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Chapters (93)
  1. Cover
  2. Dedication
  3. Prologue
  4. Chapter 1
  5. Part One
  6. Chapter 1
  7. Chapter 2
  8. Chapter 3
  9. Chapter 4
  10. Chapter 5
  11. Chapter 6
  12. Chapter 7
  13. Chapter 8
  14. Chapter 9
  15. Chapter 10
  16. Part Two
  17. Chapter 1
  18. Chapter 2
  19. Chapter 3
  20. Chapter 4
  21. Chapter 5
  22. Chapter 6
  23. Chapter 7
  24. Chapter 8
  25. Chapter 9
  26. Chapter 10
  27. Chapter 11
  28. Chapter 12
  29. Part Three
  30. Chapter 1
  31. Chapter 2
  32. Chapter 3
  33. Chapter 4
  34. Chapter 5
  35. Chapter 6
  36. Chapter 7
  37. Part Four
  38. Chapter 1
  39. Chapter 2
  40. Chapter 3
  41. Chapter 4
  42. Chapter 5
  43. Chapter 6
  44. Chapter 7
  45. Chapter 8
  46. Chapter 9
  47. Part Five
  48. Chapter 1
  49. Chapter 2
  50. Chapter 3
  51. Chapter 4
  52. Chapter 5
  53. Chapter 6
  54. Chapter 7
  55. Chapter 8
  56. Chapter 9
  57. Chapter 10
  58. Chapter 11
  59. Part Six
  60. Chapter 1
  61. Chapter 2
  62. Chapter 3
  63. Chapter 4
  64. Chapter 5
  65. Chapter 6
  66. Chapter 7
  67. Part Seven
  68. Chapter 1
  69. Chapter 2
  70. Chapter 3
  71. Chapter 4
  72. Chapter 5
  73. Chapter 6
  74. Chapter 7
  75. Chapter 8
  76. Chapter 9
  77. Chapter 10
  78. Chapter 11
  79. Part Eight
  80. Chapter 1
  81. Chapter 2
  82. Chapter 3
  83. Chapter 4
  84. Chapter 5
  85. Chapter 6
  86. Chapter 7
  87. Chapter 8
  88. Chapter 9
  89. Epilogue
  90. Acknowledgments
  91. Reading Group Guide
  92. About the Author
  93. Copyright

It was like a gift from the gods. Everything coming together at once. Unfinished business; loose ends; all the mess of the past seventeen years nicely, neatly swept away. Now I could see it, Mousey. A way of ridding myself, not of one, but two of my enemies. And all I had to do now was persuade Johnny to come and back me up, then to stand on the bridge at nine, waiting for my trap to close.

Chapter 11

11

November 4, 2005

I hadn’t been to Eric’s house for years: not since my mother died. And when his own mother started to show signs of encroaching dementia, I began keeping my distance, sensing that Eric wanted it so. He’d always been close to Margery; always the devoted son, and for over a decade, he’d managed to live in denial of her condition.

It had begun with the hoarding; a harmless habit at first, but which slowly became an obsession. Margery kept everything—­correspondence, baby clothes, empty cigarette packs—packing them neatly into boxes, labeled in her old lady’s hand and stored, first in the cellar, then under the roof, and then in every single room in the house, stacking them against the walls. Eric had tried to clear them out, but his mother’s distress at his first attempt had ensured that there would be no second.

“She’s just a bit set in her ways,” he would say. “You’ve got to expect it, at her age.” But the fact that she was sixty-one—which seems no age at all to me now—did nothing to explain the stacks of boxes piled up in every room, or the fact that Margery would not allow strangers into the house—so that any repairs to the roof, the drains, the plumbing, or the plasterwork had to be done by Eric himself, or risk a scene from his mother.

“Mother doesn’t like change, that’s all,” Eric used to tell me. He was no wizard at DIY, but managed to keep the house in shape—at least, until his mother’s decline had forced him to bring in a carer. The first of many, as it turned out—Margery Scoones had hated them all, and unlike my own mother, who had been biddable in dementia, Margery was fiercely antagonistic: arguing that she didn’t need help; accusing her carers of stealing from her; making up wildly improbable tales of abuse; and even, on several occasions, actually calling the police, to report an intruder in her house.