A Death Divided

by Clare Francis

  New realisations rolled up one after another and caught him like a succession of blows. His mind made jumps and connections in an unstoppable cascade of logic, until he came to the end of the chain and was brought up short by a single conclusion that was like running into a wall it was so startling.

  His anger subsided in a single lurch. He felt his stomach drop away, he felt a stab of nausea, he had the sensation of losing his balance.

  Sarah said, ‘Come and sit down, Joe, and I’ll explain.’

  But he couldn’t move, he could only stare at her, he could only think the one appalling thought. He steeled himself to ask her straight out, he opened his mouth to speak, but guessing what was coming, or fearing it, she forestalled him with a hasty shake of her head. ‘I’ll explain.’

  She went to the circle of puffy chairs and, stationing herself in front of one, waited for him to join her.

  He chose a chair at an angle to hers, then changed his mind and moved to the sofa opposite. Sitting down, they faced each other once more. Sarah’s face was a mask, one side drenched with cold light from the window, the other in shadow. Her features seemed both strange and achingly familiar to him. He could not take his eyes off her.

  ‘There’s one thing I’d like to say right at the outset,’ she began in a voice that contained a strong element of rehearsal.

  ‘You may not want to hear this, you may think it’s - inappropriate but I’d like to tell you all the same, if you don’t mind.’

  She glanced away for an instant and when her eyes returned to his they were almost apologetic. ‘Whatever else, my feelings for you weren’t faked. In fact, quite the opposite. I felt more for you than I ever told you. And, yes, I’d planned a lot of things, but I hadn’t planned on us becoming involved. I hadn’t intended to feel so … strongly about you. But I did. The text message I sent you yesterday - I meant it. About the love.’

  She took one quick look at him before rushing straight on, as if she didn’t expect or deserve an answer. ‘Not that it’s worth anything now, of course. I realise that. But I just wanted to tell you. Right at the outset. So you’d know it wasn’t all false.’

  Again she hurried on. ‘But otherwise, yes -1 met you on purpose. Yes - I hoped you were in touch with Jennifer Chetwood or that you’d know someone who was. I’d tried everything else, you see. Absolutely everything. It was a last resort.’

  In that instant Joe felt he hated her. ‘You let me do all your dirty work.’

  ‘I didn’t mean it to be like that, Joe.’

  He thought he had squared all the circles, that there were no gaps in the depressing chain of logic, yet a moment after she’d said this, another realisation struck him, and he felt a fresh stab of humiliation. ‘The property, the stupid house,’ he said painfully. .‘You set it all up.’

  ‘I thought it would encourage the family to try and look for her again—’

  He stopped her with a sharp gesture, a rapid upward slice of his hand. A dozen questions swarmed into the front .of his mind, but he couldn’t voice them, the hurt kept getting in the way. Finally, he managed to say: ‘You knew she owned the house?’

  ‘I searched the Land Registry. Around Hereford, all the places I thought they might be hiding. I worked my way down England and Wales. Always in his name. Then one day I tried her name, I tried her home town—’

  Mine too, he almost corrected her.

  ‘ - and there it was. I went to see the house. I realised it’d be very hard to sell. It had a terrible crack down the front. So I thought I’d put in an offer. I thought it might prompt the family to try and find her again.’

  Hating the sarcasm in his voice but unable to suppress it, Joe said, ‘Well, you must have been delighted with me. I must have been beyond your wildest dreams. Going to endless trouble. Taking out ads, finding postmarks. You must have been thrilled!’

  Sarah was very still.

  ‘And when I asked if it wasn’t too much trouble to trace the number Jenna called from! My God! Yes, you must have been thrilled! You had it on a plate!’

  He had been deflected earlier from the main question, but he wasn’t prepared to be deflected again. He said in a voice that was deliberately calm, ‘So you tracked her down and had her killed?’

  Sarah looked as though she’d like to put this off again but, catching his expression, she said quietly, ‘I didn’t kill her, Joe.’

  There was a silence like darkness.

  ‘Well, someone did, for God’s sake.’

  ‘Oh, I wanted to kill her,’ Sarah said. ‘I think I meant to.

  But in the end I couldn’t do it.’

  The grass was ankle-high and sodden. As they walked, Joe’s shoes turned black from the wet. They had crossed the lawn and passed through an archway into a side garden with a vegetable patch gone to seed at one end, an unkempt hard tennis court at the other, and a brick path across the middle.

  At the far side, almost hidden in a tangled hedge, was a gate which they forced open to reach a field with woods in the distance.

  Sarah had wanted air. She had got to her feet abruptly with something close to panic or maybe claustrophobia, and from surprise and perhaps his own need for space Joe had agreed to go for a walk. Now he wondered if it was air she’d wanted or an outlet for the sharp tension that had so suddenly appeared in her, like a bolt of fear, because she strode out with restless energy, sometimes forging so far ahead that she had to wait while Joe, walking at an altogether steadier rate, caught up. As she walked, she talked to him over her shoulder in a tone of urgent absorption.

  ‘Before anything else, you need to understand about Sam,’

  she began. ‘About the sort of person he was. About the past.

  When our parents were killed, we came to live “here with Granny and Grandpa. Our uncle and aunt lived in Malaysia then. There was no one else to take care of us. I managed all right - I’ve always managed. But I was older - twelve - and I had clear memories of Mummy, of the way she was and how much she loved us, and that kept me going. But Sam - he was only six. He couldn’t understand what had happened. He couldn’t understand where Mummy and Daddy had gone, why everything had changed so drastically, why he wasn’t loved to pieces any more. Don’t get me wrong. Granny wasn’t cruel, but it was a shock to her having young children around again.

  Having her routine upset, having things in a mess, noise - all the usual things with kids. She was very strict with us, very impatient, she kept telling us off, sending us to our rooms.

  Sometimes she flipped her lid, and then there’d be a scene.

  She’d start saying we were wicked, bad. Me - well, it didn’t bother me, I always gave as good as I got, an argument for everything. But Sam - he couldn’t take it, not when he was so young, not when he’d been so completely loved by Mummy and Daddy. It cut him like a knife. He couldn’t understand why the world was suddenly a dark and treacherous place.

  Why he was suddenly meant to be bad and wicked. It damaged him - he sort of closed down, withdrew. I decided then that I’d take care of him. That I’d look after him in the way Mummy would have looked after him. As close as I could anyway. That I’d defend him, just like she would have defended him. That I’d always be there for him.’ She paused, she half-glanced at Joe. ‘And that’s what I did.’

  They had reached the corner of the field. Following the perimeter path, they turned along the side of a low hedgerow.

  The sky was an indeterminate grey, the air damp and still, and their breath emerged in wisps of vapour.

  ‘They tried to send me away to school,’ Sarah said, ‘but I wouldn’t go. I insisted on going to the local school instead, though it was forty minutes away on the bus and pretty poor academically. There was a big argument. I think they didn’t want a nasty teenager around the house - they were rather frightened of me and my tongue. Anyway, I won. And that was the turning point. From then on, I sort of took over Sam’s life. I looked after his school work, his projects, I read him his stories at night. I organised
it so he got to see other kids and went on trips, and had a bit of normality.’

  The picture that came to Joe evoked very little normality for Sarah.

  ‘Those arguments with Granny and Grandpa, I suppose they got, me hooked on the law,’ she threw in as an aside.

  ‘Planning my case, choosing my tactics, covering every possible angle. Don’t get me wrong, I grew to love them as I got older, just as they grew to love us. They mellowed a lot, particularly Granny. But at the end of the day I always felt it was just Sam and me against the world. And that it would stay that way till Sam found a safe haven of his own, till he found work, love, stability.’

  She’d settled into something approaching a normal pace, and now they walked abreast. In profile, her face had never seemed more grave or more lovely. ‘But his teens were difficult.

  I was away at university, I couldn’t be around all the time. He didn’t settle well at school. He was bullied, he fell behind academically. All he wanted to do was his art, but he got so I little time and so little encouragement that he got frustrated, he started to drift, he began to mix with a bad crowd. I worried that he’d be drawn into drugs, the whole scene. So I persuaded Granny and Grandpa that he should go to art school straight away, without doing his A levels. That was another fight - you were dead without qualifications - but they saw sense in the end. They let Sam do a foundation course, and he got a place at Chelsea a year later. Best of all, some friends of Mummy and Daddy’s who lived in Fulham gave him a room. He loved it there - a home, you see. A family. But of course they couldn’t have him for ever. Meantime, I’d gone and committed matrimony.

  An act of pure insanity which I tried to salvage for at least a year too long. So instead of there being this second home for Sam, there was just a big messy mistake falling apart at the seams. More ground shifting under his feet.’

  Stopping, she cried fiercely, ‘I’ve made Sam sound like a lost soul, haven’t I? Like some awful drag. But that’s completely wrong. He wasn’t like that at all. He was wonderfully alive, wonderfully gifted, deeply special. The most generous, funny, loving person you could imagine.’

  She was waiting for some sign that Joe had understood, so he nodded.

  Satisfied, she went on, ‘It was just that there was this gap in his life, a gap he could never fill. To lose your parents people think they can guess what it’s like, but they have no idea. Sam wanted the sort of love that no one could snatch away from him, he wanted an anchor.’ She reached out and gripped Joe’s arm. ‘You understand what I’m saying? You realise how easy it was for Jenna to destroy him?’

  Joe gazed back at her without speaking.

  Sarah exhaled abruptly as if she’d been holding her breath.

  Dropping her hand from his’ arm, she began to walk on, but more slowly now, as though the strange nervous energy was finally spent. ‘He couldn’t stop talking about the farm, how beautiful the place was, the amazing band of people there, how much he liked everybody. He’d never seemed happier. I was thrilled. It sounded just perfect for him. He said he was painting, he said he was doing some good work. Looking back, I suppose I should have realised it all sounded too good to be true. But I only had his calls to go by, his voice, and he seemed so happy.’

  She was lost in thought for a while, and it was all Joe could do not to urge her on. They completed the circuit of the field and went back through the reluctant gate. In the kitchen garden, Sarah led the way to the far end of the derelict vegetable patch where they sat on a bench set diagonally across the turn of the path. The wood was encrusted with the silvery patina of damp and age.

  Resuming the story, Sarah stared straight ahead. As the afternoon wore on, Joe realised she was looking at him rarely, if at all, as though having made her most damaging admissions face to face she was now anxious to distance herself from him.

  ‘I didn’t realise anything was wrong till Sam started saying strange things about Jenna,’ she said. ‘Oh, he’d talked about her before, of course he had. In fact a huge amount. All the things they were doing, what fun they had. But I thought she was much older, ten, fifteen years, a sort of mother-hen figure.

  It wasn’t till Sam said how beautiful she was, how amazing, that I realised she was a rather different sort of animal. But so long as she was in a relationship, so long as she was with her partner - well, what was the problem?’

  In front of them, rows of canes supporting the withered remains of runner beans rose like skeletal teepees out of the tall grass. From somewhere at their base came a furtive animal rustling.

  ‘We always spoke at lunchtime, Sam and me,’ Sarah continued.

  ‘One day he was bursting with excitement, but he wouldn’t tell me what it was about, which was really strange normally he told me everything, everything - and I remember sitting in the office, feeling uneasy, not quite knowing what I was uneasy about, but absolutely sure something wasn’t right.

  Two or three days later, he came out with it. He was in love.

  More than that, this was the love of his life, this was his spirit-companion, his soul-mate, for ever and ever, the greatest thing that had ever happened, he never imagined it was possible to feel this way. And so on and so on. He was wild with joy, too wild. When I realised who he’d fallen for, I tried to get him to slow down, to talk it through in an atmosphere of calm. But he was beyond all that. He was … gone. It was a terrible time, the next two weeks - the sense of things running out of control.

  When I phoned, he wasn’t always there, I couldn’t be sure of what was happening. And when we did talk, he was full of how they were going to set up home together, how they were going to live in a cottage up in the hills, how they were going to be happy for ever and ever. I asked what they were going to live on, but of course he didn’t want to think about that. In fact he laughed. He never worried about money. He’d worked for a few months in a delicatessen, he’d find something else till he got his exhibition together.’

  Sarah’s expression tautened, her voice as well. ‘Then one day I got Jenna on the phone. I said how amazing it was that she and Sam were together, or something like that, and there was this definite pause, I mean a pause that gave the whole game away. She said something sort of patronising, like what a lovely person Sam was, and how wonderful it was to have him there. And I knew immediately she was stringing him along, she was making a fool of him. I asked her then if the relationship was serious on her, part, but she skirted round that one, she wouldn’t give me a straight answer, and I was horrified, terrified, because I knew Sam had gone completely overboard for this woman, that he trusted and adored her, that it’d be disaster if things went wrong. I tried to explain to her, I tried to spell it out, the awful danger, but she went cold on me, basically said there was nothing to discuss. I tried to argue with her, I tried to make her understand that she had this absolutely huge responsibility, that she must be extremely careful what she did and said to Sam. But she put the phone down on me. I couldn’t believe it. She just put it down! The absolute b—’ She corrected this to: ‘Cow.’

  ‘She denied any relationship with Sam?’

  Sarah shot him a frown as if he’d understood nothing at all. ‘She was denying everything. Everything.’ She took a steadying breath. ‘So … I tried to talk to Sam, I tried to make him realise, but he just laughed, he said it was all okay, not to worry so much. It was the first time in his life he hadn’t listened to me, the first time he hadn’t trusted my judgement. I wanted to go up there and see him straight away, but I had a ton of work to do. I couldn’t get away till early Saturday - three days later.’ Sarah faltered. ‘Then on the Friday night—’ She turned her head away, it was a moment before she managed to speak, and then in a hoarse whisper. ‘There was a message from Sam.

  He said … he said he loved me and he was sorry. I knew immediately. His voice - it was so absolutely empty. I knew he was already dead.’

  She drew a terse breath. ‘I told the police everything about Jenna, but they didn’t want to know. To
them Sam was just another statistic, a depressive who’d killed himself. They weren’t interested in responsibility. The inquest was the same.

  The coroner listened but took no notice. I knew then that I wasn’t going to get any recourse from the law, and oddly enough it was a kind of freedom, knowing it was going to be left to me, knowing I had no choice. Oh, I never had the slightest doubt about it,’ she argued suddenly, as if he’d challenged her on the point. ‘Not the slightest. It was nothing less than manslaughter, you see. Why should she be allowed to continue her life as if nothing had happened? Why should she be allowed to get away with it? I wanted her to acknowledge her guilt, I wanted her to suffer, I wanted her to pay.’

  ‘You wrote the anonymous letters?’

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed bluntly. ‘Two of them.’

  ‘You threatened her?’

  ‘By any other name - yes. I said she’d never be safe, I said she’d be tracked down wherever she went, I said she’d be made to pay. For a while I thought that it would be enough knowing she’d got the letters, knowing they’d be on her mind the whole time, knowing she’d always be looking over her shoulder. But it wasn’t enough, nothing could be enough. She had killed Sam, she had killed someone unbelievably special, for no good reason than her own repulsive ego. I decided I was going to confront her. Well, no, it was more than that - I was going to make her confess, on paper, so it’d be there for everyone to see.’ At this, Sarah pitched forward and clutched the edge of her seat, her knuckles white, as though the accumulated memories were threatening to unbalance her.

  Joe said, ‘Once you got the address of the phone box Jenna called me from, how did you track her down?’

  Sarah straightened up again and sank slowly back against the seat. ‘Oh, I went up there armed with a photograph. I copied it from one of yours, I’m afraid. I snooped around your flat.’ She shrugged. ‘There was nothing I wouldn’t do, you see.

  I loved Sam more than my life. I loved him as if he were my own child.’