Living With Evil by Cynthia Owen (ap literature book list txt) 📗

had the courage to run away that night.

I wasn’t a little girl any more, and I looked her in the eye.

‘Would you please tell them about my baby and what you did to her?’ I demanded.

‘I don’t know what you are talking about.’

My blood boiled, and I pointed my trembling finger at her.

‘You killed my baby. You stabbed her with a knitting needle in front of me.’

Her mouth fell open, and she threw her nicotine-stained hands up to her face in horror.

‘May God forgive you!’ she wailed dramatically.

I exploded with frustration. ‘Will you come with me to the lane where we dumped her tiny body, and tell me then you did not kill my daughter?’

‘I would be too embarrassed,’ she said pathetically. ‘People would be looking. I’d collapse!’

‘Well, I had to do it!’ I bellowed. ‘I had to face it. Why shouldn’t you?’

She shook her head defiantly.

‘Come to the grave then,’ I goaded.

‘No.’

‘Why not? If you are so innocent, why can’t you come to her grave with me? Why did you kill my baby? Why?’

‘You never liked me, and you always said you would get me,’ she replied.

‘Is that all you can say? Why did you feed me raw eggs and liver? Why did you send me to my father’s bed on Christmas Day?’

She continued to glare at me in a mocking, intimidating way, and I began to feel frightened.

An officer put his arm around me and told her to stop staring at me.

Her denials went on. She denied ever knowing I was sexually abused. ‘I’d have helped her if I’d known,’ she lied through her yellow teeth.

‘What about that man?’ I asked. ‘The one you made me sing “Scarlet Ribbons” to, and then forced me into bed with?’

‘That was all very innocent,’ she replied, seemingly unrattled.

‘Cynthia is a liar,’ she went on. ‘She used to steal chips off her younger brothers’ and sisters’ plates. She was a terrible child to raise.’

I laughed cynically. ‘Is that all you have on me?’

An officer reminded her they were not here to talk about me. My mother was the one being questioned about murdering a baby.

‘She tells lies,’ she repeated over and over again, regardless of what we threw at her. ‘She makes things up. She’s mad. If there was a baby, then she must have murdered it herself in the lane.’

I left the interview room exhausted and defeated at 8.10 p.m., after more than three hours with my mother.

She was nearly sixty-two-years-old. She had been arrested, locked in a cell and then grilled for twelve hours, but she never once showed the slightest sign she might give up any one of her sordid secrets.

She was pure evil, and I was heartbroken.

I was immediately beckoned to another room. I walked up to the door and glanced through the glass.

My father was sitting inside, and I gasped in shock and stood nailed to the spot for several minutes, trying to give myself the strength to go in.

He looked shaken. His body was jangling from head to toe, like he had lost all control of himself.

I said hello as I opened the door, and he looked up at me and said, ‘What’s that?’

‘That’s your daughter,’ the detective told him.

‘I don’t know her. Get her out of here,’ my father scoffed.

‘You should know me,’ I said sternly. ‘Because you are the one who raped me.’

He pointed to the statement on the desk in front of him and jabbed his finger at it.

He stank of stale cigarette smoke, and his fingernails were black as coal. I winced.

‘I’ve said what I’ve got to say,’ he said.

‘Please tell the truth,’ I begged desperately. I knew the clock was ticking. I had to get him to talk.

‘I’m sick of her lies,’ was all he could say.

I made one last, desperate attempt to find his conscience.

‘Daddy, will you not just admit I was pregnant as a child? Please?’

‘She’s mad!’ he screamed. ‘Get her out! I want judge and jury on this. I want to put her to shame.’

‘I’ve got the shame of what you did to me for the rest of my life,’ I shouted. ‘Please tell them the truth!’

But his eyes were dead and his mouth was set in stone.

I walked out and felt as if I was falling apart. I had expected my mother to be a cold, evil bitch, but I had hoped my father might find it in himself to tell the truth.

How wrong I was. I looked back at his trembling body and felt nothing but contempt. He was a cold, evil monster too.

At 9 p.m. they were both released without charge, but all was not lost.

There were other avenues to explore in my quest for justice, and I agreed to everything the police asked of me to keep the investigation going.

I underwent nine hours of interviews with a psychologist and a psychiatrist, who both verified my sanity and the consistency of my story.

I also had to identify Noleen from two photographs.

I could sense I was plunging deeper into hell, but I told myself to be strong. I was doing it for her.

I already knew my baby had been stabbed forty times. She weighed 5lbs 5oz and was 18.5 inches long.

The wound that killed her was in her neck, but my mother had gone on stabbing her repeatedly, even after she had died.

I opened the blue photograph folder very slowly, with shaking hands, and the second my eyes fell on my daughter’s body I had to look away in horror - but it was too late.

I saw Noleen’s beautiful fair hair and how perfect she had been, but I also saw how she was laid on a mortuary slab, her tiny body covered in stab marks.

One was on her chin. I remembered my mother stabbing her there, because I remember thinking she had a dimple like my father.

I slammed the folder shut and jumped out of my seat to get away from it.

‘Can you identify that child as your daughter?’ the policeman asked.

‘Yes, that is my