The Mammoth Book Of Best British Crime, Volume 8

Driven Ian Rankin

I’m the one you all hate, the one you’ve been hearing and reading about. I was a hero for a short time, but now I’m the villain. Well, not the villain. Do you want to hear my side of the story? I have this need to tell someone what happened and why it happened. Here’s the truth of it: I was brought up to believe in the sanctity of life, and this has been my downfall.

I am a son of the manse. A curious phrase; it seems to be used by the media as shorthand of some kind. But it happens also to be true. My father was a Church of Scotland minister in a career spanning nearly forty years. He’d known my mother since primary school. I was their only child. In my late teens, I calculated that impregnation (a word my father would probably have used) probably took place on their Isle of Mull honeymoon. Early July they were married (by my grandfather, also a kirk minister), and I entered the world on April 1st the following year. A hard birth, according to family legend, which may explain the lack of brothers and sisters. My mother told me once that she feared I’d been stillborn, so quiet was I. Even when the doctor slapped my backside, I merely frowned and gave a pout (family legend again).

“I knew right then, you’d grow up quiet,” my mother would say. Well, she was right. I studied hard at school, did as little sport as possible, and preferred the library to the playground. At home, my father’s den became my refuge. He’d collected thousands upon thousands of books, and started me with parables and other “wisdom stories”, including the Fables of Aesop. I grew up, quite literally unable to hurt a fly. I would open windows to release them. I would lift worms from the baking summer paths and make a burrow for them with a finger-poke of the nearest soil, covering them over to shield them from the sun. I turned down my parents’ offer of pets, aware that everything had to die and that I would miss them terribly when the time came. Nobody ever called me “odd”; not until very recently. But then you know all about that, don’t you?

What you can’t know is that I thought my upbringing normal and untroubling, and still do. After school, there was university, and after university a lengthy period of speculation as to what should come next. Lecturing appealed, but I was torn between Comparative Religion and Philosophy. I could train for “the cloth”, but felt two generations of church service was perhaps enough. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe in God (though I had doubts, as many young people do); it was more a feeling that I would be better suited elsewhere. My father had taken to his bed, in thrall to the cancer which had slumbered inside him for years. My mother was strong, and then not so strong. I helped as best I could — shopping, cleaning and cooking. Between chores, I would retire to the den — it had become mine by default — and continue my studies. I learned at long last to drive, so as to be able to visit the supermarket, loading the car with porage oats, smoked fish and loose-leaf tea, tonic water, washing-powder and soap. Once a week I wrote out the shopping-list. Other days, I stayed home. Sometimes we would manoeuvre my father into the walled garden, a rug tucked around him, the transistor radio close to his ear. My mother would pretend to weed, so he couldn’t see she wasn’t able.

Then the day came when he asked me to kill him.

The bed had been moved downstairs, into the sitting room. There was a commode in one corner. Some furniture had been removed from the room, meaning the hallway was more cluttered than before. A few of his old congregation still visited, though my father was loath to let them witness his deterioration.

“Still, some people find it necessary,” he told me. “It strengthens them to see others weaken.”

“But it’s kindness, too, surely,” I answered. He merely smiled. It was a few days after this that, having just accepted another small beaker of the green opiate mixture, he said he was more than ready to die. I was seated on the edge of the bed, and reached out to take his hand. The skin was like rice-paper.

“That stuff you keep giving me — don’t think I don’t know what it is. Liquid morphine. A couple of glassfuls would probably do the job.”

“You know I can’t do that.”

“If you love me, you will.”

“I can’t.”

“You want to see me get worse?”

“There’s always hope.”

He gave a dry chuckle at that. Then, after a period of silence: “Best not say anything to Mother.” I know now what I should have said to him: it’s your fault I’m like this. You made me this way.

It took him another six weeks to die. Three months after his funeral, my mother followed him. They left me the manse, having bought it from the Church fifteen years before. The parish had moved the new minister and his young family into a new-build bungalow. After a time, I was forgotten about. My parents’ old friends and parishioners stopped visiting. I think I made them feel awkward. They looked around the rooms and hallway, as if on the lookout for expected changes of décor or ornament. The bed, freshly made, was still downstairs. The commode was dusted weekly. The lawn grew wild, the beds went unweeded. But curtains were changed and washed seasonally. The kitchen gleamed. I ate sometimes at my father’s old desk, a book propped open in front of me.

The years passed.

I became a keener driver — maps plotting my course into the countryside around the city, then further afield — west to Ullapool, north to the Black Isle. One daring long weekend, I travelled by ferry from Rosyth to the continent. I ate mussels and rich chocolate, but preferred home. Books travelled with me. I became adept at finding cheap editions in Edinburgh’s various secondhand shops. Every now and then I would see a job advertised in the newspaper, and would send off for the application form. I never got round to returning them. My life was busy enough and fulfilling. I was reading Aristophanes and Pliny, Stendhal and Chekhov. I listened to my parents’ records and tapes — Bach, Gesualdo, Vivaldi, Sidney Bechet. In the attic, I discovered a reel-to-reel deck with a box of tapes my father had recorded from the radio — concerts and comedy shows. I preferred the former, but concentrated fiercely on the latter. Laughter could be disconcerting.

Oh, God.

I say “Oh, God” because it’s now time to talk about him. No getting around it; pointless to tell you any more about my shopping trips, tastes in music and books... All of it, pointless. My life has been condensed. For all of you, it begins with the moment I met him. Everything that I was up to that point you’ve reduced to words like “bachelor” and “loner”, and phrases like “son of the manse”. I hope I’ve shown these to be reductive. I’m not excusing myself; I feel my actions merit no apology. It was a country road, that’s all. Not too far out of town, just beyond the bypass. A winding lane, edged with hedgerows. The sun was low in the sky, but off to one side. Then a bend in the road. Dvorak on Radio Three. A fence, with trees beyond it. Smoke, but not very much of it. A car, concertinaed against one of the largest trunks. Tyre-marks showing where it had torn through the fence.

I pulled to a stop, but only once I was safely past the bend. Flashers on, and then I ran back. A blue car, leaking petrol, its engine exposed. Windscreen intact, but frosted with cracks. Just the one figure inside. A man in the driving seat. He was conscious and moaning, head rolling. The airbag had worked. I managed to yank open his door. It made an ugly grating sound. He was not wearing the seatbelt.

“Are you all right?”

It was an effort to pull him from the wreck. He kept saying the word “No” over and over.

“You’ll be okay,” I assured him.

As I hauled him to safety, hugging him to me, his face was close to mine. He half-turned his head. I could feel his breath on my cheek. There was warm blood running from a wound in his scalp.

“Don’t,” he said. And then: “I’ll do it again.”

I realized almost immediately what he meant. No accident, but an attempt at suicide. Seatbelt unfastened, picking up speed as the bend came into view...

“No, you won’t,” I told him.

“Just leave me.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I believe in the sanctity of life.”

I had laid him on the ground, a bed of leaves beneath. At first I took his spasm for a seizure of some kind, but he was laughing.

Laughing.

“That’s a good one,” he was able to say at last, blood bubbling from the corners of his mouth. Another car had stopped. I walked towards it, hoping the driver would own a mobile phone. There was an explosion of hot air from behind me. The crashed car was on fire. The heat was bearable. The injured man, I realized, had craned his neck so he could watch me rather than the explosion. His shoulders were still shaking. A young couple had emerged from their open topped sports car. I felt sure they would own phones; indeed, led lives which felt them necessary.

“You all right, pal?” the male said. He was wearing an earring. I nodded. His girlfriend was wide-eyed.

“Another minute, he’d’ve been toast,” she commented. Then, fixing her eyes on me: “You’re a hero.”

A hero?

The description would send me to the den that night, to consult any books I could find. I didn’t feel like I’d committed an act of bravery. I didn’t feel “heroic”. Heroes were for wartime, or belonged to the realm of mythology. I wished my father were still alive. We could have discussed the notion and its implications.

A police car had arrived first at the crash site, followed a few minutes later by the paramedics. The driver was sitting up by this time, arms wrapped around his chest. He was in his thirties, around the same age as me. His hair was thick, dark, and wavy, with just a few glints of grey. It had been a couple of days since he’d shaved. “Swarthy” was the description that came to mind. His eyes had dark rings around them. Tufts of chest-hair welled up from beneath his open-necked shirt. His arms were hairy, too. Even when I wasn’t looking at him, I sensed he was keeping a careful eye on me. He had been holding a white handkerchief — my handkerchief — to his scalp-wound.

“He was trying to kill himself,” I told one of the policemen. “That’s a crime, isn’t it?”

He nodded. “And we only prosecute the failures.” I think he meant this light-heartedly, but I spent part of the evening mulling his words over, reading meaning into them.

“Did he say as much?” he asked me. I nodded. But later that night a different policeman came to my door with what he termed “a few follow-up questions”. I learned that the man whose life I had saved was called Donald Thorpe, and that he was denying being suicidal. It was “just an accident”, caused by his lack of acquaintance with the route and some mulchy leaves on the road surface.

“But he told me,” I insisted. “He said he would do it again.”

The officer stared at me. His hands were in his pockets. Previously, he’d seemed interested only in his surroundings, but now he asked me if I lived alone. When I nodded, he asked if the house had been in my family a long time.

“It has,” I agreed.

“It’s almost like a museum,” he commented, looking around him again. “You could open it to the public.” I decided to ignore this. “Gashes and bruises, maybe some pelvic damage and a rib that’ll cause him gyp.” He turned his attention back to me. “He was dazed when you reached him; might explain what you heard him say.”

I made no reply.

“Papers’ll be after you for a picture.”

“Why?”

“They like the occasional feel-good story. You’re a hero, Mr Jamieson.”

“I’m not,” I was quick to correct him. “I only did what anyone would do.”

“Well, you were there. And that’s all that matters.”

Less than an hour after he left, the first reporter arrived. I started to let him into the house, but then thought better of it — which is why the word “recluse” appeared in his third or fourth version of the story.

“Just tell the readers what happened,” he explained. “In your own words.”

“Who else’s would I use?”

He laughed as though I’d made a joke. He was holding a tiny recording device, holding it quite close to my mouth. But he was looking past me at the hall’s “cramped furniture and outdated floral wallpaper” (as he himself put it later). I told him the story anyway, deciding to leave out the suicide bit.

“The other couple who stopped,” he said, “they saw you drag the victim clear as the car burst into flames...”

“That’s not quite how it happened.”

But it was how he wrote the story up. It didn’t matter that I’d told his recorder differently. I became the CRASH INFERNO HERO. When his photographer arrived on my doorstep, he asked me if I had any burns to my hands or arms, any blood-stained or charred clothing. I had already showered and changed into fresh clothes, so I shook my head. The bloodied handkerchief, discarded when the medics had arrived on the scene, was steeping in the sink.

“Any chance we can get a shot of you at the site?” he then asked. But he had second thoughts. “Car’s probably already been towed...” He rubbed at the line of his jaw. “The hospital,” he decided. “Bedside, how would that be?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

How could I tell him? Meeting Thorpe, the first question I would need to ask would be: why did you lie? Why keep the suicide attempt a secret? And then: will you do it again? (Of course, I would meet Thorpe again, at his hospital bed. But that was for later.)

After further negotiation, the photographer settled for me on my doorstep, then standing beside my car, arms folded.

“Don’t you feel a bit of pride?” he asked. “You’re a bloody lifesaver. What about a smile to go with it?”

I lost count of the number of pictures he took — well over twenty. And as he was finishing, another photographer arrived, five minutes ahead of his reporter. And so it went for much of the rest of the night. Even the neighbours became curious and emerged from their homes, to be collared and interviewed by the press.

Very quiet... private income... looked after both parents up to their death... no girlfriend... goes out in his car sometimes...

The Reluctant Hero.

Quick-Thinking Quiet Man.

Brave and Bashful.

Local Hero.

This last they used most often over the next few days. Faces I hadn’t seen for a while came calling — members of my father’s congregation, the ones who’d visited him during his illness. A neighbour over the back called to me one day and passed a home-baked cake across the fence. There were more requests from the media for bedside photos. Just a quick handshake. I appeared on two radio shows, and there was even talk of a civic reception, some sort of bravery award or medal. And then, just when it seemed to be quieting down, a call from the police.

“He’d like to see you. I said we’d pass on the message.”

Meaning Robert Thorpe; Robert Thorpe wanted to see me.

“But why?”

“To say thanks, I suppose.”

“I don’t need him to say thanks.” But then again, maybe I did. Maybe in saving his life I’d convinced him that life itself was worth living. And wouldn’t it be heartening to hear him say as much?

So I went.

And I wonder now — was that my fatal mistake?

There were only a couple of photographers this time. They were waiting in the corridor outside Thorpe’s ward. They had found a young nurse to stand next to the bed. She was to pretend to be changing a drip. I’d be shaking hands with the man I’d rescued. This was all being explained as we walked into the ward. Thorpe was sitting up. Part of his hair had been shaved, and the black stitches in his scalp looked fierce.

“Are you Mr Jamieson?” he asked, holding out a hand. I could only nod that I was. He gripped my hand and the cameras clicked. “As I keep telling them, I don’t remember too much.”

“But you’re all right?”

“So the scan says.”

“Just one more, please, gentlemen,” one photographer was saying.

“How about a smile, Mr Jamieson?” asked the other.

“And if our glamorous assistant could lean a little further in towards the patient...” (He meant the nurse, of course.)

Then the other photographer took a call on his phone and handed it to me. “Newsroom want a word.”

More questions, all about how I felt and what had been said to me. Then it was Thorpe’s turn to speak.

“Saved my life, so I’m told... eternally grateful to him... don’t know how I’ll repay... It’s all a bit of a blur...”

I realized I was drifting towards the swing-doors, keen to be leaving. But Thorpe waved for me to stay. When he handed the photographer’s phone back, he asked if he and I could be left alone for a minute. One of the photographers was asking the nurse for her name and a contact number as they left. There was a chair next to the bed, so I sat down.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I didn’t bring you anything.” There was nothing on the bedside cabinet except a plastic jug of water and a beaker. No cards from family, no flowers or anything. Thorpe just shrugged.

“They’re letting me out tomorrow.”

“You’ll be glad to get home.”

He gave a low chuckle, reminding me of the crash scene. His eyes were boring into mine.

“‘...the sanctity of human life’.”

“You remember that much then?”

“I remember everything, Mr Jamieson.”

I was silent for a moment. I wanted some of the water in the jug, but couldn’t bring myself to ask.

“Go on,” he said with a smile. “You’re dying to ask.”

“You were trying to kill yourself.” It was a statement rather than a question.

“Is that what you think?”

“You didn’t want to be saved. You said you’d do it again.”

“Do what, Mr Jamieson?”

“Kill yourself.”

“Is that what you told the police?”

I swallowed and licked my lips. I could feel sweat on my forehead. The ward was stifling. Thorpe gave a shrug.

“Doesn’t matter anyway.”

“Are you going to do it again?”

“I’m not going to kill myself, if that’s what’s bothering you.”

“So it sunk in then?”

“What?”

“What I said to you about the sanctity of life.”

“Is that what you want?”

I nodded again. Thorpe closed his eyes slowly.

“Go home, Jamieson. Enjoy it while you can.”

“Enjoy what exactly?”

The eyes opened a little. “Everything,” he whispered. To my ears, it seemed louder than any explosion.

You know what happened next.

Thorpe walked out of the hospital and disappeared. It was a couple of days before neighbours began to complain of a smell in the tenement stairwell. Police broke down the door on the second floor and found two bloodstained corpses. Ten days they’d been there. Both men were unemployed. They shared with a third, and he was missing. His name was Robert Thorpe. The car he’d crashed had belonged to one of the two. There were signs in the living room that a card game had been underway. Poker, according to reports. Cigarette-butts littered the carpet. They had been emptied from one of the murder weapons — a solid glass ashtray. It had been reduced to fragments by the force of impact against the first victim’s skull. Three empty bottles of vodka, traces of cannabis, the remains of a dozen cans of super-strength lager... The second victim had attempted escape but made it only as far as the hallway. He had been punched, kicked and bludgeoned in what the media kept referring to as a “sustained and horrific assault”, quoting one of the police officers.

Questions were asked. Why had police not checked on the flat in the aftermath of the crash? Why had none of the neighbours come forward earlier? What did it say about the state of our society that no one had intervened?

And why had Richard Jamieson felt it necessary to save the killer’s life?

THE MONSTER WHO LIVED — that was the headline I’ll always remember. Thorpe was pictured in his hospital bed, shaking my hand. It seemed to me that the pretty nurse should have been in the shot, but she wasn’t. I was aware that software existed which could alter photographs. I wished they’d used it on me instead of her, but of course I was the subject of their follow-up stories. The journalists were back at my door. They wanted to know if I felt anger, embarrassment, even shame.

“Aren’t you ashamed, Mr Jamieson?”

“Shouldn’t he have been left to die?”

“Don’t you regret...?”

“Didn’t he say anything...?”

I stopped answering the door. I left the house only in the middle of the night, shopping at the 24-hour supermarket on Chesser Avenue. I kept the curtains closed in the den. I ate from tins and drank from cans. I even let the bin go uncollected, so they couldn’t accost me as I walked up the path with it to the pavement.

Did I feel angry? No, not really. But I better understood the situation a few days later when he killed again. A shopkeeper this time, the event caught on the security camera which had been installed to deter shoplifters. It had failed to deter Thorpe. His haul consisted of cigarettes, alcohol and cash from the till. The victim left behind a wife and five children. My doorbell rang and rang. The voices called questions through the letter-box. One of them pretended to be a postman with a delivery. I opened the door.

“He’s killed again, Mr Jamieson. Do you have anything to say to the grieving widow? She wouldn’t be a widow if you’d...”

I slammed the door shut, but could still hear his voice.

Your father was a man of the church... your grandfather, too... how would they feel, Mr Jamieson?

Did I feel regret?

Did I feel shame?

Yes, yes, yes. Most definitely yes. And anger, too, eventually, as the meaning of his words sunk in. He hadn’t wanted to be saved because he’d known he would do it again — as in kill again. Don’t... I’ll do it again... And I had allowed this to happen. I had allowed the monster to live.

The TV and radio kept me up to date with the manhunt. Police questioned me several times. Could I shed any light? I explained it to them as best I could. One of the officers was the same man who’d come to my house that night with the follow-up questions, the one who had doubted Thorpe’s attempted suicide. He kept shifting in his chair, as if he could not get comfortable. His face was pale. I knew from the media that the police were under a good deal of pressure. They had let Thorpe go. They hadn’t checked his flat. They hadn’t noticed that the blood on his clothes belonged to more than one person. They shared a certain culpability with me in the minds of the press.

“If only you’d left him to die,” the officer said as he paused on my doorstep.

“I thought I was doing the right thing.”

“Turns out you were wrong, Mr Jamieson.”

Wrong? But when I rescued him, he was still an innocent man, his crimes a secret. He was victim rather than monster, and I was the hero of the hour, wasn’t I?

Wasn’t I?

Well, wasn’t I?

I turned to my father’s library again in search of answers, but found too little comfort. There were books about the nature of evil and the more complex nature of good. Why do we do good deeds? Is it in our nature, or does communality dictate that what is best for others is also likely to be of benefit to us? Do people become bad, or are they born that way? Robert Thorpe’s life was picked over in the days that followed. His father had been a domineering drunk, his mother addicted to painkillers. There was no evidence that he had been abused as a child, but he had grown up an outsider. His spells of employment were short and various. Girlfriends came and went. One opened her heart to a doubtless generous tabloid. He watched violent films. He liked loud rock music. He was “a bit of an anarchist”. Photos were printed, showing the trajectory of the killer’s life. A blurry child, clutching a funfair ice-cream. A teenager in sunglasses, no longer smiling for the camera. A man at a party, cigarette drooping from his mouth, sprawled across a sofa with a woman in his arms (her face softwared out, to preserve anonymity).

Lucky her.

The manhunt continued, but the media interest began to wane. There were rumours that Thorpe could have disguised himself and headed to Northern Ireland — no need of a passport. From there, it would have been straightforward to cross to Ireland proper. The Western Isles was another possibility. Or far to the south, melting into Manchester, Birmingham, or London. His photo was on show at every mainline station, and in shop windows and at bus stops. He had taken around three hundred pounds from the shopkeeper. It was only a matter of time before he struck again.

I started to emerge from my house, as a butterfly from its chrysalis. The neighbours showed little interest. There were no reporters waiting kerbside. But everywhere I went, Thorpe’s eyes stared back at me from all those wanted posters. I felt I would never be free of him. I dreamed often of crashed cars, mangled corpses, stained carpets, shattered ashtrays. I reached into my parents’ drinks cabinet for bottles of whisky and sherry, but found both foul beyond words. One night, I decided to go for a drive. I hadn’t been out of the city since the evening of the crash. I found myself steering the same route, slowing at that curve in the road, headlights picking out the remaining scraps of police tape. From a distance, there was no other sign that anything had happened here. I drove on, stopping at the all-night supermarket on my way back into the city.

Of course he was waiting for me, but I couldn’t know that. I parked the car in the driveway. I lifted out the bag of shopping. I unlocked the door of the house. I closed it after me, placing the bunch of keys on the table in the hall, the same way my father and mother would have done. There was a draught, meaning an open window. But I still wasn’t thinking as I carried the shopping into the kitchen. Glass crunched underfoot. There was glass in the sink, too, and spread across the worktop. The window frame was gaping. I put down the shopping and checked the den. Someone had raided the drinks cabinet. I switched on the light in the living room. He was lying on my father’s bed. The whisky bottle was on the floor next to him, emptied. He had his hands behind his head. He had twisted his body to face the doorway.

“Hello again,” he said.

“What do you think you’re doing here?”

He had removed the stitches from his scalp. The wound hadn’t quite healed. There was a baseball-cap resting on his chest. He placed it to one side as he began to swing his legs over the side of the bed.

“I missed you,” he said. “This where you sleep?”

“I sleep upstairs.”

“That’s what I reckoned. Took a look around, hope you don’t mind.”

“The window’s broken.”

“Windows can be fixed, Richard.”

“How did you find me?”

“Your old man’s still listed in the phone book — Reverend Jamieson.” Thorpe wagged a finger. “Time you did something about that.”

“You’ve been killing people.”

“Yes, I have.”

“Why?”

There was that smile again, as if he knew some joke no one else in the world did. “I couldn’t believe it,” he said, “when they took me to hospital, cleaned me up and had me checked. And the cops, asking me questions but never quite the right questions. Every time those doors swung open, I reckoned I was done for. But they patched me up and then they let me walk right out of there.” He was pointing towards the doorway. He was still sitting on the edge of the bed, and it seemed to me that he was offering me the chance to escape, indicating the direction I should take. But I was too busy listening to his story.

“It struck me then,” he went on, “that I could do it again.”

“Kill, you mean?”

He nodded, eyes fixed on mine. “Again and again and again. So tell me, Mr Richard Jamieson, how does that square with your ‘sanctity of life’? What does the Bible tell you about that, eh?”

When I didn’t say anything, he raised himself from the bed and walked towards me.

“Is this where your old man died?” he asked.

I nodded.

He was very close to me now. He had forgotten his baseball cap. He squeezed past me without making eye contact. I followed him into the hall. He turned left into the den.

“This where he spent all his time?”

I nodded again, but he had his back to me, so I cleared my throat. “Yes,” I said.

“And now it’s all yours. We’re not so different, you and me, Richard.”

“So biology would have us believe.”

“The old human DNA... go back far enough, we’d even be related, am I right?”

“I suppose so.”

“Darwin says the apes, the Bible says Adam and Eve. Do you think Adam and Eve were apes, Richard?”

“I don’t know.” He had turned to face me. “What are you doing here?” I asked him again. “The police are looking for you.”

“But they’re not very clever — we both know that.”

“How clever do they need to be?”

He answered with a twitch of the mouth. “I’ve been thinking about you, Richard. Papers have been giving you a hard time. They reckon you should have let me top myself. How do you feel about that?” He was resting the base of his spine against my father’s desk, one foot crossed over the other, arms folded. When I didn’t answer, he repeated the question.

“Why do you need to know?” I asked him instead.

“Does there always have to be a reason? I’d have thought you’d have learned that much, despite all these bloody books.” He nodded towards the shelves. “I’ll tell you why I wanted to see you again — to thank you properly.” He gave a bow from the waist, still with arms folded. Then he eased himself upright. “Now, if you’ll excuse me...”

“What are you going to do?”

“You know what I’m going to do, Richard.”

“You’re going to kill again?”

“And again and again and again.” His voice was almost musical. “And all thanks to you and your sanctity of life. Learned from your father, I’m guessing, years before you watched him wither and die. Were there any words of comfort, Richard? Did he meet his maker with a happy and a fulsome heart? Or had he twigged by then that it’s all a joke?” He waved his arm towards the books. “All of it.”

He waited for my answer, then gave up, brushing past me again as he stepped into the hall.

“I can’t let you go,” I told him.

“Good for you.”

“You know I can’t.”

I had lifted the bottle of sherry from the cabinet. There was less than an inch of liquid left inside. I was holding it by the neck. He stood there in the hall, waiting with his back to me, head angled a little as if consulting some hidden force beyond the ceiling.

“I know you can’t,” was all he said. It was as if he’d become the passenger and I the driver.

I lay down on my father’s bed that night, a baseball-cap resting on my chest. Was I hero or villain? I’m hoping you’ll tell me. I’m hoping one of you will tell me. I need to know. I really need to be told.

Again and again and again.