Cousins

by Salley Vickers

  I had ostensibly come to give a verbal statement of what I knew of the night of Will’s death, and of Cecilia. Her solicitor, perched on even higher heels, was there to greet me. She escorted me to Cuthbert Baines’s room, where he offered me coffee.

  ‘Thank you for coming here. I find a conversation often helps. As someone present at the scene, we are particularly interested in your account of events, Mrs Tye.’

  I drank the too weak coffee, waiting for him to finish. You would think that a man like Cuthbert Baines might rise to better coffee.

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘I was present.’ He was about to speak but I held up my hand to forestall him. ‘I was more than present. I’ve come to explain.’ I had Nat’s stone in my pocket, the pocket of my good jacket which Bell made me buy for Fred’s funeral. I had felt that for my confession I had better present a respectable figure. ‘I killed Will,’ I said. ‘I killed my grandson.’

  I’ve always rather regretted that Bell didn’t have these lines to deliver. She would have appreciated the reaction.

  ‘I am so sorry not to have come forward sooner but you see I never for a moment supposed anyone would – could – imagine that Cecilia could do such a thing. It’s out of the question. Completely out of character, poor child.’

  I said that day at the chapel was the last time Cuthbert spoke to me but it was not the last time I felt his presence. I felt him by me then, and much later in court. Stalwart at my left shoulder.

  ‘So,’ I continued, as neither of them spoke and I was keen to move matters along, ‘I would be grateful if you would inform whoever you need to inform so that my granddaughter can be released as soon as possible from this charge. It’s really quite shocking,’ I said, warming to my part, ‘that that girl, who loved her cousin more than anyone in the world, should have had to go through all this and be treated as a criminal. Shocking, really,’ I added again, for good measure.

  Cecilia’s solicitor sat there still speechless. But Cuthbert Baines, who had no doubt coped with odder reversals, recovered his sang-froid. ‘It would be helpful if I could impart some details to the police when we inform them of your, er, admission. The barbiturates for example …?’

  ‘They were mine, or I should say my late husband’s. He took himself off them before he died – he was about to begin a new translation of Virgil, you know, and it mattered to him to have his mind clear – and consequently I had a supply. I left them at my daughter’s. I’m afraid I cannot account for what they were doing in my granddaughter’s drawer but I customarily used her room when I stayed there. They can ask my husband’s GP. He will confirm the regular prescription.’

  ‘I see. And you …’

  ‘I pulverized them and fed them to him in a drink, with wine.’

  ‘And the plastic bag?’

  ‘Will begged me to make sure. He was unwilling that the affair should go off “at half-cock”.’

  The adrenaline of acting a part must have caught hold of me, as I felt a sort of frisson as I spoke Will’s unuttered words. And I also felt the atmosphere shift and change as if they had hit some impalpable target.

  ‘I was unsure whether he had imbibed enough of the drugs so when he seemed to be asleep I did as he asked. It wasn’t easy.’

  The odd thing was that by this time I had begun to believe I had actually been the one who had accomplished Will’s death. My eyes were welling and I was shaking. But you see, there was a way in which I believed that I had.

  ‘Well, in that case,’ said Cuthbert Baines, massaging his palm with his big thumb, ‘perhaps, Miss Bhatti, you had better inform the investigating officer.’

  Miss Bhatti had still said nothing but I saw her take out a bejewelled phone from a glistening patent leather handbag as Cuthbert Baines showed me to his waiting room, where, rather endearingly, he ordered me a second cup of his very bad coffee.

  I had prepared the ground for my confession. Before I left for London I collared Bell and asked her to pass on a letter to Cecilia but not to do so until the following day. She raised her eyebrows but she asked me no questions. She was good like that. Then I wrote to Marion. She was aware of the situation and had rung several times to see how we were.

  My dear M,

  Cecilia may get in touch with you. If she does, please will you describe the argument we had all those years ago in Cambridge about capital punishment. If you don’t recall this, or what I said then, you should ask Giles. He remembers.

  I may not see you for a while but do write when you feel like it.

  Much love,

  B

  The letter to Cecilia took more considered thought.

  My dearest Cecilia,

  I need you to do something hard. But really it will not be too hard as it is for Will that I am asking. You did an extremely brave thing and you made him a promise and I think it important that you keep that promise, both for him and for yourself. But I made no such promise. So I am going to ask you to allow me to confess to helping him to his death without attempting to refute this because I am quite sure that this is the best thing to do. And that Will would agree with my decision.

  I am an old woman. If I plead guilty the sentence will be very much lighter than any sentence likely to be laid on you, especially with a not guilty plea. For you there is a dilemma: you must either plead not guilty and risk a longer sentence in prison, or break your promise to Will.

  Admission of guilt is taken into account at sentencing and there will be no potentially sanctimonious jury to punish me if, as I plan to do, I plead guilty.

  And, and it is important that you understand this, it will help me to set some things a bit right. Or a bit righter, at least. You must take my word, and I have never lied to you, that it will be a comfort for me to do this and not a sacrifice. If you are in any doubt, please ring Marion and ask her about the argument we had years ago over capital punishment. I have not changed my mind since. And, my darling, you see it will also put me on a par with Grandpa. He would be immensely chuffed, as he would say, at the thought of my joining him in his career as a gaolbird.

  By the time you read this it will be too late to stop me. I will have made the confession and if you then try to put the record straight it will put us both at risk and ruin everything Will worked for.

  I have it on the highest authority that all shall be well. So be of good courage, darling. You did as your Will asked and he would be proud of you and that is enough. I am proud of you and Grandpa would be too.

  All love,

  Granny

  7

  The police questioned me again of course. They were rather bemused, I could see, and for a time they were hesitant about accepting my story. I imagine that they wondered if perhaps I was dementing. But I stuck to my guns. From Cele’s account I had the scene pat and, although I had my heart in my mouth, so anxious was I to be believed, it wasn’t too hard to carry this off because, you see, I was innocent. It was a corollary of that position I took with Marion all those years ago.

  I had hoped that Cuthbert Baines might defend me. But when I called him at his chambers he explained that, ‘Regretfully, Mrs Tye, that would amount to a conflict of interests. But I should have been honoured to act for you.’

  I had half a mind to tell him why I had so warmed to him but instead merely mentioned that I had a special fondness for his name.

  His tone audibly brightened. ‘Ah yes, I owe my forename to my mother whose family hailed from your neck of the woods.’

  He wished me luck in his grave courteous voice and later gave Anu Singh – to whom as my solicitor I had reverted, for I felt that I was not in need of the might of Boltons – the name of a young QC who had only lately taken silk and who Cuthbert Baines described as ‘very effective in defending Human Rights cases’.

  Hetta found him cold but there are times when coldness is appealing.

  As you know, I was tried and sentenced. But it was only me, the prosecuting counsel and my defence counsel
that day at the Old Bailey. My young QC was alight with a mission to place my actions in the most humanitarian light and by the time he had finished delivering his plea on my behalf I felt myself quite a moral heroine. It was all very bizarre.

  There is, as Giles warned me, a statutory term for murder. But thanks to my age, the fact that I pleaded guilty and the circumstances of Will’s health, the judge, a sympathetic-seeming soul, recommended the sentence be commuted to eighteen months. In the event, I was out of prison after nine.

  And after the first month in Holloway, an experience I cannot recommend, it really wasn’t so bad doing time. I was moved to a pretty decent open prison in Kent and I acquired a certain cachet among the other inmates, who were impressed by this elderly murderer. The Governor, a fair-minded woman, placed me in the library where I catalogued the books. I did a bit of teaching there too, helping some of the older recidivists to learn to read. I often thought affectionately of Fred and his blessed Tolstoy classes.

  And I read too, of course. Prison is not a bad place in which to read. It was there that I reread Bede and I sometimes used to laugh to myself at the idea of what Fred would have thought of my diet of prison reading. I think it is safe to assume that he would not have approved.

  I no longer see Beetle or Susan, or Dowlands. They refuse to have anything to do with me but for that I do not blame them. It was a price I was aware I might have to pay. And I feel no need to visit the two graves looking out to sea where Fred and Will lie side by side. I like to think of them there but it is enough that I see them in my mind’s eye.

  Cecilia goes there often. She is working now on Holy Island, on a dig that is hoping to uncover the remains of the original eighth-century monastery where Cuthbert once presided.

  It was last autumn, after Cecilia had been to plant on the graves some bulbs that I had sent her for the purpose – snowdrops and daffodils, the kind called Lenten Lily that you see growing wild in those parts in carpets of pale gold – that she came to visit me in Ely.

  Cecilia has referred only once to my decision to take the punishment for her. I had written to her before my trial, reaffirming that she was not to see this as some act of heroism on my part but a way of attempting to settle certain difficult matters for myself. So I hope you will try to understand, I believe I wrote. It would be a shame and spoil everything if you allow it to be an occasion for any more guilt.

  When I emerged through the prison door, not too much the worse for wear and grateful for my liberty, she was there waiting for me with flowers, freesias, whose scent she knows I love.

  ‘This is hardly a thank you, Granny, but …’

  ‘My darling,’ I said, ‘you have had your own sentence to bear, a far harder one than mine.’

  From that day we have never spoken of this; nor do we ever speak of what really took place the night that Will died. It is our way of honouring Will and our pledge to him. But we speak around it and it was inevitable that both Will and Fred were in our minds as she described planting the bulbs.

  She gave me a progress report on the dig over coffee at the red Formica table – she has completed her archaeology training and is now in charge of overseeing the volunteers whose efforts make that dig possible.

  ‘We live in sorry times when the government no longer cares enough about the past to provide the funds to uncover it. I’m glad that Fred isn’t here to be disillusioned,’ I said, offering her a digestive biscuit.

  She took one, which pleased me as to my mind she is far too thin. ‘But would he be, Granny? It seemed to me that the important thing about Grandpa was that he was always optimistic.’

  She was right. Fred never did give up hope. He was bigger than me in that.

  It was then that she confided something strange, so strange that I do not wish to enquire too closely into the reasons for it but I think it right to set it down. She told me that the night after she put Will out of his misery the compulsion to count that had ruled so much of her life ceased altogether. For all those years, from the very moment she awoke, she had been daily tormented by the voice of a relentless demon in her head threatening her world and all she loved if she did not submit herself to its demand. Will’s death must have called time on the demon, for from the moment she snuffed out the life of her beloved cousin it vanished altogether and so far she has never again suffered from those symptoms that had so plagued and harried her.

  Next time, I must remember to ask her to plant some rosemary on the graves.

  Acknowledgements

  In a book of this nature there will be many sources and resources which I have either knowingly plundered or unconsciously imbibed. Those who know me will recognize certain details that are taken from my own parents’ histories and their time as members of the British Communist Party, when they formed many friendships which survived their disenchantment with communism. All my ‘godparents’ remained lifelong Party members and while I have never shared their political allegiances I remain persuaded of the virtue of an outlook that pursues equality of all kinds for all sorts. Their several loving influences have enriched my life in important and lasting ways.

  I am extremely grateful to Lord Blair, former Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, who advised me at length on police procedure and was kind enough to read the relevant sections of the book, and also to Edmund Newell who made the introduction. I am grateful, too, to Lord Hoffmann for putting me in touch with Patrick O’Connor, QC, who answered my many questions about legal matters, specifically about criminal law on ‘assisted suicide’; in 1996 this was governed by the Suicide Act of 1961, which made it a criminal offence to aid, abet, counsel or procure the suicide of another or an attempt by another to commit suicide.

  His Honour Judge Owen Davies, QC, confirmed that the events described in the book would lead to a charge of murder but reassured me that a High Court judge would be in a position to recommend in passing sentence that, in certain circumstances, such as a mercy killing, the statutory term for murder be significantly reduced. And my thanks to Professor Ray Tallis, patron of Dignity in Dying, for our valuable conversation about Locked-in Syndrome. Where these subjects appear in the book any errors will be mine.

  My publisher, Venetia Butterfield, who has been a staunch champion of this book, and my agent, Jonny Geller, stood by me through some difficult patches during the writing. I know how lucky I am to have a support that many writers today sadly lack. And Petrie Harbouri has been the best and most punctilious of copy editors, saving me from many lapses and solecisms and generously offering advice of the most tactful kind.

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  First published 2016

  Copyright © Salley Vickers, 2016

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  ISBN: 978-0-241-97230-4

 

 

 
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