but it’s usually the best thing for the teller.’

‘Couldn’t agree more,’ said Ormston. ‘And do you want to know something that hardly anyone knows?’

Simon imagined what he would say next, in an ideal world:
Do you want to know who murdered Kat Allen? What the words ‘Kind, Cruel, Kind of Cruel’ mean?

‘When you do what’s best for you, you always end up astonished to discover that it’s best for everyone else too. Not many people realise that; I didn’t for a long time. We all imagine that if we’re upfront about what we want and need, we’ll meet with resistance and end up having to fight our corner, maybe a fight we can’t win. In fact, it’s forcing ourselves to do what we imagine will be best for others that leads to trouble and conflict.’

Simon wasn’t convinced, but he didn’t feel able to disagree, when Ormston had so recently agreed with him. All he knew was that his mind felt lighter since he’d decided that being straightforward and direct was best for him – better, even, than having a job, or else he wouldn’t have risked it.

‘Hold on a second,’ said Ormston, narrowing his eyes to a squint. ‘Amber. Do you know, I think there was an Amber. Yes.’ He nodded. ‘The facilitator asked how many of us were amber gamblers at traffic lights. I’m fairly sure one woman said something about her name being Amber. I think she was the one who gave the big speech. She had a cut-glass voice, I seem to remember, like a royal. And . . . an unusual turn of phrase. There was a general exchange of raised eyebrows when she started to speak.’

Simon frowned. Amber Hewerdine’s accent was pure Culver Valley. ‘What speech?’ he asked.

‘About road deaths being unavoidable in the modern world, and if we really wanted people not to die on our roads we should scrap cars altogether. I’m paraphrasing – she put it more colourfully and eccentrically than that. Since no one wanted to abolish cars, she said, we should all stop complaining.’ Ormston chuckled. ‘Everyone seemed terribly worried I’d be upset, but I wasn’t. There was something satisfyingly death-defying about her point of view. She was against speed cameras and driver awareness courses, against speed bumps, against twenty-mile-an-hour zones. No one should base their driver behaviour on fear and worst-case-scenario thinking, she said. Whenever you get into a car, you might die, so you might as well accept it and drive happily, as fast as you like, free of fear and guilt. I think that was her philosophy.’

Ormston glanced out of the window. In the garden, his wife had calmed down, even if the two dogs hadn’t; she was throwing sticks for them to fetch and return to her. ‘I can’t say I agreed with her that more deaths was a price worth paying for more freedom, but I admired her nerve,’ he said.

‘Could this woman have absented herself from the course at any point during the day?’ Simon asked.

Ormston shook his head. ‘We were all there for the duration. Even the lunch break, we all stayed in the room, apart from people nipping to the loo.’

‘Is this her – Amber, the woman who made the speech?’ Simon passed Ormston another photograph. This one came from the
Rawndesley Evening News
. Amber stood between two city councillors, smiling. The caption read, ‘Council Officials Welcome Introduction of Cumulative Impact Zone in East Rawndesley’.

‘You remember so much of what she said. Are you sure you don’t remember her face?’

‘No, I don’t,’ said Ormston. ‘I’m sorry, but you wouldn’t want me to pretend, would you? I don’t recognise that face at all.’

So. The answer is ‘the key’, and the answer is the key. I’m not repeating myself. I’m saying that the answer ‘the key’ is the key. We can view each new answer as a key to a locked door barring our way. Sometimes we open one locked door and find ourselves standing in front of another, which means that we need to hunt for the next key. Often we find ourselves coming up against door after door after door. When that happens, as I suspect it will here, it’s both a bad sign and a good sign: our journey is likely to be considerably more frustrating, but, if we can get past the obstacles that block our path, the prize could be substantial. It stands to reason: the more precious the object, the greater the protection.

Why did Amber ransack Little Orchard from top to bottom? Because she was looking for the key to the locked room, as she’s just told us. She
thinks
she also told us why she was looking for the key, what happened when she found it, and what that proves. In case that one sketchy story didn’t offer enough proof of her conclusion to satisfy us, and knowing, on one level, that her determination to utter as few words as possible is as unhelpful to her as it is to us, she backed it up with several subsidiary stories, all equally sketchy and pared down to essentials – all, as she sees it, providing further proof.

Of what, though? That Jo is a bad person? Amber suspects that the sum total of her stories doesn’t even come close to disproving Jo’s essential goodness, of which Amber reminded me more than once this morning, in the interests of fairness: Jo is a devoted mother to her two boys, a loving wife to her husband Neil, a wonderful daughter and sister. Her mother Hilary and her entirely dependent sister Kirsty spend nearly every day at her house. She cooks most of their meals, even gives them food parcels to take home, knowing it’s the only way they’ll eat properly. Hilary, a single mother, ground down from years of looking after a severely handicapped child twenty-four hours a day, would not be able to cope if Jo didn’t feed her and boost her morale constantly. Jo’s brother Ritchie has never had a job. He is what some would call a layabout, but Jo doesn’t judge him, and regularly reminds Hilary of all the reasons to think well of him: he’s clever, creative, kind, loyal, and one day he will find his passion and realise what he wants to do with his life, as long as those close to him continue to believe in him. Jo gives Ritchie money whenever he needs it, and Neil doesn’t protest about this. Presumably, as one of the chief beneficiaries of her family-conquers-all policy, he knows better than to question it.

Jo is as devoted a daughter-in-law as she is a daughter. When Neil’s mother Pam died of liver cancer, Jo saw straight away that her father-in-law, Quentin, would not be able to manage on his own, and moved him into her home. Sabina, nanny to William and Barney, is part of the family too. She is also in Jo’s house all the time, being fed, being looked after. She makes no distinction between her working day and the rest of her life, and leaves Jo’s side only to go home and sleep, by the sound of it.

Is Amber part of this big, warm, Jo-centred family? She ought to be. She’s married to Neil’s brother, Luke. Yet she speaks as a non-beneficiary, as an outsider. Why? Because of the stories she’s told us, that prove . . . what?

Let me talk us through them, adding a few observations of my own and filling in the missing details using intelligent guesswork, based on things Amber has said in this session and also this morning when we were alone together. If you’re going to tell a story, you might as well tell it properly, bring it to life. That’s what I’m going to try to do, and I’m willing to bet I’ll end up with as much truth in my stories as I would if I were describing events about which I believed I had objective knowledge. Amber, forget these are your stories and just listen. Remember, a story is not a memory; a memory is not a story. Each story contains memories, but the interpretations and analyses we impose on events come later. Those can’t be called memories.

Boxing Day 2003. Jo, Neil and their two sons have returned unharmed. Jo has gathered everyone together, announced that everything is fine, but refused to explain why she and her husband and children disappeared from the family gathering and, in doing so, turned Christmas, a day that should have been happy and celebratory, into a traumatic ordeal for all those close to them. Everyone, on the face of it at least, accepts the lack of explanation, and goes along with Jo’s idea that Boxing Day should become the Christmas Day that never was. So, first there is the present-opening and the chaos of torn wrapping paper everywhere, and then there’s a festive turkey dinner for eleven people to be cooked – by Jo alone. Amber now believes that her sister-in-law had a brilliant, devious idea while she was putting together that lavish meal, insisting she needed no help from anyone and could work far more efficiently if she had Little Orchard’s substantial kitchen entirely to herself: look as if you’re slaving away for the common good, and no one will suspect you of burying yourself under a mountain of hard slog in order to avoid potentially problematic conversations. Amber is convinced that this has been Jo’s policy ever since.

While Jo is busy assembling the perfect Christmas feast, what is everyone else doing? Neil is upstairs having what everyone is calling ‘a nap’, though he’s been asleep for so long, it seems to Amber that what he’s actually doing is trying to cram a whole night into the daytime, which probably means he didn’t get any sleep the previous two nights. Luke is sitting in a corner with a notepad and pen, making some last-minute alterations to his Christmas Day quiz. His father, Quentin, is boring Ritchie with one of his interminable, labyrinthine stories – this time focusing on a septic tank, and several unsuccessful attempts to install it – from which Ritchie has no idea how to escape. Sabina is trying everything she can to stop Barney crying, walking him around, joggling him up and down, lying him flat on his back.

Hilary hovers nearby, giving unwanted advice. She tells Sabina that Jo ought to see sense and forget about breast-feeding. Barney has only just been fed, and he’s hungry again; that must be why he’s crying. Breast-fed babies are hungry and dissatisfied, Hilary says. They scream all the time and never sleep – ask any midwife, any health visitor. Never mind what they’re supposed to say, the official line; ask them what they really think, off the record. Sabina says it’s Jo’s decision and that Hilary is arguing with the wrong person. As it happens, Sabina agrees with Hilary. She has looked after dozens of babies, and there’s no doubt in her mind that the bottle-fed ones are more contented, better sleepers. Their mothers are happier and more relaxed because they can delegate the job of feeding to others when they need a break. Sabina has said all this to Jo, she tells Hilary, but Jo wants her son to have the best possible start in life, food-wise, and health professionals are unanimous about what that is, so Sabina is putting her own views to one side and supporting Jo’s decision. What else can she do?

Hilary isn’t satisfied. From her bag, she produces a baby’s bottle in a sealed plastic bag and a carton of formula milk. Jo isn’t here now, she says – she’s busy cooking. Let me give Barney this, she says. I’ve done it before. Jo knew nothing about it, and it made such a difference. He was like a different baby that day, hardly cried at all. Pam puts her foot down. Nothing must be done to Barney without Jo’s consent. Whatever we might think, she says, it’s Jo’s decision. She makes no mention of Neil, her son and Barney’s father. His views on how his son ought to be fed are irrelevant.