Sarah neither moved nor replied. One moment she was there, and the next she, along with Dennie’s childhood toy, was gone.
* * *
‘You want me to drive you where?’ Lizzie’s toast froze halfway to her mouth in disbelief.
‘Stapenhill Cemetery.’
‘Yes, I thought that’s what you said. And that’s in…’ She waved her toast for Dennie to repeat it.
‘Burton, yes.’
‘Because…?
‘Lizzie, you asked me if there was anything you could do to help. This is it. Honestly, it’s not that far.’ She hadn’t been able to get back to sleep after Sarah’s appearance and so had tiptoed downstairs and sat in the kitchen drinking tea and listening to the World Service on Radio 4 until she knew what she needed to do. When she heard her daughter moving around she’d roused herself and got breakfast ready as if it were any normal day.
‘I understand that, but I was thinking more along the lines of cooking you a nice meal, perhaps, or doing a couple of loads of laundry. Not driving you to visit the grave of a convicted murderer who hung herself in her cell.’
‘Her victim was a monster of a man and she killed him in self-defence, remember.’
‘Yes, and then she cut him up and buried the bits in her allotment!’ Lizzie shouted. ‘It’s not the same as taking a bunch of flowers to Dad’s grave!’
‘Lizzie, I know that it doesn’t make much sense, but part of what’s been happening over the last few weeks is that for whatever reason, Sarah Neary has been…’ appearing in waking memories and now visiting me at night ‘… on my mind. I thought that if I visited her grave it might help to settle it a bit. I understand that it’s not what you planned to do, and you probably need to get back to the café, and I’m more than capable of driving myself, so if you really don’t want to…’
‘No,’ Lizzie sighed. ‘It’s fine. Of course, I’ll help. I just need to make a couple of phone calls, that’s all.’
Lizzie made her calls and Dennie convinced Viggo that it was only a half hour drive and she’d be back well before lunchtime, and they left. Stapenhill was a modest-sized council-run cemetery on the other side of the River Trent from the town proper; up from the river’s broad sweep there was a green bank crowded with daffodils and a tree-lined walk and then the cemetery’s gateway of three tall gothic arches. Lizzie left her to her ‘morbid bloody obsession’ and took herself off for a walk along the river. The cemetery grounds themselves were broad and open, and it was easy to locate the Nearys’ cremation plot – it was towards the back, in the modern section away from the old Victorian graves, and close to a neighbouring housing estate. The funeral arrangements had been left to distant relatives who wanted shot of the whole horrific business as quickly as possible, and so in a final act of cruel irony after everything that Colin had done to Sarah when alive, her remains had been interred next to his. Even so, nobody was so thoughtless as to have their plaques engraved with standard platitudes like ‘Loving wife’ or ‘Devoted husband’. There was simply a pair of names, and a set of dates. There were no flowers, not even withered remains. Dennie wasn’t sure what she was expecting to see; it was just a simple patch of gravel with two low stone blocks and their metal plaques. It was as she was looking around, wondering what on earth had made her think this was a good idea, that she saw – through a line of thick trees and a heavy wrought-iron boundary fence – a familiar glimpse of plastic sheeting, small wooden structures and tidy vegetable patches in neat rows. There were allotments bordering on the cemetery. Colin Neary’s remains had been exhumed from one allotment only to be buried within sight of another, and she laughed. Serve the bastard right.
The first thing Dennie notices about Sarah, before she even takes her seat in the prison visiting room, is how far along her second pregnancy is. She’s not allowed to give Sarah a hug so she simply squeezes her hand and asks. Seven months, is the answer. Dennie’s instinctive reaction is to feel sorry that the father will never see his new child, but she squashes it because it was the fact that he tried to make her lose it which led to her killing him in the first place.
Are they treating her well in here?
Fine, thank you, Dennie.
And little Josh?
He’s with her sister, Michelle, and her husband. She hopes to God that he’s too young to understand what’s happening.
Dennie thinks that Sarah would probably have put up with the abuse for years more, decades, and possibly the rest of her life if it hadn’t been for the imperative to protect her babies. Dennie can well understand this. Brian was nothing like Colin, but his childhood had its own problems and she’d had to set firm boundaries for him when Christopher was little. It had been the time that Brian had come home from work, tired and irritable, and found that Christopher had got into the laundry basket and ‘coloured in’ his Daddy’s favourite shirt with wax crayons, and he’d given the child a good solid wallop – the first and only one ever. Dennie had gathered the squalling child in her arms, fixed Brian with a look and told him that if he ever laid a finger on any of the children like that again, she would take them and leave. She meant it, and he knew it. He knew that she wouldn’t go to the police or try to divorce him, he would just never see his children again. She had known that the single worst thing for Brian Keeling – the fault-line which tracked right back into his troubled childhood – was to be abandoned, and she’d felt
