A Lesson in Dying

Chapter Eight

The remand centre car park was full. Sunday afternoon must have been a busy time for visiting. There was even a bus. In the queue at the gate into the prison there were babies clutching bottles and young women with picnic baskets. There was the feeling of a family day out. Inside the remand centre Jack Robson was separated from the other visitors. They were taken into a large noisy room, filled with smoke, where bored children roamed in packs. There was a tea bar at one end and the prison officers looked on with benign indifference.

‘That won’t do for you,’ Ramsay said with a wink. ‘You’ll want a bit of privacy.’

Jack was whisked away. He followed a pretty young woman in a blue uniform down a series of identical corridors. Ramsay suddenly disappeared.

Kitty Medburn was wearing her own clothes – a thin wool jersey and a green plaid skirt. She was in a drab tiny interview room with her hands clasped on the table. Jack was not sure what he had expected. He had seen films where prisoners and visitors were separated by glass screens but there was none of that here. With sufficient courage he could have reached across the table immediately and taken her hands.

‘Here you are, Mrs Medburn,’ the officer said brightly as she opened the door. She might have been a nurse. ‘I told you there was a visitor for you. I’ll see if I can find you some tea.’

Then they were left alone.

Kitty had not moved as they came into the room. ‘ Jack,’ she said, looking at her hands. ‘It was good of you to come to see me but there was no need.’

He felt that after all there was a glass screen between them. Her politeness and formality were a barrier which he was unable to break through.

‘I had to come,’ he said. ‘ I wanted to see you.’

‘There was no need,’ she said again, ‘everyone here has been very thoughtful.’

‘I didn’t bring anything,’ he said, wondering if he should have brought a present as if he were visiting someone sick in hospital. ‘I didn’t know what was allowed.’

She did not answer and there was an awkward, impenetrable silence.

‘Kitty!’ His voice was loud and cracked, and shattered the impression that there was nothing wrong. It was impossible to believe that she was an invalid in some exclusive clinic. ‘Kitty, did you kill Harold?’

She looked at him directly for the first time with a peculiar cool disapproval.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I didn’t kill him.’

He was so relieved that he did not notice that she disapproved of his lack of control. ‘I knew it,’ he said, words bubbling from him like laughter. ‘I told Ramsay that you’d never do anything like that.’ He leaned forward over the table towards her. ‘I’ve been carrying out my own investigation,’ he said, ‘talking to people. I’m already starting to get results. Patty’s helping me.’

He saw suddenly that she was crying. There was no sound, no movement, but tears were rolling down her cheeks. They seemed to Jack as smooth and as pale as the face of the dressmaker’s dummy.

‘Dear Jack,’ she said. ‘You haven’t changed at all.’

‘Haven’t I?’ he said. He thought it was a compliment. ‘I still care about you, Kitty. When you get out of here you’ll see…’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. There was panic in her voice but he was so desperate to make her realize that he was on her side that he did not recognize it.

‘I’ll have to ask you some questions,’ Jack said. ‘You won’t mind, will you? It’ll get you out of here more quickly. Ramsay’s already started to reconsider the case, you know.’ He sat back with pride. ‘I’ve found new evidence, just by talking to people.’

She seemed confused. ‘I didn’t realize you were taking such an interest,’ she said.

‘You didn’t think I’d do nothing!’

‘I didn’t realize,’ she repeated.

‘Did you know that Harold was a blackmailer?’ He wished he had a notebook. She might take him more seriously if he had a notebook.

‘No,’ she said.

‘You must have known that he was making money.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘He always refused to discuss money with me. It was an obsession with him. He had several different bank accounts and he was always transferring money from one to another. He was secretive about it, but he always had been. We lived mostly on my wages.’

‘Didn’t you mind that?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘There are different kinds of meanness.’

‘Did it not occur to you that people were frightened of him?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘I was never scared of him. I knew he wasn’t well liked.’

‘Harold was drugged with Heminevrin before he was strangled,’ Jack said. ‘Did the police tell you that?’

She nodded. ‘ They asked me where I got it.’

‘Have you collected a prescription for Heminevrin for a patient recently?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘but I had access to it. I helped out at Mrs Mount’s nursing home the weekend before Harold died and they have it there to calm some of the old people.’

‘Did you tell the police that?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I’d forgotten. But I’ll tell them when they come again. I’ve nothing to hide.’

‘Have you no idea who phoned him on the night of the murder?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I presumed it was his mistress. I didn’t ask.’

She looked at him with affection and amusement. He felt so happy he could sing. ‘I’m not a lot of help, am I?’ she said.

‘Why did you marry him?’ he asked suddenly. It had nothing to do with the investigation. He was desperate to know.

‘I thought it would work,’ she said. ‘I thought we would suit each other. It did work in a way. He gave me privacy. That was important. And security.’

‘I would have married you,’ he cried. ‘ You know I would have married you.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I knew that.’

‘I’ve so many dreams,’ he said. ‘Just wait until you come home. We’re so lucky to have found each other after all these years…’

She might have answered but the prison officer came in carrying two thick white cups three-quarters full of dark brown tea.

‘I’ve put sugar in,’ the young woman said. ‘ I thought you’d take sugar.’

She set the cups on the table and turned away, a dark plait swinging behind her, keys clanking at her side. The interruption threw Jack. The intimacy was suddenly lost. Perhaps he had presumed too much. The awkwardness between them had returned. Kitty seemed to withdraw into her own thoughts. She drank tea in silence. Her tears had dried on her cheeks. He coughed and she looked up sharply as if she had forgotten that he was still there.

‘I think you should go,’ she said. ‘There are rules about visiting.’

‘Of course,’ he said. He stood up. He did not know if the door would be locked and what he should do to attract the prison officer’s attention. ‘Shall I come and see you again?’ he asked.

‘Not here,’ she said.

‘No,’ he said. ‘You’re quite right. This isn’t a good place to talk. We need time together. You’ll be home soon.’

He wanted to lean over and kiss her smooth cheek, but the prison officer outside had seen that he was standing and had the door open. So he left the room without touching Kitty at all.

‘Goodbye,’ he said. ‘I’ll see you soon. You can depend on me.’

He was a proud, fierce little man, shorter than the woman who patiently held the door for him. Kitty remained sitting. She said nothing but she smiled at him.

Ramsay, waiting in the car, found Jack altered. He thought at first Kitty Medburn had confessed to the murder and it would all be over.

‘What did she say?’ he asked. He made no move to drive away.

‘She didn’t kill him,’ Robson said, ‘if that’s what you’re thinking. She’s a truthful woman and she told me straight out.’ He looked at Ramsay. ‘She shouldn’t be in a place like that,’ he said. ‘ It’s made her hard.’

‘Did she tell you anything else?’

‘Aye. She had access to that Heminevrin. They use it in Mrs Mount’s old people’s home, and she helped out there at weekends. I’m not betraying any confidence by telling you. She would have told you herself.’

Ramsay looked at the old man with sympathy. Don’t get so involved, he wanted to say. That sort of infatuation is always destructive. I know. I loved Diana. The only way to survive is to stay detached. But he said only:

‘Was she pleased to see you?’

Jack Robson flushed. ‘ Of course she was,’ he said too loudly. ‘We’ve always been friends.’ As Ramsay started the engine, he added: ‘Will you let her go?’

‘No,’ the inspector said. ‘ I can’t do that. But I’ll not close the case. Not yet.’

Patty Atkins felt angry and excluded for most of the day. When Kitty Medburn was arrested her father had asked for her help. They had become in a sense partners. Yet with a monumental folly and arrogance, without consulting her, he had wandered alone into the school house and been knocked unconscious. When Ramsay had helped him home the night before it had been as if Jack and the policeman were partners and she were fit for nothing better than making the tea. They told her nothing. She found out about the dummy dressed in the witch’s costume, the possibility that there were two intruders, one who had been in the school house when Jack had arrived and another who had followed him in, only by listening to their conversation. Mixed with anger there was guilt. She should have taken more care of her father. What would Ramsay think? That she was irresponsible and incompetent. It had come to matter a great deal what Ramsay thought.

On the Sunday morning her irritation persisted. Her father told her that Ramsay planned to arrange a visit for him to the remand centre but gave her no details. He wanted to go to the club with Jim for his usual Sunday morning drink, but she expressed her disapproval of the idea with a ferocity that surprised them both.

‘I’m not spending all morning cooking a roast dinner only to have the pair of you too drunk to know what you’re eating.’

They realized that she was upset, and surrendered without a fight. After all she never usually made a fuss about the club. They hung about the house, subdued and bored, until late morning when Jack said he had to go for a walk.

‘Not far,’ he said. ‘I’ll not go near the club. Just to the paper shop and back to stretch my legs.’

In fact he was gone for an hour, and she was beginning to become concerned. He arrived just as she was setting the meal on the table.

‘Just as well you’re back,’ she said. ‘It would have gone in the bin.’

Then the doorbell rang and Ramsay was standing there, tall and beautiful and apologetic.

‘I’ve come to see your father,’ he said. ‘It’s an awkward time. I’m sorry.’

‘Have you eaten?’ she asked. ‘There’s plenty.’ Jack and her husband looked on with resentment. Why was she so pleasant to the policeman when she had been so unreasonably bad-tempered with them?

‘Are you sure?’ Ramsay asked. ‘You’re very kind.’

‘Wait till you’ve tasted it before you say that,’ Jack said spitefully. ‘Our Patty’s never been much of a cook.’

Ramsay sat at the table in a space squeezed between the children and ate everything put before him. He seemed not to mind that the beef was not as tender as it might have been or that the sprouts had begun to disintegrate. He liked his vegetables well-cooked, he said. And not to worry that the Yorkshire puddings were stuck to the pan. It was the taste that mattered. At the end of the meal he said he had not enjoyed such a good Sunday dinner since his mother had died. She felt such a glow of pleasure and gratitude that she hardly noticed when he took her father away without explaining why or where they were going.

It was not until the dishes had been washed that she realized she had been flattered into releasing her father without asking questions. Ramsay was a clever man. She did not blame him, only her own vanity and gullibility. Her anger returned.

‘Come on!’ she snapped at the children. ‘ We’re going for a walk.’

‘Mam!’ They were horrified. ‘Do we have to?’

She forced them into wellingtons, coats and gloves, knowing it to be an exercise in masochism because they would moan and whine all the time they were out. Let them. It would suit her mood. Jim was settled in a chair in front of the fire watching football on the television, and irritated her beyond reason. Ramsay might be a conceited, deceiving bastard, she thought, but she could not imagine him stretched in a chair like that, turning pink from the heat, his mouth wide open in the beginning of a snore. ‘You could do with some exercise too,’ she said and poked Jim viciously in the stomach. But he took no notice of her and turned back to the game.

It was a damp, raw day. A wet mist had blown in from the sea and immediately covered their clothes and hair with fine droplets of moisture. The smoke from the coal fires hung in the valley, so the fog was dirty and grey.

‘Mam,’ Andrew said. The word drawled into a wail of complaint. ‘It’s raining.’

‘You’re not sugar,’ she said. ‘You’ll not melt.’

‘Can’t we take the car and go to Whitley Bay?’

For a moment she was tempted. The children, she knew, were seduced by the amusement arcades, the prospect of ice cream or fizzy drinks in a café, but she liked the seaside town in the winter. She liked the long empty sweep of the promenade, the monstrous shapes of the Spanish city fairground looming out of the mist and the sound of the foghorn on the buoy at the mouth of the Tyne. Later, she wished she had listened to them and taken the car into the town where the coloured neon lights shone into the gloom.

‘No,’ she said. ‘We’ll go for a walk. The fresh air will do us good.’ She took their hands and dragged them along so they were almost running.

She wanted to get away from the village and took them along one of the lanes that led to the coast. They passed the old mill, where the Wilcoxes lived, and as always she looked in, fascinated by the style of the furniture, their imagined sophistication. But although both cars were in the drive, there was no sign of life and she presumed that they were all in the kitchen at the back of the house. Perhaps they were eating a late Sunday lunch.

I bet Hannah Wilcox doesn’t cook soggy vegetables, Patty thought. I bet her gravy isn’t lumpy.

She longed, for once, to do something well.

Out of Heppleburn the lane became narrow, and the grass verge where Patty made the children walk was sodden. On one side of the lane was a wood and the brown leaves dripped over the road and blocked out the light. The few cars that passed them were already using headlights and were identical dark shadows camouflaged by mist. On the other side, between the grass verge and the hedge, was a ditch. Patty knew that Andrew was attracted by it. Water of any kind acted like a magnet. She held his arm firmly and pulled him away. The hedge had lost most of its leaves and they could look through it into a muddy field where turnips were growing.

‘How much further?’ Jennifer asked. She had begun to drag her feet. Her trousers and anorak were splashed and stained.

‘Not much further,’ Patty said, beginning to relent. She felt better for being out of the house and the children had surprised her by being good. She wanted to be home when her father arrived. The thought that Ramsay might come in again excited her. ‘Up to the bend in the road, then we’ll turn back.’

Several hundred yards further on the road curved suddenly. There was a gap in the hedge there and a pull-in for tractors to get into the field. The ditch disappeared into a culvert, and emerged again. Andrew was fascinated by it and edged closer and closer.

They were about to turn back and cross the road to face the oncoming traffic when Andrew, with a splash of muddy water, fell in. Patty had released her grip on him for an instant to take Jennifer’s hand to cross the road. He had been leaning forward, trying to reach the hedge, when the bank collapsed and he slid down, the heels of his wellingtons gouging deep grooves in the mud. He sat in the water at the bottom, half crying and half laughing while Patty looked on. There was an inevitability about the scene which made her relatively calm and she felt exasperation rather than anger.

‘Stand up,’ she said, ‘and give me your hand. I’ll pull you out.’

He slithered to his feet and she reached out to help him. She was leaning over to haul him up by the sleeves of his drenched and slimy anorak when her attention was attracted to the ditch near to the entrance into the field. She stared with disbelief. Andrew was too concerned with his own drama to notice that anything was wrong.

‘Come on, Mam,’ he said, enjoying himself, ‘before I get stuck.’

She pulled the boy out and stood him on the road. She realized that she must be filthy.

‘Go on,’ she said. ‘Start walking back. Both of you. Quickly or you’ll catch your death of cold.’

Excited by the adventure the children started back towards the village, Andrew telling with great detail the horror of his slide into the abyss. Patty watched them go, then walked on a few paces. The track into the field was churned by tractor tyres. She forced herself to stare once more into the ditch. There, its hair matted and floating to the surface like weed, its head completely submerged by water, lay the body of a man. It lay face down and the shoulders and buttocks broke the surface of the water. Patty could not see the face but she recognized the clothes. No one else in the village had such a smart leather jacket, or wore jeans with an expensive label on the back pocket. The body belonged to Paul Wilcox. Saying nothing she hurried after Andrew and Jennifer.

The walk home was a nightmare. She was overwhelmed by a panic so intense that she could hardly move. It was not that she imagined a murderer lurking behind every hedge or tree. It was that suddenly the world was a dangerous and irrational place. It was the same feeling of panic she had experienced when she had left home for the first time to go to college in the south. She had felt then that she could trust no one. The prosperous town near to the college was so alien that she felt that houses, streets, might change or disappear overnight. Every time she went out she was frightened of getting lost. Now she had the same feeling of extreme insecurity. Harold Medburn’s death had provoked a different reaction. That was ritualized, a sort of game. There was nothing playful about the body lying face down in the ditch. It went against everything she had ever known. She felt the laws of nature had been reversed. She walked on in a dream and only Andrew’s increasingly loud complaints that he was cold and wet kept her sane.

The quickest way back was past the old mill, so she went that way though she wished she could avoid it. Her eyes were drawn to the window. Hannah Wilcox sat on a rocking chair there with Elizabeth on her knee. She was holding a book for the child but her eyes were on the horizon, as if she were waiting for someone to appear outside. Patty hurried past. She was terrified that the woman might come into the garden and ask if Patty had seen her husband. Ramsay had to be told first. He was a professional. He would know how to break such devastating news.

When they arrived home Ramsay’s car was parked in the road outside the house. Patty opened the door and sent the children upstairs to bathe. The men must have just come in because they were still wearing coats. Her father was talking. He seemed in a jubilant, almost drunken mood. She wanted to tell Ramsay about Paul Wilcox but her father would not stop talking and although she opened her mouth no words would come out. It was Jim who noticed how upset she was. The others saw her only as a clown, covered with mud. It was Jim who interrupted Jack Robson.

‘Patty,’ he said. ‘What is it?’

‘Paul Wilcox is dead,’ she said. ‘ I found his body. By the side of the lane that leads to the coast past the old mill.’

She was aware of the sudden silence, of the carefully controlled disbelief.

‘Was it a road accident?’ Jim asked and she realized that he at least believed her. That had never occurred to her and she felt a spasm of relief. ‘Perhaps it was,’ she said. ‘Perhaps it was a hit and run accident. He was in the ditch.’

Then Ramsay was sitting beside her on the settee, asking her questions. In his gentle, intimate voice he probed through her panic, demanded her attention. Where exactly was the body? Had she told anyone else about it? Did she pass anyone on the road? Was there perhaps a car that she recognized?

She answered as calmly as she could, because she knew that was what he wanted and she wanted to please him. Then he was gone and she burst into tears. Upstairs the children were shouting and splashing in the bath and the sound of their laughter echoed around the house.

The news of Paul Wilcox’s death did nothing to diminish Jack Robson’s good humour. If anything it made him more excited. If it were murder, he said, there would be no reason to keep Kitty Medburn in custody. The police would have to release her immediately. There couldn’t after all be two murderers in a village the size of Heppleburn.

His lack of sensitivity increased Patty’s feeling of unreality. It was out of character. Her father seemed a different sort of man. He’s obsessed by that woman, she thought. Perhaps she’s a witch after all and she’s cast a spell on him. Then she remembered what the vicar had said about the friendship being founded on fantasy. He’s turned her into a saint, she thought, or an angel. He’s going to be disappointed when he realizes she’s an ordinary woman, like me. She’s not a witch. But she’s not an angel either.

Eventually, to their relief, Jack fell asleep, almost in mid-sentence. The incident in the school house and the excitement of his meeting with Kitty Medburn had exhausted him. Patty and Jim waited in silence for Ramsay’s return.

It was nine o’clock when the policeman finally knocked at the door. The house was quiet. The children were in bed and Jack was still sleeping. Jim sat beside her and felt awkward because there was nothing to do to help. She would not talk to him. She felt that by an effort of will she could arrange the facts so that Paul Wilcox had not been killed after all. She could persuade herself that she had made a mistake. She had seen not Paul Wilcox but a bundle of rags that had been dumped in the ditch. And if he were dead, it might be possible to convince herself that there had been an accident. He had been knocked down by a frightened driver on the grey, badly lit road. She heard the knock at the door but was so tense with the strain of these thoughts that she could not move. Jim let Ramsay into the house and the policeman walked straight into the living room as if he were a family friend.

‘I can’t stay long,’ he said in a low voice. He seemed eager not to wake Jack. ‘As you can imagine there’s a lot to do.’

‘So it was Paul Wilcox?’ Patty said. She had known all along that it was.

Ramsay nodded.

‘Was there anything I should have done?’ Patty said. ‘ Perhaps I should have tried to revive him. But I thought perhaps I shouldn’t touch him.’

And I couldn’t have done it, she thought. I couldn’t have got any closer to him. I would have been ill.

‘No,’ Ramsay said firmly. ‘There was nothing you could have done.’

He began to leave the room when suddenly Jack woke up with a start, like a character in a badly written situation comedy. It was so like comic acting that Patty wondered if he had been asleep at all.

‘What’s going on?’ he said. ‘What happened?’

‘Paul Wilcox is dead,’ she said.

‘You told me that earlier,’ he said. ‘But how did he die? Was it a car accident? Or was he murdered?’

‘Mr Wilcox was murdered,’ Ramsay said reluctantly. She thought he was embarrassed as if there was something he had failed to tell them. ‘It’s too early to be certain, but it seems that he was strangled.’

‘There you are!’ Jack struggled out of his chair. He had lost all trace of fatigue. ‘You’ll have to let Kitty go now.’ He was already planning her return home. He would get champagne, the real stuff. He had never in his life drunk champagne.

Ramsay was silent for a moment, as if considering how much to say.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It’s too late for that.’

‘What do you mean?’ Jack was puzzled. ‘You know that she can’t have killed Paul Wilcox so it’s obvious that Kitty isn’t the murderer.’

‘Oh yes,’ Ramsay said. ‘That’s obvious now. I don’t believe Mrs Medburn killed her husband.’

‘Well!’ Jack was beginning to get angry. ‘When are you going to let her go?’

‘I’m sorry,’ Ramsay repeated. ‘ I’ve got some terrible news for you.’ He hesitated. ‘Mrs Medburn’s dead. She committed suicide this afternoon. She hanged herself.’

‘Why?’ Jack cried. ‘I told her I’d get her out. Why didn’t she trust me?’

He turned on Ramsay. ‘You killed her. If you’d let her go earlier she’d still be alive.’

‘No,’ Ramsay said. ‘ She was never frightened of captivity.’

‘Then what was going on? What were they doing to her in that place?’

‘Nothing.’ Ramsay spoke gently. ‘She left a note for you. Perhaps you’ll understand then. She was afraid, I think, of being released.’