by Faith Martin
‘Oh yes, Matthew handed in his notice,’ she muttered. Trudy pricked up her ears at this, for she had assumed that he’d simply walked away from his job without so much as a by-your-leave. But if he’d actually worked out at least the requisite week’s notice, then he must have resigned his post as soon as his father had died. Which indicated, if nothing else, that Matthew Hughes had acted with considerable foresight.
‘Oh dear, well, I suppose you’d better come in then,’ Joan said reluctantly. ‘My husband is in the study. Please, follow me.’
She led them quickly down a short corridor to a door at the far end. This she tapped on briefly, then stuck her head around and announced nervously, ‘Matt, it’s the police.’ She moved aside to let them in. ‘I have to see to the children,’ she said, avoiding looking at them as she scuttled away.
Trudy carefully closed the door behind the departing woman, her big brown eyes troubled. When she turned around, she found herself in a pleasant but compact, book-lined room. A single window, with the curtains already closed against the November gloom, overlooked a small desk. There were only three chairs in the room and from a chair in front of the desk, Matthew Hughes was swivelling around to look at them.
He looked visibly older than the last time Trudy had seen him, and his thin frame seemed to droop a little, as if the weight of the world was pressing down on his shoulders and bending him in the middle. Dark smudges under his eyes were clearly noticeable in the artificial light.
He smiled at them without humour. ‘Constable Loveday, Dr Ryder. Please, sit down.’ He indicated the two wing-backed chairs that flanked a fireplace where a small gas fire hissed and popped occasionally. ‘What can I do for you this time? You’re lucky to catch us in. We have several errands to run before the children’s bedtime.’
‘Yes, your wife told us you were due to go abroad shortly,’ Trudy said, taking one of the chairs and digging into her satchel for her notebook. ‘You’re going to the United States of America I understand?’ she asked quietly.
She looked up at him and he nodded silently, his eyes going from her to Clement and then back to her again. He looked tired and wary and oddly detached. It puzzled her slightly, since she was used to people finding her official presence alarming, or sometimes amusing, or (in the case of the drunk and the habitually criminal) annoying. But she had the feeling that Matthew Hughes wasn’t feeling much of anything right then. Perhaps he simply didn’t have the energy for it. Which wouldn’t have been surprising, given what they now knew.
‘The last time I was here I spoke to your wife. She had to leave us for a while to check on your youngest – Helen, isn’t it?’ she began, determined to keep her voice calm and steady.
‘Yes, Helen. She’s four years old. She has a birthday coming up in February,’ he added, his eyes flickering to the slight gap where the curtains met in the middle. Outside, a streetlamp was casting a smoky yellow glow into the darkening street.
Trudy swallowed hard. Was he wondering if his little girl would live to see her fifth birthday? Somehow, she thought that he was.
She caught Clement’s gentle, encouraging gaze, and took a deep breath. ‘At the time, I assumed your little girl had one of the usual childhood ailments. Chickenpox, or maybe measles,’ Trudy went on gently. ‘But since then, we’ve been pursuing our inquiries, and have discovered that her condition is much more serious. Isn’t it?’
Dr Ryder had, in fact, only managed to track down and discuss the little girl’s condition with her physician less than an hour ago.
When Trudy had first asked him if the illness that had killed Mildred Hughes was one of those that could be inherited, he’d quickly consulted some of his medical tomes and found out that it could. It had then been a simple matter for a man with his contacts, to find and locate the doctor treating Matthew Hughes’s family.
And he had confirmed their worst fears.
Now the dying girl’s father sighed heavily and shifted his gaze from the light shining through the curtains, and back to her. He smiled wearily, but again without humour. ‘You have been busy, it seems.’ His tone was not so much accusatory as uninterested.
Trudy swallowed hard, aware that her heart was pounding. For a moment, her mind went blank, as she found it impossible to think of what to say next. What did you say to the father of a little girl who was almost certainly going to die very soon? And at such a heart-breakingly young age?
She licked her dry lips, and stared down at her notebook and pencil. She didn’t want to continue, but knew that she must. Eventually, she sighed gently. ‘Did your father refuse to give you the money for her treatment, Mr Hughes?’
Matthew turned and looked once more at the curtains. His brown hair caught some of the light slipping in from outside, turning one half of it almost white. His face was flat and expressionless. When he spoke, his voice was so low they had to strain to hear.
‘Of course he did,’ Matthew whispered before continuing more robustly. ‘If he wasn’t willing to give half his bloody precious fortune to save his wife, why should he give it to save one of his grandchildren?’
Matthew laughed suddenly, not loudly or hard, but it was made unbearably ugly by the quiet desperation and weary hatred that forced it from his mouth. ‘It wasn’t as if Helen was his only grandchild, you see? He had plenty of spares – and she was not even a boy. He still had Lucas, Alice’s child, and our own Ben.’ He paused, then shrugged. ‘To my father, Constable Loveday, trying to save my Helen simply wasn’t worth the bother or the effort,’ he said shockingly.
Trudy again had to swallow hard. A painful lump in her throat made it hard to breathe, and she had to clear her throat.
Matthew continued to speak, still in that same flat, uninterested voice, still staring out of the gap in the curtain. ‘Do you know what he actually said to me? When, after all the tests were done and the doctors finally confirmed our worst fears – that Helen had the same condition that had killed Mother?’
He turned briefly to look at her, but Trudy, knowing what she must do next, couldn’t meet his eyes and continued to stare miserably down at her notebook.
Matthew’s lips twisted into a grim smile. ‘He told me that if the doctors in the United States could guarantee that the treatment would work, he would loan me the money. Loan me it, mark you, not give it to us.’ Matthew laughed softly. ‘But of course, there are no guarantees to be had. You would know that, Dr Ryder, being a medical man,’ he added, turning to look at Clement curiously.
Clement, feeling sick at heart, slowly nodded. ‘I’m not on expert on rare conditions, Mr Hughes, but I understand after consulting with my colleagues, that with this particular disease, in a very small number of cases concerning children under the age of seven, it’s possible that life expectancy can be prolonged by as much as ten years. With extensive treatment and an expensive array of drugs.’
Matthew nodded. ‘Yes. That’s what they told us too. But the chances are astronomical. Most children die within a year of diagnosis. That’s why the NHS won’t fund the treatment. And that’s why my father refused to help us. Just like he refused to help mother. He said we had to face facts.’ Matthew smiled bitterly. ‘That life could be hard sometimes, and we had to grow a backbone and face up to it, like he’d had to, and get on with things. He even told us we could have more children if we wanted them.’
Trudy caught her breath at this particular piece of cruelty, but Matthew heard it. He glanced at her, too weary to feel any justification because of her reaction, and simply shrugged. ‘That was the way he thought. To him, life was one big profit and loss sheet, and accumulating wealth and power was all that mattered. And if you were unprofitable …’
But even the numbness that had been mercifully enfolding him, wasn’t up to allowing him to follow through on that particular thought, and he trailed off and simply shrugged again.
‘I understand. And that’s why you had to kill him,’ Trudy said softly, still staring at the blank page of her notebook.
>
For a brief, breathless moment, she expected him to confess. The room was so silent that even Clement seemed to be holding his breath. Trudy waited, and waited, and eventually was forced to look up at him.
And when their eyes met, she realised just how foolish she had been to think this man would ever confess. His eyes, blank, remote, tired and almost amused, looked back at her unwaveringly.
‘Is it?’ he said softly. ‘What an odd thing to say. Of course I didn’t kill my father.’
As if he hadn’t spoken, Trudy looked away from him and closed the pages together on her notebook. ‘You knew that your father, once he’d made a decision, wouldn’t be persuaded to change his mind.’ She opened the flap of her satchel. ‘And you knew that your little girl was fast running out of time. If she was to start treatment – and if it was to have any chance of prolonging her life – she would have to start it soon.’ She slipped the notebook carefully inside the leather bag. ‘And for that you needed money. Money you simply didn’t have, but knew you would inherit when your father died.’ She snapped the metal clasp on the side of the satchel, and the small ‘snick’ of sound seemed to ricochet around the room with unnatural force. ‘And so, on the night of the bonfire, you waited until he went to the shed, and then you followed him.’
Trudy turned the satchel to her lap, and then, still incapable of looking Matthew Hughes in the eye, she too turned to stare at the chink in the curtain, where the persistent, incongruous light continued seeping through. ‘It wasn’t hard, was it? It was dark, and everyone was watching the bonfire. You just walked in and … what … picked up something hard, a gardening tool maybe and hit him over the head?’
She didn’t expect an answer, and she didn’t get one.
For some reason, she noticed at that moment that the curtains were chintz ones, with big pink and white tea roses marching across them. Odd, she hadn’t realised that before.
‘He probably didn’t even get the chance to cry out,’ she carried on thoughtfully. ‘Did he start to turn around? Did he see it was you? Not that it matters,’ Trudy went on quietly. ‘You wouldn’t have stopped, even if he had. It was either him or your daughter, wasn’t it? It was as simple as that. And it was all his own doing too. That was the real pity of it. If he’d only shown some common decency – just a smidgen of love or compassion for you or your child, you wouldn’t have had to do it, would you? But the truth was, he loved himself and his money, more than anything or anyone in the world. And that proved fatal.’
She slowly turned her eyes from the curtains and met those of the man sitting opposite her. ‘All you had to do then was light the fuse of a firework and leave him, making sure you got out of the shed before it started to go off and drew attention your way.’ She paused and shook her head. ‘The whole thing wouldn’t have taken you more than a minute, even if anyone had noticed your absence. And in the dark, who would? All you had to do then was wait for the shed to catch alight and do its worst, and it would all be done. By then you were back at the fire, as if nothing had happened. Did you go into the shed sometime beforehand and spread around a little paraffin? I think you must have done, otherwise how sure could you have been that the firework would do the trick?’
He had listened to her as quietly as he’d watched her, and when she had finished, he nodded almost approvingly.
‘You’ll never be able to prove a word of it, you know,’ he said, almost sadly.
And Trudy knew that he was right.
Chapter 36
Matthew Hughes showed them politely to the door a few minutes later. Clement noticed that he shut the door behind them the moment they were off the stoop, in a hurry, no doubt, to help his wife with the packing.
Again, in tacit mutual silence, Trudy and Clement walked back to the car. Once inside, however, Clement didn’t reach immediately for the ignition key, but sat instead contemplating the darkening night and the horror of the last ten minutes.
‘Should I have stayed and tried to talk to Mrs Hughes?’ Trudy asked. ‘It’s possible that she knew what he’d done. And she might not be such a hard nut to crack.’
But she was hoping that Clement would dissuade her, and she let out her breath in a sigh of relief as he did just that.
‘No, I don’t think that would help,’ Clement said heavily. ‘For a start, there’s no way he would have told her beforehand what he was going to do. He wouldn’t want to involve her,’ he said confidently. ‘It would make her an accessory before the fact, and he’d never risk doing that. If anything had gone wrong – if he’d been caught … well, the children would have needed her.’
Trudy swallowed hard as she contemplated how high the stakes had been for Matthew Hughes, that night when the fireworks had soared through the sky.
‘Plus, there’s the fact that she might have tried to talk him out of it,’ Clement swept on. ‘No, he would have felt that it was up to him to protect his family, and that it was a matter to be kept strictly between him and his father and no one else. And I don’t think he would have told her about it afterwards, either. What would be the good of that? She would then have to share the guilt and the pain, and that man is determined to keep all of that to himself. Couldn’t you tell?’
Trudy though back to the image of that aged, stooped, dead-eyed man, and nodded wordlessly. Yes. She could tell.
‘But she might have guessed what he did,’ Trudy argued listlessly. ‘Women very often know what their husbands have been up to, you said as much yourself. After the shock of the fire had worn off, and then inheriting all that much needed money … Well, she wouldn’t have been human if she hadn’t begun to wonder,’ Trudy speculated, but her heart just wasn’t in it.
‘So what if she did?’ Clement responded, his voice sounding calm and reassuring. ‘Suppose you got her to admit that she suspected her husband had killed his father, would it really make any difference? There’s no forensic proof that Thomas Hughes was murdered. There are no witnesses willing to come forward, though it wouldn’t surprise me one bit if every single one of that family – including the children – all half-suspected or were convinced of the truth of what had happened. And Matthew himself isn’t going to confess – not now, how can he? Don’t you see the position he’s in? His family need him so much. He has to go to America with his wife and child in the hope that little Helen will be the one in a thousand who’ll be blessed with at least a partial cure – to gain a stay of execution for a while, if nothing else. Otherwise what he did on Bonfire Night will have been for nothing. Imagine the nightmares that thought must give him.’
‘Oh don’t,’ Trudy said, her voice breaking at last. ‘That poor little girl. Her poor mother. And her poor father,’ she added quietly.
For a moment, she battled against the hot tears that swamped her eyes, and when she lost and felt them rolling down her cheeks, she turned a little aside and stared out of the window, trying to surreptitiously wipe them from her cheeks with the back of her hand.
Clement silently offered her the plain white handkerchief that lived in his jacket pocket.
She took it and sniffled for a while, struggling to get her emotions under control.
‘Of course, there’s another reason that he can’t admit to what he’s done, even if he’d wanted to,’ Clement said, with forced practicality, pretending not to hear her distress. ‘Because, as you would know only too well, by law, a person can’t be allowed to profit from the proceeds of a crime.’
Trudy sighed and shook her head at the sheer futility of it all. ‘You’re right. If he confesses, they’ll lose the money.’
‘Which means that he’ll now be forced to live for the rest of his life with what he’s done, and never be able to relieve his soul with a confession,’ Clement said soberly.
In the dark and cold car, Trudy shuddered. Whilst it might be true that the law couldn’t touch Matthew Hughes – and as a police officer that thought still rankled a little – it was also true that the man could in no way be said to be getting away
with murder.
At the police station, DI Jennings called somewhat impatiently ‘Come in,’ when the tentative knock sounded on the door to his office. A quick glance at the clock told him that it was nearly time for him to clock off, but when he saw WPC Loveday, and right behind her, Dr Clement Ryder step inside, he had the sudden feeling that his supper was going to have to wait.
There was something white and tight about his constable’s face that told him there’d been trouble, and when he transferred his gaze to the coroner, a similar pale tautness marred his own handsome features. And it must be something pretty bad to rattle the old vulture, that was for sure!
In spite of the warmth of his office, the Inspector felt a cool trickle of unease run down the back of his spine. Instinctively he sat straighter in his chair.
‘Sir, we’ve come to tell you that our investigations into the Thomas Hughes case are now over,’ Trudy said crisply, all but standing to attention in front of his desk.
Jennings slowly leaned back in his chair. ‘Are they now?’ he said quietly. ‘And what have you found?’
Trudy blinked, fixed her gaze on the wall somewhere just beyond his head, and said emotionlessly, ‘We think that the case can be closed permanently, sir.’
On the way over here, they had discussed the situation between themselves and had finally concluded that there was no point in apprising her superior officer of all the details. Whilst they believed that there was simply no evidence to support a case for trial, they were both worried that DI Jennings and the powers that be might try to stop the Hughes from leaving the country whilst the prosecution service made up its own mind on that score. And that could take weeks – if not months, robbing little Helen of precious time.
And neither one of them wanted that on their consciences.
