A Room Swept White

by Sophie Hannah

  ‘You should ask Laurie Nattrass that question,’ said Duffy.

  ‘I’m planning to, soon as he rings me back.’

  ‘So it’s everyone minus one, then.’

  ‘So it’s everyone minus one, then.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Cooperating. Laurie Nattrass can’t be cooperating if he hasn’t returned your calls.’

  Do we have to have this conversation through a letterbox? ‘Mr Nattrass has already been swabbed, alibied and eliminated, as you would be if you—’

  ‘Goodbye, Mr Waterhouse.’

  Simon heard the shuffle of her feet on the wood floor as she moved away. ‘Help me out here,’ he called after her. ‘Between you and me, and I shouldn’t be telling you this, I’m worried about Mrs Hines.’ No matter what the Snowman said, no matter what Sam Kombothekra said, Simon’s instincts told him he was looking for a serial killer, or a person with the potential to become one – someone who left cards bearing strange numerical codes in the pockets of his victims. Was Rachel Hines one of those victims? Or was Simon’s imagination as out of control as Charlie was always telling him it was?

  He let out a heavy sigh. As if in response, Judith Duffy took a few steps towards the front door. Now Simon could see her again, her shoulder and her arm. Not her face. ‘I had lunch with Ray Hines on Monday,’ she said. ‘There, I’ve given you my alibi – and hers – so you can go away happy, and even if you aren’t happy, you can go. Neither of us knew that it was the day someone would murder Helen Yardley. At that point it was just Monday 5 October, same as any other Monday. We met at a restaurant, spent the afternoon together.’

  ‘Which restaurant?’ Simon got out his pad and pen.

  ‘Sardo Canale in Primrose Hill. Ray’s choice.’

  ‘Do you mind my asking . . .?’

  ‘Goodbye, Mr Waterhouse.’

  This time, when Simon pressed the letterbox, he met with resistance. She was holding it shut from the inside.

  He went back to his car and switched on his phone. He had two messages, one from a man he assumed was Laurie Nattrass whose message was a strange noise followed by the words ‘Laurie Nattrass’ and nothing more, and one from Charlie, saying that Lizzie Proust had rung to invite the two of them for dinner on Saturday night. Didn’t Simon think it was weird, she wanted to know, given that they’d known the Prousts for years and no such invitation had been forthcoming until now, and what did he want her to say? Simon texted the word ‘NO’, in capitals, to her mobile phone, dropping his own twice in the process, in his eagerness to get the message sent. The Snowman, inviting him for dinner; the thought made Simon’s throat close like a clenched fist. He forced his mind away from it, unwilling to deal with the violence of his reaction and the element of fear it contained.

  He rang one of the three mobile numbers he had for Laurie Nattrass, and this time someone answered after the first ring. Simon heard breathing. ‘Hello?’ he said. ‘Mr Nattrass?’

  ‘Laurie Nattrass,’ said a gruff voice, the same one that had left the message.

  ‘Is that Mr Nattrass I’m speaking to?’

  ‘Dunno.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘I’m not where you are, so I can’t see who you’re speaking to. If you’re speaking to me, then yes, you’re speaking to Mr Nattrass, Mr Laurie Nattrass. And I’m speaking to Detective Constable – and I’m spelling that with a “u” instead of an “o” and an extra “t” between the “n” and the “s” – Simon Waterhouse.’ As he spoke, his words rose and fell in volume, as if someone was sticking pins in him and each new jab made him raise his voice. Was he insane? Pissed?

  ‘When and where can we meet?’ Simon asked. ‘I’ll come to you if you like.’

  ‘Never. Nowhere, no-how.’

  It was going to be like that, was it? One of those easy conversations. Could this man really be an Oxford- and Harvard-educated multi-award-winning investigative journalist? He didn’t sound like one.

  ‘Do you know where I might find Rachel Hines?’

  ‘Twickenham,’ said Nattrass. ‘Why? Ray didn’t kill Helen. Looking to fit her up again, are you? You can’t step into the same river twice, but you can fit up the same innocent woman twice. If you’re filth.’ It wasn’t only the volume that varied from word to word, Simon noticed – it was also the speed at which Nattrass spoke. Some sentences spurted out; others were delivered slowly, with an air of hesitation, as if his attention were elsewhere.

  ‘Do you happen to have an address or contact—?’

  ‘Speak to Judith Duffy instead of wasting my time and Ray Hines’. Ask her what her two sons-in-law were doing on Monday.’ It was an order rather than a suggestion.

  Two sons-in-law. And, since these days the police looked at things from an equal opportunities perspective, two daughters. Were they worth checking out?

  ‘Mr Nattrass, I need to ask you some questions,’ Simon tried again. ‘I’d prefer to do it in person, but . . .’

  ‘Pretend your phone’s a person. Pretend it’s called Laurence Hugo St John Fleet Nattrass, and ask away.’

  If this man was sane, Simon was a banana sandwich. Nattrass was certainly drunk. ‘We’re considering the possibility that Helen Yardley was murdered as a result of her work for JIPAC. As you’re the . . .’

  ‘. . . co-founder, you’re wondering if anyone’s tried to kill me. No. Next?’

  ‘Has anyone threatened you? Anyone acting out of character, any strange emails or letters?’

  ‘How’s Giles Proust? Leader of the band now, isn’t he? How can he be objective? It’s a joke. He arrested Helen for murder. Have you read her book?’

  ‘Helen’s . . .?’

  ‘Nothing But Love. Nothing but praise for dear old Giles. What do you think of him? Cunt, right?’

  Simon started to say ‘Yeah,’ then turned it into a cough, his heart racing. He’d nearly said it. That would have been his job down the pan.

  ‘If he thought Helen was innocent, why did he arrest her?’ Nattrass demanded. ‘Why didn’t he resign? Morally colourblind, is he?’

  ‘In our job, if you’re told to arrest someone, you arrest them,’ said Simon. Morally colour-blind. If there was a better description of the Snowman, he had yet to hear it.

  ‘Know what he did when she got out? Turned up on her doorstep with everything his henchmen had confiscated when they arrested her – Moses basket, cot, bouncy chair, Morgan and Rowan’s clothes, the lot. Didn’t even ring first to warn her, or ask if she wanted a van-load of reminders of her dead babies. Know how many times he visited her in prison? None.’

  ‘I wanted to ask you about a card that was found in Helen Yardley’s pocket after her death,’ Simon said. ‘It’s been kept out of the press.’

  ‘2,1,4,9 . . .’

  ‘How do you know those numbers?’ Simon didn’t care if he sounded abrupt. Even at his rudest, he was no competition for Nattrass.

  ‘Fliss had them. Felicity Benson, Happiness Benson. Except she’s not very happy at the moment, not with me. She didn’t know what the numbers meant. I chucked them in the bin. Do you know what they mean? Know who sent them?’

  Felicity Benson. Fliss. Simon had no idea who she was, but she’d just leaped straight to the top of the list of people he wanted to speak to.

  Angus Hines

  Transcript of Interview 1, 16 February 2009

  AH:

  Well? I assume you have questions you want to ask me and aren’t here for the sole purpose of recording silence.

  LN:

  I’m surprised you agreed to be interviewed, frankly.

  AH:

  You mean that if you were me, you’d hide away in shame?

  LN:

  I’m surprised you agreed to talk to me. You know where I stand. You know I’m making a film about—

  AH:

  You mean I know whose side you’re on?

  LN:

  Yes.

  (Pause)

  AH:

  You think it’s
appropriate to take sides?

  LN:

  Not appropriate. Essential.

  AH:

  So, for the sake of clarity, whose side are you on?

  LN:

  Ray’s. And Helen Yardley’s, and all the other innocent women who’ve been locked up for killing children they didn’t kill.

  AH:

  How many altogether? Ever totted up the grand total?

  LN:

  Too many. JIPAC’s pressing for five cases to be reviewed at the moment, and there’s at least another three that I know of – innocent women in the British prison system thanks to the lies of your friend Dr Judith Duffy.

  AH:

  My friend? Oh, I see. So on one side we have you, my ex-wife and the scores of unjustly maligned mothers or baby-minders, victims of what I believe you’ve called a modern-day witch-hunt . . .

  LN:

  Because it is one.

  AH:

  . . . and on the other side there’s me, Judith Duffy – anybody else?

  LN:

  Plenty. Anyone who played a part in ruining the lives of Ray, Helen, Sarah Jaggard and other women like them.

  AH:

  And in your righteous war, with its clearly defined armies, who’s on the side of my children? Who’s on the side of Marcella and Nathaniel?

  LN:

  If you think—

  AH:

  I am. I’m on their side. It’s the only side I’m on. It’s the only side I’ve ever been on. That’s why I’m willing to be interviewed – by you, by anybody who asks me. You can try as hard as you like to cast me as a villain in your BBC documentary, but provided you represent me accurately, I believe the viewing public will see the truth behind your lies.

  LN:

  Me? What have I lied about?

  AH:

  Deliberately? Probably nothing. But going through life with blinkers on and spouting your prejudices at every opportunity is a form of lying.

  LN:

  So I’m blinkered?

  AH:

  You can’t see the trees for the wood.

  LN:

  The wood for the trees. The expression is ‘You can’t see the wood for the trees’.

  AH:

  (Laughs) ‘Oh! Let us never, never doubt/What nobody is sure about!’

  LN:

  I see. So I’m blinkered because I’ve always believed in your wife’s innocence? Unlike you, who betrayed her?

  AH:

  I don’t think I did betray her. And, for the record, I too now believe she’s innocent. And I believe it all the more strongly for having once believed otherwise – something I wouldn’t expect someone with your simplistic outlook to understand.

  LN:

  Is that your way of saying sorry? Have you apologised to Ray for doubting her? Have you even tried?

  AH:

  I’ve nothing to be sorry for. All I’ve done is refuse, throughout, to insult anybody, my wife . . .

  LN:

  Ex-wife

  AH:

  . . . or my children, by lying. When the police first let it be known that they suspected Ray of murder, I doubted her innocence, yes. I also doubted her guilt. I was in no position to say for sure how Marcella and Nathaniel died, since I wasn’t at home when it happened, on either occasion. The police were suspicious – I didn’t see why they would be if there were no grounds for suspicion. They’d have had better things to do, surely? Two deaths for no apparent reason in the same family is unusual. Marcella and Nathaniel were perfectly well in the days before they died. There was nothing wrong with them.

  LN:

  Are you a paediatrician? I’ll have to amend my notes. It says ‘photographer’ here.

  AH:

  Then you’d better make an amendment, as you say. I was promoted some time ago. I’m Pictures Desk Editor at London on Sunday. Someone else does the donkey work now. I get to sit at a desk eating chocolate biscuits and looking at Big Ben out of my window. See how easily you can mistake an incorrect assumption for a fact? I don’t make assumptions, unlike you. I made none about Ray. She loved the children – her love for them was genuine, I had no doubts on that front. At the same time, I was realistic enough to wonder whether certain psychological . . . conditions might exist in which love for one’s child is compatible with doing it harm. Because of Ray’s history.

  LN:

  Oh, come on! She sits on a window ledge to smoke a cigarette – next thing she knows, the filth are out in full force, cordoning off the area around the house, standing in her bedroom where she can hear every word they’re saying, on their mobiles to her GP asking about the percentage likelihood of her jumping.

  AH:

  That’s one version of the story, one of the many she’s served up over the years: the ‘all I wanted was some peace and quiet and a fag’ remix. In court she tried to pass the whole thing off as an episode of post-natal madness, claiming she had no clear memory of either the window ledge or the cigarette.

  LN:

  There’s nothing wrong with Ray, psychologically or in any other way. She’s a normal, healthy woman.

  AH:

  Does it strike you as normal behaviour to climb out of a dangerously high window and sit on a small ledge, smoking? Not to mention that this happened on Ray’s first day back after she’d inexplicably walked out on me and Marcella when Marcella was only two weeks old. Then, nine days later, she just as inexplicably walks back in, refusing to say a word about where she’s been or why she left, and when pressed on the subject, she rushes upstairs and climbs out of the window. If that was your wife behaving like that and then she was accused of murdering your two children, you’re telling me you’d have no doubts?

  LN:

  If Ray was suffering from post-natal depression, whose fault was that? You snored your way through the first fourteen nights of Marcella’s life while Ray was up every hour and a half breastfeeding. She’d endured two weeks of looking after a demanding baby with zero help from you, and she decided . . .

  AH:

  . . . that if I didn’t experience first-hand how hard it was, I’d never understand, so she took off and left me to my own devices. The ‘my husband’s a sexist bastard’ feminist remix.

  LN:

  You can call it that if you want. I call it the truth.

  AH:

  Nine days after her departure, Ray returned to find I hadn’t coped on my own at all, as I’d been supposed to – I’d summoned my mother instantly, being an unreconstructed man. Since Ray’s only desire had been to turn our home into a utopia of gender equality and me into Mary Poppins, she was furious with both me and Mum. She climbed out of the window to get away from us. You see? I’m as familiar with the lie as you are.

  (Pause)

  The fact is that from the moment I brought Ray and Marcella home from the hospital, I did my fair share of the childcare, if not more. If Marcella cried in the night, I was the one who got out of bed first. While Ray fed her, I made us both cups of tea, then sometimes we’d talk, or sometimes we’d listen to the radio. When we were bored of both, we’d open our bedroom curtains and try to look into neighbours’ windows, see what was going on. Nothing much. Lucky bastards were sleeping.

  (Long pause)

  I was always the one who changed Marcella’s nappy and settled her back to sleep. Not once or twice – every time. By the time I got back into bed, Ray would already be asleep. I did all the supermarket shopping, all the washing and ironing, cooked the evening meals . . .

  LN:

  Then why did Ray walk out on you?

  AH:

  Not only me. Me and Marcella. You don’t ever wonder whether a woman who’s capable of deserting her newborn baby might also be capable of killing that same baby a few weeks later?

  LN:

  Never.

  AH:

  A woman who has no qualms about lying under oath, implying in court that she was suffering from post-natal depression, then telling you later that it was all part of some f
eminist stand she’d decided to take?

  LN:

  Not everyone who lies is a murderer.

  AH:

  True. Ray certainly lied, but, as I said before, I no longer believe she harmed Marcella and Nathaniel.

  LN:

  We all lie from time to time, but hardly any of us kill our own children. Most men might give their wives the benefit of the doubt. Paul Yardley did. Glen Jaggard did.

  AH:

  You need first to have a doubt in order to give someone the benefit of it. Everything I’ve heard about Yardley and Jaggard suggests they never doubted. You were talking about normality before. Do you think that’s normal? Natural?

  (Pause)

  I didn’t think Ray was a murderer. All I knew was that our two babies were dead, four years apart, and some people thought Ray might have been responsible. I didn’t think she was a murderer and I didn’t think she wasn’t a murderer. I didn’t know.

  LN:

  The result of your not knowing was that Ray had to spend the run-up to her trial living with a man who wasn’t her loving husband any more but a sinister data-gathering stranger, watching her for signs of guilt or innocence. How do you think that must have been for her? And then when the verdict went against her, you gave an interview outside court saying you were glad your children’s killer had been brought to justice and that you’d be starting divorce proceedings as soon as possible. Unless you were misquoted?

  AH:

  No. That’s what I said.