‘I read books too,’ she said in response to Why do you think he did it? because she couldn’t answer that. When they asked about how he treated her, she told them about the mouse in the cage and how some of her teeth had fallen out. Did you ever go hungry? Did he hurt you? Did he force himself on you sexually? Did anyone see you when you went out on trips? Why didn’t you scream for help?
‘Goose is dead now,’ she said, staring at the feet of people she didn’t recognise. But they didn’t know what that meant, that she was sad because of it.
‘Why now, Eleanor? Why didn’t you overcome him before?’
They didn’t understand. Didn’t understand how she could never, and would never, hurt him. She couldn’t tell them why – that she loved him with all her heart. Then that voice in her head again, ringing noises inside her skull just as the hammer must have rung loud in his: Fucking kill him! Do it!
But she hadn’t.
Had she?
Those moments of her life, those few seconds, wrapped up in the years (she thought it must have been many, many, many years by now) blurred into what seemed an even longer stretch of time. Her eyes had refused to see the blood; her ears were deaf to the crack of bone and core-deep moans coming from him. Even her skin was numb to the fresh wind tunnelling down to greet her, to tempt her out. Blowing her hair.
And then there was that girl. That beautiful, strange girl. Setting the butterfly free.
Doing what she’d never been able to do all those years.
Where had she come from?
Eleanor stared up at the ceiling to make the tears go back in, then she looked around the hospital room, blinking. She pined for the jaundiced glow of the flickering bulb above her mattress, the tiny fridge that hummed her to sleep, the steady drip of the wobbly tap and the comforting clank of the locks when he came to visit, making her tummy go tight with anticipation. She couldn’t bring herself to look out of the hospital window yet, because she knew it was filled with the whole world. And that was way too big for someone like her.
Chapter Seventy-Five
It was Jason who identified Patrick’s body. A brief, clinical and impersonal procedure, there were several medical staff flanking him as he gagged at the sight of his father’s smashed-up skull. He’d been bludgeoned to death by a hammer. ‘That’s him,’ he said, nodding and cupping his hand over his mouth. He turned and left, rushing to the toilets.
Later, he crossed the street to buy cigarettes – his first in years – darting onto the pavement as a car hooted. How the fuck had the bastard got away with it for so long? Outside the shop, he lit up and inhaled deeply, needing to get rid of the bad taste in his mouth. How in God’s name had he hidden her for all these years?
‘In plain sight,’ the senior detective said, before he left. Jason knew that, eventually, it would all be unravelled – the forensic teams picking apart what had happened up at the old cottage, how their father had kept his youngest daughter alive, barely, in the most horrific conditions. Breaking it to Claire that Lenni had been so close, right under their noses all this time was not going to be easy. He crushed the half-smoked cigarette under his foot and drove slowly back to Trevellin.
* * *
Three days later, after Lenni had gradually given more and more detailed descriptions to the police with the help of psychologists, the area around the derelict cottage was still sealed off. Forensic investigators swarmed up and down the hill to do their work, picking apart the remnants of several decades, photographing, bagging, labelling, removing, in order to piece everything back together in a way that might, by some miracle, make sense. The hopelessness was palpable, could be tasted on the sea breeze. It went unspoken that finding sense, of any kind, was unlikely.
Police worked tirelessly in the cottage and around the woodland, white-suited, delving in and out like maggots gorging on rot. The lead investigator informed them it could take weeks to analyse everything, to build a picture.
Bit by bit, the cellar beneath the old cottage on Trevellin Farm’s land – the cellar that Patrick had secretly soundproofed, shored up and converted over the years – was taken apart. Once or twice Claire went to watch from behind the twisted, flapping crime scene tape, but it was too much to bear, and she retreated to the farmhouse. From the window, as the forensic teams tramped through the courtyard carrying their findings, she tracked their comings and goings as they stowed the items in an ever-changing convoy of police vehicles. Then curiosity would draw her out. Staring into the back of the van, she saw a museum of individually bagged books, items of clothing, cutlery, DVDs, scraps of paper, rotten food, hair, teeth, excrement, shreds of unidentifiable substances and thousands of other miniscule samples of a secret existence. They’d taken out Patrick’s body in a bag at the end of the first day.
She couldn’t make any of what she saw fit with the man she knew as her father. If she thought too deeply about it, she threw up.
‘I could only manage a quick glance at him,’ Jason told Claire, when he’d returned from taking Shona to stay with Angus and Jenny. Their mother had needed to get away, but would return, she promised, when she felt stronger, when Lenni was allowed home. A half-empty bottle of wine sat on the kitchen table between them. ‘They’d cleaned him up a bit, but to see him lying there in the morgue, knowing what he’d fucking done…’
Claire held up her hands to signal him to stop. ‘I don’t want to know,’ she said, turning away. He’d already told her the hammer wounds on his head were horrific, the top of his skull caved in.
‘It must have been instant,’ he added. Silence hung between them, though they were thinking the same thing: how did a frail girl like Lenni wield a hammer against Patrick?
Earlier, Jason had ventured as close to the cottage as he could get. He wanted to see his father’s perspective on the many trips he must have made up there, going undetected, delivering supplies, deceiving Claire, Shona, conning the whole family – everyone – over the decades. Guilt cut through him that he hadn’t been around for most of that time. Would he have picked up on the signs, noticed any strange behaviour to unmask his father? Perhaps that was why he’d preferred to keep Jason at arm’s length, refusing to build bridges between them. He didn’t want him – a young, fit man with an interest in the cottage – working on the farm for a reason.
Standing as close to the building as he was allowed, breathing in the clean air of the coast mixed with the stench of what had happened, Jason tried to see it through different eyes. Had his father’s love for Lenni, his over-protectiveness of her, driven him to extremes? Or was he simply a sick fuck who had abused his youngest child over two decades? Try as he might, he couldn’t see it as anything other than the vile act it was. Nothing, but nothing, could justify what he’d done. He hoped Patrick rotted in hell. He was glad they’d never made up.
Apart from the bright, flickering police tape and the comings and goings of officers, the place looked pretty much as it had done since they were kids. Ivy had almost completely obscured two sides of the wrecked cottage, and a multitude of creatures and birds had made it their home – including, he reflected, his little sister. Above ground, there was no sign of the twenty-one-year secret it contained; not a hint of what the police had described as a feat of engineering for one man. What was left of the collapsing roof had sunk lower on bowing timbers, pressing down on the cracking stone walls, while the windows were being twisted from their frames. But below, the cellar was protected and intact.
Jason glanced down. Something caught his eye. Something glinting in the grass. He looked around before bending down to pick it up. It was a silver pendant, just a simple one – a sort of cross with a rounded head on a chain. He vaguely recognised it.