Guilty

by Jane Bidder

  Besides, Simon assured himself, last night hadn’t been his fault. Not really. OK. So he’d got lost and he’d picked up the phone when he shouldn’t have. But if it hadn’t been for Hugh pulling his arm off the steering wheel like that or the car simply sitting there on a single track road, none of this would have happened. Surely the courts would see that?

  ‘Not necessarily, I’m afraid,’ Patrick had said earlier that morning when he’d arrived, smart and superior in his checked suit and narrow lips and thin black briefcase. ‘You were over the limit as well.’

  Rubbish, he had insisted, shocked. You can’t be over the limit with one glass of Chardonnay and not very good Chardonnay at that (Hugh had brought it). There had to be something wrong with the machine. It happened. Remember that case in Kent last month?

  Patrick had made soothing, patronising whipper-snapper noises and said something about talking to Claire ‘to see if she could throw any light on the situation’.

  Claire! What would she be thinking? Sometimes – although he’d never admit this to anyone – Simon wondered if he’d done the right thing in marrying her. Unlike her predecessors, Claire had shown him that love could make you warm and safe. The downside was that it made you vulnerable because you were too dependent on someone else’s affection.

  But now he had no choice. Now he had to depend not just on his wife but also – God help him – on this sharp hostile kid from the office.

  ‘We’re applying for bail,’ Patrick had said crisply. ‘With any luck we’ll get it.’

  That had been at least three hours ago, surely, although it was difficult to tell without a clock. His watch, a present from his long-dead father for his twenty-first had been cracked during the accident and stopped working, He also had a very sore right wrist and bruised ribs, although nothing else. ‘Lucky,’ the police officer had remarked, as though it was another sign that Simon was guilty.

  He was also pretty sure that he’d heard the word ‘Paki’ outside. That was another thing which took people by surprise when they met him. Mills after all, sounded such a British name. Simon took a certain pleasure in watching them when he began to speak and observe how their faces relaxed at his well-spoken, clearly educated voice. But at the same time, it annoyed him. If his grandparents hadn’t valued education and if his father hadn’t married a white woman, his life might have been very different.

  Footsteps. Simon’s heart now quickened. Claire maybe. Or Patrick. The door was flung open and a blonde police officer with tied-back hair stood there impassively. ‘You’ve got bail,’ she said shortly with a look that suggested he didn’t deserve it. ‘You’re free to go.’

  Claire was waiting outside in the main seating area. There was a drunk next to her, reeking of urine and shouting at no one in particular, plus an old man who was earnestly telling the duty officer that he was meant to be meeting his wife outside Woolworths in town but she wasn’t there.

  ‘Mr Walker, there isn’t a Woolworths any more,’ the police officer was saying in a gentle tone. ‘Don’t worry. Someone from your care home will be along to collect you shortly.’

  Simon’s eyes met Claire’s. Was it his imagination or was she looking at him in a different way? Simon Mills. So-called dangerous driver.

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ she said, tucking her arm in his. ‘Come on.’

  ‘Any news on Joanna?’

  ‘Still in intensive care,’ she said quietly. ‘But Hugh’s been discharged. It’s miraculous, given that he went through the windscreen.’ Her fingers tightened on his arm. ‘His arm is broken but he’s all right, thank God.’

  God? Too many years of boring services in the school chapel had drummed that out of him. But there was no harm in silent gratitude. Just in case.

  Home seemed inexplicably different after what had just happened. The hall with Claire’s slightly worn blue and pink rug appeared bigger, even though he had always felt it was cramped compared with his old bachelor loft apartment in London. Simon looked around, half-expecting to see the blue plastic mattress from the cell. Already it seemed like a bad dream and he felt bolder for having left it all behind.

  Some of the dinner party stuff was still on the left of the sink, unwashed. Simon could see a wine glass with a rim of pink lipstick. Claire had been wearing a coral shade and Rosemarie didn’t do lipstick, which meant it had been Joanna’s. The realisation brought last night back into sharp focus and he began to shake again.

  ‘Sorry.’

  A voice floated into his head and then he realised it was Ben who had come into the room, wearing shorts and a crumpled red and black T-shirt with the words Keep Off

  ‘Sorry,’ the boy repeated.

  ‘What for?’ Simon was genuinely confused.

  ‘For ringing you.’ The boy’s ginger freckles seemed more obvious than usual. ‘We needed a lift and I couldn’t get hold of Mum, so I tried you.’

  Simon shrugged, thinking at the same time that this was one of the longest sentences the kid had ever addressed to him. ‘It was my fault. I shouldn’t have picked up.’

  ‘And for swishing all that rum into the syllabub,’ Ben continued, fiddling with the large plug earring in his ear. ‘I wasn’t thinking.’

  ‘Rum?’ Simon froze, remembering that over-sweet syllabub and the second helping he had requested, to please Claire. ‘What do you mean?’

  It wouldn’t be a strong defence, warned Patrick. There had been too many local cases apparently featuring over-brandied Christmas cakes. It wouldn’t help the mobile phone offence anyway. There’d been a similar death near Taunton last year and there’d been considerable flack because the driver got off with a suspended. Chances were that the next ruling wouldn’t be so lenient. But none of this mattered when a woman – Joanna with her tinkly laugh and ethereal face – was still in Intensive Care on a life-support machine.

  Every morning, when Simon woke, there was a brief second-splitting moment when everything seemed all right and then he would remember.

  ‘Why can’t they try you immediately?’ asked Rosemarie directly when she and Alex popped round the following week. They would have come sooner, they had said but ‘a few things had come up’. Privately, Simon had been hoping that Alex might have had some ideas himself on defence but then again, he was a conveyancing lawyer.

  ‘There’s a queue of us dangerous drivers,’ he’d replied darkly to Rosemarie’s question. ‘They can’t get us through fast enough.’

  The fear and embarrassment had made him sarky. As if knowing this, Claire squeezed his arm as she walked past, placing a jug of coffee before their guests. Usually they drank tea. The last time they had had coffee was when Joanna and Hugh had been here. The memory made his right hand shake again and he had to sit on it to hide it.

  ‘Anyone know how she’s doing?’ asked Rosemarie, twisting the straps of her shoulder bag nervously. No need, reflected Simon, awkwardly, to ask who she was.

  ‘Still on a life-support machine apparently, although it’s difficult to find out.’ Claire’s voice hid, he knew, her panic. He had to hand it to her. She was being much stronger than he’d thought she’d be. Stronger than him. In bed at night, it was her now who held him, begging him to talk about it; stroking his back until he moved away with irritation because he wanted to be the strong one in this relationship.

  If he opened up, he might just crack.

  ‘We can hardly ring and ask,’ he added.

  There was a brief silence of consensus. Alex had hardly said anything since he’d arrived. His face reminded him of Patrick’s. Disapproving. It made Simon feel dirty. For the first time, he began to understand how his clients must feel.

  ‘I went down to the tennis club at the weekend,’ volunteered Rosemarie.

  ‘Were they talking about it?’ Claire’s voice was sharp and urgent.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And they knew it was me, I suppose?’ Simon heard his voice sound more sarcastic than he’d meant.

  Rosemarie nodded. ‘They
’d seen the local paper.’

  Too late, Simon saw the look that Claire shot at her friend. The look that said ‘I’ve kept it from him.’

  ‘Show me,’ he said simply and without saying anything, Claire rose from her seat and placed the paper in front of him.

  Local driver arrested on bail for dangerous driving .

  Without saying anything Simon got up, walked up the stairs, and shut the bedroom door behind him. Sitting on the bed, he could hear Claire seeing out their ‘guests’. Phrases like He’s not himself and All we can do is hope, came floating upwards. When he heard Claire’s own footsteps coming up the stairs, he waited for the door handle to turn and for her to find it was locked.

  ‘Simon?’

  What was there to say? You should have shown me? I’m not a kid who needs protecting? I’d have found out sooner rather than later?

  All of these were true. Yet all were also false.

  Lying flat on his back, Simon stared up at the ceiling, fists clenched as they hammered silently on the mattress to release the fear inside his body. None of this was making sense. And he had a horrible feeling that it wasn’t going to get any better.

  The hate mail started the following day with a typed note posted through the letter box.

  Go back to London.

  It took Simon back to the time when he’d been caught ‘borrowing’ a fiver from his father’s wallet as a child and then beaten for it. Only this was much worse. A five-pound note could be replaced. The only way he could cope was to hide them from Claire. Pretend they had never happened.

  Then came the other notes. All typed. Some had typos, suggesting a poorly educated bully.

  You shuldn’t use the fone when your driving.

  Very true.

  He wanted to go round to Hugh and say sorry but Patrick had strongly advised against it. He and Claire both asked to visit Joanna but that too was out of the question, said Patrick scathingly. Ben said he felt sick and couldn’t go to school but Claire suspected he was being bullied. They didn’t like to go to the supermarket in case someone saw them so Rosemarie and Alex were doing their shopping instead.

  At night, he felt too ashamed to take Claire in his arms so he simply rolled away from her, hoping to find oblivion but discovering that he could only dream about walls and vans and metal screams. The senior partner emailed to say it would be best if he didn’t come into work at the moment although they would continue to pay his monthly drawings for the time being. ‘Talk to me,’ Claire would plead at night in the dark. ‘Tell me how you’re feeling.’

  But he couldn’t. Unlike her, he’d had a lifetime of hiding his emotions as a one-man band. Besides, how could he admit he had fucked up all their lives – not least the one in the hospital bed. If he did that, he’d break. A flash of his father shot into his head. Simon squeezed his eyes tightly shut until it went.

  Then, one Tuesday morning at 6.30 a.m. after waking much earlier – something he’d been doing since the accident – there was a knock on the door. Claire, doubtless hearing the noise dimly in her sleep, rolled over. The knock came again.

  Slipping on his blue-and-white striped dressing gown, he went down the stairs, grabbing a poker from the sitting room en route in case it was one of the hate-mail writers. He wouldn’t hurt anyone of course but it might frighten them off.

  ‘Mr Mills?’

  A pair of police officers stood on the other side, eying the poker suspiciously. ‘May we come in, sir?’

  He waved his hand in a ‘welcome’ gesture as though they were guests at another bloody dinner party. The woman spoke first with a tremor in her voice. She was so young that he almost felt sorry for her. ‘I’m afraid we have a warrant for your arrest, sir.’

  What for? Holding a poker? ‘But I’ve been arrested. I’m on bail.’

  Her male colleague broke in. ‘There is a different charge now.’ He cleared his throat.

  ‘Simon James Mills, you are arrested on suspicion of causing death by dangerous driving …’

  Chapter Five

  Claire woke from a nightmare in which she had been running away from Charlie down a supermarket aisle. ‘I can’t trust you any more,’ she had screamed. ‘Don’t you see? I can’t trust you.’

  Her own screams woke her up and when she pulled herself up to a sitting position in bed, her body wouldn’t register the logic of her mind. It continued to shake as though she was still married to Charlie and not Simon. Kind, loving Simon who would never let her down but who could never be Ben’s father. Simon who, because he didn’t have children of his own, couldn’t understand that teenagers left piles of dirty mugs in their bedroom. Or left their coursework by mistake at bus stops. Or didn’t offer to clear away supper.

  Forcing herself to take deep breaths, she tried to focus on the neon alarm clock next to the bed. 6.33 a.m. Half an hour before she needed to get up. Then she noticed that Simon’s side next to her was empty even though the sheet was still warm. It was then that she heard the low urgent rumble of voices downstairs.

  ‘Simon,’ she called out, pulling on her dressing gown. There was a silence. Then Simon’s voice floated up the stairs. ‘Can you come down?’ Another silence. ‘Please,’ he added almost as an afterthought.

  Her husband never called up the stairs! ‘Come down if you want to say something,’ he was always saying to Ben.

  Quickly, she slipped into her gym slippers and made her way down. What on earth? Simon was standing in the hall with a police officer on either side. One, she noticed, was a woman. Young. Very young. But it was the stricken look on her husband’s face that caught her. He was looking at her in a way that Ben had looked when she’d said they were going to leave Daddy. Like a small boy who needed comforting but was trying to look brave.

  ‘Joanna’s dead,’ he whispered. And then, as though to make it clear to himself, he repeated. ‘Joanna died.’

  They charged him at the local police station before taking him to the magistrates court, which then remanded him in custody. ‘What does it all mean?’ she kept asking Patrick.

  ‘He’ll have to spend tonight in the police cell and then be sent to a holding prison. It’s like a remand prison. People stay there until their trials.’

  ‘Simon has to go to prison? Before he’s even sentenced?’

  Patrick gave her a patronising look. ‘Death by dangerous driving is more serious than simply dangerous driving, you know’

  Claire’s skin prickled. Did he think she was an idiot? She knew that. But it had been an accident. A horrible accident.

  ‘He’s going to a place called Holdfast in Essex.’ Patrick spoke as though it was a hotel! ‘They couldn’t send him to a local one in case he knew other prisoners there.’

  Of course! Simon had been responsible for sending heaven knows how many people down. It wouldn’t do at all if he had to share a cell with someone he’d helped to convict. If it wasn’t for poor, beautiful Joanna, it might be mildly comical.

  ‘Our best argument, in my view,’ said Patrick (she could almost hear him drumming his fingers on the file in front of him), ‘is that your husband was under severe stress due to the difficult relationship with your son.’

  A horrid cold feeling shot through her. ‘He said that?’

  ‘The stress,’ he continued, ignoring her question, ‘made him pick up the mobile when it rang. Unfortunately, Simon’s claim that Mr Goodman-Brown tugged at his arm, causing him to lose control, can’t be proved. As for the pudding being laced with alcohol, I’ve already explained it’s been used too many times. The jury may not buy it.’

  ‘But Ben tipped a quarter of a bottle into it. He’s told me.’

  ‘Did you have some yourself?’

  ‘No but …’

  ‘Then again, we have no evidence that your husband’s levels were due to the syllabub or because he actually had more than the half glass of wine he said he had.’

  Patrick’s words were closing in on her like a verbal spider’s web. She felt choked. Tight.
Unable to draw breath. ‘Then what do we do?’

  ‘Sit tight, leave it to us, and hand any more hate mail directly to me.’

  ‘May I visit him?’

  ‘You should be able to. I suggest you ring the prison for information on that. But don’t be surprised if he doesn’t call you. He won’t be able to keep his mobile.’

  As she put the phone down, it rang again. A word hissed down the line. So fast. So vehement that she almost missed it. Then it came again. ‘BITCH!’

  Hugh? Claire began to shake. She might only have met him once but she knew that voice; could picture all too clearly the pug-dog creases in his face; the steel glasses; and that rude, arrogant expression at the dining room table when he’d asked if she got paid for her work or just did it as a ‘hobby’. But now, right now, he had a right to be angry.

  ‘Bitch! Your fucker of a husband has killed my wife.’ The voice began to weep. ‘My Joanna is dead.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, Hugh.’ Claire too began to cry. ‘I’m so very sorry, but it was a terrible accident. You have to realise that.’

  ‘Accident?’ The voice stopped crying. Instead, it sounded more like a deep low growl. ‘It was negligence. Dangerous driving. And now you’re all going to pay for it.’

  There was a click. He had gone. Claire sat there in her dressing gown staring at the phone. Her mouth was dry. Her tongue stuck to her mouth. She wanted – needed – Simon.

  ‘Mum? You all right?’

  She lifted her face to him, seeing only a blur through her tears. ‘Joanna’s dead. Simon’s been taken to prison.’

  Her son, already taller than her, knelt down on the quarry tiles next to her and put his arms around her. He smelt slightly of BO and lager, presumably from the night before when he’d been out with friends. This isn’t right, she thought to herself. It should be me comforting him, especially when he finds out they’re going to try and blame him.