You could have prevented twenty people jumping from the top of Tower Bridge.

But you chose to lie.

92

Or you choose to tell the truth, but not the whole truth, and nothing like the truth.

Maybe your wife died a few years back. Some cancerous mass on her brain meant that she didn’t always recognise who you were when you visited, and sometimes you’d be visiting a person that you didn’t even know. Somebody mean. Spiteful. Abusive. You told yourself that the thing in her skull was pressing on parts of her mind and making her act that way.

Sure, you can forgive her for that but you can’t forgive yourself for telling the doctors that you wanted her to die there, not at home. You didn’t know who she would be, day-to-day, and couldn’t put your daughters through that.

Only you know that you instructed the hospital not to resuscitate her if she crashed again. And it was only a gesture when you agreed that they could cut her brain straight out of her head to examine after death but they couldn’t have her heart. A small consolation that something might be discovered that would go on to help others in a similar situation in the future.

Her heart belonged to you and your daughters, though all of your actions demonstrate that you loved her with every bit of your brain.

Then you ploughed everything into those girls and your work and you never allowed yourself to grieve properly, so, when the detectives come knocking, you say that Dinah took it the worst when her mother passed away. Like that explains why she would join a suicide cult.

You brush it off like it accounts for everything.

‘Did Dinah have any new friends that have come into her life recently?’

‘She was out a lot, meeting people. She took it the worst when her mother died.’

‘Did Dinah drink a lot or do drugs that you know about?’

‘She liked to party, blow off steam. She really did take it the worst when her mother died.’

‘Were there any money problems? Did she owe anybody anything?’

‘You see, her mum died a couple of years back and she took it quite badly so I’ve loosened the reins a little on her and I cover her expenses when she gets a little too carried away.’

You downplay your wife’s death and it loses its weight, its meaning. So the police look into the drugs and the partying and the spending.

‘Sir, was your daughter an ungrateful sack of shit, who walked out one morning to meet with some cult friends and bring London to a standstill by diving off Chelsea Bridge with a rope tied around her skinny little neck?’

You have to say no.