A Deep Deceit (16 page)

That night he gave me the worst beating of all.

He told me he knew whom I had been phoning. He punched and kicked me until I begged for mercy, although I accepted by now he was capable of none. It was extraordinary to sit in the chapel on Sundays and listen to him preaching. He was a charismatic man. I think many of his congregation regarded him as a kind of stand-in for God. How could I tell them that to me he had become a devil?

I heard a rib crack as he kicked me. I heard it go almost before I felt the sharp searing pain. Afterwards he bound me tightly around the middle with strips torn from a sheet, and told me that the ache as my ribs healed would remind me of what would happen again and again if I ever betrayed him.

‘If you leave me I will find you,' he said. ‘I will find you and I will bring the wrath of God upon you.'

Looking back, I think he was mad, I just didn't realise it then. I believed every word he said, every threat he made.

And it was about three weeks after that particularly vicious attack that I met Carl in the Isabella Garden. All too often Robert was working, and drinking, at home in the manse. I was confined to barracks then, always fearing that something, almost anything, might spark one of his dreadful rages. But two afternoons a week he devoted to parish visits and on a third he took Bible classes in the chapel. It quickly became a habit that on those occasions I would meet Carl.

I lived for those afternoons. Often we met in the Isabella; all through that first winter after I had first encountered him, we regularly shivered together in the beautiful little wooded park. We never did make the Kandinsky exhibition at the Academy, but occasionally we visited local art galleries, or Kew Gardens, or went for a walk along the riverside. Cafés, restaurants and pubs seemed far too dangerous. Wherever we went I was always terrified that we would be seen together and that someone would tell Robert. My husband was well known in the area. That went with his job.

It was six months before I let Carl take me back to the small flat he rented off the Sheen Road. I had told him already about Robert and what he did to me. I suppose I had needed to and the release helped me to bear it. Carl begged me to leave my marriage, but it was not that easy. I didn't know how to run. Since the death of my parents, and I could barely even remember them, I had only really known two people well before Carl – my gran and Robert – and they had both overwhelmed my entire being. Also my fear of Robert remained as great as ever. I believed that he would find me wherever I went. And I believed him capable of far greater violence than he had so far inflicted on me. I believed him capable of anything.

The first time I went to Carl's flat – one large room in which he ate, slept, cooked and painted, with just a bathroom tagged on, but light and airy and beautifully kept – he fussed over me wonderfully, treated me to a lovely tea he had prepared and eventually kissed me, just once, and for the first time on the lips. That was all. Then he took me home, dropping me off a few streets away from the manse where I had left my bike chained to some railings.

The second time we made love. It began when he played me the song for the first time. The song ‘Suzanne'. It was then that he had first told me about his hippie parents and how little time they had for him when he was a kid, and that his earliest memory was of this one song, a classic from another age, a Sixties leftover, played again and again, a crackly LP on a not very good record player.

Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river

You can hear the boats go by

You can spend the night beside her

And you know that she's half crazy

But that's why you want to be there . . .

I had never even heard Leonard Cohen before. I wasn't sure what I made of him at first.

Carl chuckled. ‘You're in good company,' he said. ‘I can only barely sing in tune myself and when I was in college they told me that was why I loved Cohen.'

None the less there was something mesmerising about the moody Sixties singer. And strangely soothing, too.

When Carl unfolded the sofa, which doubled as his bed, and we lay down together, it seemed like the most natural thing in the world. It was a beautiful June afternoon and the sun poured in through the big bay window, embracing us in its brilliant warmth.

He undressed me very slowly and his eyes filled with tears when he saw my bruises. My body was almost always covered with them. I had got used to it. Carl was distraught. I think that was when I first began really to love him. He covered my poor battered body with kisses. I had never known such tenderness. My gran had loved me and been kind to me, but never tender. Robert did not know the meaning of the word except from the pulpit. Maybe I thought that all men were at best coldly efficient in bed and at worst brutal. My only experience was with the monster I had married. Carl was so gentle.

He stroked me and kissed me in every secret place, and all the while he whispered softly and repeatedly the chorus of ‘Suzanne':

And you want to travel with her

And you want to travel blind

And you know that she will trust you

For you've touched her perfect body with your mind.

I am English. I was entranced, but also vaguely embarrassed. ‘I don't think my body is very perfect,' I murmured.

‘It is to me,' he said. And he was deadly serious. Indeed, it seemed as if there was not a square inch of me that he did not touch lightly with his fingers or brush with his lips. And all the time his eyes were fixed upon me in wonderment, as if I were some kind of work of art, as if he truly did find me quite perfect.

I had never wanted to reject him, but I had not been sure that I would be able to respond. I did, though. When he slipped into me I felt my own desire rise to meet his almost instantly. He brought me to orgasm on that very first occasion and afterwards we cried in each other's arms. Then he led me into his tiny bathroom and we stood under the shower together while he washed me and then himself, just as he always would throughout our life together. I found it extraordinarily moving.

Robert did not seem to suspect anything. Perhaps he was too stupefied by drink. Certainly as long as I cleaned his house, was present to cook his meals and meekly allowed him to violate my body, he didn't seem to care what I did. Once I had slept with Carl the loveless violent sex with Robert became all the more abhorrent to me. I was twenty-one years old then. My adulthood was only just beginning and yet I felt I was trapped for ever. The beatings, too, seemed worse now that I had someone who appeared to feel them as much as I did.

There came a time when I decided that I would, could, take no more.

Nine

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

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

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

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

At first I couldn't get any words out.

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

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

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

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

‘I see,' he said. He stared at me.

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

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

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

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

‘Oh, almost seven years ago.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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