Diane Fry looked at Howard Renshaw with barely restrained annoyance. Exactly what it would take to puncture the bubble of fantasy the Renshaws lived in, she didn’t know.
‘I wanted to tell you I’m sorry,’ he was saying. ‘I realize that I misled you by my behaviour in the churchyard, and I apologize for that. It must have put you and your colleagues to a lot of trouble. But it was a very emotional moment, you see. I’m sure you understand. Particularly for my wife ‘
‘But you already knew the remains weren’t those of your daughter, didn’t you, sir? You knew that it couldn’t be Emma.’
‘Well, looking back now, I suppose it should have been obvious to us that it couldn’t have been Emma. I mean, how would she have ended up in Withens, let alone in the churchyard? It wasn’t logical. But that’s hindsight speaking. We weren’t thinking logically at the time. We were both upset.’
‘But maybe you didn’t actually need hindsight.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You didn’t really believe the remains were those of your daughter.’
Howard hesitated slightly.
‘I didn’t,’ said Sarah. ‘I knew it couldn’t be Emma. She’s still alive, isn’t she?’
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‘We don’t know that, Mrs Renshaw.’
‘All this time, Howard hasn’t been believing, he’s just been pretending. Emma hasn’t had his belief, only mine. If she dies now, it will be my fault. I’m all she has left.’
Howard shifted uneasily in his chair, but Sarah didn’t look at him. There was no exchange of meaningful glances today.
‘For two years, I’ve thought it was something I did that made Emma go away,’ said Sarah. ‘I thought that if I weren’t here she would come back. Then Emma would be able to get on with her life. Looking back now, it seems very silly.’
‘No, I wouldn’t call it that.’
The never even liked her playing outside when she was a child. I always imagined the worst - that she would be abducted and murdered. You hear of it happening such a lot. I worried all the time when Emma was out of my sight, so I kept her where I could keep an eye on her. But at the same time, I felt guilty at not giving her any freedom. It was dangerous enough for children then. But it’s worse now, isn’t it?’
‘Statistically, no,’ said Fry. ‘There are no more children being abducted or killed by strangers than there were in the 1980s.’
‘But when it happens, we all hear about it, don’t we? It’s in the news, in the papers, on the TV. Everybody talks about it.’
‘Sometimes children need to learn about risk. It’s part of the process of growing up.’
‘Do you think if I had let Emma take more risks when she was younger, this wouldn’t have happened?’
‘Nobody can say that, Mrs Renshaw.’
‘I can’t help wondering. I can’t help thinking it was my fault. I feel guilty about the silliest things. I keep remembering them at odd moments. Like when I was breast-feeding Emma as a baby.’
Fry looked at Howard, who was staring into space through the window of the Renshaws’ sitting room. He was on the leather settee, near the teddy bear, which was staring into space equally vaguely.
‘You feel guilty about breast-feeding, Mrs Renshaw?’
‘No, it was one little incident, when she was teething. It was only a very brief moment, no more than an instinctive physical reaction on my part. But these things can scar a child for life especially at that age, when they’re so impressionable.’
‘I don’t understand what you’re talking about.’
‘When Emma was teething, she bit my nipple. It was very painful,
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and it came as a real shock. So of course, I pulled away sharply because of the pain, you know. It meant that I had rejected her at a crucial moment, when she was suckling, the time that is so important for bonding, for creating love and trust between mother and child that will last a lifetime.’
‘You didn’t mean to do it.’
‘No, but you can’t explain that to a baby. And Emma recognized that she had been rejected. She cried, and I could see it in her face. After that, if she bit me again when she was suckling, she would start crying straight away, even though I tried to bear the pain and not pull away. She was expecting to be rejected by me. Those early incidents leave a lasting impression that can never be erased. I’m sure Emma has spent the rest of her life expecting to be rejected by her mother. I need her to come home soon, so that I can explain it to her.’
Guilt was a strange, inexplicable thing. At the extreme, it became almost existential, a feeling of guilt for simply being there when others weren’t. But guilt was good, in a way. The worst people were those who felt no guilt at all. Guilt could sometimes be what kept people together.
‘It’s the first thing I think about when I wake up, and the last thing I think about when I go to bed at night,’ said Sarah. ‘It’s with me all the time.’
Howard finally stopped fidgeting, got up and walked out of the room. Fry watched him go, but his wife hardly seemed to notice.
Fry knew that the length of time that had passed made it much worse for the Renshaws. A few years ago, the rules for coroners had been changed to prevent the body of a murder victim being kept in cold storage for years on end, awaiting the trial of their killer. The distress caused to the victim’s family had been recognized, and the need for closure acknowledged. If Emma’s body had been found straight away, it would have been twenty-eight days at the most before the coroner released it for burial, even if no one had been charged with her murder. And then the Renshaws would have been free to bury Emma.
But that hadn’t happened. They had been denied that closure; instead they had been allowed a glimmer of
