I'm friends with THE MAN I THOUGHT KILLED DAD

Tracy King spent decades believing her father had been killed in a vicious attack, but then she discovered the truth

- FRANCES HARDY

Tracy King’s young life was blighted by her father’s killing: not only by profound grief and loss, but also abject terror, because she believed his killers – seemingly wrongly acquitted – roamed free near her home. For 34 years this misunderstanding cast a malign shadow. ‘I thought my dad, Mike, had been killed with a karate chop to the head by the ringleader of a gang of five violent youths who had fled the scene after the fatal attack,’ she says. ‘The dread, that I could be passing them in the street or at school, consumed me.’

Tracy stopped going to lessons, stopped sleeping and says she lived ‘in a state of constant exhaustion and fear’. The trauma persisted, unresolved, into her adult life. Then, two years ago – when Tracy was 46 – she confronted it head-on. Writing her new memoir, Learning To Think, she decided to research her father’s death. With astonishing courage, she arranged to meet Andrew Reynolds, the man she believed had killed him – it was a meeting that would shatter every conviction she had harboured.

Today, instead of clinging to the truth as she perceived it, she admits, with spectacular honesty, that she was wrong. ‘I met the man who killed Dad... and I liked him very much,’ she says. ‘Andrew is a kind, thoughtful person without a shred of hatred or aggression. He told me how very sorry he was that he had struck the blow that ended my dad’s life.’

That was Tracy’s first surprise: Reynolds’ genuine contrition. But there was more: ‘Since I was 12, I had been convinced the dad I loved so much – my dear, kind, clever, flawed father, who was so engaged with my learning and taught me to be curious – had met a brutal death at the hands of an aggressor.