A Fatal Truth

by Faith Martin

  Caroline Benham sighed heavily. ‘I suppose it must be about this ridiculous newspaper article? It’s all so much nonsense … Mind you, I’m not really surprised …’ She caught the receptionist’s fascinated eyes upon them and drew back her bony shoulders. ‘Oh well, we’d better go into the conference room, I suppose – there’s nobody booked in there today. Please, step this way.’

  She led them abruptly through the inner door, down a gloomy corridor, then stopped about halfway down, thrusting open a door almost as if at random. ‘Not exactly as grand as it sounds, is it?’ she asked wryly, stepping aside to let them enter. The room, indeed, was unexpectedly small, with an inadequate little square window that let in a meagre amount of daylight. It contained little more than a round table and four hard-back wooden chairs. ‘Please, sit down.’

  Trudy and Clement did so, and Caroline Benham pulled out a chair opposite them. ‘So, how can I help you?’ she asked flatly, folding her hands neatly in her lap in a gesture that was obviously habitual. She sounded neither helpful nor obstructive, and Trudy wondered if her show of calculated indifference was a result of mourning. She’d been a police officer for long enough now to know that grief and shock could have many different effects on people.

  ‘You seemed to be about to say something about the Tribune’s article just now, Mrs Benham – something to the effect that you weren’t particularly surprised by it?’ Trudy nudged her gently.

  ‘What? Oh, that. Well, no I don’t suppose I was, really,’ Caroline agreed with a frown. It had the unhappy effect of pulling her rather prominent eyebrows into a deep V-shape on her forehead, giving her an oddly simian appearance.

  Trudy shifted on her seat. ‘I find that rather odd, Mrs Benham. Doesn’t it make you angry – that the newspapers have been spreading innuendoes about your father’s character I mean?’

  Caroline gave a grim smile. ‘Hardly. If anything, I’m used to it.’

  This time it was Clement who stirred slightly on his chair, making Trudy wonder if he wasn’t feeling as puzzled as she. She had come to this interview expecting to have to tread gently, maybe even provide a shoulder for the grieving woman to cry on. Instead, she was left feeling as if she was swimming in totally uncharted waters.

  ‘Used to it?’ Trudy repeated, letting one eyebrow rise in query.

  Caroline sighed heavily. ‘What the article said was mostly true, you know,’ she said flatly. ‘Father was a heartless, ruthless man, and no doubt he cost many people their life savings. Not that that would have worried him much! The man had no heart, you see. No soul. No conscience. So I’m not surprised his chickens came home to roost.’

  ‘Oh,’ Trudy said, somewhat at a loss. For some reason, she simply hadn’t expected such candour on the part of the victim’s daughter. ‘Er … forgive me for saying so, but you don’t sound … well, very sympathetic towards your father.’

  Caroline’s square and slightly over-large chin thrust out pugnaciously. ‘And why would I be?’ she demanded belligerently.

  Trudy blinked, trying not to feel shocked. ‘You didn’t love your father, Mrs Benham?’ she mumbled, trying to keep her voice strictly neutral.

  Caroline all but snorted. ‘I most certainly did not! And I have no objection to making that very clear. In fact, I’d be surprised if anybody did love him. He was not at all a loveable man, Constable.’

  ‘Because he was somewhat cavalier with other people’s money?’ Trudy asked, finding it hard to believe that that alone could be the source of this woman’s venom. In her experience it took more than just money to make someone almost vibrate with malice, as this woman was all but doing.

  ‘Oh, that.’ Caroline again snorted. ‘I couldn’t really give a damn about that, if I’m honest. If people were stupid enough to be taken in by Father, then more fool them, I say.’

  Trudy took a deep breath. ‘So what did your father do to make you hate him so?’ she asked.

  If she expected her witness to finally back down a little and deny that she actually hated her own father, or offer up the excuse that she was fraught and her nerves were at breaking point, or some other such mitigating circumstance, then she was quickly disabused.

  Instead, Caroline Benham looked at her with flat, hard eyes that seemed to mirror the dim light in the room. ‘I hated him because he murdered my mother,’ she said simply.

  Chapter 7

  Trudy realised her mouth had fallen open, and swiftly closed it. She shot a quick look at Clement, wondering if he wanted to take over, but was gratified to see that he was simply watching their witness with a thoughtful gaze.

  If this had been their first case, he might have indicated at this point that he felt that it would be better if he took over, especially if things were becoming crucial. Now though, he was clearly happy to leave it to her to handle things, and she couldn’t help but feel a glow of pride that he so obviously trusted her not to mess things up.

  ‘That’s quite an accusation, Mrs Benham,’ Trudy began cautiously. She didn’t want to break the momentum of the interview by consulting her notebook for the facts and was sure enough of her memory to feel confident she didn’t need to. ‘As I understand it, your mother died in 1957, didn’t she?’ she asked quietly.

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ Caroline confirmed, her rather thin lips pressing into such a tight line that they almost disappeared altogether. ‘I was just seventeen.’

  Trudy swallowed hard, feeling for a moment that curious sensation of displacement that happened whenever you suddenly felt wrong-footed. ‘That must have been awful for you,’ she blurted out, and meant it. For a moment, Trudy couldn’t help but wonder how she would have felt if her own mother had died three years ago, when she’d been just seventeen. She would have been heartbroken.

  Suddenly she felt ashamed of herself for judging this woman, as she knew she had been. Although she’d tried to keep up a strictly professional demeanour, she’d been aware that she couldn’t help but feel that Caroline Benham’s reaction to her father’s death had been deeply unnatural and somehow … well … just plain wrong.

  Now she was finally beginning to wonder if there was far more to this than just a daughter’s cold, hard-hearted nature.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she added softly. ‘You loved your mother very much, didn’t you?’

  As if responding to the unexpected – but plainly sincere – sympathy in her voice, Caroline’s hazel eyes began to shimmer with unshed tears.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, her voice slightly gruff as she glanced down into her clasped hands. ‘Yes, I did. My mother was the only one who loved us. When she went … I just … well, I knew I couldn’t stay living in my father’s house for long. So I married Malcolm as soon as I was eighteen, and moved out. Not that he cared, naturally. He was glad to see me go.’ Caroline sniffed.

  ‘Your father was?’ Trudy clarified. ‘I find that hard to believe. He’d just lost his wife and—’

  ‘Oh, he didn’t just lose her,’ Caroline snapped. ‘I told you – he killed her. We all knew it, but I was the only one who was willing to stand up to him and let him see that I knew. And he didn’t like that, oh no, not a bit he didn’t,’ she carried on, her voice tight and tense with remembered rage and grief. ‘He liked people to kow-tow to him and treat him like he was the best thing since the invention of the wheel. Yes sir, no sir, three-bags-full-sir. So he didn’t like having me around, knowing that I saw him for what he really was, reminding him always of what he’d done. So no, he was happy to see me go, believe me.’

  She was almost panting now, leaning forward in her chair, her eyes a little wild, and Trudy was beginning to feel slightly alarmed. What if the youngest daughter of the dead man had some serious mental issues?

  She cast another quick glance at the coroner. She knew he’d been a surgeon before changing his career, and as such, probably wouldn’t have had much experience of patients with psychiatric problems; but he was still a doctor. And the last thing she wanted to do was cause some sort of menta
l breakdown in her witness due to her own lack of experience in how to question her properly.

  Clement not only caught her worried, questioning glance, but quickly understood the reason for it. He leaned obligingly forward a little in his chair and took up the baton.

  ‘Can you tell me how your mother died, Mrs Benham?’ he asked quietly. ‘I am a medical doctor, so you can confide in me with some confidence,’ he promised, careful to keep his voice calm and matter-of-fact.

  Caroline Benham looked at him intensely. ‘You’re a medical doctor? Then you’d know all about leukaemia? To be specific …’ And here she said something totally incomprehensible that Trudy, attempting to surreptitiously take shorthand notes, had no chance of accurately reproducing. There were far too many complicated syllables, and the only word she’d understood was ‘syndrome’ at the end!

  Clement Ryder, though, had no trouble understanding the mouthful that she came out with.

  ‘That’s an extremely rare form of blood cancer, Mrs Benham,’ he said, looking at her with new eyes. ‘Did your mother suffer from this condition?’

  ‘So her doctors said,’ Caroline said.

  ‘But that’s incurable, I’m afraid. And always fatal,’ Clement said softly. ‘If your mother died of this disease, then I’m afraid I don’t understand how you can hold your father in any way responsible.’

  ‘Oh, but he was,’ their witness insisted stubbornly. ‘Oh, not for her getting it, or anything like that,’ Caroline said disdainfully and rather offhandedly, Trudy thought. ‘But he refused to help her when a cure was offered to her.’

  ‘A cure? I can assure you, there’s no known cure for your mother’s condition. Although they are making great strides in researching various types of leukaemia in the United States, I understand, and have been doing some very promising trials—’

  ‘Exactly! Yes, that’s what I’m talking about,’ Caroline Benham said, almost leaning across the table now in her eagerness to press her cause. ‘When the doctors here gave up hope for her, one of them did tell us about some experimental treatment programmes, one in Seattle and one in California, I think. He said that Mother was a perfect candidate for one of them, and he would recommend her to the doctors over there, if we wanted.’

  ‘But—’ Clement was again quickly over-ridden.

  ‘Oh, I know, they didn’t make any promises of a total cure or anything like that!’ Caroline said, almost as if this vital fact was somehow irrelevant. ‘But then, doctors never really commit to anything, do they? But the new drugs could have helped give her more time with us, and they certainly would have made her life easier. But would my father, the miser, the utter miserable hateful skinflint,’ Caroline all but spat, ‘consent to paying for her flight and clinic and medical fees and the expensive drugs?’ She was almost shouting into Clement’s face now, her hands clutching the edge of the table, taunt and white-knuckled with strain. ‘Would he hell!’

  She was glaring first at one, and then the other of them, with such a fixed, almost manic look of hate and despair on her face, that Trudy felt a cold trickle of unease creep up her spine. She knew she was seeing obsession now, stark and entrenched, in the other woman’s ugly face, and wondered, for the first time, if it could have led Caroline to actually commit murder.

  ‘His own wife, and he wouldn’t lift a finger to help her. And it wasn’t as if he couldn’t afford it,’ Caroline panted, slowly sinking back against her chair. ‘He didn’t even have that excuse! He just didn’t want to spend it on a lost cause. A waste of time, he called it. Can you imagine?’

  For a moment, the room became utterly still and quiet as the horror of the now quietly spoken words permeated both the air and the consciousness of the two listeners.

  If all that was true, Trudy thought, appalled, then no, she couldn’t really imagine it. The dead man must have been monstrous in his callousness.

  But was it true? Their witness didn’t seem to be the most unbiased or reliable of people.

  Caroline took a deep, unsteady breath, and for the first time gave a slow, but unbearably bitter smile. ‘Oh, I can imagine what you’re thinking, both of you. That I’m mad and have a twisted mentality, or some sort of mania or something. But I can assure you, it’s none of those things. And if you knew my father as I knew him – as we all knew him – you’d know I was telling you the truth. All his life, the only thing my father cared about was money and power and acting like a king with own private empire. My mother provided him with children, and that was all he needed, and when she became ill and useless to him, he wasn’t willing to spend his resources on her. It was as simple as that.’

  Caroline’s smile slowly drained away. ‘And so she died. And I left. And now he’s dead at last.’ Her strength seemed to go as she slumped back in the chair, leaving her voice dull and almost disinterested.

  She looked up suddenly at the small inadequate window. ‘And I’m not sorry at all,’ she told the raindrops that had begun to trickle slowly down the glass.

  ‘Is that why you killed him, Caroline?’ Trudy dared to ask, her voice soft and sympathetic.

  Caroline Benham laughed then. It was a shocking sound, since it seemed to contain genuine humour in it – ironic and twisted – but there, nonetheless.

  ‘No, I didn’t kill him,’ she said, sounding ineffably weary now. ‘I think Fate did. I believe in Fate, you see. I think it was watching him and waiting to strike, just as it watches all of us. And it finally decided that it was time for Thomas Hughes to pay for his sins. And so the sparks flew, and the shed burned, and the old devil with it.’

  Caroline looked away from the window and her eyes, which had had a faraway look, suddenly seemed to focus again. In a shockingly abrupt return to normalcy, she straightened in the chair, placed her hands firmly on the table and stood up. ‘I expect you’re wondering why I went to any of the family get-togethers at all, feeling like I do.’ Her lips twisted into a parody of a smile. ‘It’s quite simple really – you see, I could tell that it annoyed him whenever I showed my face. Also, I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of letting him think that he had driven me away from the rest of my family! So, if there’s nothing further?’ she asked coolly.

  It was more of a statement or a challenge than an actual question, and Trudy found herself quietly agreeing that there was, indeed, nothing more for now. She was sure in her own mind that pressing their witness now would prove to be futile.

  Without another word, Caroline got up and showed them out, passing the curious receptionist without a second look.

  Once outside, Clement and Trudy stood under the shelter of the office block’s rather inadequate porch and watched the rain.

  ‘Phew,’ Clement finally said.

  Trudy grinned. She couldn’t help it. ‘That was a bit intense, wasn’t it?’

  ‘That’s one word for it,’ her friend agreed wryly.

  ‘Do you think she’s … you know … actually mad?’

  Clement stirred and thought about it, then shrugged. ‘Mental health isn’t my area of expertise. But I don’t think so. I think the loss of her mother was traumatic, and I think she’s got a fixed idea that her father’s to blame. But she seems rational enough, and she seems to have been able to lead a normal life, for all these past few years.’

  Trudy nodded. ‘So did you believe her? When she said she didn’t kill her father?’

  Clement took a long, slow breath. ‘Well, if she did, why now? Why didn’t she kill him at the time she lost her mother? She’d have been at her most unstable then. Why wait?’

  Trudy nodded, but she had her doubts. In her opinion, that young woman was a bit of a powder keg who could explode at any moment. ‘Well, if somebody did kill Mr Hughes, I think I’m putting Caroline at the top of the list.’

  Clement didn’t argue. ‘It’s going to be interesting to see what the rest of the Hughes family has to offer, isn’t it?’ he said mildly instead. Then he took a long, deep breath of the cold, moist air, put on his Trilby hat and
shrugged off the drama of the last ten minutes or so. ‘Well, I think I’ll go back to the office and see if I can find out who treated Mrs Hughes for her condition. The least I can do is confirm whether or not Caroline’s version of her mother’s illness is actually true.’

  ‘And I’ll report back to DI Jennings and do some more research on the other members of the Hughes family,’ Trudy said, a shade ruefully. ‘If they’re all going to be as interesting as the youngest daughter, I think we need to be better prepared with our facts.’

  ‘Yes, I think you’re right,’ Clement mused. ‘It might even be a good idea to just go back to the Wilcoxes again and get a more detailed view of things from their perspective. There’s only so much you can ask someone in open court, after all.’

  Trudy wished she’d attended the inquest, but there had been no reason why she should have, at the time. Now she asked eagerly, ‘Did you get the feeling they were holding something back?’

  Clement shrugged. ‘Not necessarily. But apart from anything else, we need to know how the rest of the dead man’s family regarded him, and more specifically if they agree with their youngest sister about his culpability in the death of their mother. I get the feeling there’s far more to the Hughes family that we need to learn, and Alice and her husband were the ones closest to him, in that they shared the same home.’

  Clement dropped Trudy off near the police station and drove away, but as he did so, his foot began to tremble, making him fumble the clutch and grind the gears noisily. He quickly checked in his rear-view mirror, but Trudy didn’t seem to be watching his car depart.

  With a sigh of relief, he drove carefully back to his office without further incident. But he couldn’t help but wonder. For how much longer would he be able to carry on driving safely?

  And that reminded him – he’d promised to teach Trudy how to drive. He’d have to ask her if she’d got her learner’s permit yet, and arrange a time to start giving her some lessons.