“Everybody had decided it was suicide but it just didn’t make sense.”
“You weren’t happy with the coroner’s verdict?”
She assessed me. “No.” Connie Johnstone, a black woman in her mid-twenties, was doing the talking. Her teenage sister, Martina, nodded in agreement now and again or scowled at my questions, their brother Roland, the youngest of the three at fourteen, kept his arms folded and his eyes averted. Connie’s boyfriend, a white man who had introduced himself in a strong Irish accent as Patrick Dowley, watched me silently.
I’d not expected four of them and had to bring down chairs from the kitchen to the cellar so they could all sit down.
“What weren’t you happy about?”
She held my gaze for a moment, eyes the colour of hazelnut shells, her skin a shade or two darker. Her black hair was braided in corn rows. There was an edge of pain in her expression then she blinked slowly and took a breath.
“Ma was scared of heights. Petrified. She would never have gone up there. Not in a million years.”
“Even if she were distressed?”
“Particularly then. Like I said she had periods of depression and at times she’d get anxious, start getting paranoid about things but she wasn’t mad,” she snapped the word defiantly, “she never lost it completely. If she had started feeling down she would never have gone there, she’d not have gone out.”
Martina nodded slowly. Patrick shifted his weight on the chair. Roland swallowed.
“You told the coroner this?”
“Yes. But it didn’t make any difference. He’d made up his mind, they all had. Once they knew she’d been treated for depression, that she’d spent time in hospital, then that was it. Case closed. Mentally ill – chucks herself off a building,” she said harshly. “That explained it for them but not for us. It didn’t make sense. If she had wanted to kill herself she’d have done it some other way.”
“She wasn’t even depressed,” Patrick put in quickly. His hair was cropped close to his skull, he wore small wire glasses. He was thin-faced and blue veins showed through his milky complexion. “We saw her on the Wednesday and she was okay then. She hadn’t been bad for months.”
