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Joseph sips his beer, wonders how to answer that. Because the truth is worse than he’s prepared to admit.
The whole world, it seems, is going crazy for Tilly Carver’s story. Everything she says or does seems to intensify the media furore further. Joseph can see no signs of it letting up.
The police investigation into what happened has been aspoorly managed as the hunt, five years ago, for Claire’s killer. The working hypothesis is that Angus Roth developed an obsession with Tilly and Drew after meeting them at the Huntingdon Manor fundraiser. After abducting and killing Drew, he’d snatched Tilly two days later. Somehow, Enoch Cullen had deduced that his daughter was at Thornecroft. On his arrival Angus Roth had killed him. Afterwards, Angus had torched the house, intending to burn Tilly with the other bodies. Miraculously, she’d managed to free herself, killing him with his own weapon.
When all the national newspapers offered interviews, Tilly negotiated an exclusive with just one. A US network paid for a TV exclusive and syndicated it around the world. They led with the heart-breaking yet strangely life-affirming 999 call she’d made from Thornecroft – worthy of an Oscar should anyone have known she was acting. In it, despite grievous injuries, Tilly’s only concern was for her dead friend.
Media organizations publish countless photographs of the pair before their abduction, each one deliberately selected by Tilly to highlight their closeness, their youth, their obvious beauty. Images of the friends in bikinis do particularly well.
The photos Tilly releases of her slow recovery, unflinching in their honesty, win her further praise. She’s lauded by victim groups for her resilience. On social media she’s celebrated for her strength.
The GoFundMe page, set up by supporters to pay for dental work and facial reconstruction, ticks higher with every media appearance, every radio phone-in, every photograph documenting her recovery.
‘You know she has an agent, now?’ Joseph asks his son. ‘And a book deal?’
‘Don’t.’
‘She’s meeting this ghost writer twice a week. There’stalk of something happening with Netflix. Every time she opens her mouth I worry she’s going to trip herself up, contradict herself, bring us all down with her.’
He drinks his beer, looks around the pub. ‘There’s something I wanted to ask. Because we never really got to talk about it before you left. I think I know the answer but I’d still like to hear it first-hand.’
‘Shoot.’
‘Why did you protect her for so long? Even after Drew? Why did you protect her at all? You let me think you’d killed someone. First by accident, then deliberately.’
Max picks up a beermat, fiddles with it. ‘She gets her claws into you, Dad. Messes with your head. When she came to me that Thursday night, she told me she’d discovered Erin’s affair and had tried to sabotage it to save your marriage. She said she’d known how devastated you’d have been if you’d found out. That she’d been trying to hold our family together. And that Angus had attacked Drew, and Tilly had no choice but to intervene.’
Max pauses, drinks. ‘You’ve seen the tape, I haven’t. She told me she only ever hit him once.’
‘It was more than once,’ Joseph says. ‘She could’ve stopped and she didn’t.’
‘I know that now, but at the time I had no reason to doubt her – and at first Drew backed up her story. They would have gone to jail, Tilly said, because it would have looked pre-meditated.
‘I couldn’t do anything Thursday night so I took the car over there on Friday, when everyone was asleep. It was too late to bury him so I put him in the boot, parked around the corner and came home.’
No wonder that Angus’s decomposition had seemed so advanced: he’d been killed a day earlier than Joseph had realized.
‘And then you found me in the kitchen,’ Max says. ‘I panicked, I guess. Came up with that bullshit about an accident. When you insisted on seeing the body, I had to invent more bullshit to explain his injuries.’
‘You could have told me the truth.’
Max nods. ‘And then you’d have found out about the affair. We thought you’d have ended the marriage. I didn’t want you to go through that. If I’m honest, I didn’t want it to break up our family. And Tilly convinced me that she could get you guys back to a better place.’
‘Tell me more about Drew.’
‘She came to me after the party, told me the truth about how Tilly had gone nuts. She was terrified, said she had a recording of Angus’s death that she wanted to give to the police. Trouble was, by that point you’d already buried him – at least, you said you had. When I told her, she agreed to keep quiet.
‘Somehow, Tilly caught wind that Drew was having second thoughts. Sunday night, she told me to meet her at the bungalow. When I got there, Drew was already dead.
‘Tilly was … Jesus, Dad. You wouldn’t believe it if I tried to explain. She said she wasn’t going to mess around any more, that she’d done her best to save our family but wouldn’t go to jail for it. She told me she knew you’d buried Angus, that she’d got the truth out of Drew before killing her.
‘She was furious. Said if I didn’t take responsibility for Drew’s death, she’d find a way to implicate me. She’d tell the police about you, too. When you showed me Angus’s wallet and said you’d found it in my footstool, it was pretty clear she was serious.
‘I knew she still had his phone, his car keys. I was scared shitless she’d plant them somewhere and throw us bothunder a bus. The one thing that might have saved us was that footage, but Drew hadn’t told me where she’d hidden it.’
‘So that’s what you were looking for at Enoch’s.’
The boy puffs out his cheeks, nods. Then he says, ‘I don’t know how you can bring yourself to stay inside that house with her, Dad.’