Unsafe Convictions

by Alison Taylor

  I should be happy to see you at any time, although, as I say, I have little to offer.

  Yours very sincerely

  Henry Colclough

  Chapter Six

  Ida glared at her telephone, willing Gaynor’s editor to ring, as promised, ‘the moment Mr Davidson reaches the office’. When the instrument actually trilled, she was so shocked her heart missed several beats and skipped to her throat.

  ‘Yes?’ she croaked, swallowing hard.

  ‘I’d like to speak to Mrs Sheridan. My name’s Davidson.’

  ‘And I’m Mrs Sheridan.’ She inhaled deeply. ‘Ida Sheridan.’

  ‘And what can I do for you?’

  ‘I rang yesterday, to speak to that Holbrook woman, but she never phoned back.’

  ‘Ms Holbrook is on assignment in the north of England.’

  ‘I know she is! That’s what I’m talking about.’

  ‘Is there a problem?’

  ‘I’ll say there is! Leastways, there is for her.’

  ‘I see. Can you be more specific?’

  ‘It’s this rubbish she’s writing about Smith and his mother.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Peter Smith, as was. He goes by a fancier name now.’

  ‘Oh, that Smith. What about him?’

  ‘He’s a liar. He’s told that Holbrook woman a pack of fairy stories, and now they’re in the paper for all the world to see. It was bad enough at the trial.’

  ‘That’s a very serious allegation, Mrs Sheridan, but what proof have you got that we might have published inaccuracies?’

  ‘They’re not “inaccuracies”,’ Ida asserted, suddenly feeling on much firmer ground. ‘They’re out-and-out lies.’

  ‘What are?’

  ‘What Smith said about his mother.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Sheridan, but there’s only your word for that.’ Davidson sounded smugly relieved. ‘Mrs Smith is dead. The police searched for her exhaustively before Smith’s trial.’

  ‘You call that an exhaustive search, do you? They knocked on one door, then went away, and that was the end of it.’

  ‘You can’t know that.’

  ‘Oh, yes I can!’ Ida gloated. ‘It was my door they knocked on. Bunty Smith lives seven doors down, and she never saw hide nor hair of them.’

  Chapter Seven

  Even with the toll of fatigue and anxiety evident in every gesture, Linda Newton was extraordinarily pretty and vivacious, McKenna thought, and remarkably self-possessed. She guided Ellen to the dining-table, her solicitor and himself to armchairs, then arranged herself beside Craig on the sofa. On a small table nearby were various family photographs in attractive pewter frames, some of Linda, Craig and the boys, others of Linda and her sister and father, and an old studio portrait of a rather beautiful woman, her face framed by a cloud of dark hair.

  ‘May I?’ McKenna asked, reaching for the photograph. ‘Is this your mother?’

  Linda took another from the group. ‘And this is Trisha, when she was twenty-four.’

  Before Smith withered her bloom, Trisha was as pretty as her sister, but with darker hair and more serious eyes. Linda’s hair was a vivid russet-red, and her eyes sparkled like mountain water.

  ‘And after she’d been with that bastard for a few months,’ Linda added, ‘she looked like an old hag.’

  ‘Violence in an intimate relationship,’ McKenna said, ‘rapidly eclipses every other aspect of the relationship and the violent partner’s personality, including memories of the decent times. So, may I suggest that even your former brother-in-law must have some redeeming features?’

  ‘Not in our book!’ Craig snapped. ‘He told enough lies at the trial, but he’s really got the bit between his teeth now, hasn’t he?’

  ‘Unfortunately,’ the solicitor commented, ‘Mr Smith can defame his first wife with impunity, but Mrs Newton’s case is quite different.’

  Linda bared her teeth. ‘He’s heading straight for a horrible fall, and so is that bloody reporter.’

  ‘Did Holbrook ever approach you?’ asked McKenna. ‘To ask for comment, or a response to Smith’s allegations?’

  ‘No, so she’s either very stupid, or so puffed up with her own importance she can’t think straight.’

  ‘People get like that,’ added Craig, ‘when they’re being bamboozled by a sly bastard like Smith.’

  ‘I may want to pursue this further at a later date,’ McKenna told Linda, ‘but today, I intend to discuss your relationship with Detective Inspector Dugdale. Are you happy for your husband to remain?’

  ‘Don’t be silly!’ Linda snapped. ‘Barry’s been our friend for years. We get on with Sue as well and, until you lot stuck your oar in, she was getting on famously with Barry.’

  ‘I can’t comment on that,’ McKenna said.

  ‘You can’t split up marriages and walk away from what you’ve done,’ she insisted. ‘Sue knew all along about me and Barry, but she didn’t know about him and Julie.’

  ‘How d’you know?’

  ‘She told me on Monday. I wanted to talk to Barry, about you coming, but she wouldn’t let me. And,’ she added impatiently, ‘don’t start going on about conspiracies! We don’t think like that, even if you do.’

  ‘In fairness to Dugdale,’ McKenna pointed out, ‘we must explore every possibility, one of which is that you and he conspired to saddle Smith with your sister’s murder.’

  ‘If only!’ Linda wished. ‘If we had, believe me, he’d never get out of prison!’

  ‘How did they go about conspiring?’ Craig demanded. ‘What did they do? How did they fix him?’

  Nonplussed, McKenna said: ‘I can’t discuss specifics.’

  ‘Why not? If you think they did it, you must know how.’

  ‘Smith’s conviction rested entirely on circumstantial evidence, much of which was supplied by your wife.’

  ‘And a lot came from elsewhere,’ Craig countered, ‘including Trisha’s divorce petition.’

  ‘From reviewing the prosecution’s case, it’s clear that the evidence against Smith was very tenuous,’ McKenna said. ‘So tenuous, in fact, that the prosecution should not have been pursued.’

  ‘That wasn’t up to Barry,’ Linda said.

  ‘He put the case together, and he recommended prosecution.’

  ‘Everything pointed to that bastard!’ Linda exclaimed. ‘Everything!’

  ‘But he was innocent,’ McKenna replied.

  ‘Was he?’ Craig asked. ‘Are you sure about that? Maybe Mrs Moneybags paid someone to batter Trisha and torch the house, while she gave herself an alibi at the dentist, and he got one off the priests.’ His face hardened. ‘But whatever did happen, I know Trisha would still be alive if it wasn’t for him. Have you any idea what he’s done to this family? When Trisha died, Linda cried so much her eyes nearly bled, and Fred looked like he’d drop dead in front of your very eyes.’

  ‘We know little of Trisha herself,’ McKenna said, ‘but she clearly had an effect, and that determined how people reacted. While I’m not suggesting Dugdale framed Smith out of affection for her, it’s possible that he was misled.’

  ‘What about?’ Linda asked. ‘Everything came out during the divorce.’ She paused, eyes downcast. ‘Up to then, she’d hidden some of it, to protect me, like always. And she was so ashamed! About being beaten, and the way he humiliated her, the way he behaved, and the trouble he caused that came back on her.’

  ‘What sort of trouble?’

  ‘Sex and money,’ Craig said. ‘He looks like a bloody queer, he talks like one, and he flounces around like one, but if anyone dared call him one, he’d get hysterical, and start a row. Then Trisha got dragged in, to “prove” he wasn’t, and there’d be threats about solicitors and suing for slander. He’d cause such a ruckus nobody knew if they were coming or going, and it was nothing but a smoke-screen to take their minds off what started the rumours in the first place. People got so they couldn’t trust their own eyes and ears, and because she didn
’t walk out on him, or chuck him out, they stopped trusting Trisha. One way or another, he saw off all her friends, ‘cos they thought she was as bad as him.’

  ‘When really, she was sweet, and good, and caring,’ Linda said defensively. ‘She always looked for the best in people, which is why she made excuses for him for so long.’

  ‘Every step of the way,’ Craig went on, ‘he took advantage of her, and he was so cruel with it. He played on her sympathy, even when he’d given her a battering. He blamed her for it, like he blamed her for everything else. It was her fault they had no money, her fault he had no job, her fault everybody was nasty to him.’ He leaned forward, hands clasped between his knees. ‘He’s wicked, and so clever he makes you doubt your own reason.’

  ‘And what did he do to you ?’ asked McKenna, almost able to feel the other man’s rage and pain.

  Taken aback by the question, Craig looked to Linda. She stared hard at McKenna, and said: ‘They used to come for supper on Saturdays, then, without a word, they suddenly stopped, and when I asked Trisha why, she got really edgy. She hardly spoke to me for months, and wouldn’t even give Craig the time of day.’

  ‘So, I went to see her at work,’ Craig added. ‘I figured he’d been making some kind of mischief, and I was right. He’d told her I’d made a pass at him, and no way was he ever coming near me again.’

  ‘And she couldn’t come on her own, of course.’ Linda resumed the story. ‘She’d be betraying him if she did. He spoiled everything one way or another, spiting her friends, lying about us, just to have her beholden to him. We started going there, because I wasn’t having my sister at his mercy like that, but we had to stop in the end because the boys got so upset. He knew we knew, and he knew we didn’t believe a word of it, so he created these awful atmospheres, like just before a storm breaks.’

  ‘And you’d be on the edge of your chair waiting for it.’ Craig’s face was grey. ‘And he’d be staring, with those horrible eyes of his. It got so bad our older lad used to throw up when he thought we were going to that house.’ He paused, face troubled. ‘And whatever Lin says, I could see the evil doubt he’d put in her head every time I looked at her.’

  ‘He didn’t put anything in my head.’ She reached out to stroke his neck. ‘That bastard never made me think black was white, even if he convinced Trisha the batterings were all her fault. No matter what I said, she made excuses, until the day he kicked her.’

  ‘When did you learn about that?’ McKenna asked.

  ‘The day after, like I said at the trial. She phoned, wanting me to go to the doctor’s with her. She sounded so ill I asked Craig to take me there, and we found her sitting in a puddle of her own blood, on a heap of old towels on a kitchen chair. She was as white as a sheet, and shivering fit to fall apart, so we rushed her to hospital.’

  ‘Trisha told them a cock-and-bull story about tripping on the stairs,’ Craig said. ‘She had to say something, because the kicking she got bloody near ruptured her innards.’

  ‘And when did she tell you the truth?’ McKenna asked.

  ‘There and then,’ Linda said, ‘but she begged us not to say. We weren’t brought up to wash mucky linen in public, and she still had a bit of pride, though God knows how. That bastard even made her feel dirty for wanting a normal marriage.’

  ‘He told her he wasn’t up to it,’ added Craig.

  ‘Up to what?’ McKenna queried.

  ‘He said he was impotent,’ Linda snapped. ‘Sodding liar! He blamed his mother’s goings-on, and his miserable childhood. Trisha told him he could get counselling, or even medicine, so she got another battering.’

  ‘Were these assaults ever reported to the local police?’

  ‘I’ve told you, she blamed herself. Anyway, she was scared stiff of what he’d do to her.’

  ‘She could have obtained an injunction,’ Ellen said.

  ‘She was too bloody terrified! If you’ve never been there, you can’t know what it’s like. She got so worn down she couldn’t even work out how to get dressed in the morning.’ Eyeing her visitors one by one, she added: ‘But you know she was battered, from what the pathologist found when he cut up what was left of her.’

  ‘Indeed, so.’ McKenna nodded. ‘No one denies the assaults took place. Tell me, did you ever seek advice on the issue from Dugdale, prior to Trisha’s death?’

  ‘No, but I wish I had,’ Linda replied. ‘She might have listened to him, instead of waiting till she was nearly kicked to death.’

  Watching her, McKenna knew she would be hounded by guilt for the rest of her life, and her husband perhaps even more so. ‘But you still blame yourself for not taking matters into your own hands.’

  ‘We both do,’ Craig told him. ‘I should’ve given that monster a taste of his own medicine.’

  ‘While Trisha was still living with him, there was little you could do without placing her in even greater jeopardy,’ McKenna argued. ‘And once she moved out, the danger diminished.’

  ‘She came here from hospital,’ Craig said. ‘Fred couldn’t have coped if that animal had come after her, and it was months before he’d get out of their house so she could go back.’

  ‘That was when things really started coming out.’ Linda took her husband’s hand, squeezing his fingers. ‘One thing after another. I could hardly believe what I was hearing at times.’

  ‘I couldn’t get my head round the way she’d kept it all bottled up for so long,’ Craig added. ‘But she said in her experience, trouble shared is trouble doubled, not halved.’

  ‘Did Smith bother you?’ McKenna asked.

  ‘No, thank God!’ Linda shivered. ‘He makes my flesh crawl. When that poor old man talked about his wife burning to death in the car, I knew exactly what he meant. That bastard’s got eyes like stones!’

  ‘He smells bad, too,’ Craig added. ‘Sour, like a wild animal.’

  ‘That’s because he eats raw meat,’ Linda told him. ‘I know because I saw him one day when he was making his usual song and dance about doing a bit of cooking. I went to the kitchen for a glass of water, and copped him stuffing raw liver in his mouth. He said it was good for the blood.’ For a moment, she stared wide-eyed into the past. ‘I wanted to faint. I mean, you never knew from one minute to the next whether he’d throw a screaming rage, or be nice as pie, and he just smiled at me, but his mouth was all smeared with blood, and it was actually dripping off his teeth.’

  Breaking that bloody strand of memory, but only to be enmeshed by another, McKenna said: ‘Did he do a fair share of the housework?’

  ‘Are you being funny?’ Linda demanded. ‘Apart from the odd bit of cooking, when he made the kitchen a pig tip and expected Trisha to clean up after him, he did damn all. He was too scared of getting his hands dirty, or breaking his fancy nails.’ She turned to Craig. ‘His nails are longer than mine, aren’t they?’

  As Craig nodded, McKenna, despite himself, glanced at Linda’s nails: neat, pink ovals just reaching the tips of her fingers, and realised that she and her husband were as obsessed with Smith, if not more so, than Smith with himself. He listened without comment or question while, ashen-faced, they competed to recount the worst outrage, coming to see this obsession as the thriving child of their guilt. He heard that Smith used those unseemly nails to tear at Trisha’s face, that he was afraid of honest labour, and forced her to hump coal from the yard in all weathers.

  ‘And when Fred went to the house one day, he found her sifting ash for bits of clinker to put back on the fire,’ Craig said. ‘They were that poor.’

  But such poverty, Linda asserted, was rooted in Smith’s greed. ‘He’d think nothing of spending twenty or thirty pounds on a bottle of aftershave, while Trisha had to buy her clothes in the charity shops.’

  Before Craig discovered that his sister-in-law was living in abject terror, he had chastised Linda for lending her money, for paying for little luxuries, as well as replacing the things Smith destroyed in his rages. ‘But you couldn’t ever replace
some things,’ added Craig. ‘Like that pretty flowering plant your mum had just before she died, and that photo of her that he smashed to smithereens.’

  Linda brushed her hands across her eyes. It’s water under the bridge.’ She sighed. ‘Perhaps it’s time to let her go.’

  ‘How can we?’ asked Craig. ‘It’s not finished with.’

  ‘In your evidence at the trial,’ McKenna said to Linda, trying to focus her attention, ‘you hinted at unpleasant and destructive secrets between you and your sister.’

  ‘No, I didn’t.’ She began to fidget. ‘We didn’t want Dad to know about the beatings because he’d have gone after that bastard with an axe. And we didn’t tell him about the sex part of it because he’d have been mortified with shame for her.’

  ‘The “sex part”?’

  ‘The way he made her feel dirty for wanting what was normal.’

  ‘You also implied that she may have colluded with the violence.’

  ‘I didn’t!’ Linda was close to tears. ‘That bastard’s brief put words in my mouth. He pushed me into a corner, and wouldn’t let me say more than “yes”, or “no”. I couldn’t explain. I couldn’t say how frightened she was.’

  ‘Tell me about the advertisements for escorts?’

  ‘Oh, God!’ She put her hands over her face.

  ‘Were they your idea ?’

  ‘Yes.’ She told him how Trisha dreaded opening the post. ‘There was always something for her to worry about, or more bills she couldn’t pay. I wanted her to have something nice to look forward to, for a change.’

  ‘Did you place the advertisements yourself?’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘You never told me!’ Craig was astounded.

  ‘And who replied?’ McKenna demanded.

  ‘A couple of blokes.’

  ‘Who? Where did they live?’

  ‘One lived outside Manchester, the other near here.’