Hilary Bonner

by Braven

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to do better than that, Miss Roth,” Karen responded.

  The other woman looked at her levelly enough, but her lower lip still had a tremble in it. She was genuinely upset. Karen had thought all along that there was no doubt that Jennifer Roth genuinely loved Richard Marshall. She had thought that when she had seen Jennifer in court every day, and she thought it even more now that Marshall had been found guilty and imprisoned. It was remarkable, really. The man was a monster and yet he could still inspire this kind of devotion. He had done it all his life with women—she strongly suspected that he had done it with her own mother—and he was still doing it. Remarkable, infuriating and quite unfathomable, thought Karen.

  Jennifer Roth did not respond for several seconds. Then, as if maybe aware that Karen had deliberately orchestrated the seating arrangements so that her visitor was at a disadvantage, she wriggled in her chair so that she was sitting as tall as possible. Her blue eyes bored into Karen’s, so much so that the superintendent had to make a real effort not to look away.

  “I know Ricky could not have murdered his wife because I was there.”

  Jennifer Roth spoke very quietly, putting no particular emphasis on any of the words. When you dropped a bombshell like that you didn’t need to, reflected Karen obliquely as she stared long and hard at the young woman, trying to make any kind of sense of her words.

  Karen’s brain was buzzing. Was Jennifer Roth mad? Or was there some other logical explanation? Something much more dangerous to the safety of the conviction so recently obtained. All kinds of thoughts raced through Karen’s head. As ever she fought the demons of doubt inside her to ensure somehow that when she spoke again she appeared calm and controlled and unflustered.

  “How could you have been there?” she asked, her voice as expressionless as Jennifer Roth’s had been.

  “I was there because Ricky is my father,” Jennifer Roth announced, almost casually. “My real name is Janine Marshall.”

  Karen was dumbfounded. This was unbelievable. This was potentially catastrophic. She found herself studying Jennifer Roth closely, trying to work out if she could see a resemblance with the man who had just been jailed for murder, and also trying to see if she could detect any trace of the child she had known only briefly so long ago. Jennifer was every bit as pale-skinned as she remembered both of Marshall’s daughters to have been. Karen stared into the young woman’s eyes. She also remembered how the little girls had both had their father’s very clear, very light blue eyes. Jennifer’s eyes were blue all right, but much darker and murkier, certainly not nearly as bright or as clear as Marshall’s still were. They could so easily have changed as she grew older, of course. The detective superintendent could really reach no conclusion at all based on Jennifer Roth’s appearance. She was exceptionally tall, just like Marshall, and had the same air of arrogance about her, that was for sure.

  Karen shook herself mentally. She was being ridiculous. This wouldn’t get her anywhere.

  “Together with the rest of the world I understood that you were Ricky’s girlfriend, his lover,” she countered.

  Jennifer uttered a little snort. “People believe what they want to believe, don’t they?” she sniffed. “I’m thirty-one years younger than Ricky, but when I moved into his flat the entire world just assumed we were lovers. Ricky said he was flattered. And it was much easier to go along with it. Much safer too, under the circumstances.”

  “And what particular circumstances are you referring to, may I ask?”

  “Ricky told me you lot had never left him alone, you were always after him, and you might come after him again at any moment. And if you did, well, I was supposed to have disappeared, wasn’t I, along with my sister and my mother? It was much safer to leave things like that.”

  “Was it indeed?” enquired Karen. “If one half of what you say is true, why on earth didn’t you speak out before?”

  “Ricky wouldn’t let me. He said there was no need. He said I had gone through enough. He said there was no real evidence against him and that he was sure to be acquitted without me rocking my boat, as he put it. But when he was sent down, well, I was left with no choice, was I? I can’t let him spend the rest of his life in jail for something he didn’t do, can I? He’ll be angry with me, I know. He didn’t want me to suffer, and he didn’t want to blacken Mum’s name either, he said.”

  Karen tried desperately to think straight, to return to the basics of policing, to pick up on detail and allow small points to clarify the big ones.

  “Why should anything you have to say blacken your mother’s name?”

  Jennifer opened her eyes very wide then, as if in surprise. “Didn’t I say?” she enquired. “I thought I’d said. It was Mummy who tried to kill us, Lorraine and me. She tried to kill all of us. It was Mummy who killed herself. Daddy had nothing to do with it at all.”

  Karen called in Tompkins again then, and arranged for Jennifer Roth to be taken to an interview room for formal questioning on tape. This was very serious indeed, and she wanted no loopholes in procedure. The eventual outcome could so well be Marshall’s reprieve. If that appalling end was achieved Karen wanted at least to be sure that it was not down to any basic errors in policing.

  Once the three of them were installed in an interview room Karen gestured for the tape recorders to be switched on, sat down opposite Jennifer Roth and began the formal interview.

  “First of all I would like to ascertain for the record that you are Janine Marshall,” began Karen.

  Jennifer nodded.

  “Please say your answer out loud for the tape recorder,” instructed Karen.

  Jennifer Roth did so.

  “Now, could you tell us the events of that Sunday in June 1975 which led to the death of your mother and sister?”

  “Not my sister,” said Jennifer. “Only my mother. Lorraine’s alive.”

  Karen did a double take. This was getting more and more curious. If Lorraine Marshall was also alive, where the hell was she? She turned her attention back to Jennifer Roth.

  “Just tell me what happened, everything,” she said.

  Jennifer Roth leaned back in her chair and half-closed her eyes as if trying to transport herself back into another time. Her voice sounded far away when she spoke.

  “Mummy and Daddy had had a terrible row that day,” she said. “They were always rowing, usually about money, sometimes about other women. Oh, I know I was only five, but kids do pick up on things. Parents never seem to realize it, but they do. Mum was violently jealous of Dad. Completely without reason, but she was totally neurotic, of course…”

  Jennifer Roth paused. Karen smothered a wry smile. Without reason? Half the paperwork in the Marshall file involved reports on the multitude of convoluted liaisons with women in which Marshall had become embroiled over the years. Including bigamy. He was not capable of monogamy, that was for certain.

  Jennifer began to speak again.

  “Dad was out, I don’t know where—it was Sunday of course, I think he may just have been down in the harbour working on his boat or something—but he phoned home and he and Mum had this particularly awful row. Mum kept shouting at him. Screaming at him. Accusing him of being with another woman. She told him that if he was going to behave like that she would take us away from him. Permanently. He could have whatever life he wanted, but he couldn’t have us. Then she slammed the phone down on him and grabbed Lorraine and me and took us into the garage…”

  Jennifer paused, put one hand to her forehead. She was frowning, trying to concentrate.

  “It’s hard, so hard to remember it. I’ve blocked it out for all these years…”

  Her voice trailed away.

  “Take your time,” said Karen softly. “Just take your time.”

  Jennifer nodded. “Can I have a glass of water?” she asked.

  “Of course.” Karen gestured to the uniformed constable at the door, who immediately left the room.

  “Do you want to wai
t?” she asked Jennifer.

  “No, I want to talk. I want to get it out of my system, I really do, it’s just, it’s just so painful to make myself remember…”

  Karen tried to look understanding. It wasn’t easy. She so wished this wasn’t happening. Never mind Jennifer Roth’s own boat, or Janine Marshall or whoever she really was, at the very best this young woman was going to seriously rock the boat of justice. At worst she could turn it right over and sink it.

  “Mummy took Lorraine and me into the garage,” the woman who claimed to be Marshall’s daughter continued. “Lorraine was crying. She was the oldest. Only a year but I think it made a difference. She always got really upset when Mum and Dad rowed. I was just bewildered mostly, that’s the limit of my memory of it, anyway. I don’t think I had a clue what was going on. Lorraine seemed to. Lorraine knew. Dad’s always said that. Lorraine knew. She knew exactly. That’s why it was more terrible for her than for me.”

  Jennifer just stopped talking then, stopped dead, almost as if she had no intention of continuing.

  “What did Lorraine know, Jennifer?” Karen prompted, and it seemed a very long time before she got a reply.

  “She knew that Mummy was going to try to kill us. She knew.”

  Karen studied Jennifer carefully. The more the young woman spoke of the tragic events of so long ago, the more she seemed to acquire a childlike voice, and childlike mannerisms. It was a bit spooky. Karen felt a shiver run down her spine.

  “Mummy took us into the car and talked to us. She was trying to calm Lorraine down. Lorraine was clinging to her. She was frightened. I clung to Mummy, too. I didn’t know what was going on but I didn’t know what else to do. Mummy held us and kissed us and then she told us we were going on a journey with her, that it would not be an easy journey, not a nice journey at all, but we’d all be together always, and that would make it all right.”

  “Then I started to feel sleepy, and then I don’t remember anything for a bit until I woke up in Daddy’s arms. Daddy was shaking me, asking me if I was all right. Asking me if I knew what had happened.”

  “I didn’t know. I didn’t know until years later, in fact, not until I found Daddy again. I’d blocked it out, like I told you. It was so terrible I just shut it out of my head. Mummy had attached a hose pipe to the car’s exhaust and she had tried to kill all three of us. But Daddy had been so frightened by what she had said to him on the phone that he came home straight away, and he arrived just in time to save Lorraine and me. We were both unconscious, but Mummy was dead already. Daddy said it was because she was bigger than us and the gas had risen so that she had inhaled much more of it more quickly than us.”

  Karen sighed. There was something about the way Jennifer Roth was talking that made her not doubt for one moment that the young woman was telling the truth. Or at the very least what she believed to be the truth.

  “So why didn’t your father call the police, call an ambulance, tell the truth?” she asked.

  Jennifer shrugged. “Because with his record nobody would have believed him, would they?” She sounded perfectly together and grown-up again. Her voice, with its public-school accent, had once more acquired that note of sarcasm, that hint of arrogance which almost made Karen angry with herself that she had not recognized her as her father’s daughter.

  “Jennifer, Richard Marshall had a criminal record, yes. But for bigamy and fraud. It’s a huge jump from those sorts of crimes to murder. I really can’t see any reason why he should have been under any more suspicion than any other man in those circumstances.”

  “No?” Jennifer Roth’s voice was heavy with sarcasm. “What about the boy he killed?”

  “I’m sorry?” Karen had no idea what Jennifer Roth was talking about.

  “When Daddy was still at school he hit another boy so hard that he killed him. It was a playground fight. It was an accident. At the time nobody found out exactly who had hit the dead boy and so no charges were brought against anyone. But Daddy knew that if there’d been an investigation into Mummy’s death all that would have come to light. He knew he’d be a suspect.”

  “If your mother died in the way you have told us, Jennifer, I think any investigation would have been able to prove that.”

  “Daddy didn’t think so. He told me that the row with Mummy had started in the morning in their bedroom and that she’d flown at him and started to hit him and he’d grabbed hold of her by the arms to keep her off. That’s all he did. Daddy was never a violent man.”

  Karen studied her carefully. Jennifer was being totally ingenuous. She was apparently as completely under the spell of her father, if indeed he was her father, as had been all the other women in his life.

  “But he knew there’d be bruises on Mummy. He reckoned the police would think he’d forced her into the car. And us. That he’d done it. He was sure of it.”

  “You don’t think he could have been lying when he told you all this?”

  “No, no, I don’t!” Jennifer Roth shouted the words.

  “Look, Jennifer,” Karen persisted. “We have investigated your mother’s death. We prosecuted your father, if he is your father, and he was convicted. But I don’t know anything about him having killed anyone when he was at school. That’s never come to light at all.”

  “Yes, but we’re talking nearly thirty years ago, aren’t we? If Daddy had called the police when he’d found Mummy dead back then it would all have been different. He was certain the police would find out about the boy he’d killed.”

  “A missing-persons enquiry was launched a year after whatever occurred in your house on that Sunday in June, 1975. It never came to light then either.”

  Jennifer Roth made a dismissive noise. “That whole investigation was a mess, wasn’t it? The police never got anything right. Everybody knows that now. But Daddy wasn’t to know then that they’d all be so incompetent, was he? Daddy thought they’d find out what he’d done at school and he’d be labelled a killer.”

  Jennifer looked triumphant. Karen leaned back in her seat, perplexed. She didn’t know quite what to say.

  “Looks like Daddy’s been proven right, anyway,” Jennifer continued. “You lot kept on going after him for twenty-eight years. And he didn’t do anything. He really didn’t do anything.”

  “Even if he didn’t kill anyone, he certainly did something,” Karen told her bluntly. “At the very least he illegally disposed of his wife’s body, didn’t he? Your mother’s body, if you’re telling the truth. And that alone is a serious offence.”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” responded Jennifer rather prissily.

  “We found your mother’s body at sea, as you well know, wrapped in a tarpaulin and bound in chains. Surely you must accept that it is highly unlikely anyone but your father would have put her there.”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” Jennifer repeated. “He never told me what he did with Mummy’s body and I never asked him. I wasn’t surprised, though, when that skeleton was discovered. It was important that she wasn’t found, you see. So what better place than the Atlantic Ocean. It was only through freak circumstances that she was ever found.”

  Jennifer spat the words out.

  “You seem very detached when you talk about your mother. Didn’t you love her?”

  The question went off at a tangent, but Karen couldn’t resist asking it. She was rewarded somewhat by the fleeting expression of surprise in Jennifer’s eyes.

  “I must have done, once,” she answered obliquely. “But I barely remember her. She did try to kill me, you know. Any feelings I might have had for her as a kid were part of what I tried to shut out. And if you think about it at all, well, knowing that someone tried to kill you, even if it is your mother, does rather put you off loving her.”

  It seemed to Karen that Jennifer was looking down her nose at her as she spoke. Certainly her voice had acquired a definite note of superiority. She remembered that Cooper had remarked on her snootiness when he had interviewed her
at the very beginning.

  Karen sighed. “And so?” she enquired. “Where have you been for the past twenty-eight years?”

  “I was adopted,” replied Jennifer in that rather smug voice again.

  “You were what?”

  “Ricky said that there was no way he could keep us, not after he started telling people that our mother had walked out on him,” she began.

  It was strange, Karen thought, how different her voice and her manner became depending on whether she was referring to Marshall as “Daddy” or “Ricky.” She was now, once again, quite grown-up and together.

  “Ricky said we were too young to be asked to keep a secret, and he was also terrified of the effect that what had happened might have on us. He thought that the best thing to do was to encourage us to forget it all. Children do have short memory spans. But he thought if we stayed with him we would have to live with it all forever. And I think he knew what the future was going to hold for him, that he would be hounded wherever he went.”

  “He found two childless couples who were desperate for children. The sort that don’t ask questions. There are always plenty of those, you know. He agonized about splitting us up. It was more difficult to place the two of us, and he knew there would be publicity sooner or later and we’d be more likely to be spotted and to have to live through it all again, become immersed in it just the way he didn’t want us to be.”

  “But that wasn’t the real reason he split us up. No. He wanted us to forget. He wanted us to have new lives. That’s why he never contacted us. And he thought we would always remind each other, wouldn’t be able to help ourselves. He thought that apart, with new caring parents, we’d forget more easily. Maybe even be able to forget altogether. That’s more or less what happened to me. There was always something in the back of my mind, but for many years it was buried inside my head.”

  “Jennifer, for a start I don’t think it’s ever been that easy to arrange adoptions in this country…” Karen began.

  “Oh, not the way you mean,” interrupted Jennifer. “Not officially. I suppose Dad just gave us away, really. And he fixed everything. I think he even arranged all the papers that were needed like a new birth certificate. You know Dad. He’s always been very resourceful.”