For Death Comes Softly

Twenty-One

My conversation with Todd Mallett had left me with a new niggling doubt about Robin which I decided I must sort out for myself as swiftly as possible.

I drove back to Bristol that evening just after the heaviest of the rush-hour traffic had subsided. The clear bright weather continued, and although it was very cold there was no ice or frost and my journey home, even after dark, went as swiftly and smoothly as journeys out of London ever do.

As soon as I got into the house I went straight to the cupboard where we hung all our keys on hooks. The spare key to Julia’s flat, which she had given me years previously, was still there. Of course it was still there, I told myself irritably. I did not even know whether or not Robin had ever been aware that I had a key to Julia’s flat. There was no reason for him to have been — although that key, alongside all of ours, did wear a label clearly marked Julia. In any case, the key was safe. Neither Robin nor anyone else had used my key to Julia’s flat to gain entry on the night of the fire. So that was the end of that. Yet again the finger had pointed at Robin, and yet again he really did seem to be in the clear.

I went to the phone and called him on his mobile. He replied at once and sounded relieved at first, and then anxious and a bit irritated — which was understandable enough, I suppose. We hadn’t spoken for three days.

He bombarded me with questions. ‘Where on earth have you been? Why haven’t you returned any of my calls? I’ve been worried sick.’

‘I’ve been with Julia,’ I said obliquely. I was still testing him, I suppose.

‘Well fine, but surely you could have called me to let me know.’

‘You haven’t heard, then?’

‘Heard what? Rose, do stop talking in riddles and tell me what’s going on.’ He sounded exasperated now.

So I told him. About the fire and about being with Julia in the hospital.

‘Oh my God,’ he said. ‘Rose, I had no idea. I do wish you had called me. I’d have come back straight away. I’ll come now, of course I will.’

‘Robin, there’s no need,’ I began. I wasn’t sure I could cope with him yet.

‘Don’t be ridiculous, darling,’ he said. Why was everybody telling me I was ridiculous all of a sudden?

‘Julia may have some bizarre bloody ideas about me, but I know what she means to you,’ he continued. ‘I’ll be there as soon as I can.’

I said nothing. There was a pause.

‘By the way,’ he asked casually. ‘Can she remember what happened?’

‘Not a thing,’ I replied.

Did I imagine the quick intake of breath. ‘How absolutely terrible,’ he said.

I replaced the receiver and tried to tell myself, with mixed success, that I was being stupid. Robin was in Ireland. He could not possibly have had anything to do with the fire in Julia’s flat. And in any case, how could I really think that the man I loved could be capable of that, or of the death of Natasha Felks, come to that. How could I even consider that Robin was that wicked?

Sometimes, as I veered from believing or fearing one thing to accepting the complete opposite and back again, I came to the conclusion that the only really wicked person around was me.

Good as his promise, Robin arrived home the next morning. He flew this time, from Cork into Bristol. And when he walked into the house the first thing he did was to take me into his arms. But I was determined at least to confront him with every detail of my terrible anxieties. I was quite possibly even more confused than poor Julia, I reckoned.

Resolutely I shook myself free of him, struggled to collate my muddled thinking and endeavoured to speak calmly and clearly.

‘I was on my way to visit Julia when I heard on the car radio the news of the fire,’ I began.

‘Poor darling,’ he said, his voice full of concern.

‘You haven’t asked why I suddenly decided to go to see her?’ I said bluntly.

‘Rose, she’s your best friend, I was going to be away for several days, why should you have to have a reason?’ he asked reasonably.

I persevered. ‘Julia had a letter to show me, a letter from Natasha to Sir Jeremy Cole,’ I said.

He looked almost as blank as Julia had in her hospital bed.

‘Rose, why do you want to tell me about a letter my late fiancée wrote to her former lover?’ he asked. ‘I’m not interested.’

I made myself not be put off. As succinctly as I could I told him about Julia’s pretend interview and about the letter and how Julia had taken it away with her.

When I had finished Robin’s face seemed to have paled considerably.

‘You can’t ever forget you are a police officer, Rose, can you? Not for an instant?’

I could see that he was hurt. More than that I could not fathom.

‘Not the investigating officer,’ I said. ‘There is one again though.’

His eyes opened wide in wonderment. ‘You’ve reported it all, haven’t you?’ he said, and there was absolutely no expression in his voice. ‘All this nonsense. And you’ve pointed the finger at me. How could you, Rose?’

‘I’m sorry,’ I responded, and I was too. Although I would have done the same thing all over again, it is impossible to describe the torment I had caused myself by doing so.

‘Surprising then that I haven’t been arrested yet, or at least given the third degree by the new national crime squad,’ he said, his voice heavy with sarcasm.

‘Todd Mallett has already checked up on your whereabouts,’ I replied quite formally, almost as if I really were on duty and dealing with a suspect. ‘And I am sure he or one of his team will question you sooner or later.’

‘Really,’ Robin said, still sarcastic. ‘Good job I have such a perfect alibi, then. Or do you think I beamed myself off the train or over from Waterford to London in order to despatch your barking mad bloody friend? Is that it? Have you gone quite barking too?’

He had raised his voice almost to screaming pitch, something I had so rarely known him to do. I said nothing. His eyes narrowed.

‘Has this letter been found?’ he asked.

I shook my head. ‘Julia’s flat was almost totally destroyed along with everything in it,’ I told him.

I was aware of Robin watching me closely, as if my behaviour were somehow curious.

‘What does this Jeremy Cole chappy have to say about it all now, then?’ he continued. ‘I presume he has been questioned.’

I nodded. ‘He says there was no letter and his interview with Julia was entirely about his new TV show,’ I said flatly.

Robin smiled, and for once I did not find his smile attractive at all.

‘So the allegedly incriminating letter no longer exists if it ever did, poor Julia cannot remember anything about it nor even interviewing Cole, and he denies everything,’ he finally remarked coldly. ‘Bit of a cock-and-bull story, wouldn’t you say?’

For a fleeting moment I almost hated him. It was the first time I had ever felt like that. Great passion and great loathing are often not far apart, I suppose. But I couldn’t really hate Robin. Not even now.

He stood up, strode across the room and caught hold of me by the shoulders. Not roughly, not even then, but firmly, as if by physical contact he might emphasise his point. And he spoke to me in the way that an exasperated parent might address a silly child. Not the first time he’d done that I remember thinking, and I wasn’t sure which of us that said most about.

‘Rose, I didn’t even know Julia had gone to see Cole. How could I have known? I went to Ireland. I was on the overnight train on the way there when her flat caught fire. You know that.’

He wasn’t being so patient now. After all this was the second time that I had confronted him with the unspeakable.

He was angry. He still had hold of me by the shoulders and just very slightly shook me. I could feel the frustration in him. For a moment I thought he was going to lose control. But he didn’t. Instead he let go of me and stepped back. When he started talking again his voice was by then quite quiet and somehow very chilling.

‘I can’t believe I am being interrogated by my own wife,’ he said. ‘And I can’t believe what you seem to be trying to accuse me of.’

I bowed my head. I’d had to have this out with him, I remained consumed with doubts and fears, but he had already succeeded in making me feel a bit ashamed of myself.

‘Are you determined to destroy our marriage?’ he asked even more coldly.

‘No, no, oh, I don’t know,’ I stumbled. ‘I don’t know what I think, or what I’m doing any more. I am so confused.’

I saw his face soften.

‘You don’t really believe such awful things about me, do you, Rose?’

He just sounded sad then. I looked into his eyes. All I could see was pain, the so familiar pain.

‘No, I suppose I don’t, I can’t really, can I?’ I heard myself say. And yet such a short time previously I had half-convinced myself that he really might be guilty of almost unimaginable crimes. What I told him next was the absolute truth. ‘If I believed it, I couldn’t stay with you.’

He reached out for me again, but this time quite tenderly.

‘You have to stay with me, Rose,’ he whispered. ‘We are so good together.’

It still felt right, absolutely right, there was no doubt about that. My body softened to his touch.

‘But you must stop doubting me, Rose, you really must, I just can’t take any more of it. You keep opening up old wounds, don’t you, digging in places where there is nothing to dig for. It’s like some kind of obsession. It has to stop.’

Then he softened his words by smiling the old to-die-for smile.

I was no longer entirely blinded by the white mist of my love for him, and maybe I never would be again. But still I could not see clearly. And it was in that moment that I realised with devastating clarity that while I couldn’t quite quell the terrible suspicions which haunted me, I would continue to belong to Robin Davey until there was absolutely no doubt left at all about his guilt. Perhaps even then I would not be able to break the hold he had over me.

I attempted to make one last enquiry into my husband’s doubtful past. A couple of days later, on a damp, grey, rather more typically English December morning, I drove to Northgate Farm, without Robin, to visit Maude. I had begun to wonder more and more about the time, just after having suffered her dreadful stroke, when she had seemed to almost bring her son back to life with those words she had whispered into his ear.

I could still remember clearly the snatches of her conversation that I had succeeded in catching, and I had begun to wonder if the meaning was rather different to what I had first assumed. That maybe Maude had not been telling Robin to share the burden with me, but that she shared the burden with him.

Roger left me alone with Maude, who lay very still in her bed. She had recently suffered a second stroke and her condition had deteriorated.

She still managed half a distorted smile when I arrived. I held her poor semi-paralysed hands, and helped her drink some of the champagne that I had brought, from which she still seemed to derive a little pleasure.

‘It’s Bollinger,’ I told her affectionately. ‘I could never give you supermarket issue.’

I thought that her one good eye twinkled, but I couldn’t be certain. Eventually I asked her the question I had come to Northgate to put to her.

‘Maude, were there newer mining maps of Abri which Robin withheld?’ I queried bluntly.

She peered at me through that single good eye. It was hard to work out just how well her brain was still functioning. Was it my imagination that she seemed to blink more rapidly.

‘Maude, I love your son, I have to know,’ I continued. ‘If there were new maps you would have seen them, wouldn’t you? You would have known about them.’

I hated the idea of Maude having connived in the dreadful secret almost as much as I could not bear to think of Robin having had any part of it. But she was a Davey. By marriage, and now remarried. But still a Davey, without doubt still a Davey, and Abri was everything to that family, I was well enough aware of that.

I studied her carefully, this once so proud, broken woman I had come to love. ‘Did you tell Robin he had done the right thing?’ I asked. ‘Was that it? Right to keep the maps back?’

I knew how much it would have meant to Robin to know at least that his mother thought he had done the right thing. Nothing would have been more likely to swing his mood around than that.

Suddenly Maude’s good eye fell shut like the other one. I was not sure if she was actually asleep. I suspected she may just have drifted off into her own world, perhaps deliberately shutting out one she no longer wanted any part of.

I stayed for a few more minutes. I supposed I knew that I had been wasting my time. Roger Croft-Maple had already told me that Maude had not spoken a word since her second stroke.

After that there seemed nothing left but to try to get on with my life again.

Christmas came and went. Robin and I spent Christmas Day alone at our Clifton home, and of course the day lacked all of the optimistic joy of the previous year on Abri when we had so delighted just in being with each other, and in making plans for a wonderful future, blissfully unaware of the horror that was to overwhelm us. Yet, curiously, it was not as bad as it should have been. I thought a lot about my sister spending her first Christmas without her beloved son, Luke, and Robin, I knew, mourned his brother dreadfully. On Boxing Day we visited poor Maude, whose condition continued to worsen. But Robin and I were together, and in spite of everything, there was no doubt that was the way I wanted it.

Also Julia, thank God, proceeded to get better and better and the doctors were now confident of a complete recovery.

I was still on sick leave from the force. I had to see a police doctor every so often, but nobody was pressurising me to go back to work. The thought occurred to me that it was no wonder that the scale and cost of police sick leave had become a national scandal. But it was almost certainly true that I was not yet fit to return.

I was a long way from forgetting all that I had left behind, though, particularly the Stephen Jeffries case, that other nightmare. I had been doing my trick of trying not to think about that either, but eventually in mid-January I got Peter Mellor to take me out for a drink and tell me all the gruesome details. I was no longer a part of any of it, and I realised that all I was doing was torturing myself. I knew that Jeffries had been charged and committed and would probably stand trial at Bristol Crown Court in the late summer, and I also knew that I would have to be there. I would have to look him in the eye at least once more, to see for myself what I should probably have seen from the start.

Mellor was at first a reluctant confidante. I suppose technically he should not have been talking to me at all about the case, but the sheer habit of a professional relationship such as we had shared is inclined to linger. The more he told me the guiltier I felt about my own ineptitude.

‘You shouldn’t feel like that, Rose,’ he said. He always called me Rose nowadays. I wondered if I did go back to the force if I would be able to work with him again. Maybe he would not feel able to work with me again. It certainly wouldn’t be the same as it had been before.

‘Richard Jeffries is the most plausible bastard I’ve ever come across, and cool with it,’ he went on. ‘We’d never have got him for anything if we hadn’t found the body, and not then without forensic having been able, thank God, to give us just enough to come up with something of a case and to be able to push Jeffries over the brink.

‘There was no history, no track record. However hard we looked — and by God we did look, Rose, don’t let yourself think otherwise — we never found anybody with the slightest suspicion of his behaviour. Not even after he finally confessed. He was a paediatrician, for goodness’ sake. Yet there wasn’t a single parent who had a bad word to say about him, not a single child patient whose experiences indicated he was anything other than a first-class man as well as a first-class doctor.

‘We are almost certain now that the only child he ever touched was poor Stephen. Not the sister, not any of his young patients.’

‘So why?’ I asked. ‘Why a lad who had a big enough cross to bear, why his own son?’

‘That was it, apparently, or so he told the psychiatrist we had on the case,’ said Mellor. ‘Claims it was all to do with Stephen not being perfect. Richard Jeffries gave every impression of loving his Down’s Syndrome son quite as much as his perfect sister, in fact he didn’t know whether he loved the boy or hated him. He saw the fact that Stephen was handicapped as some kind of reflection on himself. He couldn’t bear the lack of perfection, saw him as something sick. He did lavish affection on the boy, no doubt of that, but there was a very sick side to it.’

The very thought of having missed it, or more accurately, having refused to act on my own gut instinct, made me feel ill. My head ached and my hand was shaking when I lifted my glass.

‘How long had it been going on?’ I asked.

Mellor was watching me closely. ‘Look, boss,’ he said, returning to the old formal form of address which somehow seemed even more affectionate under these circumstances, ‘are you sure you want to hear all this? Is there any point? I can tell it’s getting to you.’

‘I need to know,’ I said simply.

Mellor didn’t argue, but merely answered my initial question.

‘In some form or another virtually since the boy was born,’ he said.

My stomach turned over. I put down my glass of beer. I suddenly felt that I would be physically sick if I ate or drank anything.

‘How the hell did he get away with it?’ I asked. ‘Do you think his wife knew all along? She must have done, mustn’t she?’

Mellor shrugged. ‘If she did she’s an even better actor than her husband,’ he said. ‘Claims Jeffries must only have touched the boy when she was doing her nursing shifts and he was at home alone preparing the children for bed. You know how feisty she was? She’s a changed woman — you wouldn’t recognise her now even compared to the way she was when we were questioning her after she left Jeffries. She still had some spirit. She didn’t give in to us, did she? Now it’s only thanks to the grandmother that the other kid hasn’t already been taken into care, the old man’s in the bin, and Elizabeth Jeffries is one broken woman.’

I nodded. I couldn’t care much about a mother blind enough not to notice systematic child abuse being carried out by her own husband in her own home — neither did I find it easy to accept, in spite of what Peter Mellor said, that she really had not at least suspected something was going on. I reckoned she had deliberately not seen, believed what she wanted to believe. And that last bit hit home at me too, hard! Wasn’t that what I was doing nowadays. Looking away from the truth, believing what I wanted to.

Mellor was still talking. I gave him my full attention again.

‘...only the one teacher ever suspected anything,’ he said. ‘We think that was partly because Stephen was Down’s Syndrome. A kid like him is naturally physically affectionate, over the top sometimes, in a way that would seem wrong in other kids. It was only when he was reaching the age of sexual awareness that anything amiss was ever going to show itself. And it is much easier with a handicapped child for an abuser to convince it that what is happening is normal everyday behaviour. Stephen wasn’t scared of his father, we all saw that, he loved him and trusted him. The final irony.’

I sighed. ‘So what went wrong, Peter?’ I asked. ‘Why did the bastard kill the poor little kid?’

‘Stephen was beginning to question his father,’ said Mellor. He looked unhappy. ‘Our enquiries may have been partly responsible for that.’

‘Terrific,’ I said.

‘I know, the final rub,’ said Mellor. ‘However you go about it you’re going to make even a kid like Stephen aware that something is wrong, something is going on. Down’s Syndrome children are not stupid — just different. And that may have been a mistake Richard Jeffries made.’

Peter Mellor paused and took a long slow pull of his pint. I suspected he really wanted to go no further.

‘Tell me what happened, Peter, please,’ I urged.

Mellor took another drink before he spoke. ‘In his confession Dr Jeffries says that the last few bathtimes his son was uneasy about what he was doing. That had never happened before. The night he killed him, Stephen had started to cry and said he didn’t want to do it any more, that he wanted to talk to his mother. The boy was quite adamant about that. Dr Jeffries managed to quieten him down and put him to bed as usual but he was afraid the boy was going to wake up in the morning and start blabbing. He went into Stephen’s room in the middle of the night to soothe him, he said, tell him he had nothing to worry about, to make sure he didn’t tell his mother, or, perhaps worse still, anyone else. But Stephen started to cry again, and said again he didn’t want to do it any more. His father tried to calm him down but the boy’s sobs got louder and louder, and Jeffries says he put his hands over the boy’s mouth and around his throat just to quieten him. Stephen struggled and Jeffries squeezed harder than he meant too, he maintains. He insists he didn’t mean to harm him, that the death was an accident, but none of that makes a lot of difference to young Stephen.’

I left the pub feeling very heavy of heart. Mellor was right that every word he told me hurt. But I had wanted to know just how much guilt I carried personally. For weeks I had put it to the back of my mind along with all my other worries. Most of us cannot do that for ever.

In March, Julia came to stay. She had spent four weeks at the Charing Cross Hospital followed by seven in a convalescence home and then a couple of weeks with her mother in Weston-super-Mare. I had invited her in just the way I would have done without all that had happened concerning Abri and Robin, because it was the automatic thing for me to do. I suppose I had not really expected her to accept, but she did so with gratitude saying that much as she loved her mum she knew that two weeks of mothering was the most she could possibly take. She seemed to have lost all recollection of her distrust of Robin, and such was my confusion that I barely considered how ironic having Julia as a house guest might still possibly be.

Certainly I was wary of confessing to Robin that I had invited her, but although he did not exactly jump about with enthusiasm he accepted my right to do so and generally took it pretty well. He did issue one warning which I suppose was fair enough considering the history.

‘I know how you love her, Rose, and anyone you care for that much must always be welcome in our home,’ he said, in that rather old-fashioned way which I still found so endearing. ‘But I do feel that Julia has tried to damage us in the past. And if she ever attempts to turn you against me again, if she ever again makes any accusation against me — then she goes and I shall never have anything to do with her again, and I would hope you wouldn’t either.’

I assured him that Julia had forgotten all about her mistrust of Robin. That chapter really was closed, I told him, and he seemed satisfied. Whether or not I could ever totally satisfy myself of that I still did not know. I simply did my best to convince myself that the whole Jeremy Cole business was just some terrible mistake, and that Julia’s awful accident really must have been just that.

Julia arrived, driven by her mother who was indeed fussing over her unbearably, on a dull wet Sunday afternoon, which, for me at any rate, was immediately brightened by her presence. She looked better than I had expected. Her red hair, shaven off for surgery, had already regrown thickly over her poor scarred head into a rather fashionable spiky crew cut, and she was functioning remarkably well in the circumstances. Her doctors had warned that she might still develop epilepsy brought about by her dreadful head injury, and she was not allowed to drive or to drink alcohol, but as yet she had mercifully shown no sign of this. In fact she seemed in remarkably good order. However, I considered that her personality had changed a bit, as well as her ability to remember.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, she seemed quieter and more subdued, at first at least — and one thing which had altered dramatically was her attitude to Robin. I knew I had promised him this, but I had not really expected her to have totally wiped out her suspicions about him. She treated him as a friend now and he responded with his usual charm and gallantry, and treated her with immense kindness. He even played backgammon with her, although, like me, she was nowhere near his standard, and he had always preferred the challenge of his computer to inferior opponents.

I had heard no further news from Todd Mallett, and Julia had been with us about ten days before I eventually contacted him. In spite of my pledge to Robin about the chapter being closed, I was unable ultimately to stop myself doing so. And having Julia to stay probably helped bring all the old anxieties to the surface again.

One morning after Robin had left for the office and while Julia was still in bed, she seemed to need an awful lot of sleep which I suppose was inevitable, I phoned Todd at Barnstaple nick.

None of his investigations had taken him any further, it appeared.

‘I barely have even circumstantial evidence,’ he said flatly. ‘Your man’s in the clear as far as I’m concerned.’

‘Have you interviewed him?’ I asked.

‘Yes.’ Todd sounded puzzled. ‘Weeks ago. We contacted him at his office. Didn’t he tell you?’

I admitted that he hadn’t. He wouldn’t have done, of course. The subject was not discussed any more, that was how Robin and I dealt with the huge rift which I suppose I had to take the blame for creating between us by my persistent doubting of him. We just pretended it wasn’t there. And, whatever the truth about the Abri disaster and the whole damned horror story, whatever the outcome of his police interview, Robin was highly unlikely to be the one to bring any of it up.

‘What do you really think Todd?’ I asked, still desperately seeking reassurance, I suppose.

He sighed. ‘I’ve given up doing that kind of thinking, Rose,’ he said. ‘It’s only evidence that counts, and we don’t have any.’

My time in limbo eventually began to run out. The doctor I was seeing finally pronounced me medically fit for work when I visited him at the end of March. My bosses were still patient, however, and I was told that I had until May to decide whether to go back to work or leave the police force permanently. I still guessed I would go back, although I wasn’t looking forward to it. The official explanation for my prolonged absence was that I was having a breakdown following the tragic events I had experienced in my life. Sometimes I thought that was more or less the truth.

I took the opportunity to talk it all over with Julia. I told myself I was executing a kind of therapy for her, trying to help her remember all that she had forgotten. The truth was the therapy was for me. I wanted to get rid of all my worries, to banish the last of my suspicions for ever. In any case, to begin with certainly, the reliving of past worries was to no avail with Julia. She accepted what I said, of course, but remained without any memory of her part in it all, and her attitude seemed at first to be that of someone hearing a story which in no way involved her.

Nonetheless, as her mental and physical condition improved I was conscious of her attitude to Robin subtly changing yet again. Superficially she continued to treat him in the same way, but I spotted her studying him warily on more than one occasion. I suspected that at least areas of her memory were returning, but I was unsure of what or how much exactly, and she did not seem to want to go into that. I thought actually that maybe she preferred to remember as little as possible. After all, she still had a long way to go before she would be anything like completely well.

After a while I did make one or two desultory attempts to talk to Robin about it all, my spurious excuse being a desire to clear the air. But all that happened was that the rift between us which we so effectively ignored manifested itself in tangible form.

‘I can forgive you for having doubted me, Rose,’ he told me harshly. ‘But I shall never be able quite to forget.’

More than that he would not say. He refused any further discussion. At one point he told me that if ever I mentioned the subject again he would leave me, and still that was a threat guaranteed to at least make me try to do as he willed. I remained unable to countenance life without him. And, in spite of everything, some kind of normality had returned to us. Strange how it always does. It has to really, I suppose, in order for any of us to survive.

Robin continued to work towards rebuilding and repopulating Abri. I liked the idea no more than I had when he had first told me about it in such excitement, but I knew that there would be no swaying him from his course. A new survey had been completed. AKEKO were now as convinced as Robin was that a tourist project was still feasible, and all that remained was to satisfy the demands of the various safety and planning authorities.

I reckoned there would be a public outcry if the plans Robin and AKEKO were making were allowed to go ahead, but I told myself that wasn’t my problem. I also told myself it was time, once and for all, to stop dwelling on the Abri disaster and its legacy. I had, after all, done everything in my power to seek out the hidden truth, and indeed I was beginning to convince myself yet again that Robin had been honest all along and that the only real problem was within my head. There was no hidden truth. I told myself it was over now, and I was probably lucky the man was still prepared to put up with me.

I didn’t think our relationship would ever be quite the same again. Much of the magic had gone. Nothing destroys magic like lack of trust. But I did still love Robin, and I was sure he still loved me.

The sex remained sensational. Sometimes I wasn’t sure whether that was a good or bad thing. If ever I came close to experiencing any clarity in my thoughts concerning Robin it would be destroyed by the rush of blood to the head which took over my senses every time he even started to make love to me. The pleasure was so intense, so extreme, it was almost like a sickness.