A Game for All the Family Read online

  ‘He said I should do whatever will make me happy.’

  ‘He’s right. You should.’

  ‘You don’t really think that. I can tell when you’re lying.’

  Christ, I hope not.

  I’m lying to my daughter. I know I’m lying, though, and I’m doing it so as not to hurt her, so that’s okay. That’s good. Except … I ought to tell her the truth.

  ‘The thing is, El, it’s just—’ I break off and sigh as a woman in a floral dress knocks my elbow, spilling a bit of my elderflower cordial. ‘I’m not sure a wake is the best place to discuss this.’

  ‘It’s not a wake.’ Ellen giggles. ‘Don’t be such a relic, Mum. It’s a party to celebrate – ugh! You know what I mean – celebrate, or whatever, Anne’s life.’

  ‘I worry that you and George will get married and then he’ll fall in love with someone else – romantic, sexual love – and leave you,’ I blurt out. ‘I worry that what he loves so passionately is normal family life, as exemplified by us.’ Used to be, anyway. ‘What if he only wants to marry you because …’ For God’s sake, what am I saying? This is too much truth, and I can’t prove any of it anyway. What if I’m inventing problems?

  Ellen isn’t fazed by it. ‘Because he wants to be part of our family, were you going to say? Because we’re happy and his family isn’t, or wasn’t?’ She shrugs. ‘I don’t care why he wants it, Mum. All I know is that, right now, he does. And so do I. Sure, we’re only teenagers – we might change our minds. But think of it like this: in the old days, people often died when they were, like, twenty-five. Didn’t stop them getting married at eighteen or twenty, did it, just because they knew it might not last forever?’

  ‘No. I suppose not.’

  Ellen pats my arm as if I’m a doddery octogenarian who needs to be reassured about the modern world.

  ‘Ellen, I need to ask you something. It’s about your story.’

  She grimaces. ‘I want to forget about that, Mum.’

  ‘I know, and you can, but … you knew, didn’t you? Who’d killed Perrine?’

  ‘Yes. George and I worked it out. It had to be the parents: Bascom and Sorrel. Why didn’t they give Perrine any breakfast that day if she was still alive as far as they knew? There was no mention of her getting any. And the turns thing. And how could Sorrel and Bascom have made a plan about what to do after David Butcher’s murder when they’d only just found him dead? They must have been referring to the original “taking turns” plan, made when they first took the girls out of school. And Sorrel talking to Perrine so harshly, accusing her of lying about the noose-tree thing. It was clear that she resented Perrine’s existence.’

  Good. Great.

  ‘So … you lied to me when I asked you who killed Perrine, at Olwen’s house? You pretended you didn’t have any idea?’

  Ellen nods. ‘Sorry. George said we had to keep it secret from everyone or his mum would think he was a betrayer – the more people knew the whole story, the more danger for George and his family.’

  ‘It’s okay. Just … do me a favour, Ellen: always know when you’re lying, and why. Always keep a grip on the truth in your head. It’s important. It’s how you stay sane.’ Is she even listening to me? ‘Ellen?’

  In a low voice, she says, ‘George says when the police found his mum’s clothes in that alleyway in London they also found … brain matter. Is that true?’

  I nod. ‘That’s how they were able to issue a death certificate. What they found … she couldn’t still be alive. It’s impossible.’ A bundle of clothing and brain in a bag: easy to carry through London at night without arousing suspicion. Not so easy to do that with a whole human body. But Olwen and I agreed we had to do something to let Stephen, Fleur and George know that Anne wasn’t coming back. It wouldn’t have been fair to let them hope for her safe return. Or fear it.

  Fleur Donbavand is leaning against the wall between two large windows, talking to Lesley Griffiths and another teacher from Beaconwood whose face I know but whose name I can’t summon at the moment.

  Today is the first time I’ve seen Fleur. She’s tall and pale, with delicate features and mousy-brown hair in a plait. As she listens to Lesley, who is doing all the talking, she nods and side-eyes the wall next to her, as if hoping it will open and envelop her. She looks bored, then guilty, then embarrassed – like someone who has no idea how to react to her surroundings. The contrast between her and George, who, since we arrived, has been orating masterfully and loudly on the subject of grief to anyone who will listen, is marked.

  ‘George is sad about his mum dying, you know,’ Ellen told me the other day.

  ‘Of course he is,’ I said in a tight voice.

  ‘Even though he really did hate her. He says it’s weird – he’d never have thought he’d be sad.’

  Across the room, Lesley Griffiths gives Fleur a hug and Fleur smiles and seems to relax. I feel guilty for asking Ops to investigate Lesley’s background. I’ll never tell anyone what he found out: that in her twenties, before she got married, Lesley was a journalist who plagiarised part of an article and lost her job at a reputable newspaper. She then trained to be a teacher and hasn’t put a foot wrong since, as far as Ops could establish. Interestingly, the man who fired Lesley, Diarmid Griffiths, was the man she married four years later. They must have decided to give each other a second chance.

  Some people deserve them. Some, not all.

  ‘Justine. Ellen. I’m glad I caught you.’ Stephen Donbavand is at my side.

  ‘We won’t leave until it finishes,’ Ellen tells him. ‘I promised George we’d stay till the end, Mum.’

  Oh, God. How long will that be?

  ‘How are you, Justine?’ Stephen asks me, as Ellen crosses the room to join her fiancé beside the buffet table.

  What the fuck do you care?

  ‘How am I? Fine. I ought to be asking you that question, I suppose.’

  ‘I’m doing well, in the circumstances.’

  ‘Fleur and George look well.’ Is this how I’d be speaking to him if I hadn’t killed his wife? All I can do is hope that it is.

  ‘They’re enjoying being back at school,’ says Stephen.

  ‘I can imagine. It’s nice for them to have some friends. A normal life,’ I can’t resist adding.

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  Clever, Stephen. Can I call you Steve, now that you’ve dug a grave in my garden and I’ve caved your wife’s head in? No need for formalities any more. Very clever indeed. Benefit, and allow George and Fleur to benefit, from their new freedom, while never acknowledging the tyranny that preceded it. Way to have the best of both worlds. Fucking coward.

  ‘It can’t have been fun for you to have the police excavate your garden,’ he says.

  ‘No. Well, they didn’t find anything. We had the garden re-landscaped afterwards.’

  ‘Why did you tell the police Anne’s body was buried in your garden when it wasn’t? I was told you insisted they dig up every square metre of your land, to check.’

  ‘I did. I had a hunch – it turned out to be wrong. I wanted to help try and find Anne, and … well, I suppose when someone digs a grave out of the earth immediately outside your front door, you can’t help wondering if that someone plans to bury a body there.’ I smile at him. Well, you did ask …

  Stephen bites his upper lip. ‘But the police never thought Anne died in Devon,’ he says. ‘You know what they found on her clothes.’

  Is he asking me a question? It sounded like a statement of fact.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘They think Anne died in London, where she apparently went to meet one of your former colleagues – Donna Lodge – having sent an email from an internet café to make the arrangement. She never turned up to that meeting. It’s funny – I know that can’t be true, about the internet café. Anne was barely aware such places existed.’

  He looks hard at me. Says, ‘I didn’t tell the police that. Don’t worry.’

  My heart starts to pound. Is
he saying what I think he’s saying?

  No. I don’t want your help or protection. I’m not Anne.

  ‘I’m sorry for what you went through, Justine.’

  Sorry? I nearly laugh. It’s so useless: a floppy, meaningless word coming from him, given everything he did and didn’t do. ‘Apologise to your kids, not me,’ I manage to say. ‘I don’t care how you feel.’

  ‘I’m also sorry my wife is dead. Missing presumed dead, but … well, I know she’s dead, Justine. Beyond doubt.’

  And he knows who killed her. That’s what his eyes are trying to tell me, that pointed look.

  He says, ‘I’m sorry Anne’s dead for her sake, you understand. All she’ll miss out on … Well, and I suppose for my sake a little as well. Anne wasn’t always … difficult. She could be very kind sometimes.’

  ‘I don’t care, Stephen.’

  ‘No, I … I can see. Anyway … you mustn’t worry,’ he tells me.

  Anybody’s ally.

  I don’t want to be curious about him – I want not to think about him at all – but I can’t help wondering if, in his own opinion, he stands for anything at all.

  Feel ashamed, you bastard.

  ‘The police won’t dig up your garden again,’ he tells me. ‘They’ve already done so at your instigation and satisfied themselves that there’s nothing there. Clever of you. They wouldn’t dig up the same garden twice.’

  I nod. That was my reckoning precisely. Particularly since I insisted they check every inch of my land. I was so eager to help in the search for missing Professor Anne, the brilliant academic and devoted wife and mother.

  The credit for my cleverness should, strictly speaking, go to Anne herself. I was less imaginative before she came into my life – considerably so. That’s one benefit of knowing a pathological liar: first you marvel at their inventive brio, then you think, ‘I could do that too. What’s stopping me?’

  Anne gave me the burial-in-the-garden idea; Anne came up with the surprise solution to the Ingrey murder mystery – a mother and father who join forces first to protect their daughter from all harm and then, later, to kill her, because they have perfected the art of compromise. Who would ever guess that?

  I rose to Anne’s challenge and formulated an equally unguessable plan. I think I succeeded. Who would suspect me of burying a body – one missing most of its brain – in the very same garden I made the police dig up only a few days earlier to search for that same body? I insisted to every police officer who would listen that Anne must be buried in the grounds of Speedwell House, knowing full well that she wasn’t – yet.

  Was Stephen watching from one of our clusters of trees the night Olwen and I buried Anne’s body? Or from his side of the river, with his binoculars trained on my house? I don’t believe he guessed, so he must know.

  ‘Look,’ he says, pointing.

  I turn. Ellen and George are handing out the few remaining buffet snacks to their classmates, conferring about who’s had how many so far and who’s owed what.

  ‘They must be the bossiest in their year,’ I say.

  Why am I talking to him, and so politely? Because I think he could land me in prison if he chose to? Or because polite conversation is what’s expected at memorial dos?

  No one expects anybody, ever, to start yelling about evil. Look, right there – evil! Wickedness, right here and now. People would say you were mad if you did that. It would take up too much time, also. All of one’s time, arguably. Better to brush it under the carpet, under the grass, under the tablecloth beneath the canapés.

  ‘Either bossy or natural leaders, however you want to put it,’ I amend my previous statement to make it less critical.

  ‘I want to put it this way: they’re good kids,’ says Stephen. ‘In every way, good people.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, they are,’ I say. Is that supposed to be the happy ending to our story? He let his wife ruin people’s lives and I killed her, but it’s okay because we have wonderful children?

  No one gets to write my story apart from me. Least of all Stephen Donbavand, ally of Anne for so many years.

  I’ll write it myself.

  Once upon a time there was a woman called Justine Merrison. She tried so hard to do Nothing, but she failed. She ended up doing Something, a bigger Something than she’d ever done before: she killed a woman. Murdered? I don’t know. Maybe. It wasn’t self-defence, but there was an element of defence to the killing. I could tell you the full story, but I guarantee you wouldn’t believe me, so I won’t bother. Or maybe I’ll tell you what happened but present it as fiction – you probably wouldn’t believe me then, either. You might say, ‘You can’t have made that up. Is there an element of truth to it?’

  After causing the death of Anne Donbavand, Justine was either caught one day and locked up, or not – it’s too soon to say. What I can tell you for certain is that she never regretted what she did, not for a fraction of a second.

  She hopes to live happily ever after. She thinks that’s what she deserves.

  Acknowledgements

  I am hugely grateful to the following people: Peter Straus and Matthew Turner from Rogers, Coleridge and White; Carolyn Mays, Karen Geary, Lucy Hale, Becca Mundy, Abby Parsons, Jason Bartholomew, Anna Alexander, Valeria Huerta, Al Oliver, Jessica Killingley, Naomi Berwin and everyone else at Hodder – there are too many people to name all individually, but I’m extremely thankful to all of you for all your hard work on my books.

  I’d also like to thank Dan, Phoebe, Guy and Brewster; Adele Geras, Chris Gribble, Emily Winslow; the inimitable Dan Mallory and all at William Morrow in America; all my wonderful international publishers who look after my books all over the world, Professor Malcolm Coulthard, and the real ‘Ops’.

  Speedwell House is loosely based on Greenway, Agatha Christie’s holiday home in Devon – which I might never have come to know as well as I do if it weren’t for Mathew and James Prichard – so an enormous thank you to them, and to Agatha Christie, for inspiring me since the age of 12.