Honeysuckle Cottage was on the market already. Charlotte had said she could not wait until the future of the farm was sorted out. It was all over. She just wanted a new life now.
‘Shall we stay a little longer?’ Michael asked Charlotte when the prison called to break the news of her mother’s death.
‘No,’ said Charlotte bluntly.
‘It’s all right to still love her, you know,’ said Michael, who was becoming more and more of a rock as every day passed.
Charlotte looked at him almost in surprise. ‘I know that,’ she said. ‘I’ll never stop loving her. She’ll always be my mother.’
‘So don’t you at least want to go to her funeral?’
‘No,’ said Charlotte. ‘She wouldn’t have wanted that. Not now. I don’t even want to know where she will be buried.’
‘Are you sure?’
Charlotte nodded her head quite vigorously. ‘Absolutely sure. My mother died for us all the day we learned that she was Mrs Pattinson...’
Later that day, on the night of Constance’s death, Rose Piper was feeling particularly low. And when her husband called her just after she arrived back at the section house prepared for an uncomfortable night alone, she was almost pathetically pleased to hear his voice. For a moment all she could remember was how much she had once loved him and how much she needed comfort.
‘I heard on the news,’ Simon said. ‘I knew you’d be upset.’
For the first time in so long she agreed to meet him. She accepted almost eagerly his invitation to go round to the bungalow for supper.
‘I’ll be there in an hour, and this time I won’t be late,’ she said.
He laughed then, and she remembered, too, how much she had always liked his laugh.
When she saw him and he smiled, she also remembered the effect that smile was inclined to have on her.
Supper went well. Simon had cooked his special pasta dish, and remarked very lightly that he hoped it would be better received than the last time. It was. Much better received. The pasta was good and washed down with plenty of excellent red wine. What happened afterwards was good too, and somehow inevitable.
It was also passionate. Fine earthy sex. How Rose had missed it. They hardly slept all night. It was as if they had both been waiting for this moment, saving themselves for the time when they would be together again. Certainly, in spite of the fantasies that had so disturbed her, she had not had sex with anyone else since their parting. And during their long and inventive session of lovemaking Rose found that the demons which had been plaguing her for months seemed to disappear as if by magic.
Sex with Simon was real, warm and caring. It always had been. It meant something. Almost as soon as they began to make love she felt that this was where she belonged, in his arms, and she started to come to terms with herself again, to accept herself for what she was and to stop punishing herself so much for being what she could only be.
Suddenly with devastating clarity she knew that she wanted Simon back. And she told him so. In fact she screamed the words at him at the moment of orgasm, so that he held her tighter and tighter and pushed himself into her more deeply, more desperately, than ever before.
The morning after was warm and companionable. Rose and Simon might have been apart for some months, but they had been together for nine years before that. It was only natural that they should start, over breakfast, to talk about their lives, to talk about their work. After all, they always had done.
‘Do you really think the Constance Lange case is over now?’ Simon asked her.
‘Yes, thank God, I really do,’ she responded.
‘I’m glad,’ he said. ‘You did get obsessed, you know.’
‘I do know.’ She reached out and touched his hand. The hand that had given her so much pleasure.
‘My boss told me the same thing. I suspect you’re both right. I’ll try to do better in future.’
He grinned, that heart-melting grin which had quite literally turned her legs to jelly all those years ago.
‘In that case, Airs Piper, everything will no doubt be just fine,’ he said.
He poured her more coffee, leaning forward and kissing her lightly as he did so.
‘I have to say though, I’m just amazed that the woman could get hold of all that Valium the way she did inside a prison. I mean, don’t they have any bloody security or what?’
He was munching toast. It was just a casual remark. Rose knew that. Nonetheless, she couldn’t meet his eye. She turned away and did not answer.
‘What’s the matter, Rose?’
He stared at her. The bloody man could always read her mind, and she was pretty sure he wasn’t going to like what he saw there.
She was right.
He thumped the table with the clenched fist of his right hand and cried out as if he had suddenly experienced a flash of intuition. Then he became deathly calm.
‘I don’t believe it, it was you, you gave her the pills,’ he said quietly.
Again she did not reply. She didn’t need to. She saw the dark cloud of anger descend over him. His mood changes were always so dramatic, had been for years now. That, of course, had been part of their problem, part of what had led to their parting, part of all the torment and tension which she had over the last twelve hours or so banished from her mind.
He was no longer the gentle funny man she had spent the night with. No longer the passionate lover or the affectionate husband. He was absolutely furious. Plain hopping mad.
‘You played God with that woman!’ he screamed at her.
He changed so fast, and that was not all of it. There was no tenderness in him now, none at all.
She realised there was little point in trying to explain, but she so wanted him to understand. He never did understand, of course, but after their wonderful night together she could not just give up without trying.
‘Constance Lange wanted to die, she could not live with what she felt she had been responsible for,’ Rose began, the tiredness of her sleepless night suddenly overwhelming her as much as the hopelessness of trying to talk to Simon when he switched into this kind of mood.
‘She did a deal with me. She would tell the truth, in as much as she knew it, if I would help her die with dignity. She had never wanted to hurt anyone, you know. She was no murderer, for Christ’s sake, just a woman who liked sex too much and let it get the better of her. She did not want to leave prison. Her only wish was to be able to end it all before having to face the outside world again. She at least deserved that. I kept to the bargain, that was all.’
‘You’re a monster.’ Simon was still screaming at her. ‘You made a deal to kill in order to get a result. How far will you go, Rose, for your damned career? Is there any limit?’
‘It wasn’t like that,’ replied Rose in a very small voice. The louder Simon shouted, the more quietly she had started to speak.
‘It fucking well is for me, darling,’ he shouted at her. ‘I can’t live with you, you may as well know that now. How could I live with you? How could anyone live with you?’
She cringed, cowering away from him, completely beaten, and yet a part of her was so terribly angry that anyone could do this to her, reduce her to this. He hadn’t even finished. His anger rose to a near hysterical crescendo.
‘Forget last night — that was just a stupid mistake, a one-off fuck! OK? I still want a divorce — fast!’
Rose walked out into the cool morning air. The sun was rising above the city below. Her husband’s words tore at the core of her. ‘...a stupid mistake, a one-off fuck...’