shakily into the wide centre space. 1 could wish to shut my eyes, but one couldn’t blot it out. One had to live through terrible things if they came one’s way.
At the point where the bomb had exploded, the black floor covering had been ripped right away, and the rest was doubled over and convoluted in large torn pieces. Serena - the things that had been Serena - lay among and half under the black folds of plastic: things in emerald and frilly white clothes, pale blue leg-warmers, dark blue tights; torn edges of flesh, scarlet splashes… a scarlet pool.
I went round covering the parts of her completely with the black folds, hiding the harrowing truth from anyone coming there unprepared. I felt ill. I felt as if my head were full of air. I was trembling uncontrollably. I thought of people who dealt often with such horrors and wondered if they ever got hardened.
Malcolm groaned in the passage. I went back to him fast. He was trying to sit up, to push himself off the floor. There was a large area already beginning to swell on his forehead, and I wondered if he’d simply been knocked out through hitting the wood floor at high speed.
‘God,’ he said in anguish. ‘Serena… oh dear God.’
I helped him to his groggy feet and took him out into the garden through the side-door, and round past the office to the front of the house. I eased him into the passenger seat of Serena’s car.
Malcolm put his head in his hands and wept for his daughter. I stood with my arms on top of the car and my head on those, and felt wretched and sick and unutterably old.
I’d hardly begun to wonder what to do next when a police car came into the drive and rolled slowly, as if tentatively, towards us.
The policeman I’d looked through the windows with stopped the car and stepped out. He looked young, years younger than I was.
‘Someone in the village reported another explosion…’ He looked from us to the house questioningly.
‘Don’t go in there,’ I said. ‘Get word to the superintendent. Another bomb has gone off here, and this time someone’s been killed.’
Dreadful days followed, full of questions, formalities, explanations, regrets. Malcolm and I went back to the Ritz where he grieved for the lost child who had tried hard to kill him.
‘But you said… she didn’t care about my money. Why… why did she do it all?’
‘She wanted…’ I said, ‘to put it at its simplest, I think she wanted to live at Quantum with you. That’s what she’s longed for since she was six, when Alicia took her away. She might perhaps have grown up sweet and normal if the courts had given you custody, but courts favour mothers, of course. She wanted to have back what had been wrenched away from her. I saw her cry about it, not long ago. It was still sharp and real to her. She wanted to be your little girl again. She refused to grow up. She dressed very often like a child.’
He was listening with stretched eyes, as if seeing familiar country haunted by devils.
‘Alicia was no help to her,’ I said. ‘She filled her with stories of how you’d rejected her, and she actively discouraged her from maturing, because of her own little-girl act.’
‘Poor Serena.’ He looked tormented. ‘She didn’t have much luck.’
‘No, she didn’t.’
‘But Moira …?’ he said.
‘I think Serena made herself believe that if she got rid of Moira, you would go back to Quantum and she would live there with you and look after you, and her dream would come true.’
‘It doesn’t make sense…’
‘Murder has nothing to do with sense. It has to do with obsession. With compulsion, irresistible impulse, morbid drive. An act beyond reason.’
He shook his head helplessly.
‘It’s impossible to know,’ I said, ‘whether she intended to kill Moira on that day. I wish we could know, but we can’t… she can’t have meant to kill her the way she did, because no one could know there’d be a slit-open nearly full sack of potting compost waiting there, handy. If she meant to kill Moira that day, she’d have taken some sort of weapon. I’ve been wondering, you know, if she meant to hit her over the head and put her in the car, the way she did you.’
‘God…’
‘Anyway, after Moira was out of the way, Serena offered to live with you at Quantum and look after you, but you wouldn’t