‘It’ll be tough letting the place go. Tough for both of us. I know that. But can we please try and not make it harder than it needs to be?’
At least he hadn’t said selling our house would be good for me.
‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘We need to sell. It’ll free us both up.’ I hadn’t meant the words to sound so heavy with meaning. ‘Money-wise,’ I added. That still wasn’t right but I didn’t trust my voice to say more.
I told him I’d contact an agent and promised to keep him in touch with how it went. We made small talk and finished our coffee. Sean lovingly stroked Wolf’s ears and gave my shoulder an awkward pat as he left. Of all the things we imagined when we were together, I’m sure neither of us imagined this. I watched him walk down the path.
His new butt looked good in that suit too.
While my resolve was still clear and before I could mull too much I phoned a real-estate agency. There’s good mulling and bad mulling and I was pretty sure selling our marital home so Sean could buy a place for his new family would fit in the bad mulling basket. The receptionist was enthusiastic; an agent was free to come to appraise the property later in the afternoon.
‘Good for her,’ I said, and then into the uneasy silence added, ‘thanks. That’ll work for me too.’ No need to take my churlishness out on her. That done, I put it out of my mind, wrung a third cup of coffee out of Sean’s pot and took it through to the office. Wolf followed, climbed onto his sofa and prepared himself for a hard morning’s work of lucid dreaming, punctuated by orchestral farting.
I started with the bulging plastic bag Karen had given me. She’d arranged the file roughly in chronological order, which gave me an easy overview of how events had unfolded. Opening a new file on my computer I dutifully copied down the dates of marriage, divorce and the births of their two children. Karen and Justin married shortly before Sunny was born, followed two years later by the arrival of their second child, Falcon. I flicked through the jumble of baby and little kid stuff: vaccination cards, first crayon scribblings and illustrated lists of milestones that all bore Sunny’s name.
There wasn’t much evidence of Falcon’s arrival. Not a single photo of either parent holding the new baby boy. Occasionally he appeared propped up on a sofa in the back of a shot and in one photo Sunny was lying with him asleep on a play mat, but there were no proudly dated drawings or finger paintings as Falcon stumbled into toddlerhood.
The few family photos from that time showed a rake-thin Karen with dark rings under her eyes. It was pretty obvious this was when she had started using. Justin was thin, too, with no sign of the narcissistic body building he would take up after the death of his son. In photos close to the time of the killing, Sunny was often on the edge of frame as if she was trying to get as far away from her parents as possible. I warned myself against reading too much into this. At six or seven she was at an age when trying to escape parents’ clutches is the norm.
Further down the pile I found a kindergarten photo of four-year-old Falcon, squinting suspiciously at the camera. He was small for his age. A tight, pinched little face and sandy-haired like his father, he wore a grubby woollen jersey that was unravelling at the neck. I copied the scribbled date on the back and then flicked forward through the documents to find the date he had died. Karen had killed him less than a month after the photo was taken.
I carefully returned the photo to the pile and then put the whole lot back in the bag. I couldn’t rid myself of the memory of that photo of Falcon, the last image of him alive. Did Karen carry it with her? Was it pinned up on the wall of her cell for those seven years? The son she had murdered. The little five-year-old boy who thought his mother was taking him to The Warehouse to buy a PlayStation.
Tracking Justin on the net turned out to be simple enough. After half an hour googling I knew Justin Alexander Bachelor was now married