And what does she remember of Ruby, before it happened? She knows that she loved her sister more than anyone or anything, that Ruby would take Viv into her bed to comfort her at night when she was sad or frightened. She remembers Ruby’s collection of china pigs lined up on her dressing table, the posters of handsome pop stars on her walls, the sweet floral perfume she used to wear, how she’d throw her head back and laugh wholeheartedly, her green eyes dancing. All those things he took from her; all her spirit and love and smell and warmth and kindness, Jack Delaney took them all.
Everything changed when Jack came into their lives. Overnight, Ruby seemed to become someone else; someone else’s. From the moment she met him her sister glowed, her eyes dreamy and lit with something Viv couldn’t guess at, her thoughts seemingly always filled with him. Ruby would wait for Jack at the window, ignoring Viv, staring eagerly down the lane for his car to appear, or else sit next to the phone, willing it to ring. Ruby told her that they’d met at the pub where she worked on Saturdays collecting and washing glasses. Jack had been sitting at the bar with the three other Delaney brothers, and Viv would picture him with his cigarette and his black hair and his thin-lipped smile and his stupid car parked outside, and feel a hard knot of dislike grow ever tighter in her belly.
Until then Vivienne’s experience of men had been confined to the ghostly, forbidden spectres of her and Ruby’s unmentionable fathers, her teacher Mr Kendal, or the kindly dads of her friends, or even Morris Dryden, the butcher’s grown-up son whom everyone said was soft in the head but whom Viv liked best of all. But Jack was different. Even at eighteen he oozed a complicated, threatening thing that was linked somehow to that new light in Ruby’s eyes, and the time Viv caught them kissing, Jack’s hands up her jumper as though rummaging for change. Slowly, however, Ruby began to alter, her usual glow and happiness seeming to ebb away until bit by bit it had disappeared completely.
Their mother hated Jack, she remembers that too; how she’d hear her and Ruby argue, Stella saying he was a thief and a troublemaker and that everyone in the village knew what he was like, what he and his brothers got up to, fighting and stealing and causing trouble. And Viv would think that her mother didn’t know the half of it, that when she went out to work Jack’s oily smile and fake politeness vanished and the real him would appear, like worms slithering from under rocks. She would see how he would change, a black mood creeping over him like the sun had gone in, how Ruby’s voice would turn pleading and tearful at his meanness and his temper. He was always cross with her about something: about how she’d looked at one of his friends or spoken in a way he didn’t like. And yet Ruby loved him, wanted to make him happy, her voice appeasing, cajoling, desperate to the end.
When Ruby got pregnant their mum said Jack Delaney was never to set foot in her house again, but as soon as Stella went off to the care home she worked at, there he’d be, Vivienne sworn to secrecy. He seemed to get worse, the bigger Ruby’s belly got. Viv would sit in the living room in front of the black-and-white TV and listen to their arguing; his rough, bullying voice, her sister’s tearful apologies, and her little hands would ball into fists, willing it to stop.
And what does she remember of that day, the day of Ruby’s murder? She remembers her sister waiting for Jack upstairs at her bedroom window as usual, running down to answer his knock and calling, ‘Don’t tell Mum, Vivi, OK? Don’t tell Mum that Jack was here.’ How she’d heard the disappointment in Ruby’s voice when she discovered it was only sweet, daft Morris Dryden, come to drop off some chops for their mum. A few minutes later, after Morris had left, she heard the second knock at the door, Jack’s voice this time, Ruby’s high, anxious one after she’d returned downstairs to let him in.
Viv had stayed in the living room, keeping out of his way, but still she heard when they’d begun to argue, heard Ruby’s desperate tears, Jack’s relentless, mocking cruelty. That day there’d been something different about their fight though, something terrible and out of control that made Viv’s heart hammer, made her chew her lip until it nearly bled. And then a scream, a heavy thud, followed by the worst, deepest silence she’d ever known. She’d waited, scarcely breathing, until she heard his tread on the stairs then the front door swinging shut behind him and as soon as she’d dared, she’d crept from the room and tiptoed up to Ruby’s. She’d known she was dead, felt it deep inside of herself, a scream of horror trapped in her throat as she stood at the door, gazing down at her sister’s lifeless body, her poor, bleeding head where she’d hit it as she fell, her green, sightless eyes.
It was the police who found Vivienne eventually; navy blue arms plucking her from the safe darkness of Stella’s wardrobe where she’d gone to hide, clothes brushing against her cheek as she was pulled into the cold brightness where the rooms were full of police and the air full of her mother’s sobs at what she’d found when she’d returned home from work.
Later, Vivienne would be told that she’d said nothing when they found her, that she’d continued to say nothing except for the one word she repeated over and over: ‘Jack.’
Over the following days and weeks, a kind and patient lady with thick round glasses, a turquoise jumper and a gentle voice had, while Stella held her hand, coaxed from her the evidence they’d needed to put Jack Delaney away for good. She’d told how she’d heard him in the house that morning, had heard him shouting at her sister, then Ruby’s terrible cry, the thump as her body hit the floor. Of course Jack had killed Ruby; who else could it have been? There was Morris Dryden’s account too; the butcher’s son telling how he’d passed Jack in the lane after he’d dropped off his delivery. And Declan Fairbanks, their neighbour, who’d seen Jack running from the house ten minutes later, and all the other locals who’d witnessed his bullying behaviour towards his pregnant girlfriend in the months leading up to her death.
Jack Delaney was responsible. There could be no mistake.
After the trial, Stella would sit immobile at the kitchen table for hour after hour, week after week, steeped in grief. It seemed to Vivienne as though all the darkness in Jack had poured into her mother: when Viv looked into her eyes she saw the same dull fury that had once burned in his.
The letters began to arrive soon after. Folded pieces of paper deposited like petrol bombs through the letter box during the night. At first she would bring them to Stella, who would turn away without looking at them, so Vivienne would go to Ruby’s room, where the row of china pigs still stood on the dressing table, where the handsome pop stars still grinned their 100-watt smiles, and she would sit on the bed and wrap the orange and turquoise quilt around herself and begin to read.
They were all from the Delaney family, from Jack’s mother or uncle or brothers. Those from his mother were pleading, desperate. You’ve made a mistake. Please please tell the truth. He’s only 18. He never did it. You know he never did it. He’d never kill no one, please, please make them see. But the ones from his brothers and his uncles were angry, threatening; written in thick black capitals that all but tore through the page: Your daughter’s a lying little bitch. Make her tell the truth. And, You and your brat are fucking liars. Watch your back. She would read them with terror rising inside her. At night she’d lie in her bed and tremble, listening for the letter box to rattle. But Viv hadn’t lied. She had heard him that day. She had told the police she did, so it must have been true.
In a matter of months, the life Viv had always known would be gone forever, though she didn’t know then the changes that were to come. Meanwhile, neighbours and kindly villagers helped take care of her. They looked at her with misty-eyed pity, picking her up from the village primary and taking her home with their own kids; to warm, busy, noisy houses with Danger Mouse on the telly and fish fingers in the oven. Your mum just needs a bit of time, they’d say. She’ll be all right, you’ll see. Later, Viv would be taken back home, to where the temperature seemed to drop twenty degrees and the silence pressed against the walls, to where Stella hadn’t seemed to move from her position at the kitchen table in weeks.
Stella never went back to her job at the care home. The letters from the letting agency piled up on the doormat amongst brown ones with ‘Final