Читать книгу Jenny Valentine - 4 Book Award-winning Collection - Jenny Valentine - Страница 33

If I’d been a proper old-fashioned detective, or if I still had my Usborne How To Be A Private Eye kit, I would have dusted Violet’s urn for fingerprints. There were eight sets of prints on there because eight people handled her after she was dead.

Me,

Martha,

Pansy (probably moved it for dusting),

Norman (maybe working out if it was Pansy),

Mr Soprano from the cab office,

Jawad Saddaoui, the structural engineer from Morocco whose cab Violet got left in,

Mr Francis Macauley at the crematorium in Golders Green,

Pete Swain, missing journalist, angel of mercy and my dad.

At least he had the decency to organise her funeral. If you could call it organise, because him and Bob were the only people there.

Bob said they followed the body to Golders Green and then afterwards they got trashed in a pub around the corner.

My dad picked up her ashes the day after he fought with Bob. It’s on record at the crematorium that they were collected. I checked.

So it was my dad that left her ashes in the back of a cab and vanished, abandoning her as well as his wife, his parents, his daughter and two sons (one unborn) and his best friend.

I’ve decided you can look at it in two ways.

1 Violet asked my dad to help her die and broke his heart. He said no but she persuaded him that it was what she wanted and without him she would have to do it alone. He helped her because he cared about her and the strain of it pushed him to breaking point. Then his best friend accused him of murder and he realised nobody would believe him and he could end up in jail for helping her. So he cracked and had to get out, away from everything, away from us. You read about people doing it for less.In other words, he was a good person who did something brave and selfless and couldn’t handle the consequences.

2 Helping Violet die was his ticket out of here – help an old lady, get a new life. My dad didn’t do it for Violet, he didn’t give a damn about her really. He did it for what she promised him in return (enough money to get a new identity) and his conscience didn’t bat an eyelid.This makes him a self-serving, cold-hearted borderline sociopath.

I can’t decide between them or any of the grey areas in between and in the end I suppose it doesn’t matter either way.

He did what he did. She got what she wanted. He left.

Those are the things that count.