A Deep Deceit

Nine

St Ives police station is a small, ugly, modern building which was once a Health Centre.

Although I had lived in the town for so long, I had thankfully had no dealings with the police, unless you counted the occasional pub meeting with Constable Partridge, and it took me some time to find the station. I knew it was somewhere around Royal Square, but so well is it concealed in a dead-end alley behind the Western Hotel and the Royal Cinema that I had to ask a shopkeeper for directions. You have to be actually on your way up the alley before you can see the only POLICE sign I noticed in the area. Indeed, I had heard Rob Partridge say that the reason crime figures in St Ives reamined so low was that hardly anybody could find the nick in order to report an offence.

I stood and studied the police station for a minute or two, perhaps deliberately delaying what I planned to do. It looked as if it might originally have been painted white, although you could no longer be too sure, and it was covered with an excessive number of drainpipes. It was not a very imposing sort of place in which to embark on the momentous course of action I intended. However, I summoned the remains of my courage and walked in – only to be confronted by a second anticlimax. The front office area appeared to be completely empty. I began to look around for a bell to ring, but after a few moment a plump, white-haired man wearing a grey uniform I did not recognise emerged from an office behind the counter.

He had a clipboard in his hand upon which was secured some kind of official-looking form, which he continued to study as he walked towards me. ‘Yes?’ he enquired without a deal of interest, barely looking up from his reading.

At first I couldn’t get any words out.

‘Yes?’ he said again, just a touch impatiently.

I blurted it out then. ‘I’ve come to report a murder,’ I said. My voice sounded very loud.

The man in the grey uniform put down his clipboard very slowly and leaned forward on the counter. He contrived to raise one eyebrow, something I have always found physically impossible. But his expression smacked more of disbelief than shock or alarm. I had once read somewhere that in the UK you are considerably more likely to be struck by lightning than to be murdered. And St Ives, mercifully, is hardly an acknowledged hotbed of crime.

Anyway, whatever he may have been thinking, the man said nothing. The silence in the little lobby was unbearable for me. I had to break it. Right away. ‘I’ve come to report a murder,’ I repeated. My voice was even louder.

‘I see,’ he said. He stared at me.

I stared back. ‘I’ve killed my husband.’

I don’t know how I got the words out. I know that I half screamed them.

I was suddenly desperate to tell my story, for someone, anyone, to listen.

The grey-uniformed man continued to stare at me long and hard. He did not seem particularly affected by what I had told him. ‘And when would that have been, then, madam?’ he enquired politely.

‘Oh, almost seven years ago.’

‘I see,’ he said again, and he stroked his chin in a world-weary sort of gesture.

‘It was a long time ago but I can’t go on hiding so I thought I would come here and confess, and then...’

The telephone rang in the rear office from which the man had just emerged. He raised one hand in a silencing gesture, interrupting my babbling, and promptly retreated to answer it, leaving me stranded in mid sentence. His white hair looked greasy and so did his skin. Maybe his excessive weight made him sweat a lot. He did not fill me with confidence. My big confession was beginning to turn into a total anticlimax.

I could hear him talking into the phone for two or three minutes while I stood alone in the small outer reception area, twitching. I was impatient to get on with it and on the verge of becoming quite overwrought. It seemed an extraordinarily long time before he eventually finished his call and returned to me. The attention he then gave me remained grudging. ‘I’m just a civilian desk clerk, madam,’ he told me in a flat tone of voice. ‘Perhaps you’d take a seat in the interview room there and I’ll get someone to see you as soon as possible.’

I opened my mouth to protest. I wasn’t sure that I could wait. I needed to get this over with. The desk clerk waved impatiently at an open door opposite the counter. I could see a table inside it and a couple of simple wooden chairs. Meekly I did as I was told, making my way into the windowless little room and sitting down as bidden, but leaving the door open so that I could still hear clearly enough anything that happened outside.

The clerk retreated to his rear office yet again, but a telephone rang once more before he had even attempted to contact anyone to deal with me.

He seemed so unconcerned. I was a murderer. That was my dreadful secret. And all these years I had had to live with it. Now I had finally revealed the truth, but nobody seemed to care very much. It was weird.

The clerk took another seemingly interminable call and it was some minutes later that he finally dialled what I assumed was an internal number and asked for Detective Sergeant Perry. ‘I have a woman here who says she killed her husband,’ he reported bluntly, but his tone was lightly ironic and the emphasis heavily on the word ‘says’.

I don’t know quite what I had expected – to be clapped immediately into handcuffs and thrown behind bars, perhaps – but I certainly hadn’t imagined anything like this.

Another five minutes or so passed before a young woman emerged through the locked door, which presumably led in to the police station proper. She called ‘All right, Ben, I’ll take it from here’ across the front desk, presumably to the grey-uniformed clerk yet again invisibly installed in the back office and marched straight into the interview room. ‘Hi, I’m Detective Sergeant Julie Perry,’ she introduced herself cheerily, holding out her right hand in greeting.

She was taller than average, maybe five foot ten, very fair, slim and fit-looking. She had the kind of face that made you quite sure she laughed a lot. Her lips turned up at the corners and although her skin was smooth and clear, apart from a light dusting of freckles, there were just hints of crinkly little laughter lines around her mouth and greenish-grey eyes. She looked as if she were about the same age as me and yet she seemed so capable, so sure of herself, so wise even. Certainly streetwise, whatever that was. Instinctively I envied her. I know that I gazed at her wide-eyed for a moment, barely hearing what she was saying to me.

She smiled reassuringly. I had not expected that kind of response either. ‘Pretty grim in here, isn’t it?’ she remarked conversationally. ‘We can do a bit better if you’d like to come upstairs.’

She escorted me to a second interview room, which at least had a window and was also equipped with a double tape-recorder. She then asked if I would like coffee and departed to fetch it herself, returning with two mugs and a pocket full of sugar packets. ‘Instant, I’m afraid,’ she said, smiling apologetically. ‘But it’s better than nothing.’

She leaned back in her chair, stirred sugar into her coffee and even took the time to indulge in a little bit of small talk about the weather and how splendid St Ives could be out of season, before encouraging me to get to the point of my visit.

I think we were partly waiting to be joined by another officer. I was horrified when Rob Partridge walked in and I think he was a bit shocked to see me sitting there.

Rob sat down without comment and I didn’t say anything either. I could have done without the presence of anyone I knew or who knew me, even as slight and casual as was my acquaintance with PC Partridge, but I supposed such things were inescapable in a small town and it wasn’t going to make any difference at all in the long run.

DS Perry switched on the tape-recorder and began to ask me questions. Gradually it had all become rather formal and I struggled to control my nerves, which were jangling madly, but Julie Perry was quietly sympathetic in her approach and not at all what I had imagined. Not that I was very clear what I had imagined, if anything. Apart from Rob, who had never seemed to count until that moment, I had never even met a police officer before.

‘Why don’t you tell me the whole story, beginning at the beginning,’ she advised.

That was easier said than done, of course. It was a long time since I had put any of it into words. Carl and I never talked about it any more, you see. I am not sure that we ever did talk about it, really. Not after the day it happened. There had not been much to say, not after what we had done.

I believed I had as many good reasons as anybody had ever had to kill a man. None the less I was a murderer, something I’d never been able to come to terms with. Something I had never wanted to even think about, let alone discuss.

I didn’t even know quite where the beginning was. DS Perry was sitting opposite me across a small table and she studied me appraisingly. I could feel the panic rising in me. The room was not particularly warm but little beads of sweat were forming on my forehead and my armpits felt sticky. ‘I had to come because of the threats,’ I said. ‘Somebody else knows what I did. I just want to tell the truth now, to get it over with...’

Rob Partridge remained silent. He had yet to say a word.

DS Perry stood up and walked across to the window, standing with her back to me as if she were looking out of it into the street below. ‘Take your time,’ she said.

I struggled for control, overcome with the enormity of what I was about to do.

All I could do, I reckoned, was to try to tell it the way I relived it again and again inside my head, sometimes during the day and sometimes at night within the awfulness of my dreams.

And I did so, as calmly and clearly as I could manage.

I woke that terrible morning as I so often had after Robert had attacked me, cowering afraid in some corner of the house to which I had crept once his rage was spent. On this occasion I was in the bathroom, curled up on the bath mat. My body ached and throbbed as usual. Sometimes in the deep silence of the night or of early morning I could hear Robert snoring, as he often did when he slumped into a drunken stupor. This time I heard nothing except the birds singing outside. I glanced through the window. It was already daylight. A fine drizzle was falling and there must have been a light breeze. I could see that the branches of the big old chestnut tree, which was as tall as our house, were swaying gently. The leaves were just beginning to turn the colours of autumn. It seemed strange that these things could be as normal when I was somehow starkly aware that nothing else was. I had a severe headache. Gingerly I touched my forehead with one hand. There was a bump on it the size of a hen’s egg. With equal caution I stretched myself. I felt so sore. I pushed aside the towel I had used to cover myself and as I did so saw with horror that it was covered with bloodstains. I looked at my hands. There was blood on them. I was naked beneath the towel. There were smears of blood all over my body. My heart lurched. I pulled myself to my feet and peered anxiously at the bathroom mirror. There was blood on my face.

I could feel the panic rising inside me. I examined myself to see where the blood might have come from. I was battered and bruised as usual, but I did not seem to be cut.

I unlocked the bathroom door, which I had locked in a pathetic attempt to keep Robert out should he have furiously pursued me as he sometimes did, made my way along the landing and went into the bedroom I shared with Robert. The heavy dark curtains at the window were drawn close. I could just see the shape of him lying in bed and he seemed to be deeply asleep. Certainly he was not moving. Cautiously I crept across the room and pulled back a curtain, just a little way – enough to allow in a narrow shaft of morning light.

Then I turned round.

Robert lay in a sodden mess of congealed blood. The pillow and the duvet were drenched in it. For just a few seconds I was frozen to the spot, the horror of it too great to take in. I made myself approach the bed and pull back the covers.

Robert’s body was a mass of blood. I forced myself to look at his face. Blood had stuck to it like thick paint. His eyes were wide open, accusing, his mouth gaped and was full of thick blood.

I didn’t scream. I don’t think my throat would have functioned. Fear, panic, horror, all overwhelmed me. I stepped back from the bed and made my way backwards, still facing the bed and the dreadful corpse that lay in it, until I reached the door. I did not want to look at Robert any more, but I could not tear my eyes away. Only when I had retreated on to the landing and closed the bedroom door behind me, shutting out the terrible image, did I turn round. Then I began to run, throwing myself down the stairs two and three at a time. For once, and in spite of the shock and horror of it, I knew exactly what I was going to do.

I hurried into the kitchen and used the phone there to call Carl.

It was before seven. He answered sleepily.

‘Carl, thank God,’ I said.

He recognised my voice, of course. But I knew how strange I must sound. ‘Please, Carl, please, come over here, come quickly. Please.’

I wasn’t crying. I didn’t have the energy for that. I felt totally drained and I knew that I must have sounded it.

‘What’s happened?’ he asked. ‘What’s wrong, honey? Whatever is wrong?’

I wouldn’t tell him. I couldn’t. Not over the phone. I couldn’t find the words for what had happened, for what I had done. I have always thought that he probably half guessed.

Carl knew where I lived well enough, he had often dropped me and my bicycle off close by, although of course he had never been to the house. He was with me within thirty minutes. I was sitting in one of the upright chairs at the kitchen table, still naked, still covered with blood when I heard the doorbell ring. I stumbled out into the hallway. I didn’t even check that it was Carl outside before I opened the door and afterwards I often wondered what would have happened had it been someone else.

He looked at me in silence for what seemed like an endless stretch of time, before he seemed able to react. I heard him draw in his breath in a shocked gasp. Then he pushed me back into the hall, stepped swiftly inside the house himself and closed the front door behind us.

I had still not covered myself. I was not functioning at all. I just stood there before him naked, bruised, bloody and shivering. But I had not realised how bitterly cold I was until he touched me and I felt the warmth of his arms enfolding me. I began to tremble then. My whole body was shaking.

I leaned against him heavily. ‘He’s in the bedroom,’ I said in a very small voice.

Carl nodded. He asked no questions. If he hadn’t guessed before he certainly had then. He took off the raincoat he was wearing and wrapped it round me.

The door to the kitchen was ajar. Carl led me back there and sat me in a chair, making sure I was sitting up straight, almost as if he was afraid I might fall over. Then he went upstairs.

I expect he was only out of the kitchen for a couple of minutes but it seemed like for ever. Everything appeared to happen in a kind of slow motion that morning.

When he reappeared he was carrying a heavily bloodstained knife.

I began to remember, then – as much as I ever remembered any of it. It began when I decided that the next time Robert beat me I would be ready for him. Most of Robert’s attacks occurred in the bedroom, happened in bed, in some horrible way linked for him with the act of sex. I could not take any more. And I could imagine only one way to escape my tormentor and that was to destroy him. I think he had made me half mad with pain and fear. I sought out the sharpest and most lethal knife in the house, my four-inch Kitchen Devil, with its point like a needle, which I used for peeling vegetables, and tucked it under the mattress of the bed I shared with the husband I had grown to hate and fear so much.

I did not tell Carl what I had done because I did not want him to share my burden of guilt. But inevitably he eventually had to. Because, of course, it was to Carl I turned at once after the deed was done.

I still could not believe that I had actually used the knife, but I knew I must have done.

The night I killed him, Robert had found the knife under the mattress where I had hidden it. He had taunted me with it, grabbed me round the neck and shaken me as he asked me very softly what I planned to do with it.

And as I sat trembling at the kitchen table, when I put my hand to my throat I could still feel the angry weals he had left there. No wonder my voice was so strange and hoarse.

Robert had been horribly angry and had beaten me more viciously than ever. I knew that at some stage he had punched me so hard that he had knocked me off the bed. I thought I must have hit my head on the bedside table, or on something, and been concussed for a few moments, because after that everything was shadowy. Perhaps Robert had been afraid that he had finally gone too far. Perhaps he had backed off, then, allowing me to grab the knife and use it on him. I could still see and feel the hot sticky blood spurting out of him, hitting me full in the face.

I had some vague recollection of eventually crawling off, maybe only half conscious, to the sanctuary of the bathroom, but that was all. The rest was a blank.

Carl sat down next to me and put the bloodstained knife on the table in front of us.

‘Oh my God,’ I said. ‘What have I done?’

‘You know what you’ve done, don’t you,’ he said gently.

I nodded, staring at him. Of course I knew. I just didn’t want it to be true. ‘I’ve killed Robert, I’ve stabbed him to death,’ I responded simply.

‘Yes,’ he said and his voice was very solemn. ‘We’ve got to leave now. Quickly.’

I started to cry, then, and the tears brought some relief, but not as much as his presence, his calm strength.

‘Nobody is ever going to hurt you again,’ he said.

He took me upstairs to the bathroom, stood me in the shower and washed me. He found clean towels in the airing cupboard and dried me with them. Then he fetched me some clothes from the bedroom – I could not go in there again – and dressed me.

When I was clean, dry and fully clothed, at last I began to feel marginally better. ‘Shouldn’t we telephone the police?’ I asked in a fairly half-hearted manner. From the start that never seemed a very attractive proposition.

‘Oh darling,’ he soothed, putting his arms round me again. ‘Do you think you have the strength to deal with all that?’

I hesitated. ‘I s-suppose not,’ I stammered.

‘Honey, at the very best you would need to face a trial and would have to plead guilty to manslaughter,’ he went on. ‘But it could be worse than that. You could well be charged with murder. You must accept that. You stabbed your husband repeatedly. He was a clergyman. Respected. Popular. I know what you did was in self-defence and that you acted out of desperation, that you were frantic, beside yourself, not responsible. Of course I know that. But who else is going to believe it? That is what you have to ask yourself.’

His words soothed me the way they invariably did. I was sure he must be right. He was always right.

‘You and I know that you destroyed a monster,’ said Carl. ‘I’m not going to let that destroy us.’

Carl had driven over in his old red van.

‘The transport’s not up to much, but it’s good enough, I reckon, to take us plumb away from here, someplace new. We are just going to leave the past behind us.’

Nothing could have seemed more attractive at that moment. Carl packed a small bag for me, just clothes. I didn’t care what I left behind as long as I could get out of that house, and away from Robert’s body and all the dreadful memories, as quickly a possible.

I was in a kind of dream as we left the manse, but Gran’s bike, the only possession I really cared about, stood in the hallway and as we passed it I asked Carl if there would be room to take it with us.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Anything you want...’

Later I regretted that I had not taken the few books I owned and valued, including several that Gran had given me and written messages in, but at the time I did not care about anything except getting away.

Carl wheeled the bike out to his van and I took the key from where it lived on a hook in the hallway and, out of habit, locked the front door of the manse.

First we drove to Carl’s Sheen Road flat and he asked me to stay there while he visited a couple of local galleries which had sold some of his work and owed him money. ‘We’re going to need all we can get,’ he said, ‘and you’ll be quite safe. Nobody knows you are here. Nobody even knows we know each other, do they?’

I said I certainly hoped that was so.

He was only gone for a couple of hours, but it seemed much longer. When he finally returned he began to load the van with what possessions he wanted to take with him, mainly his painting gear. He also prised up a floorboard and removed an old leather document case. ‘Cash,’ he said. ‘I’m not into banks. I only deal in cash and I stash away what I can. I collected three hundred-odd quid this morning. We should have enough now to last us till we get settled.’

One way and another it was almost mid afternoon before we clambered back aboard the van and embarked irrevocably on our Great Escape. I remember that I did not even ask Carl where we were going. I didn’t care as long as it was away from my past and my terrible crime. I was vaguely aware, as we ploughed through the slow moving traffic of the Sheen Road, down through Mortlake, over Chiswick Bridge, along a short stretch of the A4 and on to the M4, that we must be heading west.

‘We’re going to Cornwall,’ Carl announced. ‘St Ives. It’s the place for a painter. Don’t worry, honey. As long as I have my paints I can provide for us.’

Of course I hadn’t given the practical side of what we were doing a thought. I had never had to think about that sort of thing, not even with Robert. The drizzling rain continued through most of our journey and even though it was warm in the van I sat shivering by Carl’s side all the way to Cornwall.

We stopped once at a motorway service station just outside Exeter to get petrol and Carl tried to persuade me to have something to eat. I couldn’t face food.

Soon after we passed into Cornwall the van slew violently to the left. Carl regained control only with difficulty and we slowed to an ungainly halt by the roadside. The offside rear tyre had burst.

In order to change the wheel we had to take almost everything out of the back of the van. Strangely enough, the sheer physical effort involved made me feel a little better. Carl was not the most mechanically minded man in the world, but eventually he managed to complete the task – I was no help, that was for certain, I couldn’t even drive let alone change a wheel – and we trundled on our way again.

The old van was not capable of any high speed and so it was that we did not reach St Ives until almost midnight. The rain stopped just before we entered the town, and the night was clear and moonlit by then. I remember being captivated by the little seaside resort right from the start. Carl drove straight to the waterside and we parked illegally alongside the old sea wall, reasoning that nobody would bother us at that time of night. We clambered gratefully out of the van, leaned against the wall and gazed out to sea. The silence was devastating and the water, reflecting the moonlight, had seemed so still. I sensed that peace was within my grasp at last.

‘My Lady of the Harbour...’ I could still hear Carl’s words...

‘And that was nearly seven years ago?’ queried Sergeant Perry, somewhere in the distance. Her voice almost startled me. I had gone into a kind of trance. I seemed to have a habit of doing this, come to think of it. I suppose all that stuff about us travelling to St Ives was irrelevant, really. It had just carried on naturally for me, part of my dreadful story.

I nodded.

‘A long time to carry such a thing around with you,’ she said.

I nodded again.

Six and a half years of hiding, I thought. Six and a half years of fear. I had been so happy with Carl, but the past had always lurked and now, despite my uncertainty about what might happen next, I did feel that a weight had been lifted from my shoulders. I hoped Carl wouldn’t be too angry with me, but suddenly there had been no choice.

I took a deep breath, returning sharply inside my head to the present. Carl would be frantic with worry. I rarely went out alone at all, except to the library, and never without telling him where I was going and when I would be back. I had been gone for over two hours.

I didn’t know what would happen to me, but I suppose I expected to be arrested. ‘Could somebody contact my husband,’ I asked.

‘We already have,’ said DS Perry.

I could only imagine how shocked he must have been. But I was still sure I had done the right thing.

The DS suggested that I wait a moment while her colleagues completed some enquiries they were making and she left me alone with a stunned-looking Rob Partridge. After a couple of minutes a uniformed constable came in and told Rob he was wanted on the phone. Rob retreated with obvious relief and the constable positioned himself by the door like a sentry. I assumed that DS Perry and the others were checking up on me and my story.

I wondered what prison would be like. From the moment I decided to make my confession I had been in no doubt whatsoever that I would go to jail. I saw no alternative. I didn’t relish the prospect, but I doubted it could be any worse than what I had endured with the man I had eventually killed.

I just hoped that Carl would not feel too betrayed, and that one day he and I would have a future and would be able to live a normal life. Throughout whatever came before that it would be the dream of a future with Carl that would keep me going.

I was beginning to become aware that normality was something I had never experienced.