Letters To My Daughter's Killer

by Cath Staincliffe

  ‘The police . . .’ I clear my throat. ‘They’ve charged Jack with Lizzie’s murder.’

  Rebecca nods. She has glossy brown hair, cut in a bob, and striking clothes: a black and white geometric tunic, tweedy tights, Converse trainers, chunky jewellery. On anyone else it would look bizarre. Rebecca carries it off. Her fingernails are bitten to the quick.

  ‘He hit her?’ Rebecca says.

  Does she need to hear the details? Like I did? The grotesque litany of injuries. The back of Lizzie’s skull was crushed with multiple fractures, the right orbital socket around the eye was fractured, as well as the nose and the right ulna . . . A dozen blows at least.

  I nod. ‘They think he used the poker.’ My voice catches.

  ‘No.’ She grimaces. I sense she’s feeling awkward and start talking, but she interrupts me. ‘No, he hit her before.’ Her lip trembles. She puts her fingers to her mouth.

  My face freezes. I stare at her. ‘What?’

  ‘Jack.’ She bites her thumb. ‘He hit Lizzie before.’

  It’s like I’m falling. A swoop in my stomach. I don’t know what to say. ‘How . . .’ I begin, then, ‘When?’

  She blinks rapidly. ‘This summer. And before that, once that I know of.’

  My head feels thick, as though the blood is clotting. Foggy. As if I’ve been clouted hard. Stunned.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  Rebecca nods. She has tears in her eyes. ‘She told me,’ she says.

  And not me? The betrayal scalds me. How could Lizzie hide this?

  ‘Tell me,’ I say.

  ‘When she was pregnant with Florence, we were supposed to be going for a swim. She cried off, she said she didn’t feel like it so we were going to go for a walk instead.’ Rebecca sniffs. ‘I called for her and I grabbed her arm, just – I don’t know why, to hurry her along or something, and she yelped.’ Rebecca stops and bites her lip. ‘And she told me.’ Her voice is thinner now.

  She was pregnant then. Pregnant this time.

  ‘She made me promise never to say anything, to anyone. She said Jack got very down about work, he’d not had anything for a while, and she’d tried to reassure him and jolly him along and he just exploded. He really didn’t mean to hurt her. He was so sorry.’ Rebecca looks directly at me. ‘I told her to leave. To come and stay with me. Anything. She said she had warned him, afterwards, when he was all sorry and asking her to forgive him, that if he ever touched her again she would leave him and never go back. And he swore it would never happen again.’

  And Lizzie believed that? I cover my face with my hands.

  I think of you crying when DI Ferguson told us Lizzie was carrying twins. Imagine you hitting her, hurting her. Your face contorted with fury. Lizzie flinching to avoid the blows, crying out as you slap her, punch her in the stomach, pull her hair. Her lovely hair.

  ‘But it did,’ I say to Rebecca. ‘Happen again.’

  ‘Everything was fine for a while,’ she says. ‘For years.’ She shrugs. ‘That’s what Lizzie said.’ She looks at me nervously.

  ‘Go on,’ I say. Milky comes in, his tail high as he picks his way over the bits of plastic and wood from the toy box. He jumps on to the arm of the sofa beside me.

  ‘I’d ask sometimes how things were, but she said Jack was fine, just needed to grow up a bit. Then this summer we were going to have a girls’ night out together. Us and Hannah and Faith.’ Other friends. ‘Lizzie cancelled. Said she had a stomach bug. It just felt a bit weird. I called round the following day, just turned up. They were both there, and Florence. Jack let me in. He was very welcoming, chatty. He made us a cuppa. He stayed in the room. And Lizzie was saying she’d been sick and not to get too close and she was asking after the girls and it was all just . . . it didn’t feel right, you know?’

  I don’t know. I didn’t know.

  ‘I couldn’t say anything with him there. I didn’t want to make it worse. Then I wondered if I was imagining it. She did look wiped out. But then Florence climbed on to her knee and Lizzie yelped and went white as a sheet. She was hurt. She tried to hide it, said something about sharp elbows, but she was hurt. It was all fake. I texted her after. “Are you really OK? Anything I can do?” She just fobbed me off.’

  ‘You should have told me,’ I say.

  ‘I couldn’t. I’d promised.’

  ‘She was in danger. If we’d known—’

  ‘I’m sorry, Ruth,’ she cries. ‘She was my friend and I promised.’

  Oh, Lizzie, Lizzie. How could she be so stupid?

  With a lurch, I realize I am blaming her. You hit her. You killed her. I cling to that. You.

  ‘Rebecca, you must tell the police,’ I say. ‘If he’s done this before, then—’

  ‘I did,’ she says. ‘I came up yesterday, I made a statement.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Yesterday afternoon.’

  Before they charged you.

  ‘I wish I’d told you,’ Rebecca says miserably. ‘I wish I’d told everybody, but now it’s too late.’ And she is weeping and hitting at her own head.

  I go and catch her fists and hold them and say, ‘You weren’t to know. And the only person responsible for this is Jack. No one else. Not you, not Lizzie, but Jack. Yes?’

  Rebecca has left. I’m angry with her. And angry with Lizzie. I rail against them both. As well as you. You bastard. I see you belting her, thumping her. Did you swear at her too? Ridicule her, humiliate her? You bully. Is this why she died? Because you were out of control? Because you used your wife as a punchbag? Because your anger was greater than your love?

  Protestations crowd my mind. Lizzie wasn’t stupid. She must have known you would hit her again. If she’d told me, if I’d known, then I’d have . . . What exactly? A cold, cruel voice butts in: Saved her? Reported it? Got a restraining order, an injunction? Forced him to attend anger management classes? She stopped confiding in Rebecca; would it have been any different with me?

  I do believe what I told Rebecca, that you are the only person to blame, but the fact that Lizzie bore your violence and hid it from me, that she didn’t ask for my help and support, makes me want to howl. Did she not trust me? Did she imagine I’d think less of her? Or interfere? Or criticize her? Was she ashamed? Ashamed of your behaviour, ashamed of her reaction, her failure to act, to walk away? In turn I am ashamed that she kept this secret from me, that dirty, ugly secret at the heart of your marriage. Ashamed that I wasn’t a good enough mother.

  Did you know she was pregnant? Is that another lie? You’ve obviously no aversion to beating a pregnant woman. You pathetic little man. That’s what bullies are, aren’t they? Insecure, fearful, riddled with self-loathing. And attacking others is a way of feeling bigger, stronger, of exercising power. Is there much violence in prison? I imagine you on the receiving end as the days till your trial creep by. I’d gloat, except that’s not who I want to be any more. Loathing you, despising you, on and on and on, is a way of giving power to you. I’m sick of you in my head, in my teeth and my blood and my spine.

  You need exorcising. Will this work? This calling to account, the search for understanding?

  I do not know.

  But I have nothing else.

  Ruth

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  17 Brinks Avenue

  Manchester

  M19 6FX

  Florence is like a limpet. She sticks so close. She must be half convinced I’ll disappear next. And no wonder. Remember how she clung to your legs when they came to arrest you? How she followed you around before then? Her diligence, her attempts to hold on to the only parent she had left came to nought, and now she is to all intent and purposes an orphan.

  She sleeps with me and wets the bed every night. She is with me from waking until bedtime and often finds ways to spin that out, so it can be nine or after until she is asleep.

  My response to her clinginess is ambivalent. Having lost Lizzie, I want to gather Florence tight to me and never let her go. And it is true, the thou
ght of leaving her at school and coming home alone brings anxiety spinning through me. Haven’t you learnt anything? my body seems to say. You let Lizzie free, let her be independent, let her fly, and look how that turned out. The danger is that I’ll smother Florence, wrap her in cotton wool and make her overdependent on me, incapable of functioning properly. This need to keep her close alternates with a hunger for some solitude, some peace, some time for me, to try and get my head round what has happened. When I am not smothering her, she is suffocating me.

  I know she needs a constant, reliable, loving person with her, and that has to be me, but I find the relentlessness of it so tough. I draw solace from her presence, don’t misunderstand, but there are times when I just want to bow down and weep for Lizzie. Times I want to lie in bed all day or just sit in the back yard and stare at the walls. I am so very tired, I don’t know how my legs hold me up, or how I can still string a sentence together.

  In the night, when my resources are at their lowest, I frighten myself thinking that my selfish need for space, for time apart, will reap ill rewards.

  The sun is shining, it’s unseasonably warm, hot enough to sunbathe; certainly we need the sunscreen on. I am going to tell Florence what you have done – well, what you are suspected of doing. She is outside, she has been digging the soil out of the planter – the one that fell off the wall, the morning they came for you.

  Milky is sprawled on the path, soaking up the heat, one eye twitching open each time Florence bangs the trowel on the ground.

  I make her a drink of juice and add a straw, take it outside.

  She is hunkered down and has taken off the sunhat I’ve lent her, safety-pinned to fit.

  ‘Here,’ I say, ‘if you’re not going to wear the hat, you need more cream on.’

  She shrugs.

  ‘I’ll get it,’ I threaten, and she snatches the hat up and pulls it on, glowers up at me from under it. ‘Good girl.’

  I have rehearsed what to say with both Tony and Bea. Keep it simple. Let her respond, take my cues from that. She has not asked about you since that day. But I have found her looking under the beds and in the wardrobe, and when I ask her what she’s looking for she says, ‘I’m not.’

  She may be looking for you, or for Lizzie. Unable to accept you’ve gone. Hoping that if she’s good, you’ll both come back. She’ll go home and Bert will be there and everything will be all right again.

  Florence takes the juice and has a drink. A ladybird lands on my blouse. ‘Look, Florence.’

  She looks, gives a nod, puts her drink down and resumes scraping the soil up.

  ‘You know about Mummy being dead,’ I say.

  She hesitates, lets go of the trowel, her head bent to the ground, her face obscured by the hat.

  ‘It is very sad,’ I continue. ‘Mummy won’t come back. She can’t come back and we miss her such a lot.’

  Florence presses her hand on to the compost. Is any of this going in? Getting through to her?

  ‘You might feel cross or lonely or sad inside. I do. And you remember the other day, the men came and Daddy went with them. Well, they think maybe Daddy hurt Mummy. He . . .’ I don’t want to say ‘killed’. ‘He made her dead, they think. So he’s got to stay in a special place, called prison. He’s not coming home.’

  ‘Is he coming to Nana’s?’ she says, hopefully. Of course –this isn’t home.

  ‘No, he’s got to stay where he is for now, until they decide if he did hurt Mummy and make her die. Do you want to say anything?’

  She ignores me, uses her fingers to scatter the soil.

  ‘Is there anything you want to know – about Mummy or Daddy?’

  Still no answer.

  ‘You were a very good girl with Mummy and Daddy, their best girl. They both love you lots and lots. We don’t know why Daddy hurt Mummy so she couldn’t get better, but you didn’t do anything wrong. You were good. Shall we have a cuddle?’

  She ignores that too, straightens up, drags the hat from her head and throws it down. She goes inside.

  I feel like a failure, but what did I except? She’s four. I can barely remember being four; my only memory from then is of kindergarten, of a striped smock I wore for painting.

  ‘Nana?’ she calls after a few minutes. She’s in the kitchen. A wasp has fallen in her cup and is spinning round, buzzing angrily in its effort to escape. I take the whole thing outside and chuck it. She waits at the door, watches the wasp until it flies off.

  ‘I want to go home,’ she says, her lip quivering.

  ‘I’m sorry, Florence, you can’t go home, you have to stay here.’

  ‘I want to go home with Mummy.’

  ‘Mummy’s not there. Mummy’s dead. She can’t go home. She can’t go anywhere any more. One day we will all get together, all Mummy’s family, and have a special day and say goodbye, but she won’t be able to hear us, or see us, because Mummy’s body doesn’t work any more. It’s broken.’

  ‘The doctors could make it better,’ she says.

  ‘No, they can’t.’

  ‘Can they make Daddy better?’

  ‘Daddy’s not dead. He’s alive, like me and you, but he has to go to court and the people there will decide if he hurt Mummy and made her die.’ All the time I’m thinking: this is grotesque, macabre, but the websites I’ve consulted say the same thing: be honest, talk openly, be direct, use simple age-appropriate language.

  Her face is blank, like she’s hiding. I have no idea where she’s gone. What she is thinking or feeling.

  Did she know? Know that you sometimes battered her mother? Know that Daddy got nasty and smacked Mummy hard?

  Too hard this time.

  What have you done?

  * * *

  Three weeks after Lizzie’s death, I am at school with Florence. Time to get her back into the routine. She does not want to be here, but she is not crying or throwing a tantrum. Just very quiet.

  The friends she made before, Ben and Paige, are pleased to have her back. They keep coming up with little offerings, trying to draw her out, like Milky and his dead birds for me.

  Florence barely makes eye contact. I am sitting at the table nearby. We have read four books together and then, with my thighs aching from her weight (it’s a child-sized chair), I persuade her to sit in the Wendy house in the corner – decorated to represent a greengrocer’s. I don’t expect to leave her here today. It will be a slow process.

  The only time I read these days is for Florence. My library books are well overdue. I’ve lost all interest, any ability to concentrate, to engage. It’s like losing a sense almost.

  You have been named, once you’d appeared in court; it was all over the place. They used the photo from your Spotlight entry, which must be years out of date. The children in reception are too young to understand what’s happened, but those with brothers or sisters in the older classes may hear it being talked about and perhaps repeat what they hear. Children will talk, will gossip, just like adults. We can only hope that Florence’s infamous status won’t lead to her being taunted: Your mummy’s dead. Your daddy did it. So tempting for a child looking for easy prey.

  I cannot shake the sense of shame, prickly on my skin, hot inside. Shame because you killed her, shame that I didn’t know you were a risk, that I didn’t protect her. We are all tainted. Would it be easier if it had been a random attack by a stranger? I imagine so. One huge loss, not two.

  Ruth

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  17 Brinks Avenue

  Manchester

  M19 6FX

  The independent post-mortem for your defence has been done, the coroner has released Lizzie’s body. It is December.

  I touch Lizzie’s hand. It feels cold and smooth and dense. And dead.

  The undertaker has covered her face with a white cloth. He has dressed her in the clothes I brought. The green and blue silk tunic that she loved, those linen trousers.

  It is cool in the funeral parlour; my arms bristle with goose bumps. Sh
e can’t feel it. Her bare arms. And her feet. Toenails polished pink to match her fingers. The undertaker has done a manicure. Her hands. Slender fingers more like mine than Tony’s, but even slimmer than mine. Longer. We used to compare her to ourselves. Allocating features and traits. His eyes, my hair, his sense of humour, my love of language, his blood group, my laugh, his teeth, my fear of heights.

  Her hands, fluid and fast, making signs, symbols, flowing from one shape to another, making sense. A different language, one I couldn’t use, beyond a handful of words.

  She never told me about your violence, not in English or in sign language. Should I have read it? In the spaces between words, in the flicker of her eye or the incline of her head? Did she ever send me a signal that I missed?

  The new truth casts shadows over everything past. So now when I remember you and her – at your wedding, at the hospital when Florence was born, posing by the Andy Goldsworthy trees on that trip we made to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park – I no longer trust the memory. I see jeopardy instead, and enmity and apprehension. Her smile to you is one of sick submission, the way she catches your hand a quest for your blessing or forgiveness. Her laughter, her kiss, an effort to please, to praise, to placate.

  Those times when I made invitations: come for tea, fancy a walk, would Florence like the panto? And she put me off: busy, away, already booked. Now I don’t know if that was true or if she was hiding. Hiding her wounds, hiding her shame and her failure.

  I raised her, Tony and I raised her, to be her own person. We encouraged her to think she could do whatever she wanted to do, be whoever she wanted to be. That her life was hers to conduct as she saw fit. That she was as good as anyone else, as strong, as beautiful, as brave. That she should treat others as she’d like to be treated. At least I thought we had.

  The travesty ripples back through the past and on into the future.

  Your mother speaks to me. Same old stuff about your lily-white nature. I am tempted to confront her with your identity as a wife-beater, to ask her if she knew, if there had been whispers with your earlier girlfriends. Was it something you learned from your parents? Was Marian used to feeling the back of Alan’s hand, or his foot in her ribs? Where does it come from, this violence in you?