It had been an excellent choice with good friends made among her new neighbours.
I parked on the driveway and rang the doorbell, hoping that she wasn’t still in bed. She wasn’t. The door slowly opened.
I hadn’t seen her for some time, as I had decided that it was better to keep away rather than antagonise Joe, so I was shocked by her appearance. She had clearly aged considerably and her skin had a touch of yellow about it from jaundice, no doubt brought on by the cancer in her pancreas, or its treatment.
‘Hello, Mary,’ I said.
‘What do you want?’ she asked in an unfriendly tone. ‘You should be in prison.’
‘I didn’t kill your daughter,’ I said. ‘I loved her.’
I could tell that she didn’t believe me.
‘Can I come in?’
‘What for? To kill me as well?’
‘Don’t be silly,’ I said. ‘I loved Amelia with all my heart. I would never have hurt a single hair on her head and, if you think hard enough, you would realise that.’
‘But Joe says...’
‘Joe is lying to you,’ I said.
‘Why would he?’
It was a good question.
She was confused and I waited in silence. Eventually she stepped to one side to let me in.
‘Do you want a coffee?’ she asked.
‘Yes, please. That would be lovely.’
We went through to her kitchen and she put the kettle on to boil.
‘How are you?’ I asked tentatively.
‘Don’t ask,’ she said, throwing her hands up. ‘The doctors have told me I should have three months but I feel so weak right now that I think it could be just three days.’
‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Comes to all of us in the end, I suppose. Always too soon.’
It certainly was for Amelia.
‘I hear you had some friends from Weybridge come to see you,’ I said, getting straight to the point of my visit. ‘That was nice.’
‘Jim and Gladys,’ she agreed, nodding. ‘They lived next door to Reg and me for nearly thirty years. They’re a lovely couple. Our best friends.’
‘Have I ever met them?’ I asked.
‘You may have. I’m sure they would have been invited to your wedding up in Wales. But maybe they didn’t come. I can’t really remember. Don’t seem to remember much these days.’
‘What’s their surname?’ I asked.
‘Wilson,’ she said, remembering that with ease. ‘Jim and Gladys Wilson. He was a stockbroker, same as Reg. But he’s been retired a long time now.’
Mary poured hot water into two cups containing instant coffee and handed one to me. ‘Milk and sugar?’
‘Just a little milk.’
She poured it from a plastic bottle and gave the mixture a stir. We both sat down at the kitchen table.
‘What did you and the Wilsons talk about?’ I asked.
‘Our ailments mostly,’ she said with a hollow laugh. ‘We’ve all got so much wrong with us that it’s a miracle we’re still here.’
‘Anything else?’ I asked, pushing hard.
‘Old neighbours and friends and how so many of them have recently dropped off the perch.’
‘Do they get on well with the people who bought your house?’ I asked.
‘They seem to. Gladys said they are not as nice as neighbours as we were but I think she’s just being kind. They’re much younger than we were, of course. A new generation.’
Try as I might, I couldn’t get Mary to speak any more about what the Wilsons had said about the sale of her house. Maybe she hadn’t heard or perhaps she had forgotten. Probably the latter.
She sighed and looked at me. ‘Don’t get old, Bill. It’s not much fun.’
Amelia would never get old. Just like James Dean and Marilyn Monroe. And neither of those two would have retained their fascination and glamour for such a long time if they were now in their dotage, confined to a nursing home, doubly incontinent and with senile dementia. Maybe there was some advantage in dying young, but not for those of us left behind.
I drank some more of my coffee and we sat in silence for a while.
‘I miss her terribly, you know,’ Mary said unhappily.
‘So do I.’
Tears rolled down Mary’s cheeks and dripped onto her scrubbed pine kitchen table. It was as much as I could do not to cry with her.
And straight into this tableau of misery walked Joe Bradbury.
‘Hi, Mum, it’s only me,’ he called as he walked through the front door. ‘What is Amelia’s car doing outside?’
He came into the kitchen and saw me.
‘What the fuck are you doing?’ he shouted. ‘Get out of here at once.’
‘I’ll leave only if your mother asks me to.’
He turned to her. ‘Tell him to get out,’ he demanded.
‘Now, now, dear,’ Mary said. ‘Why can’t you two be friends?’
‘Friends?’ he screamed. ‘With him? Don’t be stupid. He killed your daughter.’
‘I did not,’ I said. ‘And you know it.’
‘Get out,’ he shouted at me again.
I remained exactly where I was. I was fed up with always taking the course of least resistance, of not antagonising him in order to have a quiet life. It was time to stand up to his bullyboy tactics and face him down. But what I hadn’t expected was for him to grab a large carving knife from the block beside the cooker.
‘Now, get out,’ he said, brandishing the eight-inch blade in my direction. ‘I won’t ask you again.’
My heart was racing faster than a filly’s in the Nunthorpe Stakes, but still I didn’t stand up.
‘What are you going to do?’ I asked in as level a tone as I could manage. ‘Kill me too?’
‘Joe, put the knife down,’ Mary said, but he took absolutely no notice of her and it suddenly dawned on me that he might use it. Perhaps it was time to heed the old adage that he who fights and runs away, lives to fight another day.
‘Okay, okay,’ I said, standing up. ‘I’m going.’
I backed my way into the hall, never taking my eyes off the knife. Joe followed me.
‘Bye, Mary,’ I shouted past him.
‘Bye, Bill dear,’ she replied, seemingly totally unaware of the seriousness of the situation.
That seemed to make Joe even more angry.
‘You leave my mother alone, do you hear,’ he hissed. ‘Come here again and I’ll kill you.’
‘Developed a taste for killing people, have you, Joe?’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘I just wondered if you enjoyed strangling your own sister?’
‘I didn’t kill her,’ he said, his lips drawn back in a frightening grimace of hate. ‘You did that. You’d been killing her for years, cutting her off from her true family and driving her crazy. I loathe you. In fact, I’d be doing everyone a favour by killing you. Everyone knows you’re a murderer. They’ll say you got your just deserts.’
I now became genuinely worried. He was demented and, perhaps for the first time, I thought he was truly mad. And mad people act impulsively and to hell with the consequences.
The time for goading him was past. Now, I had to concentrate on getting out of this alive.
I continued to back across the hall until I could feel the front door behind me. He followed, getting ever closer, the knife held out in front, his manic staring eyes clearly visible behind his glasses.
‘Come on, Joe,’ I said in as consolatory a tone as I could muster under the circumstances. ‘Don’t do anything silly. Put the knife down.’
Try as I might, I couldn’t keep the fear out of my voice, and Joe liked it.
He smiled at me. ‘Frightened, are you?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m frightened how your mother will cope for her last few months on her own, without both her daughter and her son. Amelia is dead and you’ll be in prison for murder.’