Cambridge Blue - Alison Bruce [120]
Perhaps it was involuntary, perhaps it was just a burst of nerves but, as he’d hoped, she giggled.
Make her laugh: move two completed, and straight into move three. ‘If I can’t convince you about being forty, try this,’ he said quietly. Their eyes were still locked. ‘If no one believed me when I told the truth, I’d be pretty upset. But if I was six and it was my parents who didn’t believe me, I’d devastated. And it wasn’t as if they were remote people, I reckon. You loved and admired your father.’ Jackie’s face reddened, but she didn’t look away; he guessed she wanted to, but it was like she was witnessing a car crash and she couldn’t. ‘If that was me and he died still thinking the worst of me, I’d be heartbroken. I wouldn’t expect anyone else to believe me, not when my parents didn’t.’
Jackie opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came. Still she watched him.
‘You should have told us about Willis and Joanne Reed, but it hurts too much when everyone assumes you’re lying, doesn’t it?’
This time she finally tore her gaze away from him. She hid her nose and mouth behind her hands, and tried to hide the tears forming in her eyes.
‘It hurts, doesn’t it?’ he pressed, knowing he was at the point where he couldn’t afford to continue taking no answer as any sort of reply.
But he didn’t need to ask her again. Her hands didn’t move, making the ‘Yes’ sound more like a muffled grunt, but they both knew what she’d said. She opened her eyes and tears fell on to her cheeks; they trickled down in twin tracks, pausing at her jawline and vanishing into the mesh of her jersey.
‘I’m not trying to catch you out,’ he said.
‘I know,’ she said finally. The stubbornness had left her face – so, strangely, had her depressed expression – and in its place was acceptance. ‘I haven’t lied to you, just kept things back until I knew you’d believe me.’
‘And I do, so no more now, OK?’
‘OK.’ She spent a single minute collecting herself, though it felt more like the entire afternoon. ‘My father wasn’t just educated,’ she explained at last, ‘he was by far the most intelligent and inspiring man I’ve ever met. And yet he spent nearly all of his life thinking that I killed my own brother. If he could be so wrong, how could I ever be sure of anything? I actually know nothing.’
‘But you think you do,’ Goodhew persisted.
She opened her mouth to speak, but he could see the tears threatening again. She blinked them away and took deep breaths until she seemed to feel confident that they weren’t going to choke the words she was about to speak. ‘I know I saw Richard with David that afternoon . . .’ She paused. ‘He was in David’s room, sitting on the floor at the foot of the cot. I wasn’t very old, of course, but I remember thinking that was odd.’ She frowned. ‘Maybe it was later that I thought it was odd. I don’t know now.’
‘What was odd?’
‘Odd that Richard was in the room at all when he had never shown any interest in the baby. No interest whatsoever. He had a pillow on the floor beside him . . . and there was poor little David. Lying in his cot. Looking all wrong. Not even like a baby somehow. I could tell it was all wrong, he was like a toy. Like alabaster. Richard said nothing, just stood up, then walked right past me and through the door. I didn’t go any closer, but I couldn’t leave either. I don’t know how long it was before my mother came and found me there. She said something to me, but I don’t know what, and when she saw David she began to scream, but I can’t remember any sounds, just a huge silence. I only know she was screaming because of her face. She was holding him, and he was completely limp, and I remember thinking that it looked like there weren’t any bones left in his body. Then there were people everywhere. My dad, of course, but I don’t know who else. They were in and out of the house, and they took his body