Kind of Cruel (33 page)

‘You’re important to Terry Bond? Why?’

‘I knew he wasn’t a murderer. I convinced the police, in the end. Or, if you’d prefer Jo’s version, I didn’t know anything and was kidding myself: Terry might well have killed Sharon, and, since I can’t claim to know that he didn’t, I betrayed my best friend’s memory by going to the opening of his restaurant.’

‘So if I speak to Bond, he’ll be able to alibi you?’ Simon says.

‘Yes. If you’re willing to take the word of a former murder suspect.’

‘Did you try to unbook the course, book yourself in for another date?’

‘I’d already done that as many times as they let you.’

‘So . . . what you told us about the man on the course called Ed, about his daughter dying in a road accident – Jo told you that?’

I nod.

‘Did she mention that she sounded off about drivers’ rights and freedom?’

‘Jo?’ I laugh. ‘If someone on the course said that, it can’t have been her. She’s a big fan of punishment for minor misdemeanours.’
Of course she is
. Punishment is how self-proclaimed good people get to hurt others and still look good.

Simon studies his notes. ‘The woman calling herself Amber said it. There was only one on the course.’ He looks at me to check I’ve understood. ‘Cars are lethal machines, she said – if we want them in our lives, we have to accept some road deaths. What we shouldn’t accept is that we must all drive unnaturally slowly and think about death all the time, forced to worry about speed cameras, fines; made to go on pointless courses. She didn’t tell you any of this?’

‘No. Those aren’t Jo’s opinions. They’re the opposite.’

‘Maybe she was impersonating you not only in name,’ Simon suggests. ‘Could she have thought those might be your views?’

A shiver makes my skin prickle. Then I think again.
Just because it scares me doesn’t mean it’s true
. ‘Yes, but . . . she wouldn’t want to air those views. Jo wants her opinions to be heard and no one else’s.’

‘You’re on record as saying that someone from the residents’ association murdered Sharon,’ Simon changes the subject. ‘Is that what you really think?’

‘I never said that. I said they
could
have, and I pointed out that, since Sharon had switched her allegiance from them to Terry over the issue of the pub’s extended licence, they were the ones with the motive, not him. It was fucking outrageous the way they queued up to accuse him.’

But you never really believed one of them was a killer, did you?

‘Amber? Are you all right?’

‘Fine,’ I lie. ‘Tired, that’s all.’

‘Who do you think murdered Sharon?’

Nobody. Nobody.

I will not allow a name to come into my mind. I manage a shrug.

‘Do you think it’s the same person that torched your house last night?’

Is he serious? How am I supposed to know that?

You know.

‘Try not to worry,’ Simon says, having done his best to worry me. ‘There’ll be a police presence here for the foreseeable future, as well as at Dinah and Nonie’s school. All their teachers are aware of the situation.’

I manage to restrain myself from saying that I’ve seen the police presence outside Hilary’s house, such as it is, and I’m not impressed: so far, it’s been one young uniformed bobby with a shaving rash and a too-loud car radio.

‘Just a couple more questions about Dinah and Nonie Lendrim,’ Simon says, as if they’re nothing to do with me, just two random girls who don’t even share my surname. If the adoption goes through, Dinah and Nonie will still be Lendrim. Luke joked about adding both of our surnames to theirs. ‘Triple-barrelling them’, he called it. Dinah and Nonie Hewerdine-Utting-Lendrim. He asked me if I thought the double-barrellers at school would feel threatened. We laughed about it.

‘Do you know who their father is, or fathers?’ Simon asks.

‘No. Neither did Sharon. She had artificial insemination, both times.’

He looks as if he’s not quite sure what that means.

‘She bought donor sperm from some private place. That’s all I know. She made me swear not to tell anyone.’
I’ve no way of knowing she’d have wanted me to make an exception for you, but that’s what I’m telling myself
.

‘And Marianne, Sharon’s mother – she’s against the adoption, even though she doesn’t want the girls herself and doesn’t mind you and Luke being their legal guardians?’

I nod. ‘It’s only the adoption she wants to block.’

‘Why?’

Because she’s a vile witch
. I try to formulate a more open-minded, informative answer. ‘She doesn’t see the need. Dinah and Nonie live with us already, we’re their guardians . . . Marianne thinks that for us to become their parents would be denying Sharon’s existence, pretending she was never their mother. It’s rubbish!’ I snap. ‘Sharon will always be their mother. Luke and I would be their adoptive parents. It’s different. It’s not an either-or.’

‘But . . . you said before, things’d be pretty much as they are now, in practical terms. Why does it matter so much to you and Luke to adopt them?’

‘Are you asking if we’re infertile? We’re not.’

‘No.’ He looks surprised. ‘That wasn’t what I meant.’

I mumble an apology. Are most people embarrassed by their own idiocy as regularly as I am?

‘It matters to us because it matters to Dinah and Nonie,’ I tell him. ‘They want a mum and dad.’ Does he understand? Even if he does, his understanding is worthless if he can also see Marianne’s point of view: that there’s no need.
If there’s no need, if nothing would change, why go through a legal battle that will serve no purpose other than to waste time and money, upset the girls, upset a poor elderly lady who has already lost her only daughter?
I take a deep breath, remind myself that Simon hasn’t said any of this, nor do I have any reason to believe it’s what he thinks.

I speak to him as if I’m addressing a press conference. People who issue statements to the press don’t always tell the truth. They take what they wish was true and present it as fact. ‘Dinah and Nonie want parents, and they’re going to get them,’ I say, as if no other outcome is possible.

I’m starting to get an inkling of why Amber might find it so hard to let go of the Little Orchard mystery. Because she is clever and, whether she’s aware of it or not, highly intuitive, she alone in the extended family senses that there is something badly off-kilter about Jo. Neil, Hilary and Sabina probably think of Jo as sensitive – a little bossy and controlling, maybe – but only Amber perceives it as anything more sinister or dangerous than that. Yet Amber sees Jo regularly, and so from a factual point of view she knows that everything in Jo’s life is above board. The only unknown is the unsolved puzzle: where did Jo go when she disappeared that Christmas? Why did she disappear? Why did she reappear?

The mystery behind the mystery; Amber is hoping that the answer to the more localised question might bring with it the answer to the one that constantly evades clear definition, and so can never be asked.

It doesn’t have to work like that. We can do it the other way round. Let me prove it. Thanks to Amber’s rather incredible powers of verbal historical re-enactment, I am now confident that I can solve the more elusive puzzle decisively, although I still have no idea where Jo, Neil and the boys disappeared to, or why.

Everything I’ve heard about Jo tells me that she’s suffering from narcissistic personality disorder. She’s a classic psychologically abusive narcissist. She fears aloneness so much that she stuffs her house full of as many people as possible; she’s cruel and critical, doesn’t allow others their points of view; she’s self-contradictory. Amber, everything you’ve said about Jo being vicious one minute, then requiring you to participate in her pretence that her outburst never happened – that’s textbook narcissistic personality disorder. You yourself told me that Sharon diagnosed it, though she probably only intended to make a joke when she referred to you as a source of narcissistic supply to Jo. Sharon knew all about dangerous narcissists from her experience with her own mother, of course. Narcissists unleash their venom on you when they’re feeling bad, in the way that you or I might burp loudly if we had wind. Once the trapped air is released, we feel better: normal again. A narcissist feels no guilt and has no awareness that his or her unpleasant eruptions might adversely affect others.

Simon, you’re looking uncomfortable. How can I diagnose a woman I’ve never met? Unfortunately, with narcissists, remote diagnosis is almost always the best you can do. Most of them hate and fear the idea of psychotherapy. They denigrate and ridicule it to anyone who will listen. They accuse therapists of being sick and depraved, filling their patients’ heads with lies. Narcissists cause few psychological problems to themselves, being happy to deny the truth about their disorder forever and assume the world is to blame for everything that goes wrong for them. It’s the husbands, wives, children and colleagues of narcissists that seek therapy in their thousands – literally – because of the suffering inflicted on them by the narcissists in their lives.

And before Amber points out that Jo is devoted to her children . . . Narcissists are, as long as those children reflect well on them and treat them as the font of all wisdom. As soon as the adorable accessories start to want to be a bit independent, or develop ideas of their own that aren’t necessarily in accordance with the narcissist’s views, God help them.

Let’s bring this back to Christmas Eve at Little Orchard. Jo doesn’t socialise with friends, and seems to have no interest in making any. Her preferred company is family: her family of origin, the family she’s made with Neil, and in-laws like Amber and Luke. Chances are her family of origin is where she suffered whatever trauma caused her to become a narcissist, but because narcissism is all about repressing real pain and believing instead in a false, idealised version of one’s self, life and history, Jo will have idealised her childhood, her mother, her siblings – perhaps to the point of worship, of believing they’re perfect.

People who overvalue family – and someone with no friends has to fall into that category – almost always esteem the family they were born into more highly than the family they were instrumental in making. Easy to see why: their birth family was where the importance of family above all else was instilled in them, the notion of ‘Everything you could possibly need and want is here within these walls, so there’s no need to venture out.’ The birth family, or whoever’s in control of it, would be foolish to brainwash its children into believing that once they grow up and marry and have children of their own, that ‘chosen’ family will trump the pre-existing one. The opposite happens: to preserve its own strength and influence, the birth family instils in its children the belief that, while the chosen family is of course important because family is paramount, it’s never going to be quite as important as the family of origin.

You must both have met women who ignore their husband’s opinion but bow down to their father’s? Men who force their young children to deny their own needs if those needs are inconvenient to Granny or Grandpa? Jo is a classic example, possibly the daughter of a narcissist herself. Does Hilary mind being needed by Kirsty for every tiny thing, or does she rely on that need to boost her own ego and make her feel important? Narcissists tend both to come from and to create families that overvalue family. They have to. Who would want to be friends with a person who behaves so appallingly and so erratically? Family members are easier to brainwash and find it harder to escape.

Amber, on the other hand, is only Jo’s sister-in-law. She could easily escape. She could say to Luke this evening, ‘Jo’s a bitch. I don’t want to see her any more.’ Why doesn’t she?

The mystery behind the mystery.

Neil, Jo’s husband, has no idea why he was woken in the middle of the night on Christmas Eve 2003 and forced to leave the house in secret. He doesn’t need to be told, does he? He’s family, yes, but not blood. He’s not a member of Jo’s first family, the family that stayed in the lounge after everyone else went to bed to discuss something secret and important.

If anyone knows what made Jo decide that she, Neil and the boys needed to vanish that night, it’s going to be Hilary, Jo’s mum, or Ritchie, her brother. And whether they know or not, I’d put money on the vanishing act having been somehow caused by or linked to that private conversation in the lounge.

Are you all right, Simon? Do you want a glass of water?

8

2/12/2010

‘Do you appreciate your parents?’ Marianne Lendrim asked, as if she were the one conducting the interview. When she’d agreed to come in so willingly, Gibbs had assumed that willingness would extend to answering his questions. He’d been wrong. So far she’d done all the asking. His insistence that he wasn’t able to tell her anything because the investigation was confidential didn’t seem to put her off at all. This, about his parents, was the first thing she’d asked that he was able to answer.

‘I get on all right with them,’ he told her.

‘Getting on with them is easy. Do you appreciate everything they’ve done for you?’

‘Probably not as much as I should.’ It was nothing personal. According to Olivia, Gibbs was insufficiently appreciative of most things. ‘It’s not your fault,’ she’d told him. ‘I blame your parents, even though I’ve never met them. The children of enthusiasts grow up to be enthusiasts. Did your parents ever point out beautiful things to you when you were little? Did they talk about beauty and joy, did they know how to have
fun
? A lot of people don’t.’