Strange Sally Diamond

Work kept me occupied. As usual, I kept my distance from my workmates, and refused their invitations to parties and after-work drinks. I did not join in the water-cooler conversations.

I was desperately lonely. I did some internet dating but I never forged a relationship. I slept with some of the women anyway, if they wanted it. Sex was hasty, physically satisfying but emotionally empty. The need for connection could never be satisfied by strangers.

Almost a year after her death, in January 2013, DNA tests definitively linked Lindy to her surviving brothers, Paul and Gary Weston. Both of her parents had gone to their graves never knowing what had happened to their daughter. Her brothers were left with the burning question of where she had been for twenty-nine years.

I thought about my mother and my sister in Ireland. I googled them regularly. There was a lot of information. True crime websites compared my father to Lord Lucan but my father had not killed anybody. Not directly. Denise Norton had died in a psychiatric hospital a year or so after she was freed from my father’s house. My sister, Mary Norton, had been adopted in England. Conor Geary had gone on the run. I looked everywhere for mention of Conor Geary’s son. Had Denise not told them about me? Had she forgotten about me? Was she mad? Or just terrified? How brainwashed I had been. My father was evil. And I was half evil, at least. I had to live with that. It became my habit to check on updates to the Denise Norton story at least once a month.

In December 2017, a story broke in Ireland. Mary Norton, my sister, had tried to cremate her dead adoptive father. I saw a photograph of her. Tall and strong in a black coat with a jaunty red hat, at Thomas Diamond’s funeral. She looked like me, her nose, the shape of her eyes. Thomas had been my mother’s psychiatrist and he had secretly adopted my sister after Denise’s death. I knew where Mary was, her village, her new name.

A spark lit inside me. I had a chance to do something good. To right a wrong. I remembered tearing that teddy bear from her tiny fingers. I could return it to her. I packaged it carefully in an old shoebox and sent it anonymously with a short note.

Six months later, my father’s real name started popping up in internet searches, and then on the pages of the New Zealand Herald. A very old photo of my father, clean-shaven and without spectacles, taken back in Ireland. An artist’s impression alongside it of what he might look like now in his early eighties. Why were they looking for him now? How had they tied the missing paedophile Conor Geary to New Zealand? Who told them he had been here?

And then I realized – it was me. Sending Toby had alerted them to a Kiwi connection. How stupid of me. I was a cyber security expert. I had always been able to hide my Google search history by setting up privacy software and I wasn’t dumb enough to have any social media presence, but I was the person who had alerted the Irish authorities to New Zealand. Now the police were looking for him. A retired Irish dentist. No mention of a son.

But in August 2018, I got a phone call from the New Zealand police. They wanted to interview me about my father, James Armstrong. They came to my home. It wasn’t hard to pretend to be upset about the circumstances of his death in 1985 in a burning car. They asked me where I’d been born and where he had been born. My story was so well rehearsed after thirty-eight years, they hardly pressed me on any issues. They asked if the name Denise Norton meant anything to me. Had my father ever used any other name? Where had he studied dentistry? Where had I lived in Ireland? Had my father taken any special interest in other children? Why had my father homeschooled me?

I was able to paint a picture of a strict but indulgent father, in deep mourning for my mother ever since we left Ireland. His distinct lack of interest in other children and his belief that the New Zealand education system was sub-par. I was able to produce his Irish dental qualification document on which the name Conor Geary had been expertly replaced with James Armstrong.

My father, I said, was an eccentric but a loving father and an excellent dentist as any of his patients might testify. I missed him every day. I teared up at the hypocrisy of my words. The detective apologized for the intrusion and said they would not bother me again. They implied they knew they were on a wild goose chase. The man they were looking for did not have a son.

I continued to monitor any news of my sister, Mary Norton, living as Sally Diamond in Carricksheedy, Co. Roscommon, Ireland. I felt some warmth towards her. All of the reports I had read described her as ‘a loner’ or ‘a misfit’ in school or her village. I couldn’t find any record of her having a job or a career. I felt for her. Was that kinship?