Unsafe Convictions

by Alison Taylor

  Julie had one faded photograph of that stranger, and she kept it, with other precious relics, in a locked wooden box on the chest in her bedroom. The key to the box hung on the fine silver chain she wore around her neck, even though it often chafed her scars.

  Her colleague’s footsteps thumped overhead, and her voice called cheerily as she checked each small dormitory. Julie scalded the pot, brewed the tea, took a film-wrapped plate of sandwiches from the refrigerator, and carried the tray to the office, trying to imagine how her mother had felt to be carrying a child. She had never been pregnant, and not, she thought wryly, for want of youthful trying, especially with Barry Dugdale. She had been fond of Barry, and of some of her other lovers, which was, she thought, too grand a name for any of them. The vow of chastity, which crept up on her after the event and without her knowing, proved so much easier to keep than the vow of silence, self-imposed in the bleak years before Barry warmed her frozen little heart.

  ‘Jools? Jools!’ Her colleague’s voice held that low, intense tone people reserve for anxious moments in the near dead of night.

  Julie went to the bottom of the staircase. ‘What is it?’

  The other woman leaned over the banister. ‘Have you seen Debbie? Did she come downstairs? Only, she’s not in her room, or the toilet.’

  ‘Did she go up?’

  ‘I can’t remember. I thought she did, but I was seeing off Father Brett.’

  ‘Look again,’ Julie said. ‘I’ll check down here.’

  The living-rooms and dining-room were empty of all but their perpetual institutional odour. Julie tried the bolt on the front door, and returned to the kitchen, switching on lights as she went through the building. The back door was locked, and the laundry contained only the usual heaps of soiled, stinking linen. Wondering where to look next, she heard a faint, strange noise, and followed it down the stone-flagged passage to the unused sculleries, while the sound grew as if the walls around her were moaning. She found Debbie sitting on the floor of a tiny room with an old stone sink, her back against the cracked tiles which covered the lower half of the wall, her bare feet scuffing backwards and forwards in the dust on the floor. She needed to be taken to the hairdresser soon, Julie thought, looking at the girl’s unkempt gingery hair, and she had made a terrible mess of the best clothes obviously donned in honour of Fauvel’s visit. Her blouse was undone, exposing a lacy white bra, and her new black shoes were flung into a corner.

  ‘What on earth are you doing in here?’ Julie knelt down, and began to button up the blouse, sniffing as a faint odour of stale tobacco drifted under her nose. ‘You’ll catch cold.’

  Debbie giggled, her mouth slack, and slowly lifted her hands, then ran them over Julie’s breasts. ‘Soft,’ she said. ‘Nice.’

  Wincing, Julie moved the kneading fingers. ‘I’ve told you before not to do that, Debbie. Not to me, not to anyone else, and not to yourself.’ Out of the corner of her eye, she glimpsed other footprints in the dust. ‘How long have you been here? You’re ice cold.’

  ‘Don’t talk,’ Debbie said, clamping a hand over her own mouth.

  ‘Of course you can talk!’ Fatigue, and a total mind-numbing weariness, suddenly hit Julie. ‘Don’t be so silly.’

  ‘Not allowed,’ the girl insisted, mumbling through her fingers.

  Julie’s hands stilled themselves in mid-air. ‘What did you say?’ Her voice was a whisper.

  Debbie pushed her feet against Julie’s knees, almost toppling her, then lunged forward, and began beating Julie with a violence to match the swelling growl in her throat.

  Chapter Five

  When she awoke that morning, Janet had been disorientated by strange noises and unfamiliar scents. Rolling over in a huge bed that smelled of lavender and old wood, she located the window, reassuringly half lit around its edges. When she pulled back the curtains, she realised that the screeching and squeaking paining her ears was coming from the inn sign fixed to a bracket on the outside wall, on which the white-faced Hereford bull looked all the more menacing for being so crudely painted. She squinted as the sign was dragged back and forth by the wind, noticing how the bull’s eyes stared into hers from every direction.

  In front of the pub, Church Street became a steep hill, bordered on one side by a row of medieval cottages, and by the graveyard on the other. From her room, Janet’s view of the church was a deep perspective of geometric planes and lines within the tangle of bare trees, where the steeple towered over the loftiest branches, its weathervane luminous. Day and night, a faint reddish light glowed behind the chancel window.

  Now, the curtains drawn on the night and a large towel enveloping her body, she sat on the edge of the bed, switched on the hair drier and let heat caress the back of her neck and her shoulders, wondering if she would ever again feel a man’s hands do the same. Her short dark crop fell into place of its own accord, and, unplugging the hair drier, she unwrapped the towel, draped it over the radiator, and stood naked in front of the large oval mirror on the wardrobe door. Her ribs cast shadows through her skin, her pelvic girdle was a bony protuberance around a concave space, and her skin hung so thin on the bones that she looked like a half-starved old mare. Her feet and hands, she thought, might well belong to one of the churchyard rooks.

  The proud red weal across her belly seemed to glisten. She touched it, holding her breath, wishing so desperately that her child were still inside her, instead of sluiced down a hospital drain, along with her vitality, her youth and the blood which poured from her, the doctors said, for hours on end. Then, sickened by the sight of herself, she pulled her pyjamas from the hook on the door. But she had to pass the mirror again to get to the bathroom to clean her teeth, and, compelled to look despite herself, stood there in her turquoise silk pyjamas, trying to imagine Julie Broadbent’s pain when a pan of boiling fat tipped itself all over her.

  Part Seven

  Wednesday, 3rd February

  Morning

  Chapter One

  THE POWER OF LOVE

  Beryl Stanton Smith talks exclusively to our chief reporter, Gaynor Holbrook, about her marriage and her husband, Piers, whose life sentence for the murder of his first wife, Trisha, was recently quashed on appeal.

  Beryl Stanton Smith is forty-one, seven years older than her husband. Her family home is a beautiful Regency house surrounded by matured grounds and swagged stone walls. As she ushers me to the drawing-room, I see the groundsman closing the high wooden gates.

  She fiddles with a silver coffee pot on a silver tray, still very distressed by her young husband’s imprisonment. During our talk, it becomes clear that the experience badly scarred both of them. The fact that the police who secured his conviction are under investigation is also acutely disturbing. Both fear the backlash.

  Her hands shake as she pours our coffee, adding a dribble of cream and a little sugar to her own. Rather inconsequentially, she says she has put on weight, and is dieting. But she looks the same as she did at her husband’s trial. She is small, slightly plump, brown-haired, green-eyed, almost homely. Clad in a suit which has seen many better days, there are no give-aways to her huge wealth. Her wedding band is simple. On her right hand, a jet-and-diamond mourning ring glints darkly with each movement. It belonged to her mother, who died only a week before Beryl’s marriage. The old woman had bitterly opposed the relationship. ‘But sick old people get strange ideas,’ she explains. ‘She’d even tried to get in touch with Trisha. I found some notes among her papers.’

  Beryl is convinced she and Piers Stanton Smith were fated to come together. They married by special licence. Simply cohabiting while Beryl recovered from the shock of her mother’s death was out of the question. His high moral standards would not permit it.

  There was a chilling experience on the morning of that hurried wedding. The telephone rang about six o’clock. ‘When I answered it,’ she remembers, ‘no one spoke, but I felt someone was there, trying to say something.’ Common sense tells her it was a wrong number, not her
mother calling from beyond the grave. But she still finds it ominous.

  She offers to show me the house. The housekeeper and groundsman have a spacious flat on the top floor. Another husband-and-wife team come in daily. But the house is remarkably littered and untidy. I pick my way around stacks of books and overflowing boxes. ‘Piers is completely redesigning the interior,’ she says. ‘He’s already finished his study.’ She looks at the mess at our feet. ‘But he has to feel in the right mood. The tiniest thing can still throw him right off balance.’

  The two huge bathrooms have wonderful Victorian brass showers. She thinks they will be ripped out. ‘Piers says they’re not very ecological.’ We trail through six bedrooms, every one with a fine view of the moors. But the rooms are filled with clutter. Battered old furniture is humped against good Art Deco pieces, and I notice a rare Mackintosh cabinet dull with neglect. Fine china is thrown almost carelessly into crates, and almost every wall is covered with pictures. In a landing recess, I find a set of Lowry drawings.

  Convinced her husband’s fickle enthusiasm is still alive, Beryl says: ‘You won’t recognise the house when Piers has finished. He’s terribly artistic.’ Close to tears, she adds that the brutality of prison was a particular tragedy for him.

  Downstairs, she is about to bypass his study, then changes her mind. She raps gently on the door, and opens it a few inches. He is at his desk, cigarette in hand, staring into space over a pile of papers. When he turns, face in shadow, cigarette smoke curling like white mist, I sense the coldness. Beryl backs away without a word.

  ‘He hates being disturbed when he’s working.’ She hurries me to the dining-room, then the breakfast room. She says he is ‘writing’, but knows nothing about it. ‘It’s a very private thing. I won’t intrude.’

  She claims to feel privileged to support him. She is angry when I suggest he seems like a spoiled child. ‘You might see an unequal relationship,’ she asserts, ‘but you couldn’t be more wrong!’ Once more, she regales me with details of his awful childhood and sluttish mother. She adds that Trisha made everything worse. His wrongful conviction for her murder was the last straw. ‘Now, society owes a debt to Piers.’ She never once doubted his innocence.

  It is hard to make her focus her mind on her own unhappiness. While he was in prison, she felt imprisoned herself. Her monthly visits and their letters were the only glimmer of light. But that bleak period is still marring their relationship. ‘A crisis can drive couples apart,’ she tells me. ‘Relationships are terribly fragile at the best of times. The smallest change can be fatal. We were faced with utterly cataclysmic changes. Piers and I must now renegotiate our whole life together.’

  I try to probe deeper into her feelings. But she again talks about her husband, as if someone has yanked a chain. She starts to tell me about his barbaric treatment in prison. ‘The prison staff are utterly emotionally illiterate!’ Suddenly, she jumps to her feet. After rooting in a bureau, she hands me a clutch of letters. ‘You must read them. Then you’ll understand.’

  She watches me tensely. His letters from prison are a catalogue of self-centred complaints that must have fed her own apprehension. Occasionally, he mentions happy moments from their marriage. But everything is coloured by dark despair, and frequent suicide threats.

  ‘Those letters broke my heart,’ she admits tearfully, telling me more about his misery. She still resists talking about herself.’ There’s nothing to say. I’m completely defined by my marriage.’ I manage to glean a few details about her early life. She is the only child of a rich family, and went to an exclusive boarding-school. At home, her grandfather doted on her. But the local girls resented her privileged lifestyle. She became somewhat withdrawn. ‘I even began to feel guilty about having so much money!’

  The years before her marriage to Piers Stanton Smith appear to be a wasteland. ‘Happiness can be a long time coming.’ She looks at her two rings — one for love, one for loss. Then she drops a bombshell. ‘Actually, I’ve been married before. I was nineteen.’ She is bitter. ‘Because my husband was poor, Daddy said he must be a gold-digger. Every girl dreams of a white wedding, but he wouldn’t pay. We had to get married in a register office.’ After six months, her husband walked out. Her father had offered him a lot of money to leave. ‘But I’ve never forgiven Daddy for destroying my illusions. We need illusions to be happy.’

  Her eyes light up as Piers Stanton Smith comes in without warning. He glides over to sit on the arm of her chair. ‘More of your armchair philosophy, darling?’ he asks.

  Beryl clings to him girlishly, prattling. Her self-consciousness is extravagant. Perhaps that is why he pulls a face behind her back. Then he rises, patting her arm. He leaves us, saying: ‘Back to the grindstone!’

  She continues to glow even though my questions become very pointed. She dismisses the criticism which followed her second marriage. ‘I did not buy my husband!’ She denies being exploited. ‘People can say what they like,’ she assures me. ‘I don’t care. They’re probably just jealous of our togetherness.’

  When I suggest her upbringing left her immature and vulnerable, she refuses to respond. But about her husband’s tendency to marital violence, her answer is all worked out. She escorts me to my car. Her words are chosen with exaggerated care. ‘He never denied being violent towards Trisha. But she asked for it. She often attacked him, quite viciously. Or she’d frighten him so much he couldn’t help lashing out. He had to fight back to survive. Everybody thinks I’m living in a minefield. But as long as I don’t give him cause to attack me, I have nothing to fear.’ As I get into the car, she has the last word. ‘Do I?’

  Chapter Two

  Three floors up in her hutch under the cold Sheffield sky, Ida Sheridan decided, after much dithering, to use her own telephone. Sooner or later, she would redeem the cost and, hopefully, share otherwise in the good fortune she was guiding towards her friend.

  She had passed most of the night in agitated wakefulness, alert for the twang of her letter-box, and when the delivery boy came she was already at the front door, dressing-gown swaddling her body while her ankles turned to ice in the draught. She snatched up the paper, riffled the pages anxiously, then leaned against the wall, still in the draught, reading the third instalment of Gaynor Holbrook’s foray into the heart of the matter. As the hole the woman was digging for herself simply got deeper, Ida’s smile grew broader.

  Chapter Three

  ‘It’s the likes of Beryl Kay that make men think they’ve got the right to batter their women,’ Rene announced, edging aside Janet’s newspaper to make room for a plate of bacon and tomatoes. ‘Well, I hope she doesn’t think her money’ll protect her when the crunch comes, because it won’t.’

  ‘D’you know Beryl?’ McKenna asked.

  ‘Only by sight, but you can’t miss people like her. The whole family set themselves up high, even though they were just shopkeepers.’ Stacking cereal bowls in the sink, Rene added: ‘Beryl’s parents didn’t do her any favours, you know. She’s no notion of the real world, so she’s fair game.’ She turned on the hot-water tap. ‘Folk rumoured for years that she got wed when she was barely out of school, but nobody knew for sure. I wonder why she’s talking about it now?’

  ‘Probably to broadcast her version of events in case her ex comes out of the woodwork,’ Jack suggested.

  ‘Probably,’ agreed Rene, watching Ellen watch Janet eat, and wondering what else was going on under her nose.

  ‘She’s very stupid,’ Ellen commented. ‘I was quite sorry for her before I read this garbage, but in her own way, she’s as nasty and insensitive as her husband.’

  ‘You’re not the only one to think like that,’ Rene told her. ‘If you look a bit further on in the paper, you’ll find something about the tyres on her fancy car getting slashed yesterday.’

  Chapter Four

  ‘Why aren’t they here?’ Fretfully, Linda paced the length of her combined sitting-and-dining-room.

  ‘Sit down,’ Craig ord
ered. ‘You’re wearing holes in the carpet.’

  She stared at him, almost crackling with tension. ‘Can they really think Barry and me fitted up that bastard?’

  ‘We’ll ask when they get here,’ Craig said patiently. ‘What did the hospital say when you rang?’

  She flopped on the sofa, and began kneading the cushions. ‘Dad slept like a baby, and he’s had a good breakfast.’

  ‘When can he come out?’

  ‘I didn’t ask. I’ll do it later.’

  ‘And don’t forget to remind the police he wants to talk to them.’

  Chapter Five

  Henry Colclough, the widowed husband of Smith’s teacher, had sent a letter, penned rather waveringly in black ink on white paper.

  Dear Superintendent McKenna

  I don’t know if you intend to see me — indeed, I can probably add little to what I said at the trial, except these few observations, which may or may not be useful to you.

  Despite the lack of proof, and the boy’s vehement protestations of innocence, I remain convinced that Smith somehow deliberately brought about Joyce’s death: it is that conviction which stops me from letting go. The memory of her death will always be indelible, for I loved her deeply, but the manner of her death left an open wound. Perhaps your brief does not extend to investigating this distant past, and I know Smith will never admit the truth, but if you should find yourself able to offer some peace of mind, I shall go happier to my grave. I long ago abandoned hope of vengeance, but when Smith went to prison for killing his wife, I toasted justice, even if it was not specifically for Joyce. When I learned of his release, then read the sickening rubbish besmirching the papers, I confess I gave up hope of justice in this world, and can only pray that it awaits him in the next.