She can still feel it – the shock of that word: killer. The sour plunge it brought about in her tummy. Sitting in the car, turning the word over in her head, she thinks of Anton, the soft timbre of his voice, the gentleness of his expression, and tries to marry this image of him with her recently acquired knowledge of his violent history. It seems incongruous. For the past two weeks, she has kept returning to the facts, trying to parse them to make sense of what she’s learnt, but still she can’t quite believe it. Two weeks of careful avoidance, the attendant guilt deepening every time she hears the creak of a floorboard overhead or catches the scent of cigarette smoke on the air through the open French windows.

In the evenings, sometimes, she can hear him out there in the garden, waiting for her. And yesterday a letter was pushed under the door.

There are many different versions of the truth. Just because something is reported doesn’t make it fact. Remember our conversation about Agamemnon and Iphigenia? Was she sacrificed for the sacred deer or did she change into a goddess? Different accounts, different outcomes. What matters is what you choose to believe. I did not do that of which I am accused …

Her head hurts thinking about it. She looks at the list of Google results, the lives of all the other Anton Woodburys scattered around the world. Tentatively she scrolls down the page until she finds him. She selects a result, clicks on it.

EVENING HERALD
25 MAY 2000

Behind Façade of Happy Marriage Was Violence and Betrayal

To the casual observer, Anton Woodbury and his wife Charlotte had it all.

He was 41, a successful businessman, and she was six years his junior, attractive and sociable. They lived with their two young children in a plush Victorian terraced house in Dublin’s upmarket Dún Laoghaire.

Neighbours included former Attorney General N______, and the acclaimed theatre director D________.

But the social life, the material success and veneer of happiness were merely a façade concealing a ‘shell marriage’, full of bitter recriminations, infidelities and violent rows.

In the early hours of 2 August last year, it also turned into a recipe for murder.