A Death Divided

by Clare Francis

  The food arrived. They began to eat without enthusiasm.

  Joe said conversationally, ‘I didn’t realise you’d met Jenna.’

  Kate had been miles away. ‘Oh… yes.’

  ‘When?’

  She shrugged. ‘I can’t remember. Ages ago now.’

  ‘Up at the farm?’

  ‘We met in London.’

  ‘And do I get the feeling you didn’t like her?’

  ‘Not a lot, no.’

  He asked lightly, ‘Any particular reason?’

  She had been prodding her food with a fork. Now she paused, eyes lowered, she took her time before saying, ‘I thought she was incredibly spoilt, if you really want to know.’

  Joe allowed this statement a moment to settle. ‘And she liked to have men at her feet, you said?’

  Kate said warily, ‘That was what I heard.’

  ‘From Ines?’

  ‘No, all sorts of people.’

  ‘I didn’t realise you had friends in common.’

  She raised a shoulder. ‘A few.’

  ‘And these men, she liked them at her feet as what - lovers?

  Admirers?’

  Kate cast him a narrow sideways look. ‘She was your friend, Joe.’

  He wasn’t sure if she meant this as a reproach for encouraging her to speak ill of the dead, or a warning against hearing things he might prefer not to hear.

  ‘I’d be interested to know.’

  Kate gave a neat little shrug. ‘People say she flirted all the time. That she liked to win men over, other women’s husbands included. That she wasn’t satisfied until she had them eating out of her hand. That once she’d got them just there’ - she pressed down on the table with her thumb - ‘she cut them out of her life.’ She gave another little shrug. ‘That’s what they say.’

  Disturbed by Joe’s silence, or inferring some criticism from it, she added sharply, ‘That’s what happened to the boy who died! That’s what made him kill himself. That’s what everyone said. She made him miserable and then he killed himself. And now Jamie’s being made to suffer! Why should Jamie have to take the blame? Ifjenna felt guilty, then she deserved it, if you ask me. If she killed herself - well, I would have said she did exactly the right thing!’

  The cabbie double-checked the address with Joe, once as they set off, and again two minutes into the journey, for the place Joe wanted was a trap for unwary cabbies, a square named after Kensington Gardens which was neither in Kensington nor particularly close to the Gardens. It lay instead in that part of Bayswater which is forever foreign. Early Jewish emigres had built a synagogue there, the Greeks a cathedral, waves of Italians and Spanish had come and gone; now the area formed the western boundary of an Arab enclave. The houses were faded white stucco, their steps overlaid with thick asphalt worn thin down the middle. Many had long ladders of bells, but number eighty-five had only five and clean stone steps and a gleaming front door. Ines lived on the top floor.

  She was waiting for him at the door of the flat. She was dressed in jeans and a heavy fleece zipped up to the neck, as though she was on the point of going out, an impression reinforced by the two travelling-bags sitting ready in the hall.

  ‘You’re going back to Wales,’ he said.

  ‘Yes. I’ve managed to negotiate some leave.’

  ‘Are you sure it’s the best idea?’

  He had followed her into a sitting room painted stark white with exhibition posters on the walls and sparse modern furniture.

  Despite the CDs, books and framed family photographs scattered around the room, it had the impermanent look of a place rented ready furnished by the year.

  She faced him. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It may not look so good for Chetwood if you go and live with him at the cabin.’

  ‘I understand that. I am going to stay with Pym and Evan.’

  ‘Yes, well, that’ll go some way to … I suppose.’ The awkwardness that seemed to mark his encounters with Ines had returned. In the hours they had spent waiting for news in the grimy hotel lounge near the police station in Carmarthen they had talked spasmodically about Chetwood’s predicament, nearly always at Joe’s instigation, and he had struggled to find a tone, an approach, an argument that didn’t seem inadequate in the face of Ines’s austere rationality.

  ‘You don’t think it might be better to stay away altogether?’ he ventured.

  ‘I could not do that,’ she retorted. ‘He cannot be left alone.

  From every point of view it would be unthinkable. I am his family.’

  From an Englishwoman this argument might have been questionable, from a Brazilian it was unanswerable.

  ‘How did you get on with the police?’ he asked.

  Ines went purposefully to a small dining table under the window and sat down with a briskness that suggested pressure of time. ‘I told them everything they asked me. What we did when Jamie was here. The restaurants, the shops we went to, the film we saw. But I think they did not wish to believe very much of what I said.’

  He took a seat on the opposite side of the polished black table; they might have been at a business meeting. ‘What about receipts, bills - have you managed to find any?’

  ‘Sure. The shop where I bought food, the cinema tickets there was never a problem with the things I bought. But the restaurant, the wine, the things Jamie paid for - he paid in cash. There is no proof for him. He did not use his credit card while he was here.’

  ‘No one who might have seen you together? Be able to identify Chetwood?’

  ‘In a city?’ she threw back. ‘People don’t notice strangers in a city.’

  ‘What about the restaurant? The waiter?’

  ‘It was a Chinese restaurant. You know how they are. They have trouble knowing one Western face from another.’

  She sat straight-backed, immobile, hands lightly grasped on the table in front of her. He noticed her wedding ring again and wondered if she wore it for Chetwood.

  ‘What else did the police want to know?’

  ‘The same as in the first interrogation.’ She tilted her head.

  ‘I have the wrong word, I think?’

  ‘Interview.’

  ‘Interview,’ she repeated, fixing it in her memory. ‘They asked what was our relationship, how often we see each other, how long we spend together, if we travel together, had we plans to go away together soon, had we plans to live together.

  And always - I don’t know how many times they ask - was not Jamie my lover. They found it impossible to believe he could stay with me here and not be my lover. I think that is a very English thing - the idea that a man and a woman cannot be close friends without being lovers.’

  ‘Particularly when they’re first cousins.’

  But she didn’t seem to set much store by this point; she dismissed it in a very Latin way, with a twitch of her shoulders, a small twist of her head. ‘They wrote everything down oh-so slowly,’ she resumed. ‘Each word, like a child, bent over the page. They left out many things. They only want the facts. So what can I do? I signed it. But I had the sense of wasting my time.’

  Aware that time was pressing on her now, that she had asked him here for a reason, he waited expectantly. But, far from hurrying, she pulled off the hot fleece jacket, she placed it neatly on a chair, and regarded him for a full ten seconds before announcing, ‘I spoke to Elwyn Roberts. The new postmortem by the expert professor - he has the results.’

  ‘And?’

  Suddenly Ines’s immutable poise wavered. Her eyes dropped. She breathed, ‘I’m not sure if it is good or bad.’

  ‘Well, what about the marks on her neck? The ones the police have been so excited about?’

  ‘Yes, he found them. Yes - I asked several times to be certain - bruising. Symmetrical. Here.’ She touched two fingers to either side of her windpipe, low down near the collarbone.

  ‘Made by thumbs, from the front.’

  Coolly, she mimed it, placing her hands around an imaginary neck,
and the words, the image caught Joe like a blow.

  Shock gripped his stomach, he felt a sudden heat. He understood everything and nothing: that there was absolutely no chance of suicide, that something truly appalling had happened to Jenna.

  He managed to gasp, ‘Is he sure?’

  ‘Yes. But he cannot say if this pressure was enough to cause her death. There was no damage to - what do you call it in the neck here?’

  ‘What? Oh - cartilage?’

  ‘The cartilage. So for this reason he cannot give asphyxiation as the cause of death.’

  ‘A deliberate act, though?’ And still the horror was growing in him.

  ‘Yes. But, Joe?’ She waited for him to meet her eye. ‘There was something else. Something which I think can only be good for us. The expert professor, he found more marks - around her wrists. He thinks a cord - a thin rope.’

  Joe felt another lurch of disbelief.

  ‘The way the marks were formed - he thinks her wrists were tied, one on top of the other.’ Again she mimed it.

  ‘My God.’

  Ines leant forward across the table. ‘But this is good, don’t you think? Because this is not something a husband would do if he wished to kill his wife! This is something a stranger would do. A deranged person. A person who has come to commit a terrible crime. Not a husband. In a moment of madness a man might strangle his wife - yes, okay - but tie her hands together?

  No. Why would he do that? No, no - it is not in the psychology of such a thing! Don’t you think, Joe?’

  But Joe was too shaken to follow her argument. His mind was still overwhelmed by images of Jenna bound and terrified, of powerful hands tightening around her neck.

  ‘Don’t you think I’m right?’ Ines demanded again. ‘Only a violent stranger could do such a thing.’

  ‘My God,’ Joe muttered again. Then, with a shot of anxiety: ‘Poor Chetwood. How’s he taken it? He does know?’

  She nodded.

  ‘There’s someone with him?’

  ‘He is with Pym and Evan. I have made him promise not to be alone until I return.’

  And still Joe couldn’t take in the enormity of what she had told him. Getting up, he stood at the window, he stared unseeing over the darkening square towards a murky pink sunset.

  She had been murdered, and he had doubted her. All of them had doubted her. She had not chosen to die. She had died loving life and Chetwood and her animals. She had not died easily or willingly. She had died in panic and terror.

  Perhaps - he winced as the thought leapt ready-formed into his mind - perhaps she had been half-strangled first, then dragged to a car and driven to the weir, only to realise that it was here she was going to die for real. Or - worse still perhaps she’d known at the beginning of the car journey that this was how it would end and had already died a thousand deaths by the time she was pushed into the water.

  Gradually he became aware of Ines calling to him. ‘Joe, listen to me.’ She repeated it sternly, ‘Joe, listen. I have something to say to you.’

  Inhaling slowly, he turned to find her standing beside him.

  ‘Listen,’ she said again. ‘There is something that Jamie told the police this morning. Something he is mad not to have told to them at the very first moment she was dead, the first instant, she was found! But no, no - he did not. He did not tell them. And now—’ She broke off with a sharp sigh. Close up, her e almond eyes were a rich hazel, rimmed with dark lashes, the whites very clear, but where before they had expressed a rather intimidating composure, now they showed something almost defenceless, like fear. ‘Yes, he has told them now. Yes, I drove him there and he told them. Yes! Fine! But Joe, I do not think they will believe him. I think they will find it too obvious, too imaginative, too convenient. They will wonder why he did not tell them before. And I think - well, I know that it does not look good for him!’ She gesticulated with a graceful arc of one hand.

  ‘He had his reason, yes,’ she argued, staring past him at the window. ‘This I understand. He wanted to protect her. Always to protect her. But once she was dead …’ She rolled her eyes and, swinging away, took two angry paces across the room.

  ‘To protect her - that was his obsession. He said, “But she needs me. And I cannot leave her.” He could not see beyond this one thing! That she needed him.’ Now Ines was a mass of gestures. Hands described patterns, shoulders lifted and fell, eyes sparked. ‘He was like a man who has lost his will. Lost control over his life. Sometimes I think she must have some crazy power over him, because before, he always needed to be free. To wander. To discover. To search.’ Turning on Joe, she declared, ‘But you know how he used to be! You know how he was. He lived a life of the mind and the intellect and the spirit. A life of places and ideas. I think he would have been a great writer. The letters he wrote me - fantastic! Beautiful! Full of poetry and imagination! A great writer! A great intelligence!

  Instead - what? Instead, she makes him into this man who must be home for dinner. Oh yes, she intended from the beginning to - tie him down?.’ - she flung Joe a glance to check on the accuracy of the phrase - ‘and she succeeded. First she tried one way. She tried to keep him from travelling, she demanded he stay close. But he would not explain himself to her all the time, he would not say where he was at every moment. He did not want to be captured.’ Now she knew she had the wrong word, and she shot out a hand in appeal.

  ‘Trapped,’ Joe offered.

  ‘Trapped. The farm - there he felt truly trapped. Oh, he told me all this! How the dream was no longer a dream. How he was ready to leave. And he was almost gone, you know.

  When it happened, he was almost gone!’ She raked the fingers of both hands through her thick hair, she held them there a moment. ‘But then … after the boy died … suddenly the one thing he wants more than anything in the world is to protect her. To save her. She is in pieces and he wants to make her build her - back into—’ She gave up on this idiom with an impatient shrug. ‘He needs more than anything to protect her.

  Why?’

  She drew Joe back to the table and down onto the seat next to her. She opened an expressive hand towards him. ‘Why?

  Because she is feeling sad about this boy’s death? I do not think so. Because she was unkind to this boy when he was in love with her? No. This cannot be the reason. No, it is more than that. I think she did something bad that caused his death, something that was heavy on her conscience, and she persuaded Jamie to share this guilt. She made him think that he somehow—’

  Dismissing this argument, she moved rapidly on.

  ‘What I think is that he was covering for her, Joe. That he was protecting her from what she did, though he will never say so.

  Even now he won’t tell me what happened! But there was someone else who knew - and this is what Jamie has finally told the police - there was a person who believed Jenna had killed the boy. And this person sent threats to kill Jenna. That is why Jamie needed to protect her. That is why he took her to hide in the mountains. Because this person wanted to kill her.’

  Joe digested this with a mixture of astonishment and unease. ‘But who?’

  ‘Jamie does not know.’

  ‘Well… he must be able to guess.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Friends of the boy? Relations?’

  ‘They never discovered this. They thought perhaps someone who used to come to the farm. But they were never sure.’

  ‘How were the threats made?’

  ‘Letters.’ Anticipating his next question, she added, ‘They were destroyed.’

  ‘So … there’s nothing to prove the threats took place?’

  Ines’s eyes narrowed and darkened. ‘That is exactly what the police think, of course. They are thinking he is inventing this story to try and save himself. But Elwyn Roberts said we must tell the police, because if we do not they will never look for another person. They will simply decide it is Jamie. He said we must tell them immediately, so that they are forced to make an investigation.’
/>
  Joe took a moment. ‘Sorry - maybe I’m missing something - but why didn’t Chetwood report these threats to the police at the time?’

  Ines frowned at him as if he were being remarkably slow.

  ‘Because he was protecting her. Because she had killed this boy.’

  ‘I see.’ Though as he said this, he felt he was seeing rather less than before. He risked what might be another stupid question. ‘And this person making the threats - why on earth didn’t he or she go to the police right at the beginning?’

  ‘Maybe they tried the police and the police did not listen.

  Maybe this person is mad,’ she added carelessly. ‘Look, Joe …’ She leant forward again. ‘You are Jamie’s friend - yes?

  You are his true friend?’

  ‘I would hope so.’

  ‘Because this is what he needs at this moment. More than anything in the world. He needs his true friends. He needs all of us. You will help him, won’t you, Joe?’

  ‘Well… if I can.’

  ‘Will you help to find this person, Joe? This person who made these threats?’

  Whether he was still shocked by the confirmation of the murder and the images which had imprinted so disturbingly on his mind, whether it was the sheer quantity of information that had come his way in so short a time, but only now did Joe manage to force some sort of order into his thoughts. He felt the detachment come over him that was his way of confronting unwelcome facts. He understood what Ines had told him, he realised how it would look to the police, he felt sorry for Chetwood; but he was also deeply puzzled, and the reason for his puzzlement sent a small sliver of unease into his stomach.

  ‘What about the note, Ines? The suicide note?’

  She pulled back. She said rather coolly, ‘What about it?’

  ‘Well… how could Jenna have written it?’

  ‘It is obvious she wrote it at some other time. A time when she wanted to kill herself.’

  He absorbed this slowly. ‘But the note was found at the house after her death.’

  Ines conceded, ‘Yes.’