This is the conclusion to this part of the story, There is some nastiness here, but not as bad as has been shown so far.

CHAPTER 18
We went into the bathroom together to repair our faces. Not that either of us had any cosmetics on, but a splash of water does help to reduce the redness of crying. Mum started laughing.

“I have no space left for my own stuff now you are here. Make up, hair remover, AND shaving kit. Not to mention these”

She picked up the stockings I had rinsed out the night before, laid over the bath.

“You were wearing trapping kit last night, dear? I do believe I have some more that…hang on, whose are these?”

“Er, I just thought I might borrow some…”

She kissed me on the cheek. “My darling, I will be blunt. You have had sex with a man, but there is a huge difference between sex and love, and between love and rape. You and Peter will find your own way, just do not feel that there is any script, any prescribed way, for you to show your love for each other”

That startled me. She smiled fondly.

“Yes, I know. I could never read Odd John, as you call your past, because there was never anything there to be read. You, my dear, become more human each week, and it is both wonderful and painful, painful because I lost you for two decades. Now, breakfast, and then Pete and I have some things to talk about.

We went down, and the feast was demolished in short order. Dad Pete sighed,

“Next time I will bring some decent black pudding down”

My mother squeezed my hand under the table. Such a simple statement, so much meaning behind it.

“Pete, Laura, your mother and I have a lot to go through this morning. I want to clear the decks now, so that we have a weekend to deal with any issues. Firstly, though, we need a promise. There are things we need to tell you that could have savage consequences for the two of us, and if you cannot promise to keep them in confidence, we can go no further. Do we have your promise?”

Pete and I both nodded our agreement. Dad Pete grunted.

“OK, then. We will simply speak, get through this with as little fuss as we can .Please just listen; this is hard enough for both of us already, harder than you know.

“I met your mother, Laura, when I turned up for that burglary. She was a beauty then, just as she is now, so elegant, and it was a real shame to see the mess that had been left for her to clear up. I asked where John was, and she said that she had been left to sort out the Police report because he had better things to do”

Mother interrupted.

“He said that I should deal with the fucking plod, he had a business to fucking run, just make sure I got the crime report sorted so we could get a decent screw out of those thieving fuckers in the insurance”

“Yes, too important to speak to me, that was it. Anyway, Pete, your mother, you have to understand, was already heading off into that odd little world that took her, and Lucy here offered me a cuppa, and of course it was a proper pot, china cups, biccies…”

He trailed off, smiling at her, and she melted back. Twenty years apart.

“Anyway, I found her so easy to talk to, I ended up telling her too much, more about me than the job I was there to do. And I made sure I came back a few times to …answer any queries, and one thing led to another, and there was a dance group that we ‘coincidentally’ both joined”

“None of that rowdy silliness, proper ballroom dancing”

“I am not going to go into details, but we knew each other slightly because of you two, and I knew all about John Prentice Evans, as he made such a point of letting the world know exactly who and what he was, or at least what he wanted the world to think he was. And one thing led to another, and suddenly Lucy had missed a couple of periods, and we decided to pass it off as his.

“He was a drinker, and that had led to diabetes, and even though he couldn’t get it up any more Lucy tried to persuade him that one night, one pissed night, he had managed, and that worked for a while till he lost it again, and beat her again, and then SHE lost it. Lost him, lost our son, your brother”

“You were both six, my dears. Laura remembers it.”

Dad Pete’s face hardened, and I realised that he could still frighten people if he wanted to. He almost frightened me, then.

“That was when I wanted to kill him, but your mother closed everything down. She made me promise. Pete, you know what happened to your mother, I am not going to go there, but understand that Lucy stuck with me all through that. She did her best to help your mother, because she knew I loved her and she loved me in her turn. I don’t want you to see this as some tacky bit of playing away”

My Pete spoke up.

“Dad, Lucy and I talked about that. I think I have managed to get my head round it, and seeing you two together helps”

“Thanks, son. She called me from the hospital that day in 1985. She had never, ever mentioned how he was treating you, Laura, and I was shocked at what that bastard had done to his own child. They had to operate, he had torn you so much. The only time he could get it up, he got it up his own daughter”

Dad Pete was shaking now. Mum got up and went to sit on his lap, wrapping herself around as much of him as she could. As the tears fell, he kissed her and continued

“I wanted to go round and kill him, and she…”

He paused, gathered strength.

“When your mother is stressed, she pulls everything in, tighter than a duck’s arse...sorry. She has a way of locking herself so she looks and sounds completely in control”

“Years of dealing with that man taught me some important lessons, my love”

There it was, dropped lightly into the middle of our ‘little chat’. Dad Pete carried on.

“ I said to her, I will deal with it now, permanently, and she said…she just lifted an eyebrow a little, as she does, and said ‘Just give it another hour’ and….and I knew. So, we went to the Friends’ café in the hospital, as they worked on John, on Laura, and once he was as stable as they could make her…sorry, this gets confusing”

I sighed, “Tell me about it…”

“I know. After a while, Lucy asked if I could take her home. He was dead, as I had suspected, with his hand wrapped round a broken hypodermic. The needle was still in him, and he had bled into the sheets. I asked your mother what she had done, what she had injected him with, and she just raised that eyebrow again. Such control….”

She looked round from his chest. “Somebody needed it. We had to get through that night with no more hurt”

“I asked what she had injected him with, and she said ‘nothing’ “

“I did indeed, my love. I said that he had injected his own insulin, which I measured for him”

Oh shit.

“And then, after maybe a little too much of his medicine, as he lay there, drunk and snoring,, with my child’s blood still on his penis, and my other child cremated, I injected him with nothing. I found a vein, and gave him about four syringes full of nothing. Air, my dears.”

Dad Pete hugged her to him again.

“Murder, pure and simple in the eyes of the law, and I was the law. But I knew it wasn’t simple, so we had a lot of work to do. I called your doctor up, and he didn’t want to come out, so I offered him the option of being collected, and he came. When he saw the body, he wanted to call it a suspicious death, autopsy and all that, so I just told him his fortune.

“It was a full and happy future that awaited him, in Lewes, or Brixton, or the Scrubs, for complicity in child rape. That for starters, anyway. As he certified the death by natural causes of that man, I called it in. After it was all cleared away, after that, I failed you all.”

My mother looked so small, like a child, wrapped up on his lap as he stroked her hair.

“I ran away. I tried for a couple of years, but she was a murderer, and I was a copper, and I had buried a murder for my own gratification, and I could not deal with that. Pete had lost Laura, because she ran away that night and never came back, and so I resigned, and moved us as far away as I could, and slowly built up my little haulage business, and I have missed this woman for every second of every day.

“If I could make that right, I would. It looks like my son has been doing what his father should have finished”

My mother reached up and pulled him down for a kiss. I looked at Pete, my Pete, and it just seemed the right thing to do, and it was.