‘We can return it,’ Tully suggested.

‘We’ll get through it,’ Heather replied.

She opened a bottle of red and filled up their glasses. Tully’s was still half full of white, but she just shrugged and drank it anyway.

‘A toast,’ Heather said, raising her glass. She sounded different, her accent a little broader, her words less carefully enunciated than usual. Probably the alcohol. ‘To shitty fathers.’

Tully looked at her. ‘Your dad was shitty too?’

She swallowed a large mouthful of wine. ‘Still is.’

‘But I thought he died?’ Tully tried to recall the circumstances of his supposed death. ‘In a . . . a car accident?’

‘I just said he died because it sounded less shameful than saying he was in jail,’ Heather said. ‘But there’s no point in lying now, is there?’ She smiled, one of those heartbreakingly sad smiles. ‘He killed my mum. That’s why he’s in there.’

Tully sat up. For the first time all day, she put her drink down. ‘Wow. Heather, I’m so sorry.’

Heather waved this away. ‘He was always abusive. For as long as I could remember, I was afraid of him. He could be nice, sure, but I never knew when he would turn violent.’

‘That’s awful,’ Rachel said, also sitting forward.

‘Were you afraid of Stephen when you were growing up?’ Heather asked.

‘Not at all,’ Tully said. ‘That’s the strangest part. How could we not have known?’

‘I suppose some people are masters at keeping it hidden,’ Rachel said.

‘It’s a trait of Dad’s that we inherited, Tul.’

‘But not anymore,’ Tully said.

Rachel and Heather nodded. ‘Not anymore.’

65

RACHEL

One month later . . .

‘Hi,’ Rachel said from the doorway of Mum’s room.

Mum looked over at her blankly, which was a little frustrating, as it was the third time Rachel had visited in as many days. Since Dad’s death, she found she couldn’t stay away.

The day after the wedding, they’d all had to go to the police station to give statements, except Mum, who had been declared unfit by the forensic medical officer. They’d all consistently said that Mum had been the one to swing the candlestick – apart from the celebrant who said she’d been too busy signing the register to notice anything – and a hearing had determined that to be the case. It was possible that the prosecution could still charge Mum with something, but Sonny explained that even if they did, it was unlikely Mum would live long enough to face it. The event had made the papers – GROOM DIES AT THE ALTAR – but it had been written up as an accident; the story was that he’d slipped and hit his head. It was preferable to groom murdered by daughter who then blamed killing on ex-wife with advanced dementia.

The wedding had entered Rachel’s nightmares several times now. Each time, a different person held the candlestick – sometimes it was her, sometimes Tully, sometimes Heather, sometimes Fiona Arthur. Sometimes Dad wasn’t hit immediately, and he fell to his knees first to beg for mercy. ‘You’d know if I was an abuser,’ he said, looking directly at Rachel. That little seed of doubt had wormed its way into her thoughts lately, but when it did, she quickly quashed it. If he wasn’t, why had he grabbed Mum like that in the chapel? And why had Mum stashed all that money away?