Cruel Legacy

The policeman came towards her. There was a policewoman with him. Both of them had grave faces.

‘If we might just come in …’

She knew, of course … had known straight away that Andrew was dead, but she had thought it must be an accident … not this … not a deliberate taking of his own life. They had tried to break it to her gently. Found in his car … the engine running … unfortunately reached the hospital too late.

Suicide.

WPC Lewis would stay with her, the policeman was saying quietly. ‘Is there anyone else you’d like us to inform … your husband’s parents … ?’

Philippa shook her head.

‘I’ll make you a cup of tea,’ the WPC was saying. ‘You’ve had a shock.’

Suicide …

She started to tremble violently.

CHAPTER ONE

‘MUM, Paul’s still in the bathroom and he won’t let me in.’

Sally paused on the landing, grimacing as she stooped down to pick up the sock she had dropped on her last trip downstairs with the dirty washing. Her back still ached from working yesterday.

‘Paul, hurry up,’ she commanded as she rapped on the bathroom door.

‘He knows I’m going to Jane’s and I’m going to be late now,’ Cathy wailed.

‘No, you won’t,’ Sally soothed her daughter. ‘He’ll be out in a minute.’

‘He’s doing it deliberately. I hate him,’ Cathy announced passionately.

Sally had just finished loading the washing machine when Paul came into the kitchen. Was he never going to stop growing? she wondered. Those new jeans she had bought for him last month were already too short.

‘Where’s Dad?’ he demanded.

‘He’s not back yet,’ she told him.

Joel had been irritable and difficult to live with ever since they had heard the news that Andrew Ryecart had committed suicide. Sally knew that he was worried about his job, but there was no need to take it out on them—it wasn’t their fault!

‘He said he was going to come home early,’ Paul grumbled. ‘He was going to take me fishing.’

Sally’s face tightened. This wouldn’t be the first time recently that Joel had done something like this. Only last week they’d had a row about the fact that he’d forgotten that she’d arranged for them to go round to her sister’s and had arranged to play snooker instead.

‘You were the one who arranged to see them,’ he had countered when she had complained.

‘Well, someone had to,’ she had told him. ‘If it was left to you we’d never see anyone from one blue moon to another.’

‘I forgot,’ he’d told her, shrugging the matter aside as though it weren’t important. Unwilling to continue arguing with him in front of the children, Sally had gritted her teeth and said nothing, but inwardly she had been seething.

She had still been angry with him about it later that night when he had come in from his snooker match, walking away from him when he started telling her about it and later turning her back on him in bed, freezing her body into rejecting immobility when he had reached out and touched her breast.

They had argued about that as well. In hushed, angry whispers so as not to wake the children. They were getting older now and Cathy in particular was becoming sharply aware. Only a couple of months ago she had come home from school asking if Sally and Joel still had sex.

‘Well, you shouldn’t have had much problem answering that one,’ Joel had grunted when she’d told him.

She frowned again, remembering the conversation which had followed.

‘I suppose that’s going to be another excuse, is it?’ Joel had demanded aggressively. ‘You don’t want the kids overhearing us. Not that there is very much to overhear these days.’