The Kindest Thing

Chapter Twenty-one

‘Deborah, will you please tell the jury what happened on the fifteenth of June 2009?’

‘The children went out, Sophie first to school, and then Adam.’

I had made a point of asking each of them if they had seen Neil before they left. One of the clues, perhaps, that had made Sophie doubt my story later that day.

‘I sat with Neil in our room until about one o’clock.’

Adam had gone by then. I felt sick. Sick and shaky and terribly frightened. It was the fear of nightmares, visceral and inescapable. Neil seemed calm, resigned to his decision. I wanted to savour our last hours and minutes together. It was a beautiful day, a good day to die. But my mind was fractured, panicky, skittering away from the deed that lay ahead. Would he want to eat? The notion of all these ‘lasts’ – a last meal, last kiss, last breath – was intolerable to me. I said very little. I lay beside him. Should I have made more of it? Brought in flowers and put music on? Songs to end a life to? I did none of these things because until the end I was hoping it would never happen.

‘And then what did you do?’

‘I got us a drink.’

Are you hungry? I had said. Perhaps if he ate a good lunch he would be sick and the whole thing would fall apart, a débâcle that would set him straight. Neil had shaken his head: I’d like a drink. Some wine.

I thought of his Greeks and his bloody Romans, drinking their flagons before falling on their swords. I smiled at him and went downstairs to cry. I’m sure he knew how distressed I was but he didn’t say anything when I returned except ‘Thank you.’ What was he thanking me for? The wine or the rest of it?

‘A drink?’ Mr Latimer wants the details.

‘Some wine.’

Red wine. The colour of blood. Ruby staining his lips, his tongue.

‘And then?’

‘It all happened so quickly,’ I say. Tears start in my eyes, but now I will say my piece. I’m damned if I’ll collapse again. ‘We hadn’t even finished the bottle and Neil said my name, he touched my face. And I knew what he meant.’

‘What was that?’

‘That it was time.’

‘Thank you. Please tell the jury what happened next.’

‘I got the morphine bottles and opened them.’

My hands were shaking and my heart hurt in my chest, a profound pain, as if a fist was squeezing it. I thought how fucking ironic it would be if I had a heart-attack before I could give him the drugs. End up dead and Neil forced to live on.

‘Neil drank one. I kissed him and told him I loved him. He told me the same.’ My voice is uneven, fluting with emotion. In the jury box Alice is crying silently, her hand over her mouth, her eyes closed and her wide face flushed.

‘Then I gave him the other bottle. Then I think he had some more wine. Then the last one from the breathing space kit, or it might have been then that he had the wine. I can’t be sure.’

‘How long did it take Neil to drink all the medicine?’

‘About five minutes.’ It was so quick.

‘And then?’

‘He fell asleep.’ His eyes closed, his hands relaxed, his breathing altered.

‘What time was this?’

‘It was almost two o’clock.’ I remember looking at the alarm clock and thinking that when it next rang Neil would be gone. That I’d be getting up on my own. It seemed unreal. Preposterous.

‘And what did you do then?’

‘I lay down with him. And waited.’

‘How long did you stay like that?’

‘Half an hour. Neil was still breathing. I didn’t know what to do. I knew Sophie would be home soon. I tried to wake him. To see if it was too late.’ As I talk, I can’t catch the rhythm of my own breath. There is no oxygen in it, I am choking. Pushing at Neil, shaking his shoulder, slapping his cheek. Neil, Neil, wake up. Please, oh, God, please.

Mr Latimer waits, hoping to settle me.

‘I couldn’t wake him up. I had the plastic bag.’ Sweat breaks out across my body. I am trembling. ‘I put the bag over his head. He jerked and made this sound, this awful sound. I held it tight. Then he stopped breathing.’

‘Would you describe what happened as a good death?’

‘No,’ I whisper.

It had been horrible. It hadn’t been dignified – not from my point of view. How could he have pressured me into it? The worst moments, the drumming of his heels on the bed, the strangled murmur that might have been ‘Stop’ or ‘Help’, the bubbling breath, the way his body bucked, the smell as he emptied his bowels. They pulse through me time and again in waves of shame and revulsion.

‘What did you do then?’

I cursed him. ‘I took the bag and the morphine bottles, along with the breathing space kit, put them in an old carrier bag in the wheelie-bin, then emptied the kitchen bin on top.’ My knees threatened to buckle as I went outside. I felt eyes on my back, expected someone to come up the drive any moment. Pauline to trot round with a complaint.

‘I went back upstairs. I needed to make sure he was still there. Still… dead.’

Flo, in the back row of the jury, blanches and looks down.

When I cupped his face in my hands I thought perhaps he was slightly cooler. I traced the lines on his brow with my thumbs, rubbed the heel of my hand against the stubble along his jaw. Speckles of silver in there with the black. He had never grown a beard, not even a moustache. He looked worried in death. His mouth turning down. His lovely eyes marbles now.

‘Wake up.’ I tested him. ‘Neil, come back.’ All I heard were the birds outside and the hammering from down the road where they were converting the loft. I wrapped one palm around his throat, over his Adam’s apple, absorbing the absence of motion, the lack of rhythm in his blood. I wanted to clean him up, bathe him with libations, oils and tears. Like the godly women who laid out the dead. We no longer had that skill: death, like birth, had been hived off to professionals, to antiseptic corporate enclaves far removed from the glory and filth of the real thing.

‘Then I rang the ambulance. And I left a message for Adam on his phone. And I rang Sophie,’ I tell the court.

‘What did you tell her?’

‘She guessed. When she got back I told her that I had gone upstairs and found he wasn’t breathing.’

‘When you and your husband planned his death, you hoped to evade detection?’

‘Yes.’

The Prof settles back. I sense disapproval. Dolly glances his way and behind them the Artist scratches at his neck, a leisurely move that seems foreign in the circumstances.

‘And did you discuss what you should do if any suspicions were aroused?’

‘Yes, if it came to it, I was to say that Neil had taken an overdose, that unknown to me he had hoarded his medication and that I had no idea what he was planning. And that I had then hidden the evidence to spare the children.’

‘But you didn’t do that, did you?’ Latimer asks.

‘No.’ Because once I knew Sophie was caught in the undertow with me, only the truth would do. ‘When I heard that Sophie had gone to the police, I just wanted to stop all the lies. To tell her the truth. Her and Adam. To help them understand. And also because I’d had to use the plastic bag, and they’d found evidence of that in the post-mortem, well, it made it less likely that Neil could have done it all himself.’

The bag was strong, clear plastic. It had once held some fabric samples in it – for some curtains in the Arts and Crafts style I was working on. I had gripped it tight under his chin. His breathing was shallow and the bag compressed in tiny, incremental stages until it lay plastered and creased against his forehead and cheeks, sucking against his nostrils. His face darkening and then those dreadful pitiful movements he made. The brief clamour for life that had me leaping out of my skin. The appalling stillness that followed.

‘Why didn’t you tell Sophie the truth?’

‘I wanted to protect her, and Adam. I didn’t want them to know what we had done. Neil wanted them to believe he had died naturally from his illness.’

‘And why didn’t you tell the police what you had done when you were questioned?’

‘The same reason. Because of the children. Because I had broken the law and Neil was dead and I had to be there for our children.’

‘What do you think now about your actions?’

‘I never should have done it. It was awful, the whole thing. If I’d only been stronger and kept refusing him.’

‘Why didn’t you?’ Mr Latimer sounds almost harsh now.

‘I couldn’t think straight. I couldn’t work out what was best. And Neil was so clear, so sure. I was absolutely exhausted and losing my mind and he kept on at me until I couldn’t say no any longer.’

‘How do you feel now about agreeing to his request?’

‘Terrible.’

I look across to Sophie, willing her to face me but her head is bowed, her hair a veil.

I wrote to Sophie from Styal. Ms Gleason cautioned me that I ran the risk of being accused of exercising undue influence on a prosecution witness but I promised that there would be nothing inflammatory in my letter. The prison monitored communication anyway. I wrote to say how sorry I was. To tell her how much I loved her and how I never meant to hurt anyone with my actions. And that, whatever happened, I would never stop loving her. I told her that Neil loved her too. Also I promised that if she ever wanted to ask me about Neil, about his life or his death, whatever she needed to know I would tell her. There was one thing I didn’t write that needled at me like a toothache. I left it out because it might have seemed too harsh and because this wasn’t the place to pose that question, because she was my daughter and only fifteen. What would you have done? That was what I really wanted to know. If it had been you, and you loved him as I did, then what would you have done?

When Briony Webber stands up and launches into me she is crisp and professional, just the right side of hostile. ‘Ms Shelley, you say you feel terrible about your involvement in your husband’s death. Is that because you were caught?’ There’s an intake of breath from someone in the gallery.

‘No.’ My cheeks glow with heat.

‘If you’d got away with it, would you still feel so terrible?’

‘No. Yes. It’s not like that.’

‘I think we’ll let the jury judge for itself what it’s like, whether the picture you paint of someone driven to lose reason is only that, a picture, a fiction.’

Mr Latimer bolts to his feet: this sort of language should be saved for the closing speeches but Miss Webber’s ahead of the game and moves on. ‘Tell me, Ms Shelley, you were still working in the weeks leading up to Mr Draper’s death?

‘Yes.’

‘Did any of your clients complain about your work?’

‘No.’

‘Anyone cancel a project, dispense with your services?’

‘No.’

‘Did any of your clients give you bad feedback about your attitude or behaviour?’

‘No.’

‘So, as far as your clients were concerned you were performing your work perfectly well.’

‘Yes.’

‘And home. You were still looking after your house and family?’

Someone had to. ‘Yes.’

‘And apart from a spat with your neighbour we have nothing to indicate you were not in sound mind and coping admirably with a difficult situation? Is that true?’

‘I don’t know.’ It’s a weak answer and my mind darts about, desperate for a better one.

‘Oh, I think you do, Ms Shelley. Let me take you back to the events of that fateful morning. According to your own testimony, your husband did not specifically ask you to do anything that morning, did he, apart from fetch some wine?’

‘Not as such.’

‘But you inferred that he was desperate to commit suicide?’

Her tone riles me and I feel a tide of anger mounting beneath my fear. ‘He had said, ‘‘Tomorrow.’’ I knew what he meant.’

‘Did you check? Did you ask him outright?’

‘No.’ My blood boils.

‘You just chose to interpret it that way.’

‘Why?’ I yell, knowing as I do that this is folly. ‘Why the hell would I want to do that? I wanted him to live.’

In the aftershock there is a deep silence. Briony Webber doesn’t reply but pauses, gives a tight smile of forgiveness before she sallies forth. ‘I put it to you that you knew full well what you were doing. That you believed your husband had a right to die and that you supported him to the hilt.’

‘No!’ My face is hot, my composure lost.

‘And that when the medicine failed to work as quickly as you expected, you had the plastic bag at hand to complete what you had started. Is that not the case?’

‘I didn’t know what I was doing.’ I force down my fickle temper, mute my tone.

‘I say you did. And having carried out your promise to the bitter end, you then made every attempt to cover your tracks, did you not?’

‘Yes.’ I can hardly say otherwise.

‘You hid the evidence. You lied to your family, then to the police. I put it to you that had you been incapable of responsible thought, as my learned friend suggests, you would not have then had the wherewithal to maintain this fabric of lies. You knew exactly what you were doing when you fed those drugs to your husband, when you selected that plastic bag and held it over his face until he suffocated. When you hid the evidence.’

‘No. I was wrong. I was so mixed up.’

‘Ms Shelley, you were able to withstand hours of questioning with little evident distress. How do you account for that?’

I wear it well, I want to say, but simply shake my head. The more I say the more she will devour me.

‘Only when the evidence against you became overwhelming, when you were told that your own daughter was a witness for the prosecution, did you even admit to any complicity in Mr Draper’s death. I suggest your change of tack was simply a tactic to try to save your own skin.’

Of course it bloody was, you daft bitch. What else could I do? There is no other defence they will let me make. ‘I’m telling the truth,’ my voice rings out, a tremor of rage in it.

‘Now, when it suits. But we have heard different versions of events. You lied in order to acquire the drugs in the first place, you lied to your own children, to Neil’s parents, you lied time and again. If you lied then, how do we know you are not lying now? Lying to the court, lying to this jury. There is precious little in what we have heard to suggest you are a credible witness.’

I look directly across at the jury, feeling miserable, bullied. ‘I’m telling the truth,’ I say to them.

Mousy drops her gaze, most of the others look away but some people meet my eye in that moment: the Cook and Dolly. And that humanity helps ground me.

Miss Webber finally drops me, a dog tired of its chewing slipper. She leaves them with the accusation ‘liar’ pervading the air. This is the word stamped on each of her bullets, carved on the shafts of her arrows, engraved on her knuckle dusters. Say it enough times and it will gather weight, gain credence.

A shaft of light, pale golden sunshine, gains admittance through the large window high in the walls and floods the ceiling. My neck is fused with tension. I can smell my own terror, a sharp musk.

There is a brief pause while Mr Latimer confers with Ms Gleason. From the gallery Jane smiles at me, an open, warm smile. The worst is over. Is it? I bite my tongue and suck in my cheeks.

Mr Latimer calls my neighbour Pauline Corby. There was never any love lost between us, though relations were more or less civil until the hammer incident. My defence team think this distance will give her testimony clout, as it were. This is no fawning friend or loyal relative but a mere acquaintance who can tell it like it is, no punches barred. And Pauline Corby does her stuff. Particularly when Mr Latimer asks her about my aggression.

‘She was like a mad woman. Completely off her rocker. I thought we should get the police, have her sectioned.’

‘And when later you heard that there were suspicious circumstances surrounding Neil Draper’s death, what did you think?’

‘I wasn’t surprised. I’d already said as much to Barry’ – Barry is a short, fair Londoner with all the social graces of a wasp – ‘ ‘‘The woman’s not safe. She’ll swing for somebody.’’’

Hah! A hundred years ago I would have swung for this. Women standing here, men too, would have been taken from here to the gallows at Strangeways prison. That please you, Neil? A little historical perspective? My skin feels clammy as though the ghosts are with me now pat-a-caking my arms and cheeks, grinning slyly with black, bloated tongues and blood-red eyes.

If they find me guilty how will I bear it?

‘Was her behaviour out of the ordinary, different from normal?’

‘Oh, yes. She was like a different person. She was just crazy.’

‘And apart from this incident did the situation return to normal?’

‘Hardly. She was always wandering about the garden at night, going out to her conservatory.’

Workshop, Pauline. Workshop.

‘The security light would come on and wake us up. I don’t think she ever slept after that. We didn’t know what to do.’

Miss Webber thanks Mr Latimer and approaches the witness box.

‘Mrs Corby. It’s true, is it not, that you have had previous problems with your neighbours and their children?’

‘Some.’

‘Could you give us an example?’

‘Well, the son Adam, he damaged the car. We had to ask for money to get it fixed.’

Adam, stoned, had found it amusing to walk over the Corbys’ Golf. The dents in the roof cost a small fortune to repair. ‘It’s only a car,’ Adam had protested, when Neil and I had hauled him into the kitchen to sort it out. ‘It’s not like I barbecued the cat or something.’

‘Anything else?’ Miss Webber asks.

‘We had to complain about the noise sometimes. Loud music going on half the night.’

‘And wasn’t this incident simply one more confrontation in the series?’

‘No,’ Pauline says stoutly. ‘This was different. She threatened me with a hammer. She was abusive.’

‘Did she raise the hammer?’

‘A little.’ She sounds defensive, unsure. ‘She was off her head.’

‘You’re a housewife, Mrs Corby?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Do you think that qualifies you to assess someone’s mental health?’

‘Maybe not,’ she says bluntly. ‘But I was a psychiatric nurse before I got married and I reckon that does.’

Oh, bless you, Mrs Corby.

There’s a moment’s silence, then the court erupts with laughter. Dolly cackles and Hilda and Flo giggle and Alice whoops. Even Miss Webber has the grace to smile and gives up on Pauline before she digs a deeper hole.

The judge decides we will break for lunch. I realize, with a swirl of vertigo, that by the end of the day my trial will be over. There is only Don Petty, my shrink, to give evidence and then there will be the closing speeches. As the jury file out, I watch them go, the Callow Youth hunched but any attempt at looking cool compromised by his gait – he bounces on his toes like a kid as he walks. Flo has to help Hilda up. I see them as lifelong friends, like Jane and me. But they met for the first time last week, selected at random. The Sailor wears the same clothes again. It strikes me that I have never heard any of these people speak. They are silent in the court, eyes and ears. Once out of the room their chatter will flow, conversation and anecdotes with which they oil the lunches and coffee breaks, the times they wait for the call of the ushers, the partings at the end of the day.

I have absolutely no idea how we are faring. When the court is almost empty Mr Latimer comes over. ‘That was a gem,’ he tells me. ‘She doubled the weight of that witness’s evidence.’

‘Can you tell,’ I ask him, ‘what the jury are thinking?’

He shook his head. ‘Never can. Not worth a moment’s speculation. Only time I ever did, I was wrong.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘for shouting.’

He dipped his head. ‘Hard to resist. Could have been worse.’

‘I could have gone for her with a hammer,’ I murmur.

His eyes glint. He purses his lips. The smile is in his voice. ‘That would never do. I will see you after lunch.’