by Caron Allan
‘I was wondering about what it was like for someone to come from Jamaica to live in England. I was trying to picture it. I mean—I’ve never been to Jamaica, but I’ve heard about exotic plants and fruits, and of course the sea, and the hot summers. So I was thinking how hard it would be for someone to come from all that to live in, for example, London. Was it hard?’
Catherine laughed. ‘Oh Dottie, you have no idea! It was like moving to the north pole. It was such a long way, geographically, and culturally—well... Try to imagine going somewhere where everyone who you met or went past in the street would turn and stare at you. Or spit at you. Or tell you to go away—often in the most detestable language. You didn’t even need to do anything or say anything, just your very face was enough to set you apart from every single person you met. Because of where we lived when we got to London, you know, with my father’s position, it was easily three or four months before I saw another black face. I wanted to hug the woman and say, ‘Thank you Lord!’ because honestly, I thought we were the only people of colour in the whole of England.’
Dottie said nothing. What could she say? She felt appalled. She felt ashamed of her own ignorance.
‘At school they made me scrub my body until I bled, telling me I was black because of the weight of my sin, that I was unclean. And you know what? I believed them too, until I told my father about it. My mother cried for a week after we arrived. She didn’t speak to my father for two weeks. They—who had never spoken an unkind word to one another in almost twenty years of marriage. My father was horrified. He had tried to prepare us—and himself—for what life would be like, but I think it was far, far worse than he had ever imagined. He said a hundred times, ‘I wish we had never come here.’ In the end it was my mother who said, ‘The Lord brought us here, we must trust Him.’ It got a little better after that. Oh, but it was so dark here, and so cold, and so crowded. I suppose I got used to it eventually. But even now, almost every day, I am insulted and embarrassed by the things complete strangers say to me. I can’t go home to Jamaica, because my parents, and my two brothers are here, as well as my husband, and now my baby. We are here and here we shall stay.’
‘I’m so sorry, Catherine.’ Dottie’s voice was barely above a whisper.
‘Oh Dottie! It’s all right my dear, you were a good friend to me at school. We had fun, didn’t we, giggling at the back of Miss Russell’s class? But look, I need to go soon, the cost...’
‘Of course, please let me help with that. Um, there was something else I wanted to ask.’
‘If I can help...’
‘I wondered if your father still knows anyone in Jamaica? I know it’s a big place, and you haven’t been there for quite a few years. But I need to find someone.’
‘Well I can ask. He knows a number of ministers and pastors both here and back in Jamaica who might be able to help you.’
Very quickly, and without overwhelming her with too much information, Dottie told Catherine about Richard Dawlish. Catherine promised to speak with her father, and then they said goodbye, vowing to meet up once Dottie got back to London.
That evening, Penny and Miranda had gone to dine at the Maynards’ home. Dottie hoped it was a sign of thawing in Norman Maynard’s cold displeasure with his daughter. Perhaps Miranda might even move back to the family home. While they were out, Gervase had come over.
She wasn’t quite sure how to bring up the subject. How could she make a start on something like that? She looked at him. He smiled, showing her by his very attentiveness that he was listening. She took a breath, and just... blurted it all out in a panicked muddle:
‘Gervase, I’m so sorry, but I’m absolutely certain. I can’t see any other explanation, I just...’ She took a deep breath and started again. ‘It’s about Richard—he was murdered, I just know it. Richard Dawlish, I mean, obviously.’
He was still staring at her but his expression had taken on a scornful quality. ‘That’s absurd, Dottie.’
‘Not only that, but I believe he was murdered by someone from your group of friends.’ She watched him, guessing how he would react.
Now that he realised she wasn’t simply teasing him, he looked plain annoyed. He clenched his jaw, the line of his chin and cheek rigid. She reached for his hand to try and take it. To her dismay he shook her off.
He said again, ‘That’s completely and utterly absurd. What possible reason could you have for thinking such a thing?’
She hesitated. In her head the reasons that had seemed so conclusive and overwhelming in the early hours of the morning now shrank and seemed too small, too chancy, just not enough. But she had a stubborn streak and she met his cold eye with her own gimlet expression.
‘Well there’s his character to begin with...’
He gave a sarcastic laugh. ‘Oh well!’ He shook his head, and was hardly able to look her in the eye. ‘You didn’t even know him, Dottie!’ He had half-turned away, she believed he was about to leave, and she again tried to take his hand or grab at his arm. He didn’t pull away this time, but his anger was unabated. ‘Really Dottie, this is too bad of you. I should never have given you that case-file if I’d known it would lead to this.’
She resented his tone; he was talking to her as if she was a silly child. She wasn’t having that. She came out of her corner ready to fight. ‘Ah yes. The case-file. Just why did you give it to me, Gervase? I agree, it was a dreadful breach of police procedure on your part. Even though it’s been extremely interesting, to say the least.’
‘Yes well...’
She had him wrong-footed now, and decided it was a good idea to press her advantage, or she felt instinctively that in their relationship, her soul would never again be hers to call her own.
‘How many other girlfriends have you shown files to? Is it something you always do once you get to know a girl? Or do you only do it to impress potential girlfriends?’
‘No, of course...’
‘So you obviously had a reason? Perhaps on some deeper level you’ve always felt that there was something unsatisfactory about the investigation?’
She was giving him the chance to save face and lie his way out of the situation. They both knew it was a test. Would he be honest, and admit his foolishness, or would he lie to make himself look better?
‘This is ridiculous!’ he hedged. Then, more forcefully, ‘There was no investigation, because Richard Dawlish killed himself!’
‘Exactly.’ She leaned forward, eager to impress upon him the truth of his own words. ‘Exactly. From the very start, they took all the evidence, the crime scene, everything at face value. The police—your father—had made up their minds from the outset that he had killed himself.’ She began to count the points off on her fingers. ‘And even the knowledge that there was no suicide note, that he had been decorated for bravery, that he was a deeply religious man with strong moral values, or even that he had a wound on his head—even those things did not make them change their preconceptions about how he had died. They saw him as a valueless inferior with no moral code or personal integrity. They didn’t bother to investigate. It suited your father and his best friend, Norman Maynard, to assume Richard had killed himself. And his murderer has been walking around free for the last fifteen years.’
He glowered at her. His chest was heaving with the quick shallow breaths he was taking. He was furious, she thought ruefully. Surely this meant the end of their burgeoning romance? After a pause she added, ‘Even your own statement said that he hadn’t appeared depressed, and that even as a joke he had never talked of hanging himself.’
That threw him. If anything it made him angrier that she’d used his own words against him. He was silent a moment, thinking of something to hurl back at her. He found it.
‘And now I suppose you’ll tell me this same person killed my brother Reggie, and even Margaret too! Really, Dottie, it’s too ridiculous for words!’
It was her turn to feel angry and off-balance. ‘Now you’re the one who’s being ridiculo
us!’ she snapped back. ‘Of course I’m not saying that...’
But things shifted in her mind, a piece here, a piece there, and she stared at him, appalled by her own dawning thoughts.
‘Gervase!’ It came out as barely a whisper.
‘Dottie, you can’t—you can’t possibly...!’ His voice too was softer now, and he leaned towards her until he could kiss her cheek. He took her hand. ‘Dottie? Darling?’
‘I hadn’t... It hadn’t even occurred to me that...’ She shook her head. ‘No, it’s too horrible. Surely that can’t be true?’
He leaned back again looking thoughtful. ‘I need to read those case notes.’
The telephone rang. Dottie knew Mrs Bains was busy in the kitchen, so she went herself to answer it. It was a good thing she did. The caller was an elderly Jamaican gentleman, who began to explain to Dottie that he was a friend of Catherine’s father, and had heard of Dottie’s enquiries about Richard Dawlish. His slow, gentle voice came to her over the line, and she felt calmed by its soft tone. He might not, as a cleric, be much in the ‘fire and brimstone’ line, Dottie thought, but as a counsellor, or a comforter of the sorrowful or suffering, he would be absolutely perfect.
‘I used to know Richard Dawlish’s whole family when I was a young man back in Jamaica,’ he told her. He began to reminisce, but after a few moments she felt obliged, through concern for his telephone bill, to bring him back to the point. She asked him if Richard had had a sweetheart. Immediately he confirmed this, and told her a little about Lois, and her father, the noted veterinarian Clifford J Bell, still working in his practise though now nearly seventy-five years of age. Lois, his youngest child, kept house for her widowed father.
‘If there is one thing I remember very clearly, it’s that she always wore Richard’s ring on a chain about her neck, with her cross. When he passed, well, she had to stop wearing it on her finger. Too many people asked her when was the happy day and so on, and it upset her so much. But she couldn’t bear to part with it, so she put it on the chain to wear it next to her heart. To this day, she’s never looked at another man. I’m sure if she had, my sister would have told me the news. I keep in touch, you see, what with so many friends left behind.’
‘It must be so sad to leave your home,’ Dottie said.
‘Yes, true,’ the old man said, ‘but if I hadn’t, well, I wouldn’t get to play chess every week with Catherine’s father, now would I?’ He laughed heartily at that. In her mind’s eye Dottie could picture the two men, laughing together and talking about old times over their chess pieces. It brought a lump to her throat. She hoped she would meet this dear fellow too, when she saw Catherine.
She had one further question, and then she thanked him and said goodbye.
‘I suppose Richard was very in love with Lois? Do you think he would have left her for another woman?’
‘Never!’ There was no hesitation whatsoever. ‘I knew that boy. He had loved her since he was fifteen, and she was thirteen and came with her father when he took over from the old vet who retired. The first moment they saw one another, that was it. they were inseparable. No, I asked my sister last night, and she said he wrote his last letter only shortly before we heard about his death, saying how he was about to leave to come home, and that she should start making plans for the wedding because he was tired of being apart. ‘Never again,’ he told her. ‘Never again will we be parted.’’
When Dottie returned to the drawing room, Gervase was still reading. But she could see from the little pile of pages leaning against his chest that he was nearing the end. She sat down to wait.
He set the papers aside with a frown. He said nothing for a few minutes, but just stared into space. Dottie could almost see him gathering his thoughts. What if he told her he still believed she was being absurd? She needed him to tell her what he was thinking. But she couldn’t push him, so she had to wait. At last he turned to her and said,
‘My first thought is ‘how’? How exactly did he kill himself?’
It wasn’t what she’d been expecting. She didn’t know quite what to say.
He got to his feet and began pacing the floor as he spoke, one of those men who can think and talk better when he is active, she thought. It was clear immediately that he was now on her side.
‘Think about it, Dottie, darling. Say you want to kill yourself, and you settle on hanging as the way you want to achieve this. Let’s ignore for a moment that there are far easier methods to make away with oneself, especially for someone used to handling weapons as Richard most certainly was.’
She thought for a moment, then said, ‘Well, I suppose I’d need a rope.’
‘Yes! And luckily, there is a rope already there. All you need to do is to knot it.’
‘I wouldn’t know how to do that,’ she pointed out, and he laughed.
‘Girls never do know how to tie a decent knot. Let’s say you’re a chap, and you can do all kinds of useful knots. Now you’ve got this rope that someone has already most obligingly cut a swing seat off, leaving you with a good bit of rope, already attached to your chosen tree, and you tie a nice noose in the end of it. What do you do next?’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t know. I suppose I put my head through the noose?’
‘How?’
She looked at him. ‘What do you mean?’
‘How do you get your head in the noose?’
‘Well, you hold the noose open and slip it over your head so that it sits around your neck.’
‘Hmm. And then?’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Suppose I told you that the noose, when examined by the medial officer, was found to be precisely eight feet above the ground.’
‘Oh!’ She frowned in thought. ‘You mean he had to have something to stand on? How tall was he?’
‘Well he was tall, but nowhere near eight feet! He was about five feet eleven. I’m six foot and he was very slightly shorter than me. When you hang someone, you have to allow for a drop. You can’t have people standing on their tiptoes, cheating the hangman. So the noose is quite a bit higher above the ground than the height of the man to be hanged, either that or a trap door is employed.’
‘Then he would have needed a box or—a chair—or—something. Would it have needed to be exactly two feet tall?’
‘No, just anything that would be able to get his head through the noose eight feet above the ground.’
‘But nothing was found?’ She saw now what he was driving at. He smiled.
‘Nothing.’ He pulled a packet out of the inner pocket of his jacket. It contained the photographs from the file. He riffled through them until he found the one he was looking for. ‘I know I said I didn’t want you to see these, but well, this one isn’t too horrid, if you think you can bear it?’
‘I can.’
He handed one to her. A little nervously she took it and saw a black and white grainy picture of a man hanging from a tree. It gave her a jolt to see him—this person known to her only as a name, a sad story. Here he was, dead, but present, and all too real. Richard Dawlish.
Two men in business suits stood to one side of Richard’s body. One of them, the one closest to the body, was smiling, for all the world like a proud fisherman standing beside his catch. It reminded her forcefully of the photographs hanging in the hall at the Maynards’ home. The two men and their trophies. It made Dottie’s stomach churn with disgust.
‘That’s my father,’ Gervase said, though she already knew this. His shame was clear in his tone.
‘And the other is Norman Maynard,’ she said.
He nodded. He sounded as though he was still thinking about this. Slowly he said, ‘Yes. He was a rising star of politics in those days, just got his knighthood a year or two earlier. He was destined for great things, and even recently he was tipped for Prime Minster.’
She looked back at the photo. Made an effort to concentrate on the details. ‘Yes, there’s nothing in the photo to show there was someth
ing for Richard to stand on. Unless they moved it out of the way to give the Honourable Gentleman a bit of space.’
‘I don’t think so. There’s no box or anything in this one either.’
‘Let me see.’
Gervase hesitated. ‘Dottie, dearest, you can’t, it’s not very...’
‘I loathe being protected,’ she said and whipped it out from between his fingers. Sure enough it was a close-up picture of Richard’s face, but taken at a downwards angle, it also showed much of the grassy area around the swing. To one side, there was the slat of wood that made the swing seat, and nothing else, apart from the doctor’s bag.
‘No box,’ she murmured. She looked at Richard’s face.
‘He looks quite peaceful, as if he’s asleep.’
‘Yes, dear, so perhaps he had wanted...’
‘Oh rot, Gervase! I’m sure you know as well as I do that if he had hanged himself, his eyes would be bulging, not peacefully closed, and his tongue would be lolling out! He looks very handsome and relaxed, as if he were simply sleeping. He had to be already dead when he was hanged.’
If Gervase was disconcerted by her knowledge of the graphic details of hanging, he didn’t show it, instead leaning over her arm and saying, ‘Good God, Dottie! I believe you’re right!’
He sat back, holding up his hand to count off the points as she had done. ‘So there was no box; the rope was already there, as was the tree, obviously; he had a contusion on his temple; and died before he was hanged, yet death was by asphyxiation.’
‘Or bleeding into the brain,’ she reminded him. ‘According to the report in the file. The bleeding could have been caused by a blow to the head. The medic dismissed that as of significance initially due to the presence of tiny bits of wood in the wound. But what if, rather than bumping his head on the tree trunk or branch as he tried to hang himself, he was hit with something. Something made of wood. Something close to hand?’ She handed him the photo again. His eyes widened as he saw what she was getting at.
