The Kindest Thing

Chapter Seven

‘Call Deborah Shelley.’

I stand in the dock, beside me a guard from the court. The clerk asks, ‘Are you Deborah Shelley?’

‘Yes.’

Do they ever get it wrong? No, not me, mate. Whoops, sorry, you should be next door with the traffic offences…

‘Deborah Shelley,’ she reads from a notepad, ‘you are charged that on the fifteenth of June 2009 you murdered Neil Draper at 14, Elmfield Drive, contrary to common law. Are you guilty or not guilty?’

‘Not guilty.’ My voice sounds thin, swallowed by the space.

The judge is exactly how you would imagine a judge to be: old, white, male. The only deviation from the stereotype, a northern accent. He has wild white eyebrows and a pleated face. He leans forward slightly and asks the clerk to fetch the jury. They file into the court and make their way to the jury box. Here they are sworn in, each person putting their hands on the Bible (no one chooses the Qur’an even though two are Asian and one is black) and promising to try the case faithfully and reach a true verdict on the evidence presented. Three of them choose to affirm rather than use a holy book. I find it depressing that nine are believers. But perhaps their faith is the church-once-a-year variety, the sort of people who tick ‘Christian’ on the hospital admission form because they can’t bear to tick none. If any of them are fundamentalists, rabid right-to-lifers, it bodes ill for me.

The clerk repeats the charge against me to the jury.

The judge explains to the jury and the court that we will hear first from the prosecution who will make an opening statement. He consults with the barristers about a probable time to break for lunch. The exchanges are eminently civil and the reality that I am in the dock for murder seems preposterous set against this mannered chat. I detect warmth in the judge’s voice, perhaps down to those Lancashire vowels, and a benign paternalism in his manner. It shouldn’t make a difference: he is meant to be impartial, his role simply to apply the processes of the law, but had he seemed waspish or frosty I would have been more fearful. After all, the jurors will look to him for guidance, they will drink in all his non-verbal communication. And if I am not acquitted he will set my sentence.

The prosecuting barrister stands up and introduces herself. ‘Your Honour, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, my learned friends, I, Briony Webber, appear for the prosecution, and my learned friend, Mr John Latimer, appears for the defence.’

I guess she is in her early forties. She’s extremely tall, like a seedling gone rampant, but she carries it well. No stoop. Her wig looks fresh and tidy, whereas Mr Latimer’s has the appearance of a scrap of sheep’s wool caught on barbed wire.

Miss Webber has a clear voice, a fluency with words as she lays out my crime for the court.

‘In the dock today stands Deborah Shelley. She is here accused of the gravest crime, that of murder. The murder of her husband Neil, a loving son, a caring father, a valued colleague. The case for the prosecution is that Deborah Shelley set out to kill Neil Draper, in the full and clear knowledge that what she was doing was wrong. We shall show how she attempted to cover up her crime, lying to her family and lying to the police. We shall show how, faced with incontrovertible evidence that she had poisoned and then suffocated her husband, she continued to lie. Neil Draper was unwell. He suffered from motor neurone disease. He had a limited life expectancy. It is our contention that Neil Draper asked his wife to help him end his life prematurely and that she complied. We shall call witnesses who will testify that Deborah Shelley was functioning well in the days before this tragic death, witnesses who will report her being in good spirits, able to socialize, to work. We will call a psychiatric expert who has examined Ms Shelley and who will tell you that the defence of diminished responsibility is a sham. Ms Shelley knew exactly what she was doing that day last June.’

She gives the word ‘Ms’ a little buzz, a hornet’s touch.

‘She set out to end Neil Draper’s life and she succeeded. She then covered her tracks, employed deceit and a web of lies to try to convince the world that this was a natural death. There was nothing natural about this death, there was nothing natural in her behaviour. This woman lied to her own children, to the parents of the man she killed, to the authorities, and she persists in her lies even as she stands before you today.’

Holding my head high, fighting the urge to bow, aware of the tension in my throat and my jaw, I watch the jury, their eyes flicking from the prosecutor to me. Examining my hair, my clothes, making assessments already. Forming first impressions. Snotty cow, not even a Mrs, unnatural, how could she do that?

The day the magistrates refused me bail and remanded me to Styal, I rang home again. The desire to hear their voices, to make sure they were coping, was all-consuming. Sophie answered the phone.

‘Sophie, it’s Mum. Are you all right, darling?’

There was a pause and then she said in a low, trembly voice, ‘You shouldn’t have done it, Mum.’

My heart racketed in my chest. I felt the blood drain from my cheeks and the cold steal into my bowels. ‘Sophie, I never meant to hurt-’

There was a clatter as she let go of the phone. She believed what they were saying. She trusted them, not me. I longed to call her back to the phone, to try and explain. Her censure was understandable: she’d adored her father and now she thought I had taken him away from her. I felt unsteady, the love and concern I’d anticipated from Sophie snatched away. The chance we might console each other shattered.

A few seconds later, Adam came on. ‘Mum?’ He was subdued.

‘Adam, I’m sorry for all this. I need you to be strong now, look after yourself.’

‘Yeah.’

‘You can go to Grandma and Grandpa’s.’

‘I’ll stay. Sophie’s going.’

I’d a mad image of Adam opening up the place for a house party. It’d be great weather for it, tents in the garden and a barbecue, giant spliffs and too much booze.

‘Talk to Jane, if you need anything.’

‘Cool. Can I come and see you?’

I couldn’t speak for a moment. Tears burned the back of my eyes. I didn’t want to break down on the phone, didn’t want him to have to cope with that on top of everything else. ‘Yes, please. I’ll find out what we have to do. You’ll need to go shopping – make sure you eat something.’

‘Course.’ There was a pause. Then he went on, ‘ Jonty’s going to this festival in Spain – there’s a load of them going. I…’ He offered it as something to talk about, then realized it might seem tactless.

‘That sounds great. You thinking of going?’

‘Maybe.’

‘When is it?’

‘Middle of August.’

‘Good.’ I’ll still be in here, I thought. Ms Gleason had told me it would be between six months and a year till my trial started. ‘You could take the little tent.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Well, I’d better go. I love you. I’ll ring you about the visit.’

‘Cool.’

‘Bye-bye.’ My hand ached from gripping the phone.

That night as I lay in my bed, Sophie’s words tore through me, again and again. You shouldn’t have done it, Mum.

The prison isn’t one big building, as I’d imagined. Instead two rows of large red-brick villas slope down avenues lined with oak and lime and beech trees towards the wing at the bottom. Most women live in the houses, which were built as Victorian orphanages. Nowadays the villas all take their names from venerable women, good role models for us: Brontë, Gaskell, Pankhurst. Though when I think about it Pankhurst spent quite a bit of time behind bars, being force-fed for her trouble.

The more dangerous prisoners, those with chronic addiction problems and those in for the most serious offences, live on the wing. Although my charge was up there with the worst, once I had been assessed and deemed to pose no threat to the other women, I was allocated a room in one of the houses near the bottom of the hill close to the wing.

The majority of the women ‘pad up’, two or four to a cell, in the houses. When they sent me to Shapley House – this villa is named after a pioneering radio broadcaster who lived in Manchester – I was put in one of the small single rooms, a privilege, and I was hugely relieved that I didn’t have to put up with someone else’s taste in television night after night, that I didn’t have to lie awake listening to another woman breathe and dream.

We share a bathroom, one to each floor, and I can’t get used to sharing with strangers, never time to indulge in a long shower or a hot soak, someone always knocking on the door. I dart in and out when I have to and never linger. The single cell gives me the option to retreat. That’s all I want to do. To withdraw into my shell like a hermit crab. To creep back along the crevices of memory.

My ‘pad’, as I learned to call it, measures ten foot by eight. Beneath the protector, the mattress is plastered with graffiti, crude and poignant: Cilla4Shawn, I suck cock, help me, Kimberley Smith died age 3 my angel in heaven. There is a moulded block covered with a speckled rubber coating for the mattress to rest on. I once used some of the same material for a maternity unit. It copes well with heavy human traffic, is fireproof, will easily repel blood or urine or vomit and withstands accidental or malicious damage. An important aspect in prison. My pad also has a set of built-in shelves and a cupboard made of the same tough material, a chair, a telly and a sink. Its redeeming feature is the big lime tree outside the window. Its limbs sashay in the wind. I lie on my bed and gaze at it. Listen to the rooks cawing, the ‘teacher teacher’ song of great tits and the roar of jets. We are close to the airport, below the flight path, and the planes overhead are a reminder of freedom, of escape, of holidays. And beyond all those sounds are the haunting calls of women yelling from the wing. Like a chorus of sergeant majors, their plaintive conversations bellow across the spaces between the cells, between the wing and the houses. That sound more than anything is Styal. I can never make out the words. No one ever calls for me. But through the mangled yells and shouts, news travels: of private affairs and public tragedies. Of the woman who set her hair on fire and the one who’s got a release date and the one whose child has been taken away in the mother and baby unit.

And at night, at the bottom of the hill, I am close enough to hear the clamour that erupts at intervals from the wing. The sudden alarms and bursts of activity, shouts and feet kicking at doors – ‘Come on, Keely, come on, girl, come on’ – as Keely or Jen or Emma or Kim is discovered hanging or bleeding or comatose. Night after night, the same deadly dance.

Ms Gleason came to see me the day after I had been remanded without bail. She told me we would be back for a preliminary hearing in a week – and that a timetable would be set for the trial. Then we had six weeks until the plea and case management hearing. This sounded like so much jargon to me. I asked her to explain. ‘That’s when you enter your plea to the charge, guilty or not guilty. It’s also when we adjust the timetable and agree on dates for the exchange of papers, the preparation of reports and so on.’

She placed her palms against the edge of the table, fingers splayed, edged forward towards me. ‘We need to run a defence. It’ll be my job to prepare a brief for your barrister. That will include our instructions, what we want them to do for you and all the information they need to fight your case. The barrister will be there when you plead and again for the trial. Between now and then I expect them to come and see you to go over statements. And I’ll chivvy them if they don’t.’

‘Don’t they always?’

She gave a little snort of amusement. ‘You’d be surprised. I’ve had plenty of clients meet their brief on the day the trial starts. But a serious case like this, they’ll want to put the time in. There’s a QC I know who’d be excellent. Meanwhile we need to consider your defence. The prosecution have substantial medical evidence, which they will produce to back up the murder charge. But we can use our own medical experts to raise doubts about each element of that evidence. Considering the drugs, for example, we might argue that Neil took the medication himself, without your knowledge.’

This was our fall-back position but now I wonder if it’s going to fly. The police asked me about smothering. If they can prove I did that, they will see he had help. Should I tell Ms Gleason the truth now? It’s hard to think clearly. I almost miss what she is saying.

‘Or that his condition led to a build-up of toxins in his system. If his metabolism was impaired then the drugs might not have been processed as quickly as in a healthy person.’ She held up her hands in warning. ‘These are just examples off the top of my head. Medical advice would help us formulate the best defence.’

The prison meeting room where we sat was pleasantly warm and brightly lit but I felt feverish, as though I could no longer maintain my temperature. My skin was clammy and my back ached. From somewhere else in the prison I could hear the banging of doors and the occasional voices raised in greeting or farewell. Guards coming and going, I thought, or inmates going for their recreation. Are we inmates? Or prisoners? What’s the correct term for us? There was a glimmer of hope in what she was telling me: if we could use science and doctors to explain away those post-mortem results then I might have a chance.

‘We would also need to produce expert testimony to give alternative explanations for the lung damage, perhaps as a consequence of the drugs, or his condition. He had trouble breathing?’

‘Yes. We knew it would get worse.’

We had a kit from the Motor Neurone Disease Association for just such an eventuality. When I first read about them in the literature that, more than anything else, brought home the inexorable horror of Neil’s future.

‘And it may well have,’ she said. ‘Then there’s the haemorrhaging in the eyes. I’ve had a quick look into this and I think we can easily dismiss that – in some people a heavy sneezing fit can cause the same outcome.’ She smiled and sat back. ‘We have a number of options. At one end we have a clear not-guilty defence that relies on us countering the medical evidence – and it’s crucial for you to remember that we do not have to persuade the jury of how Neil died. We simply have to cast doubt on the prosecution’s version of events.’

I tried to grasp this: she was saying they could argue away the symptoms of suffocation. So, if I told her Neil had taken the overdose, that I’d found him and hidden everything…

‘To convict you, the jury must have no doubts about the prosecution case.’

‘What are the other options?’ I asked.

‘Reckless or negligent manslaughter. We would argue that you administered the drugs to Neil but without any malice aforethought. You increased the doses or gave extra tablets for the best of intentions, not realizing the risk.’

I shook my head. This muddied the waters. And it’s not me – I’m not some ditzy wife who gets the pills mixed up. ‘I didn’t do that.’

Ms Gleason nodded. ‘Good. I’m confident we can cast doubt on the forensic evidence, which would leave us with witness testimony.’

My stomach spasmed as I imagined Veronica on the witness stand, talking about Neil, rewriting the story of our marriage from her perspective. Veronica, who believes unflinchingly in the sanctity of life. There had already been features in the papers, laden with assumptions, portraying me as some euthanasia campaigner and Neil as some martyr to the cause of assisted suicide. A knee-jerk reaction to news of my arrest and Neil’s condition. It was not a mantle I wanted.

I didn’t help Neil die. I found him dead. I’d no idea. It wasn’t a mercy killing. That was what I’d been telling everyone. Even my lawyer. What happened was personal, and particular to the two of us, to our situation. I could hear Neil teasing me: ‘You used to think the personal was political.’ But I didn’t know any more. I didn’t know whether what I had done was right, you see. And it was certainly not something I was prepared to wave banners and go to gaol for.

‘I don’t know yet who they are calling as witnesses,’ Ms Gleason went on, ‘but I’ll set the wheels in motion for our medical experts and I’ll have a think about who we call for the defence. As soon as I have any news, I’ll be back. Have you any questions?’

I was wordless, out of my depth on the high seas. Was silence the safest option? She sounded so confident. Would she find a medical expert who could explain away Neil’s death? Perhaps we could win this and I could keep my secret. I hesitated and missed my chance.

She let the guard know we were finished and said goodbye. She hoped to get back to me in a few days’ time.

She was back within twenty-four hours. I was in the common room – feeling awkward and horribly lonely, trying not to make eye contact with any of the women around who all seemed more at home than me, a situation reminiscent of waiting for Adam and Sophie in the school playground – when one of the warders called my name. My cheeks burned as I got to my feet and I saw one young woman nudge her neighbour and whisper something. It only occurred to me then that they knew who I was, why I was there.

The warder took me through to the meeting rooms where I found Ms Gleason. She looked solemn and tired. My stomach knotted.

‘Deborah, I have some news, some difficult news. Regarding witnesses.’ I stared at her. How could this be any worse?

‘Your daughter Sophie is appearing for the prosecution.’

There was a massive thump in my chest. The shock made me cry out. My girl, my Sophie. ‘No,’ I moaned. ‘I don’t want her to.’ I looked across at Ms Gleason. ‘She shouldn’t have to. She’s sixteen.’ I imagined her, brave and scared, in front of all those people. Hurting from her father’s death, hurting because she thought I helped him leave her. Angry and mixed up. What would that do to her, to us? ‘I don’t want her to,’ I repeated. ‘She’s a minor, I’m her only parent.’

‘We can’t do anything about it, Deborah. Sophie’s already made a statement. She contacted the police with her grandmother, on the twenty-fourth of June.’

I froze. Stared at her. Nine days after Neil’s death. Before I was arrested. Sophie went to the police. And then they arrested me. Oh, God. The phrase ‘turned me in’ came to mind. I imagined Veronica fuelling that grief, not from malice, for all we have clashed, but out of her genuine sorrow and outrage at my sin. At my going against God’s will and robbing her of Neil. I will lose Sophie, Adam will lose her. How do we ever come back from this? I imagined Sophie’s fierce determination, her moral certainty. The way she raises her jaw and stares you down, all conviction and courage. All that ranged against me when I’d had unspoken hopes that she would come round, see sense and deploy that passionate belief on my behalf. Tears slid down my face. I wiped them from my chin. Took a deep breath.

‘If I plead guilty, say I did it, that Neil begged me to help him – would she still have to testify?’

Ms Gleason stilled, her face became a mask. ‘Probably.’

Oh, no.

‘Deborah, you need to be very careful. I can only run a defence based on the account you give me. If you’re changing that account then the whole of our defence needs re-examining.’

‘But if I say Neil wanted to die, that I did what he wanted-’

‘No defence. That’s an admission of guilt and a mandatory life sentence.’

‘He was terminally ill.’

‘They’d lock you up, a life sentence. No alternative.’ She said this crisply, surprised I think at my naïvety or maybe at my volte-face.

All those myths of lovers torn apart by death: Dido so bereft she stabbed herself and leaped into a pyre, Hero throwing herself from her tower when Leander drowned, Orpheus, torn to pieces, his head severed from his body yet still calling for his beloved Eurydice as he floated down the river. But I’m not going anywhere. My side of the deal is to stay, to hold my resolve, to protect the children from the fallout. And I never imagined this.

‘I don’t want to stay in prison,’ I begged her. ‘I don’t want Sophie to be a witness.’

‘We can’t do anything about Sophie. I’m sorry. If you’re changing your story, if you’re admitting that you deliberately gave Neil the medication, then there’s only one defence possible and that is guilty to manslaughter due to diminished responsibility.’

‘What would that mean?’

‘We wouldn’t need to challenge the medical evidence, the post-mortem report and so on. Our argument would rest exclusively on your state of mind at the time. We would argue that you didn’t know what you were doing.’

I wanted to laugh. I’d known exactly what I was doing. ‘So, I pretend I was disturbed?’

‘No pretence. You were disturbed. The strain of caring for him, other stresses in the family…’

She means Adam.

‘… the situation drove you to behave irrationally, to break the taboos, to break the law.’

‘He asked me.’

‘And the fact that you did what he asked is proof that you were out of your mind at the time.’

I was Alice in Wonderland. ‘And if I stick to denying it all?’

She frowned and ran her hands through her hair, then looked at me directly: her eyes, a caramel brown, a freckle of gold in each iris. Her gaze stark. ‘You’ve given me two versions of events. I cannot lie to the court. I cannot represent you if I believe you intend to lie to the court. If you revert to your original statement and deny involvement I would have to advise you to get a new solicitor.’

She can’t leave me! I was as panicked as a small child. I couldn’t bear to start again with someone else. ‘I want to tell the truth. Neil asked me to be there with him, to help. We talked about it many times. I finally said yes.’

She nodded gravely. Sighed. ‘One thing you need to be aware of is that the prosecution will make a meal of your change of story. They will use the fact that you lied as a stick to beat you with, to undermine your credibility. But if we know that from the outset, we can do our best to counter it.’

‘I’m sorry.’ Maybe I should have told the truth straight away but I was hoping they’d let me go, that if I repeated the version of events that Neil and I had settled on often enough, the children would never know he had chosen to leave them and I would not risk prosecution. But it had all fallen apart.