A Deep Deceit

by Hilary Bonner

  He spoke first. ‘I went to the hospital last night, I didn’t know you’d left . . .’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, not really meaning it. I wasn’t much concerned with anyone except me and Carl right then. ‘I should have let you know . . .’

  ‘No. No. Of course not. It’s just that I’ve got something for you, the rest of what I owe you . . .’

  He produced one of those familiar brown envelopes. As ever, the practicalities of life were eluding me. I had not given money matters a thought, beyond being able to get myself to Exeter to see Carl. The sight of the brown envelope concentrated my mind. I realised suddenly how welcome it was. Presumably soon there would be rent to pay and other bills.

  I took the envelope from him and studied it almost curiously.

  ‘There’s just over £500, I’ve had a really good run,’ he said. ‘Sold two of his big abstracts and another couple of the little watercolours as well.’

  He sounded almost eager.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, stuffing the envelope in my pocket. There was not time to tuck away the cash in its usual hiding place. And in any case it was a matter of habit not to allow visitors, rare as they had always been, to become aware of our secret cellar.

  I was still hovering in the doorway and Will remained on the doorstep directly in front of me. He made no attempt to move. I stepped forward, pulling the door shut behind me and only then, with great reluctance it seemed, did he shift back out of the way.

  As I was locking the door he began to talk again. ‘I just wondered if I could do anything to help. There must be something . . .’

  Yes, there was. I wanted him out of the way, so that I could get to Carl. ‘No, Will, there isn’t,’ I said. ‘Now please, you’re just going to have to excuse me.’ I spoke a little more curtly than I had meant to, but I was in a hurry.

  Will looked quite crestfallen. ‘Oh, yes, of course,’ he muttered in a bleak sort of way.

  I had neither time nor inclination to worry about his sensibilities.

  He still did not move and I simply sidled my way round him.

  ‘Goodbye, then,’ he said.

  I think I called a goodbye or something similar to him over my shoulder but, to be honest, I can’t really remember.

  I was intent upon my journey, hurrying, even though I didn’t need to, as I rounded the corner at the end of our alleyway and began to make my way down the hill towards Porthminster and the railway station, leaving Will still hovering outside Rose Cottage.

  Luckily the train was punctual and I arrived in the centre of Penzance half an hour or so later with plenty of time to have a cup of coffee on my way to the police station.

  DC Carter was older than I had expected. He had a pleasant enough manner but somehow gave me the impression that he was not terribly well prepared about Carl’s case.

  He was small for a policeman, with hair so dark that I wondered if it were dyed. He had a crumpled look about him and bore a more than fleeting resemblance to the American TV detective Columbo. However, the resemblance stopped sharply at physical appearance. Ray Carter showed no sign whatsoever of Columbo’s intelligence.

  He kept me waiting for several minutes, sitting on a plastic chair in the reception area of the modern purpose-built police station which was nothing special but something of a palace compared with St Ives, before taking me to his first-floor office.

  There he shuffled papers on his desk and did his best to tell me as little as possible.

  ‘As you know, your husband has been charged with abducting you and he will be committed for trial here at Penzance,’ he recited unhelpfully. ‘We haven’t got a date fixed yet, but in any case the committal will be just a formality. You won’t need to be there.’

  I hadn’t thought that far ahead. A trial – me giving evidence against Carl. It didn’t seem possible. In spite of everything I still wasn’t sure that was what I wanted, or even that I could cope with it. I suppose I was still hoping that when I saw Carl he would put things right, just as he had always done, that he would in some way be able to tell me it was all one big mistake.

  ‘I’m not sure that I want to go ahead with it. Maybe I should withdraw the charge. Can I do that?’ I was still feeling far from my best. I stumbled over my words in confusion.

  ‘No, you can’t, Mrs Peters,’ he said. Everybody still called me that, even though it had turned out to be a much greater lie than I had ever suspected.

  ‘Your husband is accused of a criminal offence. The crown is prosecuting him, not you.’

  Carter’s voice was weary. He was certainly a very different prospect from either Rob Partridge or DS Perry. I didn’t think I was going to get very far with him, but I tried. ‘What about the American charge?’ I asked. ‘I need you to tell me about what Carl did over there, about his daughter and him being wanted for manslaughter.’

  Carter sighed and rubbed the back of one hand across his forehead. ‘You know about that, do you? And I bet I know who gave you all the inside info, too.’

  ‘The whole of St Ives knows about it as far as I can gather,’ I countered, finding just a little bit of spirit.

  Carter managed a tight-lipped smile. ‘I expect they do, too. Look, I doubt very much that I can tell you any more than you know already. He’s a wanted man in America all right and that means the American government can apply for a warrant for extradition. That’s really as much as I can say until we know exactly what is going to happen.’

  He didn’t actually use the phrase ‘it’s more than my job’s worth’ but you knew that was what he meant. Ray Carter was the kind of policeman who went strictly by the book.

  I made one or two more attempts to extract information from him, but eventually gave up. In any case I didn’t have a lot of time to spare. I wanted to catch the 10.04 train to Exeter to see Carl.

  As I got up to leave I said softly, more to myself than anything else: ‘I didn’t even know he had a daughter . . .’

  Ray Carter’s face softened. ‘C’mon, I’ll run you down to the station. I know you’re off to the prison. It’s all fixed, by the way.’

  Rob Partridge was probably right. Just because he had probably neither shown any initiative nor taken any kind of risk in his whole life didn’t mean DC Carter wasn’t a nice man.

  The main railway line out of Penzance runs through the heart of Cornwall and then, after Plymouth, meanders along the South Devon coast via Dawlish Warren. Much of the scenery along this tortuous route is quite spectacular, but I wasn’t in the mood for sightseeing. I just wished the bloody train would go a bit faster. You can travel the 200-plus miles from Exeter to London in two hours and eight minutes by train. Exeter is only just over 100 miles from Penzance, yet the rail journey takes an extraordinary three hours. That’s Devon and Cornwall for you, I thought glumly as we finally chugged into the old county town.

  My ticket, the cheapest going, had cost twenty-six pounds. I had less than ten pounds of Will’s original forty left. Grateful, suddenly, for his last-minute visit and the brown envelope tucked snugly in my pocket, I took a taxi from St David’s Station to the County Prison, a forbidding Victorian building prominently situated high on a hill overlooking the rest of the city. It was a chilling sight and I dreaded to think of Carl locked up inside. For a history enthusiast like myself it was all too easy to imagine a gallows set up before the enormous double gates and a crowd, baying for blood, gathered for a public execution.

  Between them, PC Partridge and DC Carter had made all the promised arrangements. I was expected and I gained entry easily enough. I was searched and asked if I had brought anything to give to Carl. I hadn’t. To be honest I hadn’t even thought about it. I was taken to a room in which other prisoners were already seated at tables talking to visitors.

  I sat down as instructed and waited. A drawn and haggard-looking man was led into the room. It was Carl. I know it sounds crazy, but the change in him in such a short time was so dramatic that I barely recognised him. He looked broken.
r />   In spite of everything I felt the tears come to my eyes. I was torn between my belief in the love we had shared and the awful things Carl had apparently done in his life, things that I still found hard to believe. He had held me prisoner, there was certainly no doubt about that, and in such conditions that I had nearly died of pneumonia. I tried to harden my heart against him, but I still could not equate all that I had discovered about Carl with the gentle, loving man I thought I had known so well and the feelings I had had for him for so many years.

  He seemed to shuffle rather than walk. He wasn’t the same Carl at all. He couldn’t have lost any substantial weight in a fortnight, surely, but I thought he was thinner than when I had last seen him, gaunt almost. There was a nervous twitch at the corner of his mouth, which I had not noticed before. Maybe it had not been there. And yet, when he looked at me, his face lit up the way it always did.

  He walked straight up to me and wrapped his arms round me. ‘God, I’m glad to see you, Suzanne,’ he said.

  The prisoner officer standing nearby let him hold me and kiss me for a moment before he stepped forward and gestured for both of us to sit down opposite each other, separated by a table.

  Carl leaned forward and grasped my hands. ‘I’ve missed you so much, sweetheart.’

  It was weird, almost surreal. He was behaving practically as if the kidnap had never happened. His expression was full of the love and kindness to which I had always been accustomed. But if he knew of how ill I had been he gave no indication of it. And the memory of being kept captive by him in that terrible hut, of being tied to my bed, was too vivid for me to be won over that easily.

  ‘Why did you do it, Carl?’ I asked quietly.

  At first he looked puzzled. ‘I’d never have h-hurt you, not you,’ he said haltingly.

  I stared at him. That was no answer.

  ‘Why did you do it?’ I asked again and this time I could hear the anger in my own voice.

  ‘I wanted to protect you, to look after you, that’s all.’

  I withdrew my hands from his. Suddenly I didn’t want him touching me. ‘Oh, not that again, Carl,’ I said sharply.

  He recoiled from me as if I had hit him. Then he seemed to recover himself and carried on speaking as if he had not been interrupted at all. ‘You see, you are so d-different, you were always d-different. You understood. You wanted me to look after you. You needed me to protect you, didn’t you?’

  The words were all too familiar, much the same as he had used while he had been keeping me a prisoner. The nervous stammer was familiar too. I did not reply.

  ‘Didn’t you?’ he asked again.

  He was right, of course. I had wanted that. I nodded slightly.

  ‘Yes, of course you did. We were made for each other, weren’t we? If only I had found you first everything would have been all right, for both of us.’

  I wasn’t getting anywhere. I decided to concentrate on what I really wanted to know. ‘Carl, you let me believe I had killed my husband. You showed me that knife covered with blood. And you knew I hadn’t killed Robert, didn’t you?’

  He stared at me. ‘You did kill him,’ he said.

  ‘No, Carl, I didn’t. Nobody killed him. He died of sclerosis of the liver. There was blood, but you must have seen that he hadn’t been stabbed.’

  ‘He had been stabbed.’

  ‘Carl, don’t be so stubborn. You must have seen that . . .’

  ‘Must I? Then why didn’t you?’

  Was it my imagination or was there a sly note in his voice.

  ‘Carl, I had been badly beaten, I was in shock. You were perfectly calm.’ I could still remember vividly how calm he had been, unnaturally so perhaps.

  He shook his head sorrowfully. ‘I showed you the knife, you saw it, you saw the blood on it.’

  ‘Carl, that knife was never used on Robert,’ I continued. ‘For all I know you may even have put the blood on the blade.’

  His face turned even paler. ‘You’d b-believe that of me?’

  I didn’t reply. I wasn’t going to fall for emotional blackmail, not any more.

  ‘I’d never do anything to hurt you,’ he said again. It seemed about all he had to say.

  ‘You have hurt me, Carl, you’ve hurt me beyond measure.’

  ‘I wanted to hide you away, that’s all . . .’ he whispered, the same mindless babbling, it seemed to me. ‘I wanted you always to be mine. I had to keep you safe. Maybe I can explain. There are things I should tell you, if I can find the words after all this time . . .’

  ‘I’m sure there are,’ I said, still feeling angry. ‘What happened in America, Carl? You’re wanted on a manslaughter charge. Is it true that you killed your daughter?’

  ‘Is that what they told you?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Then you know, you know what happened.’

  I shook my head. ‘Carl, I want to hear it from you. I wasn’t even aware that you had a daughter, remember?’

  He smiled bleakly. ‘I haven’t,’ he said in a dead tone of voice. Then he was silent.

  ‘Carl, just tell me what happened. Please.’

  In spite of everything I still wanted him to say there had been a dreadful mistake.

  He looked up and I could see the pain in his eyes. ‘I wanted our d-dream to last for ever. I just c-couldn’t bear it to end. But I knew it was going to. I could feel it h-happening all over again. The one I loved most, the one I most wanted to protect. It was going to go wrong again and I c-c-couldn’t let it. You must see that?’

  I didn’t see anything at all. He was babbling and talking gibberish as far as I was concerned. And he was stammering badly by then. ‘Of course I do,’ I lied. ‘Just tell me, I have to know, did you kill your daughter?’ I kept on staring at him. Silent. Waiting.

  ‘Oh yes, I k-killed her, I killed her all right,’ he said eventually. His voice was very soft.

  I swallowed hard, fighting to keep control. ‘Tell me what happened.’

  He was looking into the middle distance now, unseeing, unaware I thought, even of where he was. ‘My wife never understood, you see. I d-did everything for her. I was so proud when she had our child. I worked hard. She wanted for nothing. But it wasn’t enough. She always had to have other people around and she shouldn’t have n-needed them, that’s how the problems started . . .’ There were tears in his eyes.

  ‘What happened, Carl?’ I asked. ‘You must tell me.’

  ‘She said she was leaving me and taking our daughter with her.’ He sounded so strange, slightly hysterical almost. ‘She said she’d had enough of being shut away with me. That she wanted to live. That she couldn’t bear to be with me any more.’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Well, I c-couldn’t let her go, could I? I couldn’t lose them. They w-were everything to me. Like you. To begin with I thought she was like you, but she wasn’t.’ His eyes opened wide as if he was surprised by what he was saying. ‘I just wanted her to stay, wanted them both to stay . . .’ He put his head in his hands.

  ‘So you used drugs, didn’t you, Carl? Drugs to subdue your own family, to keep them with you, just like you tried to do with me.’

  He raised his head slightly. He had started to cry. Tears trickled down his face. ‘What do you th-think I am, Suzanne?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know any more, Carl. I really don’t.’

  ‘If you have stopped believing in me, Suzanne, there is no point in anything any more,’ he said flatly.

  ‘Carl, you drugged me, the woman you are supposed to love more than anything.’

  He reached across the table in an attempt to grasp my hands again. I pulled away from him.

  ‘I do love you and I didn’t drug you, Suzanne, not really. It was just something to make you sleep.’

  That was what he had told me in the dreadful hut. It wasn’t the way I saw it, nor the police. Suddenly my anger overwhelmed me. ‘Is that what you gave them, your wife and five-year-old child, for God’s sake? Just something to make them sleep? I’m sick of
your lies, Carl. Even your name is a bloody lie. Tell me, Carl, tell me the truth, damn you, you bastard,’ I virtually screamed at him.

  Carl more or less cowered in his chair. I don’t suppose I had ever yelled at him before. I had certainly never sworn at him like that, not in all our years together. Several other prisoners and their visitors turned to look at us. One of the prison officers took a step forward as if considering intervening, but he retreated again.

  Carl merely stared at me in shocked silence.

  When I spoke again I managed to do so in a more or less normal tone: ‘Just tell me. Did your daughter overdose on drugs you had given her, is that true?’

  ‘The drugs were for her mother, not her.’ Carl’s voice seemed to come from a long way away.

  ‘Oh, that’s all right then,’ I snapped at him. ‘You didn’t mean to drug your child, only her mother, is that it? For God’s sake, just tell me, Carl, did your daughter overdose?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ he moaned, still cowering in his chair. ‘She overdosed . . .’

  ‘And she died,’ I said flatly.

  ‘Yes, she died,’ he repeated. He was sobbing quite loudly by then. ‘I killed her. That’s what you came here to hear, isn’t it. It’s true. It was all my fault. And I’ve never f-forgiven myself, never . . . I couldn’t let it happen again, I just couldn’t. I couldn’t lose you as well.’

  I felt as if I had been kicked in the stomach. Somehow I had expected Carl to deny it, to have some kind of an explanation. Even after what he had done to me I could not really believe that he had killed his own child. Now I had to. He had told me so himself. He was still babbling on. It was a kind of torture to listen to him.

  He put his head in his hands. ‘I c-couldn’t let them leave me. As long as I kept them close to me they would have been safe, you see. I just wanted to keep everyone s-safe, all of them, like I did you . . .’

  ‘Safe from what, Carl?’

  Abruptly he stopped crying and stared at me, as if uncomprehending. ‘I guess I’m pretty mixed up, but . . .’

  I’d had enough. I certainly didn’t want any more of his excuses. I had heard all I wanted to hear. ‘No, Carl,’ I told him firmly. ‘I’m not going to listen to any more of this.’ I stood up. ‘I will never forgive you,’ I said. ‘And I never want to see you again as long as I live.’