“But why?”
“Because another of my sister’s annoying traits is that once something has been discussed, she thinks – or professes to think – that it has been agreed. And it was very obvious to me by the way that she was leading up to it that a straightforward split between us, or even allowing each of us some of the money on account until the inevitable happens, is not what she has in mind. No, she will be thinking of tying it up in some way. No doubt she is indoctrinating Mummy to think along the same lines, as well. I therefore need to be one step ahead of her, ready both to say the right thing and to act pretty smartly, too.”
“I don’t see what kind of action you can take, short of having your mother certified.”
Peter looks at me with intense distaste.
“Well, that isn’t going to happen: I won’t have my family name tarnished with that,” he says pointedly. “Besides, you haven’t met Mummy. When she tries, she is sanity and good sense personified.”
“Peter, you are baffling me. And I’m very tired. Just tell me what you intend to do.”
Peter cackles – a surprising sound, coming from his quarter.
“It is rather a question of what we are going to do, darling. And now I have had time to think – and in fact I was formulating my thoughts throughout your strange shouting episode, as well as on my way home – I have decided that we need to visit Liverpool with the utmost urgency. On Saturday, in fact, since I presume you are unable to take tomorrow away from your wretched place of work at short notice.”
“I suppose that a visit would be useful for you, so that you can continue the conversation with Jillian. But I fail to see why you want me to go with you.”
“Oh, but you are my very dear partner, darling, and I am devoted to you. It is high time that you met Mummy. Besides, you might be useful for keeping the old boot at bay while I talk to Jillian; and I am quite certain that you will be able to help if more drastic measures are needed.”
I feel a sick pang of fear. “What do you mean?”
Peter thrusts his face much closer to mine than good manners dictate.
“I don’t mean anything yet,” he says, almost viciously. “We don’t know what kind of turn events will take; and I’m sure I wouldn’t want to pre-empt a superfluous action. But it is possible that needs must. No doubt your mother would understand perfectly.”
The sick feeling grows worse. I am panicky.
“Just understand that I have no intention of doing anything illegal. That isn’t the way in which I operate.”
“Ah. I think it is, darling, when you care about the outcome sufficiently. You just need to give my affairs as much weight in your mind as you give to your own.”
“I’ve got no idea what you are talking about.” I am fighting hysteria now. Peter draws back a little, and the extra physical space helps to calm me, even though he says, very quietly so that I can only just hear him:
“So you say, Hedley. But I think you know exactly.”
Chapter Fourteen
Detective Inspector Tim Yates was naturally a very cheerful man. He felt happy most of the time. Today, although it was still February and bitterly cold, he thought that he could feel some glimmerings of the spring: the light had changed, and the evenings were beginning to draw out at last. As he drove along the M42 in his battered BMW (he was a car snob, though half-ashamed of it, and would rather be seen in an elderly BMW than a chipper new Ford or Volkswagen) he was humming plain chant music to himself, and looking forward to the meeting ahead of him.
He was on his way to interview the psychiatrist who had examined Dorothy Atkins prior to her trial, and who had testified as an expert witness. When he had told his team that he would like them to find Dr. Bertolasso, he had thought it unlikely that they would succeed: the chances were that the psychiatrist had been middle-aged at the time of the trial, and would therefore now be very old or, in all probability, dead. However, it had not taken Detective Constable Juliet Armstrong long to locate the Professor, who was now an eminent criminal psychologist and held a personal chair at Birmingham University.
Tim flashed his police pass at the porter who was manning the impressive main gates of the redbrick and was directed to park in a multi-storey car park to the left of them. He had visited Birmingham University once before, when he was a student. Emma, his sixth-form girlfriend, had gone there to study Chemistry. At school they had been inseparable, but it had been on that first and only trip to Birmingham that he had realised that they had little in common. In the space of three weeks, she had acquired a coterie of dowdy conventional friends who had persuaded her to join the Junior Conservatives and take up going to church. She had immediately looked older and dressed more severely. He had described to her the much more raffish and exciting, though less scholarly, life that he was leading at the University of Leeds and she had responded with humourless contempt. They had agreed that trying to continue with their relationship would be pointless. He remembered running over a long stretch of grass after they had parted, exuberant to be free again, yet with one small secret part of him mourning the pretty and vivacious Emma that not only he, but the world at large, had lost.
Now he was walking more decorously on the path which abutted that same stretch of grass. He stopped a student with an Afro hairstyle to ask the way to the Department of Psychology. The directions that the student gave were somewhat garbled, so Tim had to ask again before he found the correct building and started to pace what seemed like miles of gloomy corridors. He wondered if Emma was still buried in here somewhere, delighting the rarefied world in which she moved with the audacity of her chemical experiments. The last time he had heard of her, she had been working for a PhD, and was obviously destined to take up an academic career. It would be strange – unnerving, even – to bump into her in this corridor.
Eventually he came to a secretary’s office, and was asked to wait while she told Professor Bertolasso that he had arrived. The secretary was young, curvaceous and funky, dressed in a bright multicoloured calf-length skirt and little red buckled boots. She had a mass of dark curly hair which was escaping from the red bandana with which she had tried to tame it. She moved nimbly, and was back at her post in a trice.
“Professor Bertolasso is expecting you. He says please to go in when you are ready.” There was the trace of an accent. Not English. Mediterranean? He returned her bright smile.
Professor Bertolasso was a tiny bald man who appeared to be seated on a velvet throne. He remained seated as Tim approached his desk, eventually extending a hand.
“Ah, Inspector Yates.” His voice was another surprise: the thick lilting tones proclaimed him a native of Birmingham. “You’ll have to excuse me for not standing,” he continued, in his aggrieved-sounding sing-song. “I’ve hurt me back – which is why I’m sat on this ridiculous chair. No delusions of grandeur, I’m sure!” He nodded encouragingly towards a chair. “Do sit down. Would you like a coffee?”
“Not if it’s too much trouble.”
“Oh, no trouble at all – you see, I have this machine on the go all the time.” He pointed at an electric coffee maker which was seething quietly on a glass-fronted cupboard. “Help yourself. There’s biscuits in the jar.”
Tim poured himself a cup of black coffee. He raised it: “Professor?”
“Oh, no thank you. I prefer tea. Rossella will bring some in for me later.”
Tim re-seated himself, and took a sip. The coffee was surprisingly good: strong and nutty, and not bitter. Purchased by Rossella, no doubt.
“Thank you for agreeing to meet me, Professor. I believe that the detective constable who contacted you explained why I wish to talk to you.”
The Professor’s brown eyes stopped darting about, and fixed Tim’s blue ones.
“I understand that you have come about Dorothy Atkins. A very strange woman. I gave evidence at her trial as an expert witness.”
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br /> “On behalf of the Crown, I believe.”
“On behalf of the truth,” wailed the Professor in his best falsetto. “The evidence I gave was as much in her favour as against it. I didn’t in fact suggest that she was insane – Dorothy is an unpleasant and devious woman, but she has a certain perverted magnificence, and she undoubtedly has her pride. I said that she was narcissistic, had borderline paranoia, and was suffering from undiagnosed depression. That did not mean she was a total basket case.” His voice rose an octave as he uttered the last two words, surprising Tim with the slangy terminology. “It was the judge who decided that she should be sent to a secure mental unit. In his shoes, I would have sent her to a normal prison.”
“But you did not challenge the sentence?”
“What do you think, Inspector? I was very young: Criminal Psychology was a discipline new to British universities at the time, hence my being offered the job despite my youth. There were no older and sager academics available to take it on. But it was not because I was cowed by the situation that I found myself in that I did not protest – not, I think, that protesting would have done me any good. I would have had a shot at it if I had believed that she was being treated too leniently. As it was, I thought that whatever sentence was passed on her, inevitable as it was, it would be unfair.”
“I’m not sure that I follow you. You have said that she wasn’t insane.”
“Oh, I’m sure that she wasn’t, though she was probably trying to convince me of the opposite. As I’ve said, she is an unpleasant person – devious, manipulative and self-interested. But in one respect, and one respect only, she deserved my compassion.”
“What do you mean? I’m not sure that I follow.”
“It’s quite simple, Inspector.” His voice rose to soprano pitch. “Despite the circumstantial evidence, and the testimonies of various witnesses – all relatives of Dorothy’s, as I’m sure you will have noted – nothing ever convinced me that she was guilty of murder. In fact, rather the opposite.”
Although this was a momentous statement, and judging from the swelling crescendo of his voice, the Professor intended it to be such, somehow Tim was not surprised.
“What makes you say that?”
“Well, for a start, Dorothy never confessed satisfactorily. I know that this is true of many, perhaps most, criminals, but you have to remember that Dorothy also entered a plea of guilty – or rather, she did not protest when her barrister entered the plea on her behalf. When I met Dorothy – as I did on many occasions before the trial, and they were long meetings – she would never talk directly about the murder. She would not describe the exact circumstances in which her mother-in-law had died – though I pressed her on this, because of course I wanted to understand the motive – nor exactly how she had died.”
“From all I have heard and read, Dorothy is not exactly a co-operative person. Perhaps she was just trying to make life difficult for you.”
“Of course you are right and of course I have thought of that. Alternatively, she may have blanked out the actual events from her memory, though she did not strike me as the sort of criminal who could not face up to the consequences of her actions. But there is another possible explanation – that she could not describe the murder to me in detail because she was not there. And then there is her one highly cryptic comment about the crime: that her mother-in-law died because she was ‘too fond of gardening’. But it is my reading of her personality that I rely on most of all. I am convinced that if Dorothy had done it, she would have confessed. Not with bravado, but with a sort of defiant honesty. And she was a terrible liar.”
“If you are correct, not so terrible that the jury did not believe her to be guilty and the judge was not convinced that she was sane.”
“That also helped to convince me that my theory was correct. As I’ve said, Dorothy was not good at lying – although she had a good memory, she found it difficult to describe the events leading up to the killing and the killing itself consistently if she was asked about them repeatedly. I think that this was not only because she was fundamentally honest, but also – and this would be characteristic of her arrogance – because she had not rehearsed her story in her own mind. I doubt if she realised that a guilty plea had to be proven. She had given her version of events in a fairly ad hoc way when she was first arrested, and then realised belatedly that she would be asked for them again and again after that, both by the defence and the prosecution and of course by me. She knew that she was in a mess – unable to remember what she had said on the first occasion. If she wanted her guilty plea to be believed, there were two courses of action open to her: either to remain silent after giving the first account, or to appear to be confused. She tried a bit of each of these tactics: and it was the confusion, coupled with my psychiatric assessment – which I repeat did not indicate that she was insane – that determined the trial judge to send her to a secure unit. And you should take into account that this sentence was not necessarily in Dorothy’s best interest. Sure, conditions at the unit were easier, and she had more time to cultivate the pursuits that she liked – she worked for an Open University degree while she was there – but she spent far longer incarcerated than she would have done for a single isolated crime, even a murder, if she had served a prison sentence and got time off for good behaviour.”
“Can you explain why, if she was fundamentally rational, she would have behaved like this?”
“There are two possible explanations. One is that she did it to protect someone else. Based on many years of experience of dealing with such cases since, this would be the most commonplace and logical reason. The difficulty is that there is no immediate obvious candidate for her protection. The Atkins family was not close – in fact, it was as ‘dysfunctional’, to use the modern cliché, as any family could be whose members had not actually gone their separate ways at the time of which we speak – and Dorothy was not devoted to her children. As for her husband, she despised him; she would gladly have seen him put away. And it is highly unlikely that he would have killed his mother. He appeared to have been very fond of her.”
“You don’t think that she could have been protecting Hedley Atkins? Despite his mild manner, there seems to be something about him that doesn’t quite fit. And he and Dorothy seem to circle each other from a distance, though they have not met for many years.”
“It is a long time since I met him, and then only on one or two occasions. He seemed to be rather an effete young man, but he got on well with his sister, and I believe had also had a girlfriend. He was not your typical loner. I have to say that I quite liked him: he didn’t give me any ‘bad vibes’, as they say. The sister was as ‘normal’ as can be.”
“Oh, so you met Bryony Atkins as well?”
“I spoke to her on the phone, and as I say, she seemed quite normal, whatever that means. I suppose what I mean is that it is hard to believe that she grew up in that household and still turned into the girl that I interviewed. Have you met her?”
“No, we have just started trying to trace her. Apparently no-one has seen her since she was about to become a student. Somewhat surprisingly, the police did not call her as a witness at Dorothy’s trial, although Hedley Atkins told me recently that she left home shortly before her grandmother’s murder, which may explain why she was overlooked. Hedley claims that after the murder she cut herself off from her family, which I suppose would not have been surprising. She must have changed her identity as well: her national insurance number has not been used since that same year.”
The Professor looked serious. He leant back in the velvet chair and shaded his brow with stubby splayed fingers.
“That is interesting – and seriously alarming. You should also be aware that Dorothy’s psychiatrist at the secure unit disagrees completely with my diagnosis of Dorothy; and naturally she has spent much longer analysing Dorothy’s problems than I could, as well as offering extensive therapy.
She believes that Dorothy committed the murder, and that the other behaviour that I have described demonstrates self-interest and a total lack of remorse. In short, her diagnosis is that Dorothy is a psychopath. Which brings me to the other possible explanation of which I spoke.”
“Go on.”
“If my assessment of Dorothy is wrong, then it is possible that she tacitly accepted responsibility for Doris Atkins’ murder and displayed confusion because this was the only one of her crimes for which she had been caught, and that by focusing on it in this way she avoided having the police cast their net wider. This is Doctor Hemingway’s view. If she is correct, then it means that Dorothy may have killed – in fact, has probably killed – on more than one occasion.”
Chapter Fifteen
Dr. Hemingway had declined to see Tim at the secure unit at Bracknell where she worked. She had said that she was coming to London on the date that he had suggested, and had offered to meet at a café at Waterloo Station instead. Tim could have caught an early train from Peterborough to King’s Cross, but instead he decided to take the opportunity to stay with his sister in Surbiton, and had bought her dinner on the previous evening.
The café chosen by Dr. Hemingway was in fact a rather down-at-heel pub which also served coffee. Although it was only 10.00 a.m., there were already several dishevelled characters propping up the bar and drinking what looked like brandy. Tim sat down at one of the steel tables which had been arranged outside the building, in a small square roped off from the main concourse. It was quite pleasant here, watching the pigeons swoop down on to discarded bits of pastry and the crowds hurrying past. None of the bar staff approached him, though he had not placed an order.
Tim liked watching people, in a professional way. He knew that it was one of the things that made him good at his job. He placed a bet with himself that he would spot Dr. Hemingway before she introduced herself. None of the people passing at that moment was a possible candidate. There were several men walking together, all with paunches and dressed in baggy suits, who were talking and laughing far too loudly; a couple of women in their twenties wearing tiny skirts over thick black tights; and a busker with straggling hair and day-glo panels sewn into his donkey-jacket, clearly looking for a pitch. His arrival precipitated some activity from the waiters: one of them darted out from behind the bar and asked the busker to move on – though politely, Tim noticed, and with the accompanying gift of a croissant and a carton of coffee. He applauded the tactic, and was sufficiently distracted by it not to notice the arrival of a slight middle-aged woman with crisply-cut short blonde hair. She sat down at his table with a poise and certainty which took him by surprise.
In the Family Page 10
