The Lying Game

He loved us, but Kate was him. It was impossible to think of him sending her away.

So what could be so bad that he felt he had no choice but to part with her?

‘Are you sure?’ I asked Thea, feeling as if my whole life had been shaken like a snow globe and left to resettle. ‘Is that really what he said?’

And she only nodded, and when I pressed said, ‘Do you think I’d get something like that wrong?’

I can’t let it go on …

What happened, Ambrose? Was it something Kate did? Or … the thought twists in my stomach … was it something else? Something Ambrose was protecting Kate from? Or something he himself had done?

I don’t know. I can’t answer the questions, but my head is spinning with them as my feet eat up the distance between the Tube station and home.

Our road is coming closer, and soon I will have to push these thoughts aside and become Owen’s partner and Freya’s mother.

But the questions beat at me, things with wings and claws, battering against me so that I flinch as I walk, turning my face as if I can avoid them, but I can’t.

What did she do? What did she do, to deserve being sent away? And what might she have done to stop it?

ACCESSORY TO MURDER.

Accessory to murder.

No matter how many times the phrase repeats inside my head, I can’t seem to understand it. Accessory to murder. An offence which carries a prison sentence. In the darkness of my bedroom, the blackout blinds drawn against the evening sun, Freya in my arms, the repeated phrase washes over me in a wave of cold terror. Accessory to murder.

And then it comes to me like a chink in the darkness. The suicide note. That’s what I have to hold on to.

I am feeding Freya down to sleep, and she is almost unconscious, but when I try to take her off she grips me, monkey-like, with her strong little fingers, and begins sucking again with renewed determination, burrowing her face into my breast as if she can return to the safety of my body.

After a minute of this, I realise she is not going to let go without a struggle and I sigh, and let my weight fall back in the nursing chair, and my thoughts return to their round-and-round, their back-and-forth.

Ambrose’s note. A suicide note. How could he have written a note, if he were murdered?

I read it, though all I can remember now are short phrases and snatches and the way the writing seemed to disintegrate into straggling letters at the end. I am at peace with my decision … please know, darling Kate, that I do this with love – the last thing I can do to protect you … I love you, so please go on: live, love, be happy. And above all, don’t let this all be in vain.

Love. Protection. Sacrifice. Those were the words that had stayed with me over the years. And it made sense, in the context of what I’d always believed. If Ambrose lived, the whole scandal with the drawings would have come out – he would have been sacked, and his name, along with Kate’s, would have been dragged through the mud.

Back then, when we got that call into Miss Weatherby’s office, I had had a sense of pieces falling into place. Ambrose had seen the storm coming, and had done the only thing he could do to protect Kate – taken his own life.

But now … now I am not so sure.

I look down at the baby in my arms and I cannot imagine ever leaving her willingly. It’s not that I can’t imagine a parent killing themselves – I know that they do. Being a parent doesn’t grant you immunity from unbearable depression or stress, quite the opposite.

But Ambrose was not depressed. I am as certain of that as I can be. And more than that, he was the last person I could imagine giving a shit about his reputation. He had means. He had friends abroad, many friends. And above all he loved his children, both of them. I cannot imagine him leaving them to face music he was too frightened to face himself. The Ambrose I knew, he would have scooped his children up and taken them to Prague, to Thailand, to Kenya – and he would not have given the smallest of shits about the scandal left behind, because he would have had his art and his family with him, and they were all that mattered to him.

I always knew that, I think. It’s just that it took having a child of my own to realise it.

At last Freya is properly asleep, her mouth slack, her head lolling back, and I lower her gently to the white sheet and tiptoe out of the room, downstairs to where Owen is sitting watching something soothingly mind-numbing on Netflix.

He looks up as I come into the room.

‘Is she down?’

‘Yes, she was knackered. I don’t think she was very happy about me being out today.’

‘You’ve gotta cut those apron strings sometime …’ Owen says teasingly. He’s only trying to wind me up, I know it, but I’m tired and stressed and knocked off balance by everything that happened today, still trying to make sense of the envelope of drawings and Thea’s revelations, and I snap back, without meaning to.

‘For Christ’s sake, Owen, she’s six months.’

‘I know that,’ he says, nettled, taking a sip of the beer that’s sitting at his elbow. ‘I know her age as well as you do. She’s my kid too, you know. Or so I’m led to believe.’

‘So you’re led to believe?’ I feel the blood rising up in my cheeks, and my voice when I repeat his words is high and cracked with anger. ‘So you’re led to believe? What the fuck does that mean?’

‘Hey!’ Owen puts down his glass of beer with an audible thud. ‘Don’t swear at me! Jesus, Isa. What’s got into you lately?’

‘What’s got into me?’ I am almost speechless with fury. ‘You make a crack about Freya not being your baby and you ask what’s got into me?’

‘Freya not being – what the hell?’ His face is genuinely confused, and I can see him replaying the conversation of the last few minutes, and then realising. ‘No! Are you out of your mind? Why would I mean that? I was just trying to say that you need to chill out sometimes, I am Freya’s dad, but you wouldn’t know it by the amount of childcare I get to do. How the hell could you think I’d imply that she’s –’

He stops, lost for words, and I feel my cheeks flaming as I realise what he meant, but my anger doesn’t abate; if anything, it rises. There’s nothing like being in the wrong to make you fight back.

‘Oh well, that’s OK then,’ I spit. ‘You were just implying I’m some kind of controlling obsessive lunatic who won’t let her husband change a nappy. That changes everything. Of course I’m not cross now.’

‘Oh Jesus, will you stop putting words into my mouth?!’ Owen groans.

‘Well, it’s hard not to, when you make these cracks without ever coming out with your point.’ My voice is shaking. ‘I’m fed up with these constant little jibes about stuff – if it’s not childcare it’s bottles, and if it’s not that, it’s getting Freya out of our bedroom and into her own. It feels like I –’

‘They weren’t jibes, they were suggestions,’ Owen interrupts, his voice plaintive. ‘Yes, look, I put my hands up, it is something I’ve been starting to get frustrated about, especially now she’s six months. She’s on solids – isn’t it a bit weird breastfeeding her when she’s getting teeth?’

‘What’s that got to do with anything? She’s a baby, Owen. Give her solids! What’s stopping you?’

‘You are! Every night it’s the same thing – of course she won’t go down for me, why would she when you won’t stop breastfeeding?’

I’m shaking with anger, so furious I can’t speak for a minute.

‘Goodnight, Owen,’ I eventually manage.

‘Hang on.’ He stands up as I begin to walk out of the room. ‘Don’t come all high and mighty. I didn’t want to have this bloody argument in the first place. You were the one who dragged it all out in the open!’

I don’t answer. I begin to climb the stairs.

‘Isa,’ he calls urgently, but softly, trying not to wake Freya. ‘Isa! Why the hell are you being like this?’

But I don’t answer. I can’t answer. Because if I do, I will say something that might damage my relationship beyond recovery.