SPOILERS!!!
Sally manages to coax the teaching assistant, Sian, to tell her what she knows. Sian says that Lucy was a lovely girl, intelligent and enthusiastic, and Sian doesn’t believe for one moment that her mother killed her. Sian was with her in the teachers and parents’ association, and Geraldine was always warm and kind, and a good mother. Geraldine always looked forward to the end of the school day and almost jumped in joy when her daughter came out of the school. Sian also observed that she and Mark were a lovely couple, very much in love, and unlike the other parents, they used to hold hands. Sian also tells her that Lucy had two best friends, Oonagh, whose mother Geraldine mentions in the diary, and Amy. From the description of the photograph, Sian thinks that the girl must be Amy. What she tells Sally shows that Sian doesn’t have a good opinion of Amy’s family. Apparently, her parents didn’t come to the school very often, and in May last year her parents took her to another school. Sian describes Amy as lovely, but she also says that she was prone to bad temper, and it was Lucy who used to rub her up the wrong way. Sian also explains that Amy was a girl with a great imagination, which is what made her clash with Lucy, who was more logical in her thoughts, and it seems that in the book where the pupils wrote about their weekends and things like that, Amy wrote peculiar things, which made Sian think her mother wrote them. After the conversation between Sally and Sian, the latter promises to find Amy’s diaries, and she also gives Sally the telephone number of Amy’s nanny, who can give her more information.
When Sally goes to her car, she discovers that there is a long scratch all along the bodywork of the car, and the tyres have been slashed. Then she finds a cat dead near the car. Its body has been removed, and there is duct tape on its mouth. This is clearly a threat, and Sally feels nauseous and very afraid. Trembling, she drives her car to a pub and gets inside. After phoning her children’s nursery school and checking they’re okay, Sally starts writing the unfinished letter to the police. She still feels shaky and sick, so she decides to go and pick up her children. On the way out she hears a voice calling her. It is her neighbour Fergus, who has heard her ask the landlady where she can take a taxi. Fergus volunteers to drive her home, but she declines, but she asks him to take her letter to the police. When she is outside and starts walking to the taxi rank, a VW stops before her, and to her surprise the man who spent the week with her emerges from the car. At once he is worried about how pale Sally looks, and then she tells him to get into the car as she is in danger. Sally hardly has time to react when she suddenly passes out.
The parts about Simon, we learn that after he told Charlie to marry him, she burst into tears, started to hurl recriminations to him and kicked him out. Now Simon feels down, and he goes to see the professor about Professor Habard’s theory. It seems that they worked together in studying familicides, but it was Professor Hey, who first started the study. It is also evident that the motivation for both men is different, and he tells Simon that he is trying to make Habard see that the case of Geraldine is very different. Yet, Habard won’t listen, and he is even thinking of writing a book about the case.
I am not surprised about Charlie’s reaction, but I really hope that these two find some common ground and realise that there might be something for the two of them to explore.
And the case still puzzles me. Who is threatening Sally and why? And who is the man who pretended to be Mark and now appears out of the blue?
My Reading Journal 