The Society Game

by H. Lanfermeijer

  ‘All rise for Lord Justice Banner,’ interrupted the court clerk.

  ‘She looks ghostly white; her eyes have sunk into their sockets; they look like they haven’t experienced sleep in years,’ continued Mum.

  ‘They probably haven’t,’ I whispered.

  The trial lasted far longer than the one day we ignorantly assumed it would take. I tried to attend most of it but it was seriously boring. Even though the trial was about a member of my family I found it difficult to stay interested as the defence and prosecution thrashed out every intricate detail about their marriage and the circumstances leading up to the murder. This was not helped by the heavy dark and musty wooden-panelled courtroom, which gave an oppressive, claustrophobic atmosphere.

  The defence focused on years of emotional abuse but this was counteracted by the prosecution who forcibly demonstrated that there was no abuse.

  ‘Mrs Hopkins led a lavish lifestyle and she enjoyed a wealthy jet set life, indulging in many holidays which her poor husband paid for to keep his beloved wife happy…’

  They also claimed that she had plenty of opportunity to leave the marriage but she was inherently:

  ‘…a greedy woman who pushed her husband away to the arms of others as all he was looking for was love. This love he finally found in the arms of another who had stood by him and given him a son, and it was Mark who finally found the strength to leave this woman. However, this rejection caused Mrs Hopkins to snap and murder her husband, as she could not bear the idea of losing any of her wealth to another woman… So she found a gun and, with an evil calculating mind, she callously planned to murder him then escape undetected. However, her plan didn’t work and she was finally apprehended by police before she had the chance to run away…’

  Throughout this trial Mum would tut.

  ‘This is not the case, it’s just not true Colin.’

  ‘I know dear,’ Dad would say.

  ‘The jury will see through it Mum, don’t worry,’ I would say.

  And the courtroom remained silent.

  The jury listened and their body language didn’t waver in favour of any side. There were no nods of agreement or murmurs of disgust; just twelve men and women sitting patiently through the trial. The only hint the jury were listening to the prosecution or defence was when a few members recoiled at seeing the pictures of the murder scene.

  Occasionally, the focus was on my aunt who remained slumped in the dock; she appeared smaller as each day and hour passed. Her defence was disappearing and her barrister was beginning to appear as disinterested as Mr Thomson who, by now, was periodically nodding off; probably dreaming of the beer he was going to enjoy once this “pesky trial” was finally over.

  Nearing the natural end of the trial our confidence in obtaining a fair outcome had disappeared. The prosecution had successfully painted Aunt Olive as an evil, greedy, manipulative woman and the defence seemed unable to disprove it; after all, the indisputable evidence was that a man was dead due to the trigger of a gun being pulled by his avaricious wife.

  The benefit of watching Aunt Olive’s defence crumble away was that we were prepared for the verdict. She was found guilty of murder and sentenced to thirty-five years. My aunt did not quiver when this sentenced was passed. All she did was to hang her head low when the judge described her.

  ‘…You are a truly evil woman who abused your husband throughout your marriage. …You did kill, with evil intent, a man who had supported you for over twenty years… You not only killed a man in cold blood but you destroyed the hopes of his son ever knowing his father… all in the pursuit of protecting your riches. Take her down.’

  The court room watched a frail old lady totter to the prisoner’s exit door. Before she left she was stopped by a guard to place handcuffs on her wrists. It was then that she briefly looked up to her family where she would have seen her sister crying whilst being supported by her husband, she would have seen me with pity etched across my face and she would have felt the court room audience bustle as they gathered their things after the final curtain of the case had fallen. Some were already standing, some were chatting amongst themselves reviewing the show and others were secretly checking their phones for any messages they had missed throughout the case. But there was one member who remained rigidly watching Olivia leave. He was a tall thin man with a full beard. He seemed lost, unable to fathom the outcome of the trial. He too looked frail as he tentatively, quietly stood and nodded at Aunt Olivia when she deliberately turned to look directly at him. She smiled with eyes swollen by tears then she disappeared through the door.

  Outside the court room we were met by Mr Partridge who hurriedly made his prepared speech.

  ‘I’m sorry ‘he said, ‘we did our very best but the evidence was stacked against us.’

  ‘No, Mr Partridge,’ my mother began between tearful rasps, ‘no, this isn’t fair, she led a miserable life, why didn’t you call for more witnesses? Why didn’t you ask her more questions about her mental state when you called her to stand? You used me as a witness but asked puerile questions that displayed nothing about her life or how worried we were for her such as; ‘what was my favourite memory of my sister as a child!’ – what use is that? Also, you could have shown to the jury that she tried to leave so many times but he wouldn’t let her. So, no, Mr Partridge, you did not do your very best!!’

  In an insincere, obsequious tone, Mr Partridge said, ‘There there, I know it is hard to take in, but all I can do is to give the jury the evidence as we all see it. However, as I said, this was stacked against us and however hard I tried, and I did try hard for you, dear lady, the verdict comes down to the jury.’

  I suspect Mum would have screamed at him a little longer but instead she turned and cried into the comforting hug of Dad who in contrast was quiet but firm.

  ‘You did not defend my sister-in-law. She was a used and abused woman. Perhaps you would agree that to kill takes independent thought, but as Olivia was controlled in every way by her husband then, surely, he plays a part in orchestrating his own death? This may appear a tenuous link but it demonstrates that she may have pulled the trigger but it was not entirely his wife, no, let me explain… there were reasons as to why Olivia did what she did and these were not explored. So, no, Mr Partridge, the verdict is an unfair one.’

  ‘Again, I am sorry for the outcome but despite all my efforts, society has judged Mrs Hopkins. Good day.’

  And with that he swooped away like a black cat in the headlights of an oncoming car leaving my family mourning the final loss of their Olivia.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Today

  Jason

  It’s a bright, spring Friday, the type of Friday in the year I love. For me, this day is even brighter as the weekend has begun at 5.45pm with the first pint in my hand at the Hare and Hound pub in Holborn. Work has slackened temporarily to let me leave on time and walk out into the remaining part of the day. It welcomes me with evening sunshine as the days get longer and people reach out to the pub as a prelude to the oncoming summer. It has not rained in days and the trees are as green as the grass, making any Londoner grateful to be right where they are in the heart of the capital. I sit on my own outside, on a wooden pub bench, waiting for Jess who has texted:

  ‘Won’t be with you until 6.30 and Sarah and Mike will join us for dinner by 7 – if it is ok for them to join up as well?’

  It’s not okay as I know they’ll ask me more inane questions about my murderous aunt, such as. “Did you ever suspect she would become a murderer one day?” and “Were you subconsciously scared of her when growing up?” I was friends with them by default, for dating Sarah’s best friend. Nevertheless, as with all relationships, there’ll be difficult parts and great parts; today the difficulty was Sarah and Mike but the great part was I now had forty-five minutes to myself with a pint of London Pride as company under the summer sun.

&nb
sp; It was a perfect opportunity to open the letter I received yesterday from Aunt Olivia. I’d got home late on Thursday and it was waiting for me on the door mat. I knew it was from her as there was a Durham prison postal stamp across the top. I resisted the temptation to open it then as our lives had finally slipped back into normality after the trial. Mum and Dad were planning a holiday to Tenerife to celebrate their belated twenty-fifth wedding anniversary and Dad’s sixty-third birthday. These celebrations were some time ago but they used them as an excuse to upgrade their hotel to the Sensetori.

  I’m seeing Jessica daily and we’re already discussing moving in together. I’ve thought about Jess on every absent moment and I’ve missed her company throughout the day. She’s given me purpose to finish work as soon as I can to pursue a life outside the eleventh floor of a London office block.

  Aunt Olivia paused our lives for nearly eighteen months and now we’re claiming those lost months back. So, seeing another letter from her was actually easy to resist. I didn’t want to be dragged back down to where she had fallen because with the death of Uncle Mark she had inadvertently tried to pull us all down to the depressing pit she had lived in for decades.

  However, out of a feeling of warped family loyalty, I at least picked it up in the morning and put it in my jacket pocket. If it was not a Friday and if a pint of London Pride had not bolstered my spirits then the likelihood would be the letter would have remained in my jacket until I discovered it when I needed to clear out my suit pockets on the drycleaner’s counter some time later.

  Olivia

  ‘Dearest Jay,

  I was moved to Durham maximum security prison a little while ago and I know that the distance is too far for you to visit, hence, another letter from me. I hope the last letter found you well and that it explained why your aunt would take the life of another. I’m deeply ashamed of my actions but although I will most likely see the rest of my days here, I now possess a sense of peace; a peace I don’t remember ever feeling.

  Let me explain this flippant remark: I’m receiving counselling and we’re exploring the idea that I have held my emotions in a box and, throughout my life, inferiority was my jealousy’s best friend; they colluded with one another to stop me accepting others, but urged me instead to scrabble around for any feeling of superiority over people, and this led me to Mark and the riches he offered.

  I was scared of Mark and I was scared of how depressed I was, living in his hands. This led to feeling inferior, which led to jealousy, which led to Mark’s credit card, which led directly back to Mark and hence this box was never closed until I killed him.

  I know I have no right to be jealous of others; I accept I am inferior to everyone outside these walls as I have committed a terrible crime, but this fact gives me peace. I rejoice that I’m not scared anymore and my devil has not returned for a chat since the day I picked up Mark’s gun.

  I admit I was scared when I was first arrested. The police said nothing to me in the car and when I was at the police station I was strip-searched and made to squat in front of a policewoman just to prove there was nothing hidden inside me; it was humiliating but I accepted it without a quibble.

  The cell was grey with a green plastic bed at one end and a stainless-steel toilet without a lid in a corner. The toilet was full as it was blocked, I tentatively complained, but there was no one to fix it. The surprising benefit to this was I was escorted to use the staff toilet; it meant I had a break in the long hours of sitting on this bed waiting for something to happen, so the need to pee bought a tiny bit of control and it refreshed me from the pain of boredom.

  Within this first cell, time had left me and it was replaced with pure silence – empty and long, very long – which teased my internal sense of time: a minute was no longer a minute but an hour, and an hour was no longer an hour but a day. There was nothing to distract me from this confusion as all that was on offer to me was to sit on the green plastic bed and wait. But wait for what? A lawyer who didn’t arrive for an eternity, meal times and, of course, toilet breaks which I utilised as often as I could just to be able to move and stop thinking about what I had done to have led me to be sitting on a green plastic mattress.

  It felt like many lifetimes, but finally the administration of bagging and recording my possessions, which consisted of a pair of earrings, a wedding ring and a watch, was complete. I then saw a nurse who patched up my bloody feet and I briefly saw a psychiatrist who merely wrote a few notes then left me to be interviewed by the police. The police questions were not confrontational but there to clarify certain parts of my story. The lawyer that had been instructed to sit by me said very little as the case was straightforward: I had already admitted to intentionally murdering my husband then running away. The only request this young lawyer gave on my behalf was to ask for further psychiatric assessments but there was a problem with a staff change over, so I had to wait for another psychiatrist when someone came available.

  The next part is hazy as all I can remember was the overall feeling of long waits, followed by long interviews, followed by long waits. I remember I was confused and scared but I’m ashamed to say, I was also thinking about what others were making of my actions and how all my lunch friends would be reading about their friend murdering her husband. If I listen hard enough I can still hear their gossiping and it was these voices that distracted me in the interview room, hence I found it very difficult to concentrate:

  The sun shone through a high, dirty, sealed window, lighting up the dust floating in the stale air. These beams created lines of fog and one of them covered half the face of my interviewer; I could make out his loose brown tie on top of his cream shirt; I could make out his grey beard and his left ear but everything else on his face was camouflaged by the dusty rays. Jason, I was exhausted and because all I could see was the inspector’s mouth, it meant I missed many questions which had to be repeated. After a while I sensed his frustration at having to repeat yet another question.

  ‘I’ll say again, were you aware your husband owned the gun used to kill him prior to the morning of the 15th?’

  ‘Er, I think so. I’m not sure really but I remember seeing it, yes,’ I said.

  Before the bearded officer could re-word the question to gather a definitive, ‘yes’, a lady officer entered the room. She was no more than thirty with long black hair tied into a bun resting on the nape of her neck.

  She looks like Lorraine when she was younger, I thought.

  Lorraine was a lunch friend who had many affairs with prominent wealthy men and finally caught a futures’ trader and married him two years ago. She continued to have affairs and so, within eighteen months of marriage, Lorraine gets to enjoy her country house whilst her new husband enjoys his Battersea house and they meet occasionally to keep up the pretence of the perfect social couple for the sake of their friends. These friends are fully aware of the masquerade but are too polite or disinterested to jeopardise this farce, thus allowing the marriage to remain intact.

  She’s celebrating her fifty-fifth birthday soon; in fact isn’t it her girls lunch today?

  ‘Mrs Hopkins, I’ll ask again, have you ever used your husband’s gun prior to the 15th?’ the inspector said sharply.

  It’s 14.03 pm, I wonder if they’re onto the canapés yet after the champagne reception?

  I wonder how many times my name has been mentioned? I bet they’re all laughing still. I wonder how many times they’ve said they knew I was strange: ‘Yep she had murderous eyes,’ they’ll be saying,’ I never trusted that one…’

  ‘Would you like a break Olivia? I can ask for a break for you,’ my young lawyer interrupted, which bought me back to the dusty interview room.

  ‘No, I’m fine,’ I said. ‘Er, yes, I’ve used a gun before. My husband sometimes wanted me at a hunt, but I don’t own one myself. Sorry was that your question? Sorry, I’ve forgotten what you said.’

  ‘Let�
�s take a break,’ said the interviewing officer, ‘this interview is suspended at 14.09…’

  The officer leant back and I could now see his face; beyond his beard I saw his blue eyes sinking in a bag of wrinkles, but I could also clearly see the pity wallowing within him; pity for a foolish vulnerable old woman sitting in front of him apathetic to the carnage she had caused for herself.

  I was refused bail and a day later I was bundled into the back of a police van where I sat inside a small cage and was driven to Holloway prison. On the way there I caught a glimpse of life still continuing whilst my life now stood still. There was the little old man walking his dog, the housewife hurrying her two daughters to school and the milkman finishing his rounds.

  I slipped into prison life, which was a daily routine of conforming to rules. I received a psychological assessment which graded me as having moderate to severe depression, but I was not considered a danger to myself or others and, therefore, I remained in Holloway instead of being moved to a secure hospital. The drugs I was prescribed helped me cope with the sadness of no longer being able to move freely about my life.

  I was an inmate of the British prison system who resided alongside all other of her country’s social rubbish; rubbish thrown away and out of sight of her good citizens. Knowing I was one of them was harder to cope with than the lack of freedom. I couldn’t relate to other inmates who were either angry or, like myself, scared and moved from shadow to shadow.

  I rarely spoke, mainly because I was too intimidated by everyone in there and also because I couldn’t understand the confused ramblings of many of the inmates who seemed to have led the same life as each other. Most of these women were neglected by their family and ignored by society. Their only escape was found in drinking and doing drugs which in turn led to isolation from any social norms; they didn’t work, but instead signed up to crime or prostitution. They were arrested at a very young age to start their career cycle of drugs, crime, prison, more drugs, release from prison, more drugs then more crime and back into prison. For many women this was all they knew and anything outside of this was unknown and too difficult to attempt. So, some, like Trish, knew the prison guards on a first name basis.