Page 25 of Vengeance is Mine

‘How do you mean?’

‘Carole needed to talk about Dominic. I refused. I banned his name from this house. All she wanted to do was talk, and I wouldn’t let her. She kept everything bottled up until she couldn’t stand it any longer. Then she…’ His voice broke, and he bowed his head.

‘I heard about what happened.’

‘Who from?’

‘An old neighbour of yours. Sylvia Hurst.’

‘Bloody hell, is she still going? She must be about a hundred by now,’ he said, with a chuckle. ‘Is she still on Aldwick Road?’

‘Yes.’

‘I think they probably built those houses around her – she’s been there that long. Lovely woman, well, Carole liked her, but bloody nosy.’

‘I really am sorry… about your wife. Could I ask you some questions about my father?’

‘What do you want to know?’

‘What was your relationship with him like? I’ve read that you worked away a lot – that must have been a strain.’

Anthony’s eyes darted from me to the floor and back again. ‘I was a long-distance lorry driver. I was away a lot. I phoned Carole every night, asked her how she was, but it wasn’t the same as being there. Depending on what routes I was working, sometimes I was only home at weekends.’

I didn’t say anything, but I had noticed how Anthony said he called home every night to ask how his wife was, not his son.

‘There was an atmosphere in the house,’ he continued, his gaze fixed straight ahead. ‘Dominic was a sullen child, and Carole, well, those tablets she was taking turned her into a zombie. I knew the problem wasn’t with her.’

‘Did you spend much time alone with Dominic?’

‘No,’ he answered firmly, after a short silence. ‘I… there was nothing there between us.’

‘What do you mean?’

He looked at me with watery eyes. ‘Tell me, do you and your mother have a good relationship?’

‘Yes.’ I smiled. ‘We’re very close.’

‘Do you do things together?’

‘Yes. We go for meals, the cinema. Sometimes it doesn’t feel like we’re mother and daughter.’

He gave a weak smile. ‘That’s nice. We didn’t have that, me and Dominic. He was a difficult boy to like.’

I hope I didn’t let my facial expression show my revulsion. Had Anthony really said he hadn’t liked his own son?

‘Sylvia said he was a problem child, always in trouble. Yet at the time my mum was going out with him, she paints him as being a very caring and affectionate man. How can someone go from one extreme to the other?’

Anthony adjusted himself on the sofa. ‘Not long after he was sent to prison, that drug he was taking was taken off the market.’

‘Drug?’ I felt bad for playing dumb and deceiving him, but I wanted to hear everything in his own words.

‘Yes. I can’t remember what it was called. Carole went to the doctor’s many times, because she wasn’t coping with Dominic, and they gave her tablets for her nerves. It was only when this new GP arrived at the surgery and said he wanted to see Dominic that we realised it was Dominic who should have been on medication, not Carole. So, she was weaned off her tablets, and he was given some kind of new wonder-drug.’

‘What for?’

‘To stabilise his moods. He was an angry child. He didn’t mix well with others. He wanted to be friends with other children but didn’t know how to, and they all thought he was weird. I suppose nowadays he’d be labelled as autistic or as having that ADHD or whatever it’s called.’

‘So, this drug he was taking was taken off the market? Why?’

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