Free Wish You Were Here by Catherine Alliott

was
what she wanted. That was fair with three children under thirteen, that was what she needed to release herself. She’d married a man twice her age, it had been a mistake. Hers, she realized. She’d pushed for the marriage, to this confirmed bachelor whom she’d met at a Highland wedding and who had looked rather splendid in his kilt, certainly to a young girl from Godalming, Surrey. Yes, she had pushed him into it. He’d been unsure. But now she needed out. It wasn’t going to happen, Drummond said again and again to himself as he read those letters with a horrified, clenched anger. It simply wasn’t going to happen. Over his dead body. Or, as it turned out, over hers.
    Of course, he hadn’t intended to shoot her, or even threaten her, not with a gun – with words, perhaps. But when she’d opened the back door, still giggling, tripping over the step, filling the kitchen with fumes from her painted lips, and when he confronted her and she’d shouted right back in his face, about his sexual prowess, or lack of it, and Darren’s overwhelming competence in that department, he’d reached behind the door in a blind rage and, the next thing he knew, she was dead.
    Life imprisonment, obviously, for shooting your wife. Nine years, in those days. And some say he’d weighed it up. Some cynical old neighbours on another crag, in another pile, who’d been there for centuries, applied their own warped logic and said,
Yes, reckon Drummond gave it some thought and decided, Well, I’ll be out in nine years and the house and land will still be mine. And then my son’s.
No one who truly knew Drummond’s heart believed that, though, they knew it had been a tragic accident, and anyway, James didn’t want the house. And we never, ever talked about it.
    When
I met him, he told me about it, obviously. I remember it must have been as early as our second date: ‘By the way,’ he’d said, ‘there’s something you need to know about me. My father killed my mother.’ It was a sort of ‘Take me or leave me now’ statement. Warts and all. I took him. Loved him for thinking it needed to be out there so soon, wanting no deception, no misunderstandings. No difficult decisions a few months down the track, by which time I might have fallen in love with him. In fact, he pretty much told me, defiantly, ‘My father’s an ex-con.’ Although I was very shocked, I remember liking his defiance, in that wine bar off the Fulham Road. I’d just come out of a long relationship with someone who’d been much more economical with the truth. Truth was what I needed. What I liked.
    We were engaged within ten months and, naturally, during that time I went to Scotland and met the Brig and James’s two sisters, not spinsters then, just two girls at home with their dad. And Drummond, who’d been out for a good few years by then, seemed just like any boyfriend’s father: a little older and crustier, perhaps, because he was, and quite grand and scary in his big Scottish house, but certainly not like anyone who’d spent nine years in Dartmoor.
    Just like Eton, Sally told me later Drummond had said, because of course, although James wouldn’t talk and I respected that, girls do. And Sally, being the more verbose and vocal of the two sisters, had prattled away in the morning room at Brechallis, on the worn, gold Dralon sofa, hugging a cushion. Up to a point. No one ever discussed
that night, when three sleeping children had awoken to a single blasting shot ringing out. A hideous scream. A father in pieces. But Sally told me about the court case. Swift and conclusive due to a guilty plea, but with lots of old friends giving mitigating evidence, supporting and swearing allegiance to an old friend who’d married the wrong girl. Not a wrong-un – different class and generation that these neighbours were, they could see there was nothing bad about Vicky Murray-Brown. It was just that she was not right for Drummond. And Sally told me about Dartmoor,