‘Exactly. Reading the trial transcript, I think that’s what did for poor Deb more than anything else; you know, that even her mother thought she was guilty. And now she’s dead, too, so there’s no way of unpicking the mess.’
‘Dead? When? How?’
‘Oh, even before the case came to trial. She fell, broke her hip and never came out of hospital.’
So, thought Trish, not suicide. Then maybe the daughter did do it after all.
In her experience, most elderly men and women who killed their spouses then went on to commit suicide – or at least tried to. Darby-and-Joan murders, the police called them. They were surprisingly common, almost always the result of desperation as the needs of the weaker half of a devoted couple outgrew the carer’s capacity to cope. It was one of the saddest results of old age that she’d come across.
‘Which is why,’ Anna was saying, ‘there weren’t any witnesses for Deb. The prosecution had her bitchy sister – giving evidence of how she’d always hated her father – and the doctor, who claimed Deb had ordered him to end her father’s life.’
‘Hm. If it’s true, that sounds a trifle inconvenient for your friend. Did anyone challenge it?’
‘I wish you wouldn’t keep calling her “your friend” in that sarky way. Yes, it was inconvenient, but it wasn’t true.’
‘OK. I’m surprised the judge allowed the jury to hear about the mother’s confession. But, given that he did, I’m amazed they convicted Deb.’
‘She went down because she was a stroppy, outspoken woman, who wouldn’t put up with arrogant men ordering her about, or play the game they wanted. And you know how the establishment hates women like that. They were sure she was guilty and wouldn’t believe any evidence to the contrary.’
Trish had to smile. Through the sticky windscreen, she could almost see Anna’s face, more pug-like than ever in rage. Ever since she’d thrown her unfaithful, financially irresponsible husband out of the house, she’d been battling to empower bullied women. Anna believed it was every woman’s right to give full expression to her anger, instead of funnelling it out in psychosomatic illness and tears, ceding her sovereignty to other people in the hope of happiness, and ultimately destroying herself. This case sounded tailor-made for her. For Trish, children took precedence and she liked to reserve most of her efforts for them.
‘Look, Anna, the traffic’s clearing. I’m going to have to go. I’ll phone you later. We might be able to meet tonight. OK?’
‘Yes, but, Trish …’
‘Got to go, Anna, sorry.’
‘Deb’s innocent, Trish. I’m sure. She didn’t do it. She’s not the kind of woman who could.’
‘We’ll talk later,’ Trish said, more gently.
In her years at the Bar, she had met far too many people who were utterly convinced that their friend or relation was incapable of the cruelty they’d hidden so successfully. She had often wondered how they recovered enough to trust anyone else again. But then she wasn’t very good at trusting people at the best of times, so what did she know?
Trish had always hated going to prison, but this was worse than usual. She wasn’t here on legal business now, bolstered by a solicitor and her own status. Today she was just a friend of a friend of an inmate, clutching a visiting order, and treated accordingly.
Everyone was bad-tempered with the long wait for security clearance, and the air was heavy with heat and resentment. The officer who had to search Trish had sweated right through her shirt and had hot, damp hands.
Ten minutes later, already longing for the shower she wouldn’t be able to have for hours, Trish was ushered into the big visitors’ room. Families were gathered down one side of the long row of grey-topped tables with the prisoners opposite them. The noise was indescribable.
Trish sat down as directed, in front of a tired-looking woman about eight or ten years her senior. She had big dark-grey eyes, almost the same colour as the bags underneath them. Her skin was bad, but that could have been the result of prison food and lack of fresh air. Fat blurred the outlines of her face and shoulders. That was normal: most women put on weight in prison.
‘So, Anna Grayling sent you,’ she said unemotionally, in a voice that could have come from any of Trish’s colleagues and sounded out of place with all the others that squealed and echoed around the hard-surfaced room. The air smelt of
sweat and cigarettes and about forty-three different sorts of scent.
‘Yes. She wants me to advise on the legal background for her film.’
Deborah Gibbert’s eyes shifted quickly, as though to check that no one else was listening. She was biting her lip and picking at the skin around her left thumbnail.
‘I keep wondering if there’s any point in it.’
‘Only if you didn’t kill your father and want that proved.’ Trish tried not to sound unfairly tart.
‘No one believed me before. Why should it be different now?’ Deborah sounded as though she couldn’t care less.
Trish was about to point out that she wasn’t here for her own amusement, when Deborah stopped picking and wiped a hand over her eyes, before turning to look towards the officer in charge of the visitors’ room.
The officer was a comfortable-looking, middle-aged woman who sat on a raised platform to make sure no visitor was passing drugs or other forbidden items across the tables. As Deborah caught her eye, the officer shook her head.
‘What’s up?’ Trish asked as Deborah looked back at her. ‘You seem worried.’
The grey eyes narrowed for a second. It might have been amusement or contempt that made them glitter. Either way they made Trish uncomfortable.
‘It’s my cell-mate,’ Deborah said, after a moment. ‘She took an overdose the other day. She’s in hospital. It’s hard to get news.’
‘What did she take?’ asked Trish, thinking: Trouble with overdoses does seem to follow you round, doesn’t it?
‘Smack. They’ve given her the antidote – you know, naloxone, but I don’t know if they got to her in time. Oh, I could kill dr—’ Deborah stopped, her face betraying her.
‘Drug dealers?’ Trish suggested. ‘I can sympathise with that.’
‘Maybe, but it was a stupid thing to say. The sort of thing people remember and use against you years later.’ The words were raw and bitter. Trish could understand that, too.
‘Why have you been sharing a cell?’ she asked, grabbing the easiest question out of the conflicting ideas that were milling about in her brain. ‘Lifers don’t usually.’
‘No.’ The ghost of a good-looking, much younger woman showed for a second in Deborah’s face. ‘But I was lonely. I decided to trade my privacy for a bit of company. I’m not sure I’d do it again.’
The party at the next table included a whining child, whose mother suddenly cuffed him over the head and told him to fucking well stop squealing and go and play out of her way. He moved a few feet from her chair, his face screwed up and shiny with tears. Trish caught Deborah’s expression of hopeless, miserable anger and for the first time thought they might be on the same side.
‘Now …’ Trish caught sight of the clock. ‘Look, we haven’t much longer. And I need to ask some questions.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘Can you tell me a bit about your father?’ Trish switched on the tiny tape recorder she’d brought with her.
Deborah’s eyes stilled and her face tightened. When she spoke again her voice grated like a hacksaw.
‘He was a difficult man. You’ve probably heard that I hated him.’ She paused, waiting for a response.
Trish had read the trial transcript and as many of the background documents as Anna had managed to acquire. She’d tried to get more from Deborah’s solicitors, she said, but they were waiting to hear whether they were going to get leave to appeal and didn’t want to get involved in anything else until they’d got the decision and were sure where they were going next. Trish nodded encouragingly.
‘Well, I didn’t. But I was afraid of him.’
‘Why? What did he do to you?’
Deborah looked up at the grimy, once-cream-coloured ceiling. Her eyes were welling, but her full mouth was twisted, not trembling.
‘Nothing physical, so there are no visible scars. It’s hard to explain.’
‘Try.’
Deborah shrugged, which made her double chin quiver. ‘Oh, he’d belittle everything I did, mock, shout, and generally make it clear that I could never be good enough to share the world with him and Perfect Cordelia. That’s my brilliant elder sister, you know.’ The saw-edged voice was even sharper now, like a flaying knife. Trish could almost feel her skin curling away from it.
‘You must have detested her, whatever you felt about your father,’ she said lightly.
The shadow of a smile momentarily lifted the corners of Deborah’s mouth again. ‘Sometimes,’ she admitted. ‘She egged him on, you see. If he ever showed signs of weakening and began to treat me as …’ Her voice wobbled out of control and she fell into a battling silence.
Trish waited a moment and then tried a gentle prod: ‘Treat you as …?’
The other woman took a deep breath, as though to prepare for something impossibly difficult. Her voice was several tones deeper when she eventually managed to bring it out: ‘As an acceptable human being.’
‘Why did you go back so often to look after him, if he was so awful to you?’
‘I couldn’t leave my mother to put up with it alone,’ Deborah said, her voice braced with indignation. ‘She was even more frightened of him than I was.’
Was it that? Trish wondered. Or was there a bit of satisfaction in rubbing his nose in his dependence on a once-despised
daughter?
Looking at the other woman’s face, Trish thought she might have been unfair. It was equally likely that Deborah had been trying to mend the relationship before it was too late. Either way, it was no wonder that she looked as though she was being eaten from the inside out.
Trish thought of Paddy as he’d been just after the heart attack, lying helpless and mute, fed, hydrated and made to breathe by machine. He was going to need a lot of help when he left hospital. How would she feel then? He’d deserted her when she needed him. Could she trust herself to give him support now?
‘If it hadn’t been for Mum, I don’t think I’d have made it. But every time she defended me, Cordelia hated me even more.’ Deborah Gibbert’s voice cut the ropes between Trish and her private preoccupation. She remembered how little time there was and looked at her notes.
‘Did it ever cross your mind that one way of making your mother’s life better would be to give your father a merciful release?’ she asked briskly, looking up.
Deborah’s eyes were steady as she stared back across the table. ‘Never once,’ she said, articulating with extra clarity.
‘Why? Sorry to sound so sceptical, but I have to be sure.’
Deborah shrugged. ‘Maybe it’s having been brought up Catholic. Maybe it’s cowardice. Or something else. I’m not sure. All I know is that, whatever I might do to myself, I couldn’t kill anyone else.’ She paused, as though checking her thoughts for accuracy, then she added, ‘There is no violence in me.’
Trish didn’t believe that. She was certain that, given enough provocation, every single human being could hit out. Still, there was no point saying so now.
‘It must make being among the lifers in here pretty difficult.’
‘It can be hard,’ Deborah said frankly. ‘Even though some of the stories I’ve heard still make me ill with rage. You know there are women here who were regularly beaten up, even had unborn babies kicked out of their wombs, by their husbands?’
Trish nodded. Everyone involved in family law knew all about battered wives and violent men. She suppressed a shudder. Since her own one terrifying encounter with real violence, she’d avoided them whenever she could.
Stop it, she told herself. It’s over. He’s doing life. He was nothing to do with you personally. Forget him.
‘The women put up with it for years.’ Deb’s quiet voice, more compelling now than when she was talking about her own troubles, pulled at Trish, forcing her to concentrate. ‘Then one day, for no apparent reason, they suddenly can’t take any more and kill the bastard. I can understand why, but I still can’t believe there wasn’t another way of getting free.’
Trish thought of the moment when she’d been backed up against the wall, bruised, blood already dripping from her neck, feeling as though her guts were being Hoovered out of her body. ‘That’s what I’ve always thought,’ she said steadily. ‘But there are reasons why they stay. They like the kindness they get afterwards; they try to make it right; they’ve been told so often that they’re bad, hopeless, failures that they’ve come to think they don’t deserve any better.’
‘I know.’ Deborah’s intensity woke all Trish’s protective instincts.
She thought of the childhood bullying that Deb had described and reminded herself that sometimes they do hit back.
‘Was that what happened to your cell-mate?’ She had to stay lawyerly, above the story, and ask sensible questions.
Deborah shook her head. ‘No. She was a prostitute, introduced to heroin by her pimp and working the streets to pay him to feed her addiction.’ Her bitterness was entirely
understandable, and her anger.
‘And she killed him? That’s surprisingly rare.’
‘No. She killed a punter. Beat him over the head with a milk bottle until he was dead. God knows what he’d done to her that was so much worse than the routine stuff she took every day.’
Mandy’s past was irrelevant to their meeting, but Deborah’s reactions were giving Trish a better idea of her adult character than anything she could have said in her own defence.
‘Mandy isn’t very bright, you see. She was still trying to revive the punter when the police got there and found her with his blood all over her, and her prints on the bottle.’ Deb’s eyes welled again. ‘Oh, God, I hope she makes it.’
‘You’re fond of her, aren’t you?’
Deb nodded. ‘God knows why, because she sometimes drives me mad. But she’s never had a chance, you know, no proper mothering or schooling or hope of any kind.’ Suddenly she looked almost happy. ‘And you’ve got to be fond of someone in a place like this if you’re to stay sane.’
This woman doesn’t feel like a killer, Trish thought. ‘And now before I’m thrown out,’ she said aloud. ‘You’d better tell me exactly what happened on the night your father died.’
The drive cross-country to Norfolk had been bad enough, with the dread getting heavier and heavier the closer Deb got to her destination, but arrival at the house was worse. She felt her heart thump and her throat tighten, as it always did.
She parked among the nettles her father no longer had the strength to kill, took her bag from the boot and walked through the puddles in the uneven path up to the house itself, her footsteps lagging like Marcus’s whenever she took him and Louis to a party.
She knew how the house would smell. Her throat closed
completely as she pushed open the never-locked front door and met the familiar mixture of dust and rot, misery, and stale urine from the last time her father had missed his aim.
The drawing-room door was pulled open with the usual screech of damp-swollen timber, and her mother stood there, eyes red, lips bitten, hands clutching each other. Things must have been bad today, then.
Deb dropped her bag and hugged her mother, feeling how tiny she’d become, how near the surface all her bones were. Her bent hands clutched and the curved end of the stick pressed against Deb’s spine. She’d led the way into the kitchen, turning on the sink taps so that they could have a few moments of private talk without him listening in and yelling at them both.
‘It’s not his fault,’ Deb said at one moment, trying to believe it, ‘if the rash is that bad again.’
‘I know.’ Her mother wiped her eyes on a piece of kitchen paper, which was far too rough for her thin skin. Deb could see where it had raised red patches. ‘But it’s not just the rash. He’s been awful all week, and now … I can’t … Oh, Debbie, I don’t know what to do any more. The doctor won’t come and I can’t manage on my own.’
‘I know. That’s why I’ve come. And I’ll deal with the doctor. You go and lie down. I’ll bring up a hot water bottle and a cup of tea as soon as I’ve seen him. All right, Mummy?’
‘Yes. Sorry.’ She sniffed. In a way that brought it home more than anything else. For someone who minded so much about cleanliness and manners, to sniff and rub the back of her hand under her dripping nose was a sign of complete defeat. ‘And you ought to sit down after that awful drive. You must be tired.’
‘Don’t worry about me, Mummy. You go on up and get some rest. You’re worn out and it’s making things seem even worse than they are. I’ll look after things down here.’
Deb watched her mother haul herself towards the stairs, then heard her stick bumping on each tread as she went. The slow, dragging steps and punctuating thumps echoed through the kitchen ceiling. But at last they stopped and the bedsprings creaked. Deb braced herself to face him.