Copyright

      Harper Press

       An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

      First published by HarperElement 2011

      © June Thomson, Giselle Ross, Marion Scott and Jim McBeth 2011

      The authors assert the moral right to be

      identified as the authors of this work.

      A catalogue record of this book is

      available from the British Library.

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

      HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

      Source ISBN 9780007438518

      Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2011 ISBN: 9780007438525

      Version: 2018-07-13

      Dedication

      To little Jay-Jay, Paul, Ryan and Michelle –

      forever innocent, forever loved

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

      Copyright

      Dedication

       Foreword

       Prologue: Fairy Shoes and Toy Soldiers

      Chapter 1 - Beginnings

      Chapter 2 - Love of Our Lives

      Chapter 3 - Moths to a Flame

      Chapter 4 - Rings on Our Fingers

      Chapter 5 - Closer to the Flame

      Chapter 6 - I Take This Man

      Chapter 7 - The Honeymoon Is Over

      Chapter 8 - The Way It Is

      Chapter 9 - Even in Darkness

      Chapter 10 - Nothing Ever Changes

      Chapter 11 - Behind Painted Smiles

      Chapter 12 - A Deeper, Darker Place

      Chapter 13 - If Only ... (June)

      Chapter 14 - This Child of Mine

      Chapter 15 - So Alone

      Chapter 16 - Why Didn’t We Walk Away?

      Chapter 17 - These Special Gifts

      Chapter 18 - The Joy They Brought

      Chapter 19 - Beginning of the End

      Chapter 20 - The Final Straw

      Chapter 21 - If Only ... (Giselle)

      Chapter 22 - Saturday 3 May

      Chapter 23 - Mummy Can’t Fix It Now

      Chapter 24 - Tranquillisers and Sympathy

      Chapter 25 - In the Arms of an Angel

      Chapter 26 - Tell Me Why

      Chapter 27 - Revenge

      Chapter 28 - Brutal and Merciless

      Chapter 29 - Cold and Evil

      Chapter 30 - Reaching for the Light

      Chapter 31 - The Kindness of Strangers

      Chapter 32 - The Love They Left Behind

      Chapter 33 - This Sisterhood of Ours

       Afterword by Ian Stephen

       Moved by Giselle and June's story?

       Help and Support for Victims

       Acknowledgments

      About the Authors

       About the Publisher

       Foreword

      What follows is a conversation between two mothers who are leading each other from the darkness to the light.

      Before they were united by two unspeakable acts of evil, June Thomson and Giselle Ross did not know each other. Today they are the closest of friends. In their hearts they wish they had not been brought together by incomparable loss, but now that they have found each other they are able to walk together towards a future neither of them believed was possible.

      Only Giselle can appreciate how June has suffered; only June can understand the monumental effort it takes for her friend to rise and face each new day. This bond has already saved their lives, dragging them back from the edge of madness and giving them the courage to endure unimaginable pain.

      On the same day, a few miles apart, June and Giselle’s estranged husbands, Rab Thomson and Ashok Kalyanjee, murdered their children. The men were not driven by rage. The killings were planned and carried out with precision, and designed to crush the women they had once dominated.

      The names of the lost innocents are Ryan and Michelle Thomson, and Paul and Jay Ross, whom you will come to know and love as little ‘Jay-Jay’. Ryan was seven. His sister, Michelle, was 25, a wonderfully innocent woman-child, who had an intellectual age equivalent to that of her brother. Paul was six and lived for Spiderman. Jay-Jay was two, he loved Bob the Builder, and was still wrestling with the mysterious joys of a world in which he would not grow up.

      Their fathers were the worst of all predators, perfect examples of what has become known as the ‘family annihilator’ – parents who kill their own children in an unfathomable act of revenge.

      It is a psychological syndrome that is becoming disturbingly prevalent, but which no mother’s intuition or father’s sixth sense can predict.

      According to the eminent clinical and forensic psychologist Ian Stephen, such killers are now responsible for more than one-third of all child murders. Throughout the pages of this book – and after the mothers’ story has been told – Stephen will offer his professional insight into the minds of the murderers and the women who once loved them.

      It may seem a bitter irony that, while their crimes have united their wives, Thomson and Kalyanjee have also been brought together. They languish in the same jail, where they have yet to offer any explanation or display remorse. Their silence continues to devastate both June and Giselle, for no power on earth can erase the misguided guilt they have assumed – the belief that somehow they should have known.

      The mothers have lived with that erroneous belief since their children were killed. At least they are now insulated by sisterhood and the memories of the happy times with their children.