Chapter 54

chapter fifty-four

Now

‘Let’s see it one last time,’ said Christina.

Ethan pressed play and they sat, side by side at his desk, transfixed by the jerky but clear colour footage from the CCTV provided by the neighbours who lived two doors away in the same cul-de-sac as the Delaneys. The camera had been smashed by a hailstone in the big storm two days after Joy had disappeared and Caro Azinovic’s son, who had installed the camera for his widowed mother, had been getting it fixed. He was the one who had brought police this damning video revealing a fish-eye view of the front of his mother’s house. It captured, accidentally, a pie-shaped sliver of the Delaneys’ driveway.

Christina and Ethan watched Stan Delaney emerge from the front door of his home, at two minutes past midnight on the day after his wife disappeared, struggling to carry an unwieldy, floppy object wrapped in a blanket to his car.

He opened the boot of his car, dumped the object, leaned in to rearrange it, reached up with both hands to slam the boot shut, and then he stood – for exactly three minutes and forty-seven seconds – both hands flat on the car, his head bowed, like a man in solemn, reverent prayer, before he finally lifted his head and walked off camera.

It was eerie and powerful to watch.

‘Jesus,’ said Ethan. ‘The way he stands there, for all that time. It’s so . . . my God.’

‘I know it is,’ said Christina. She would get her confession today. She could feel it. She would play this footage to Stan Delaney and she would not say a word or make a sound for the entire length of the video. She would watch him watch himself bow his head over his wife’s body. She knew he was not a churchgoer, but she knew he’d been brought up Catholic, as had she, and she recognised the stance of a man in prayer, a man who longs to confess his sins.

Tonight she and Nico would go to meet their parish priest to discuss the holy sacrament of marriage and she would try not to think about the fact that Joy and Stan Delaney had once made the same vows that she and Nico would make next spring. She would not think about a young Joy Delaney or Polly Perkins promising their husbands to have and to hold, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and health, until death do us part, until you carry my body out to the car in the dead of the night and dispose of it somewhere it will never be found, until I speak too loudly, until I spend too much money on a new iron, until I hold back your career for the sake of our family, until I kiss another man at a party, until I displease you in some way I cannot yet imagine.

‘Christina?’ said Ethan.

‘Sorry,’ said Christina. ‘What were you saying?’

He said, ‘Nothing really. Just that I didn’t pick it. That first day we interviewed him, I knew he was hiding stuff from us, but when he looked at that photo of his wife, I thought, No way did he do it. He loves her.’

‘I never thought he didn’t love her.’ Christina adjusted her engagement ring so the diamond was centred again on her finger.

But she’d always known he’d killed her.

That was the cruel knowledge that she would carry down the aisle on her wedding day along with her bridal bouquet of white roses and blush-pink gardenias: it was possible for both things to be true.