I sank onto a chair. “Oh, Rose.”
Her face twisted in pain. “She’s gone,” she said. “Emily has gone. We don’t know where she is. She says she never wants to see or speak to us again. She hates us—she thinks we’re monsters!” And then Rose told me what had happened. Emily had come home from seeing Hannah, beside herself with fury. “She kept shouting, ‘Is it true? Is it true?’ She knew everything. About Oliver’s affair, Nadia’s death, how Hannah had been given away. Hannah even told her that I had killed Nadia, that I’d pushed her into the sea in revenge for sleeping with Oliver!”
“My God,” I said. “Did Emily believe her?”
She put her head in her hands. “I don’t know. I hope not—I don’t think so. . . . I don’t know! She said that even if it wasn’t true, it was still Oliver’s fault she jumped, that he drove her to it.” Rose burst into tears. “And she said I was as bad as Oliver, because I’d known all along about Hannah, about Oliver’s affair and Nadia’s death, and didn’t tell her. She said I’d covered up for him, that I was as disgusting as he was. God, it’s all such a mess. She hates us, absolutely hates us.”
I looked at Oliver, and he put a hand on his wife’s arm, but she snatched it away, continuing to cry bitterly. “She said she never wanted to see us again, that we repulsed her, and then she ran off and locked herself in her bedroom. When I went up to see her an hour later, she was gone. There was only a note, saying she never wanted to see us again.” Her eyes welled with fresh tears. “I don’t think she’ll ever forgive us.”
“Oh, Rose,” I whispered. “I’m so dreadfully sorry.”
“Why didn’t you tell me that she’d been there that day?” she asked angrily. “That she’d overheard us talking? We would have had some warning—we could have been prepared!”
“Because you told me not to contact you again!” I cried. “And I had no idea that she would go looking for you all, that she’d been watching you all this time and would eventually do this! How could I have known? I told you nine years ago that I wanted to come clean, that I wanted to put this right, but you said no—you told me to keep out of your life and leave you alone!”
—
I stayed with them for a long time, and it was past midnight by the time I left. On the drive back, the feeling of dread built and built. Would Hannah be home when I returned? What would I say to her if she was? I thought about Emily, how distressed she must be, and then of Oliver and Rose, their shock and devastation. It made me think of Toby, of how I’d feel if he told me he hated me, and the idea of it made me physically sick. I longed suddenly to be home with him and Doug, and I put my foot on the accelerator and headed back as fast as I could toward Cambridgeshire.
As I turned the corner into our road, it was almost one a.m., and I was met by a scene of such pandemonium that at first my eyes couldn’t make sense of it. The street was full of our neighbors; black smoke billowed from the upstairs windows of our home. My stomach dropped. At that moment I heard the sound of sirens, followed by two fire engines screaming down the street after me. I screeched to a halt, then scrambled out of the car, stumbling and tripping in my haste as I ran toward my burning house.
—
Doug and Toby died that night. I could describe the horror of those hours, the brutal, freeze-frame panic as I watched the firefighters battle their way through the bonfire of my house, the endless awful waiting for my husband and son to be saved. And then that moment, when all hope was lost, their bodies dragged out into the cold night air. I remember the arms and hands of strangers, neighbors, police, restraining me, stopping me from running to them, the ungodly sound of my scream.
I could describe the aftermath, the blind stumbling through what remained of my derelict life. But I won’t. I can’t relive it all again. I will tell you only the facts of what she did, Hannah, of how she paid me back.
After she left Emily, she bought petrol, two cans of it, from the local garage, then walked the streets with brazen carelessness with one in each hand. And finding the house in darkness as she’d expected (assuming, I suppose, that I, too, was safely tucked up in bed), she set to work. Afterward, a neighbor saw her running from the flames across the fields. Somewhere her plan must have gone wrong, because she was found by the police less than a mile away, badly burned herself. I imagine she wanted me to die too, but in the end the outcome was probably better for her. She had said she wanted to punish all of us: what greater punishment could there be than allowing me to go on living?
—
The trial lasted seven days. There was never any question of her being acquitted; the evidence against her was too overwhelming—not least the CCTV footage of her buying the petrol that day. And in fact I don’t think she actually cared about being caught; her aim was to destroy as many lives as possible, by whatever means, so her punishment was the least of her concerns.
The trial attracted a fair amount of media attention—the tabloids, especially, baying for her blood. TEEN SLAYS FAMILY, that sort of thing. They, like me, wanted retribution. Yet the Hannah who appeared in court defied all expectations, knocked the wind out of the jury’s sails with her doe-eyed
