‘What are you talking about?’ she asks and her voice is heavy with bewilderment.

‘Alex, my Alex,’ I say as evenly as I can. ‘He told us this morning. He was with Joe when he died. He found him unwell and …’ I can’t say the rest. I can’t bring myself to have someone, especially not Kathleen, judge Alex.

‘And what?’ Kathleen asks.

Ciara continues. ‘He didn’t call for help. He chose not to. He saw the diary and he was so upset, so angry, he let my father die.’ Ciara’s voice is devoid of emotion. She is not upset with Alex. She’s not angry with him. ‘He’s with the police now. Making a statement about it all.’

‘They took him away,’ I blurt, thinking of his stricken face as he climbed into the back of the police car.

Kathleen is shaking her head. ‘That’s impossible,’ she says.

‘It’s all too possible. Those two officers, King and Black or whatever their names are. They cautioned him and he left with him.’

Kathleen is still shaking her head. I want to rattle her. To grab her by the shoulders and scream in her face that it’s her fault, just like Ciara screamed in her face.

‘No. Not that. I’m not talking about the police. I’m talking about Joe. It’s impossible he was still alive when Alex went into the room.’

She looks stricken. Panicked for the first time in all of this. Her eyes dart between Ciara and me.

‘He was dead. He was definitely dead when I left the room. I made sure of it,’ she stutters.

Chapter Seventy-One

Ciara

Now

I can’t quite believe what I’m hearing. Kathleen? Her words stop me in my tracks.

‘What?’ I exclaim, and I can see that Heidi’s eyes are as wide as mine.

Kathleen is fidgeting, curling her hair behind her ear. Her legs jiggling up and down with nervous energy. She shakes her head periodically, as if trying to put together the pieces of a puzzle in her mind, and then stops.

‘I … should’ve checked for a pulse. But he wasn’t breathing. I know that. He was still and he’d stopped fighting me …’

I’m dazed by her words.

‘I don’t understand,’ I tell her.

There is nothing about this that makes sense. Kathleen has grieved the loudest and hardest of all of us and now she’s saying she was responsible all along? Were her tears borne out of guilt and not grief?

‘I don’t know how I can make this any clearer,’ Kathleen says. ‘I … I killed him.’ She pauses, chokes back a sob then takes a deep breath to try to compose herself. ‘I put a pillow over his face, a knee to his chest, and I held it down until he stopped moving.’

She is looking at neither of us as she speaks. It’s as if she is replaying her actions in her head. I see her shudder.

‘Did you know it takes longer than it usually does in the movies to kill someone that way? You have to … well, you have to try and put pressure on their chest, too. I can’t stop thinking about it. How I had to do it. How I felt him struggle beneath me, but I was trying to make it easier for him. To make it quicker. I read about it …’