My grandmother recoiled at this. ‘You mean they don’t already look that way?’
‘Excuse me. I misspoke.’ The inspector set his teacup down. ‘What I meant was, his intentions. This footage makes the whole thing look a bit spontaneous. Do you understand? Premeditation is what the coroner will look for. I don’t want there to be a whiff of doubt about it. For your daughter’s sake.’
‘She’s . . . dead,’ my grandpa said weakly. ‘Who . . . cares?’ He had pulled the tubing from his nostrils. He was breathing gravel.
‘I do, Mr Jarrett. And the coroner will, I can assure you of that.’
‘Not going . . . to jail . . . either way.’
My grandmother rose. ‘Philip, get your air back on, you fool—I’m not burying you, too.’ She went and worried with his oxygen canister. She vented at the inspector: ‘You lot should’ve warned me how upsetting this would be for everyone. What good does it do to go back through it?’
‘If we’ve upset you, Mrs Jarrett, we apologise,’ said PC Millen. ‘We weren’t trying to make this worse.’ She looked at me, her lips pulled tight. ‘It’s just, we thought we might be missing something Dan could help us with.’
‘What did he give her there, at the end?’ said Barber, angling his head at me. ‘That’s what I’m interested in. What should we be looking for?’
I didn’t know. I was too numb to think. It was easier to focus on the quiet snowstorm of the television screen, the fluctuating grey.
‘No, no,’ my grandmother said, ‘I think you need to be going. Daniel’s been through too much as it is. I want you out now, please. My husband’s very unwell. And you lot should’ve told me you’d be doing this—I would never have allowed it.’
‘Yes, well, I can see it was an error. I do apologise if I’ve distressed you all.’ The inspector stood and brushed crumbs from his shirt and tie. ‘Thank you very much for the tea, Mrs Jarrett. We’ll leave you to get on with things.’ He collected his blazer and the video. ‘I’ll just use your loo, if that’s okay?’
‘Across the hall,’ my grandmother said, and he went.
PC Millen was still on the lip of the sofa. ‘I’m sorry about him. He’s under quite a bit of pressure and it’s making him a bit, you know.’ She got up and straightened her uniform. ‘The last case like this he worked on ended up a mess—a man got off who shouldn’t have—and, well, you should know he’s doing everything he can to make sure he gets this one right for you.’ She glanced at me with an expression I mistook for pity. ‘If there’s anything you can think of, Daniel, you just give me a ring, okay? You have my number.’
The next afternoon was honeyed with the kind of full, enticing sunshine that no person wants to see projected on his curtains when he’s trying to forget the world. My grandmother appeared at my bedroom door to persuade me out of bed to have some lunch with her on the patio. ‘Just a few minutes of fresh air, a bit of daylight, Dan, that’s all I’m asking. You need to eat.’ Hers was the only voice that I still paid attention to. I knew that she was giving me the best of her affection, devoting every bit of energy she had to looking after me, and I felt guilty that I couldn’t yet reciprocate—I couldn’t even rouse the impulse to feed myself or wash. All I wanted was to lie in bed with the curtains shut and my headphones on, letting myself be hypnotised by Maxine Laidlaw. ‘I tell you what,’ she said, coming in, ‘I’ll get everything ready, all right? I’ll put your clothes out for you. All you have to do is put them on and come downstairs.’ I let her rattle through the dresser, rummage through the stiff new clothes she’d bought for me (I couldn’t stand to wear the old ones that were in my drawers at home). And then she went into the corner cupboard, sliding metal hangers. ‘What’ve we done with your shoes, Dan? I can’t see them anywhere. If they don’t fit you, we can always change them. I didn’t know what kind you liked—all trainers look the same to me, but I thought I couldn’t go wrong with Nikes. You should say, though, if they’re not right. I don’t mind going out and getting you a different—oh, you’re up. That’s wonderful, Daniel. I’m so glad.’
My feet were on the floorboards for the first time since the early hours. ‘They took them,’ I said. ‘The police.’
‘Oh no, I don’t think so. They’ll be downstairs somewhere, in the shoe rack.’
‘Not the new ones. The old ones. They’ve still got them.’
When I’d been admitted into hospital, I’d changed into a gown and blue pyjamas. The police had taken all my filthy clothes in evidence at the DCI’s request, including my blood-spotted trainers. I’d watched PC Millen put them into plastic bags before she left my cubicle. She’d told me I could get them back whenever I wanted, but I hadn’t replied. I would’ve been content to let her burn them where she stood.
My grandmother was looking at me oddly. She came and felt my forehead with her palm. ‘Well, I suppose we could ask Dudgeon if they’re done with them.’
‘No, I don’t care about the shoes. I hate those shoes.’
‘Oh. All right. Well—’
‘I need to speak to PC Millen.’
‘Oh, my darling, I don’t know if that’s the best idea. Maybe once you’ve eaten something. I could get her on the—Daniel?’
I was up and out of bed already, heading for the landing, where Millen’s direct line was scribbled on the jotter by the telephone.
It took a few rings to connect with her. She answered with an enervated tone, then heard my voice and changed immediately. ‘Okay, okay, I’m all ears, Dan,’ she said, ‘you tell me what you think you know, and I’ll make sure I pass it on.’
I explained that underneath the insole in my trainer I had kept a twenty pound note. Safety money from my mother. Maybe if they checked my father’s car, or searched the field again, they might find it there. Currency of Aoxi, I told her. It had to be what he’d shown her in the car park.
‘Okay, spell that last bit for me. What was on it, Eyoxi?’
‘A-O-X-I . . . It’s where Cryck’s from. In the show.’
‘Your dad’s show?’
I went quiet.
‘Dan—you there?’
‘It’s not his show. He just worked on it.’
She breathed a moment. ‘Yes, you’re right, love. I don’t know why I put it that way. Stupid of me.’
‘Will you tell Graham?’ I said.
‘Of course I will. As soon as we’re done here, I’ll get right onto him.’
My grandmother was on the landing now. She came and covered my shoulders with a dressing gown.
‘She knew I wouldn’t have told him about the money,’ I said. ‘Not unless something was wrong. That’s why she got in the car.’
‘You’re saying she thought he’d harmed you?’
‘I think so. Maybe. I don’t know.’
Millen considered this. ‘No sound on the tape, that’s the problem. We know he said something to change her mind, but if we can’t hear it, we can’t prove it.’
Six days later, at the inquest, DCI Barber would say different. He would outline to the coroner what he felt the evidence suggested: that she had got into the car and driven nineteen miles with Francis Hardesty to Audlem for the simple reason that he’d told her I was waiting for her there. I was the incentive she was following, Barber said. The banknote was the lure. It was a premeditated plan, devised by Francis Hardesty before he arrived to meet her. The shotgun wasn’t brought out from its hiding place until they’d left the services together, when the road was dark enough for him to threaten her, unnoticed.
Let me tell you one important thing I’ve learned: presentation of the facts is not the same as exposition of the truth. There are fissures in the substance of what people say. As we speak, we omit. It’s purposeful sometimes, a self-preserving measure. At other times, it’s accidental, a failure of memory, a lapse in awareness. Either way, it’s inevitable. I have tried to be as open with you in this version of events as I have ever been with anyone. But I’m certain that, for all my efforts at transparency, I
’ve left things out that are significant. That’s why it’s difficult to look back at the inquest and ascribe much blame to Declan Palmer and the others who gave testimony. Because even when we try our best to let the truth out, there is always a remainder. When a story is told, it is changed.
Had I been at the hearing, I would’ve been the only person in the room who could’ve told the court that Declan Palmer’s statement was inaccurate. Nothing he withheld bore any consequence to the verdict (four unlawful killings and a suicide), so you could say it didn’t matter. But what he left out of his testimony made my father into something he was not—it bothers me that I’m the only one who understands this. Palmer’s version:
‘I wouldn’t say I sacked him as such, no. He was on an hourly rate with us, uncontracted. I just decided not to keep on paying for his services. We had a chargehand carpenter on a pretty good wage already, and another three casuals—Barnie Seddon being the best of them. I needed to make room in the budget, so I got rid of the one my chargehand said was the most dispensable, whose work wasn’t as good, and that person, unfortunately, was Fran . . . Oh no, he wasn’t happy. There was a bit of a scene in my office—well, I call it an office: it was just a trailer out in the car park the directors shared with me . . . He knocked over a filing cabinet, that’s all. Ranting and raving, mostly . . . I honestly couldn’t say for sure. I was told that he and Chloe had been seeing each other, and it hadn’t ended very well . . . I think it’s possible that he was jealous, yes. She’d started going out with someone else, is what I heard . . . If that’s who it was, I’ll take your word for it. I honestly didn’t pay too much attention to the love lives of the crew. I just tried to keep the shoot running on time and within budget. That’s my job as a producer. But I can say that Chloe was extremely talented, and very well liked.’
And so the public record shows my father was a lesser carpenter, released from the crew for his sub-standard work. I know this to be wrong but I can’t prove it, and I hate that I still care.
There was not a single mention of the name Eve Quilter at the inquest. No talk of what happened in her dressing room. No reports of gossip on the set about the two of them. No acknowledgement of Chloe Cargill’s allegations whatsoever. At first, I wondered how this could’ve been allowed to pass unchecked in Palmer’s testimony. Even Chloe’s friends didn’t remark on it when they spoke about the end of her involvement with my father. Does this mean they weren’t aware of it? Or does it mean it never happened? All I know is, when I looked through my own statements to the police, I found no mention of Eve Quilter either. I checked through the recordings from my interviews with the inspector, hoping it was a mistake, but they confirmed it was my fault. I hadn’t broached the subject once. I’d failed to get across the detail. Maybe I was lost and muddled in my grief. Maybe I was still trying to protect his reputation in some unconscious way, I can’t be sure.
You see? Omission.
Omission begets more omission.
Omission leads to maybe after maybe.
Such as, maybe Declan Palmer had no reason to admit why he’d dismissed my father, since the police never asked him about Eve Quilter specifically. Maybe he was acting in the show’s best interests. Maybe he was acting in his own best interests. Maybe he was trying to spare Eve’s reputation. Maybe he was telling the truth. Maybe, in the years gone by, I misremembered everything that Chloe told me in the car. Maybe some involuntary process in my brain planted the memory of Eve Quilter there in the aftermath. Maybe I can’t trust my own recollection any more. Maybe you shouldn’t trust it either.
You see?
There are other facts I have to question now, because of this. Like all the documents submitted to the court. Divorce papers, drafted by my mother’s solicitor four months prior to our trip. Eviction threats, found at his last registered address, demanding payment of rent arrears. Deeds to my granddad’s farm, signed over to a family of strangers. My granddad’s will and testament, from which the name of Francis Hardesty was expunged in 1990. A letter from my father’s GP: ‘Mr Hardesty was in good physical health, but he was palpably depressed.’
The implications of these things are quite persuasive. They seem to indicate his motives. Except my father was more complicated than these facts report, and I can’t reconcile them with the man I knew, the equanimity he showed on our drive up to the farm, the easy-breathing comfort of him in the lay-by with his Stanley knife.
Another oddity: when the contents of the plastic bottles in his car were tested by forensics, they found that one contained a brew of toilet bleach and acetone—homemade chloroform, they said, which toxicology had shown to be ingested by my granddad and QC. At what point did he decide to make this concoction? After the divorce papers came, or before? Was it the day my granddad sold the farm? The night we spent at the White Oak in Rothwell? The day he picked me up? Or was it just a blend of chemicals he found effective in removing gum and varnish, which he happened to have with him from the start?
The coroner’s verdict spoke of a man driven to murder by rejection, jealousy, humiliation. A man whose separation from his wife and child, whose escalating debts and thwarted aspirations, whose failed relationships with others pushed him—and I quote—‘to the verge of despair and then off the edge’. But I don’t believe his crimes were born of any pent-up rage at all the disappointments of his life. I believe that they were born when he was born. I believe the problems that he had were merely the excuses he’d been gathering over time, the licence he’d been saving up to use.
It would be just as false to claim that Chloe Cargill’s life is represented by the facts reported in the newspapers. They might as well have printed her CV. Twenty-six years old. Assistant make-up artist (credits: The Artifex, Singles, Demob, Stay Lucky). Former pupil of Pudsey Grangefield High School. Member of the Roundhay running club. 5’ 3”. Blue eyes, brown hair. Blood type: AB. If you believe what they wrote in the tabloids, she and my father had a ‘doomed romance’, ‘a sex-fuelled affair’, ‘a torrid five-month fling’. Was this really the extent of her? For some reason, I expected better from the television news. The main networks covered my father’s crimes for a fortnight, and they regurgitated the same details about Chloe. They showed them as graphics, bullet points on screen. They played slideshows of her happy and alive in photographs, one of which I recognised from her toilet wall. Sometimes a reporter summarised her in dramatic tones, standing in the partial darkness of Vicarage Lane with a logoed microphone and hair stirred by the wind. Sometimes she was mentioned in the voiceover to a montage of images: quivering police tape—front door of her house—plain-clothes officers in conversation—lay-by—ashtray—farm and driveway—field in Audlem with coroner’s tent. They reran her parents’ anguished statement outside court after the inquest. They held cursory, in-studio discussions with criminologists and other experts, Chloe’s bereaved friends and colleagues: a make-up artist from a show she’d worked on, a man she knew from the running club, a woman she’d been at school with. It’s taken me this long to realise I have no right to know any more than this about Chloe Cargill. Those few hours I spent with her are all that I deserve, these images are what I get to carry with me. The rest is for the people who loved her.
My mother will not be reduced in the same way. I have twelve happy years with her to cling to, the privilege of witnessing her life in motion. I have the small things no one else perceived. I have her heart. At any time, I can recall the structure of her face and all the pretty imperfections that defined it—the pores, the lines, the marks, the moles. If you want me to sketch the tight arrangement of her teeth from memory, I can show you every angle, gap, and intersection. I can recreate the sound she made when she bit an apple, the hollow clamour of her mouth upon it like a horse’s. I can describe to you the slightly scalded colour of her skin whenever we went swimming, how the chlorine dried it out. I can tell you how her stance was different from the other mothers at the school gate: upright as a stake with both hands pleated at her st
omach. I could list for you each piece of jewellery that she ever wore, from the opal brooches to the nacre pendants, from the cheap unwieldy beads she bought at market stalls to the pure-gold heirlooms locked inside her dressing table. I can explain the curlicues of hair that stuck to her forehead when she boiled pasta at the stove. I can identify the point at which her voice would split when she got angry, how it deepened when she got suspicious of the speed at which I’d done my homework, how it shifted up two octaves whenever something pleased her. I can reveal her maddening habits: the way she licked her thumb before she turned a page, the way she would remove her clip-on earrings and put them in her sweaty shoes when she lay down to watch TV, the way that she would squeeze the hoover bag to check for coins before she emptied it. I know the books that she read twice (Wild Swans, Alias Grace, Hotel du Lac, Doctor Zhivago) and the ones that she pretended to have finished (The Bonfire of the Vanities, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, The Sea, The Sea). I can tell you that she always had a first-class postage stamp inside her purse. I can recall the dresses that she wore on my tenth, eleventh, and twelfth birthdays (floral, pale yellow, stripy blue). I can tell you that she never stopped surprising me with things she knew, like how to make lined curtains from two rolls of basic fabric, how to play the chord of D on a guitar, how to defragment a hard drive, how to mend a puncture in a paddling pool. I could always glean her mood from the weight of her footsteps on the stairs and the sharpness of the clatter when she laid the dinner table. I could divine her thoughts from what she doodled while she talked to people on the phone: a shaded pyramid or square meant she was bored of listening, a cartoon boy with bug-eyes meant she was excited to be sharing news. I can remember everything about her, good and bad. The dear and disagreeable. But what I cannot do is capture the full splendour of her personality in words: there simply aren’t enough of them.
A Station on the Path to Somewhere Better Page 23
