Greenwich Park by Katherine Faulkner (primary phonics .TXT) 📕

felt I could hold on to that. He got me through, in the end. He got me through everything.

Katie has pulled her chair closer to me now, her hands on top of mine. ‘I don’t know how you can be so calm.’

I smile. Maybe it’s lucky I’m so tired. Leo is difficult at night, always has been. He has nightmares, or at least I think that’s what they are. I’ll find him screaming, inconsolable, his little face contorted, even though he’s not really awake. Sometimes, I have to hold him for a long time before he will go back to sleep.

‘It was horrible when I first read it. But – I don’t know. At least it explains some things.’

‘Does it? That’s what I’m trying to work out.’

I fold the letter back into its envelope. ‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s just … I know this explains some of it. Like why she pretended to be pregnant.’

I can still hardly believe that part. The lengths she’d gone to. It came up in the trial, the device she had been wearing whenever she saw us, the website she had ordered it from. The papers had gone mad for that part of the story, of course.

‘I suppose it also explains the money – why she always had so much cash,’ Katie goes on. ‘But it doesn’t explain other things. Like, what about all the other stuff you told me about? The notes you found in Rory’s house? What were they all about?’

I shake my head. ‘Oh, Katie, who knows what I thought I found? Some old scrap of paper from years ago – it could have been anything.’

‘I suppose,’ she says gently, ‘they could have been … from Lisa?’

It was Lisa, the secretary, who’d saved Rory in the end. She’d been having an affair with him for months, she admitted – and could give him an alibi for the night of the bonfire party when he’d left the house at 9pm, as well as most of the other gaps he’d disappeared for. Once Daniel confessed to the whole thing – including that he’d been the one wearing Rory’s coat – the case against Rory had fallen away.

Not that they didn’t fight it. Daniel said he had acted alone. But DCI Betsky wouldn’t have it. She just couldn’t drop the idea that someone else was involved. According to Rory’s lawyer, they dragged it on for far longer than they should have done, talking endlessly about fibres on Rachel’s body that they thought could have been from Rory’s house, and about the phone triangulation data that placed her phone at Rory’s the next day, when that text was sent.

Luckily, his lawyer had it all thrown out of court in the end. We found experts of our own; they said Daniel’s and Rory’s homes were too close for the masts to say with any real accuracy that Rory had had the phone at his house. But still, the police insisted. Even that detective, Carter, the one who saved Katie’s life, wasn’t entirely supportive. He kept asking awkward questions, making out like it couldn’t have just been Daniel, that there must have been someone else involved.

Katie keeps going on at me, saying we should listen to him, and what if he’s right. We have nearly fallen out over it, once or twice. I don’t know if Katie is still talking to him, even now. I hope she isn’t. I wish she would just lay it to rest, that both of them would lay it to rest, like I have tried to.

Serena left Rory before it even came to trial. Neither she nor Rory came to see Daniel in court. Only me. Amazingly, Rory and Lisa are still together. They have moved to somewhere in the West Country. I keep saying I’ll go and see them, but it seems so far. And it is difficult, being on my own.

Serena, meanwhile, has moved abroad with her little baby, Sienna. A little girl, the same age as Leo. My niece. I’ve never even seen a photograph. Rory doesn’t like to talk about her. It must break his heart. But she has washed her hands of me, of Rory, of all of us. If I’m honest, I would have liked an explanation, about her and Daniel. I know it was years ago, but it still hurt. Then again, after everything that’s happened, who could blame her for cutting ties, for moving far, far away?

‘I don’t know though,’ Katie is musing, stirring her mug of tea. ‘Could the note you found at Rory’s really have been from Lisa? If Lisa was W, why would Rachel have had it? How would she have got hold of it? And why would Rory call Lisa “W”?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Maybe they weren’t even love notes. They were probably – I don’t know … a figment of my imagination.’ Not to mention all the other weird stuff I thought I saw.

She looks at me, shakes her head. ‘Helen, I can’t believe you are still letting him do this.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Daniel! He was always encouraging you to think you were stupid, or that you were losing it. You weren’t. You lost your parents and had four miscarriages. You were very, very sad, as anyone would be. You were not crazy.’

This is her latest theme – that I’m a victim, just like Rachel. Except Rachel is the one who was raped, robbed of justice, and who ended up dead. Not me.

‘I’m just saying. If you saw those things, you saw them.’

I sigh, put my hand on hers. The hand that was bandaged for months, after that day. Sometimes I struggle to believe it really all happened. To think about her, clinging to the drain hooks. To think about what might have been, if DCI Carter hadn’t worked out that Katie would head to Daniel’s house. If he hadn’t got in his car, turned up there when he did. Got his police contacts to find him the address as he