Act of Darkness

by Francis King

  ‘What’s this?’

  Helen shook her head frantically from side to side.

  ‘The boy. It’s something to do with that boy.’ Last night, as those invisible wings first rustled and then rushed all around her and the invisible beaks had torn at her, she had come to it. ‘That boy. The dead boy. Tell me.’

  Helen suddenly put out her arms, placed them around Ilse’s shoulders, drew her down towards her. Her mouth was against Ilse’s ear, its breath sour. She shuddered convulsively. Then she said: ‘Oh, Ilse, Ilse, Ilse, I killed him, I killed him, I killed him.’

  Ilse said: ‘I know, darling. I know.’

  Chapter Eleven

  From the summing-up of Mr Justice S – at the trial of Helen Thompson at the Old Bailey:

  … You have heard the accused describe in detail how she alleges that she committed the crime. She knew that the governess, Miss Clare O’Connor – whom, unfortunately, it has been impossible to trace in India, in this country or in any other country – had taken a soporific, bromide, for a migraine headache. She had in her possession a boy-scout knife, which you have been able to examine. This, she explained, she used in connection with her work as leader of a troup of Brownies – or Bluebells, as they are called in India. On the night of the murder, which she has told us was long premeditated, she undressed herself and, after following her custom of going into her grandmother’s bedroom on the same floor to see if the old lady wanted anything, she went to bed. She lay awake until she was sure that all members of the household were asleep. Soon after midnight she left her bedroom and went downstairs. She entered the drawing room and opened one of the three French windows on to the tennis court. She left the knife on its ledge, together with a pair of rubber boots. It was always her intention to make it appear that the killing had been the work of an Indian or Indians, as an act of revenge against Mr Thompson, her father, in particular or of terrorism against the British in general.

  She then went up to the room in which the governess and child were sleeping, approached the child’s bed and lifted him out. He awoke and, though he recognized her and knew her well and had every reason to trust her, he appeared to be about to cry out. She therefore snatched up the first thing to hand, the brassière which the governess had thrown over a chair by his bed, and pressed it against his mouth. She continued to press it against his mouth as she carried him downstairs and through the drawing room. When she got to the drawing room window and was about to put on the boots, she realized that he was dead. She carried the corpse and the knife up the path above the tennis court, through the trees and into the privy. It was there that she inflicted on him the terrible wound that all but severed his head from his body. She has told you that she deliberately used this ferocity, in order to give credence to the theory that some Indian or Indians had been the culprits, rather than someone within the household. She has also told you, in particularly macabre detail, that she thought that, after the cutting of the throat, the blood would never come and has given that as the reason why she both sliced the child’s hand and wounded it in the chest. In fact, as you have heard from the medical evidence both of Dr McGregor and of Dr Cathcart, if the child were already dead, then the blood could not be expected to spurt, as it would have done if he had been still alive. She threw the corpse into the privy. She has no memory of also throwing the brassière there and presumes that she must have let it fall, without being aware of it.

  She returned to the house, taking off the boots before she entered it. She left the window open, in accordance with her plan that an intruder should be suspected. She went upstairs and into the bathroom, where she washed herself, the boots, her nightdress and the knife. Her grandmother heard her moving around but thought nothing of it. She replaced the knife in its sheath and hid it under some underclothes. She hung up the nightdress, which she had washed, to dry by the open window. She put on a clean nightdress.

  The next morning, she noticed not only that the nightdress was still damp but that there were still some residual stains on it. She wrapped the knife, still in its sheath, in the damp nightdress and concealed both in the laundry basket in the bathroom next to her room. Unfortunately, as you have heard from ex-Inspector Singh, the view at first taken by the police was the one that she hoped that they would take. They assumed that an intruder or intruders had murdered the boy and no immediate search was made of the bedrooms of the occupants of the house, though a thorough one was at once made of the servants’ quarters. This, according to the account of the accused – I must stress yet again that it is her account that I am now summarizing for you – enabled her to take both knife and nightdress, hidden under her raincoat, out with her when she went for a ride on the afternoon following the night of the murder. She rode to a lonely bluff above the lake and from there hurled the bundle into the water, weighted with a stone and tied round with string. As far as she knows, no one saw her, though she says that there were some Indians fishing in that vicinity.

  … I cannot too strongly impress on you that the utmost caution must be exercised in accepting a confession unsupported by evidence. But in this case, the knife was retrieved from the same area of the lake into which she declared that she had thrown it. You have also seen the affidavit of the ayah on the subject of the nightdress. She was all along suspicious of the accused and she voiced these suspicions to ex-Inspector Singh. Ex-Inspector Singh had a hunch, as he himself put it to you, that the accused was the killer; but without her confession and without the discovery of the murder weapon, and in view of the plausible explanations that she gave to him of everything which seemed to him suspicious in her conduct, he felt, as did his superiors, that no case lay against her.

  … You may well ask yourselves: What possible motive could induce a young girl of reputable family and previous good conduct, with up to then no history of mental illness, to commit so horrible a crime? She has herself said that she bore no ill-will to the victim and that she killed him as an act of revenge against her stepmother. There is absolutely no evidence that her stepmother ever maltreated her or behaved to her in an unfitting manner. But it would be only human if she preferred her own child to her stepdaughter and if, however unwittingly, she made this preference clear. The accused plainly had – and still has – a close attachment to both her father and the memory of her deceased mother. You may think that jealousy may well have aggravated trivial slights and humiliations into wrongs to be avenged.

  … You may also well ask yourselves: What, after so long a period of years, drove her to make this confession? She has spoken of her remorse. Indeed, as you have heard from her flat-mate, Miss Ilse Rothstein, who was in part instrumental in persuading her to seek out the police, that remorse, combined with pity for her father, suspected with cruel injustice by former friends and associates of having killed his own son, resulted in her having what was, in effect, a nervous breakdown: she almost entirely ceased to eat, she rarely spoke to anyone and, when not at her work, she spent all her time in the dark in her bedroom, usually on her bed. She herself has said in this court: ‘ It is a tremendous relief to lay down this terrible burden.’

  You have heard both Dr McGregor and ex-Inspector Singh declare that, at the time of the murder, she evinced absolutely no symptoms of mental instability, much less insanity. She was, admittedly, not then examined professionally by Dr McGregor, who is not, in any case, a specialist in the field of psychology. You have also heard the evidence of Dr Aidan, eminent in this field, that, after extensive conversations with her, he is of the opinion that at present – naturally he cannot speculate about her mental condition at the time of the murder – she is entirely sane.

  … Altogether, a more horrible story has never been presented to a jury in my whole experience. Here, if we believe her, we have had a description, given by a woman of twenty-four, of the way in which, at the age of eighteen, she murdered her little stepbrother for no motives other than those of the most trivial nature. Can some sort of diabolic possession have driven this intel
ligent, educated, otherwise kindly and well-behaved girl to execute this premeditated atrocity? If we lived in another age, we might be tempted to believe so …

  Chapter Twelve

  Toby stumbled into the small, square, whitewashed room, with its surround of chipped lincrusta, his hair sticking up in tufts around his flushed, sweating face. He had recently had an eye-tooth removed, so that there was a gap at one corner of his mouth, which obliged him perpetually to suck in saliva as he was talking. In his once-expensive suit, now creased and worn, his striped shirt frayed at cuffs and collar and his light brown brogues, cracked over their insteps, he had the air, by turns farouche and ingratiating, of some old conman down on his luck. He held out his shaking, swollen hands but Helen did not take them.

  ‘Oh, Helen, Helen, why, why, why? After all these years. Why?’ He had put the question repeatedly to her before the trial.

  Her answer was unaltered: ‘I had to, Father.’ In the past, she had always addressed him as ‘Daddy’. He felt a strange disorientation that she no longer did so now.

  ‘But it was all so pointless. Useless. You can’t bring him back.’

  ‘No. I can’t do that.’ Her voice was tranquil. ‘I can’t bring anything back.’

  Soon he had left her, emerging from the cell as though from a deathbed, his face contorted, a hand to his forehead.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Ilse came.

  ‘You’ll get parole eventually. It won’t be long. It’s a light sentence anyway.’ Under the overhead bulb in its inverted glass cone, her eyes looked even more protuberant. She fingered the chain of the crucifix which lay beneath her blouse.

  Helen stared at her.

  ‘I’ll visit you whenever they allow me. And I’ll pray for you, Helen.’

  Helen smiled. ‘ Yes, visit me. But the other – no. Pointless.’

  ‘I will, I will!’ Ilse twisted the chain as though she wished to snap it.

  Again Helen smiled. ‘The judge spoke of demonic possession. Do you think that such a thing is possible?’

  Ilse took the question seriously. Only later she decided that Helen had been intending a sardonic joke. She thought for a while. Then: ‘Who can be certain?’

  Ilse knew about demons. Both her parents had, as she had often put it, been ‘fried to a crisp in the gas ovens’.

  It was not impossible.

  Part IV

  INTERLUDE

  From an unpublished, private memoir by Dame Pamela –, one-time Governor of – Women’s Prison: … On the first occasion when I met him, at (of all places) a royal garden party, he confided in me, a total stranger, that even now, as a Bishop, he never felt wholly at ease with the Church. He bit into a cucumber sandwich and then, having masticated for a moment, added: ‘But the important thing is that I feel at ease with God.’ I restrained myself from asking whether he thought that God also felt at ease with him.

  It was because of that encounter that, a few weeks later, I found myself showing him round the prison. ‘Prisons and prisoners have always been an absorbing interest of my life,’ he had remarked on the decorous Palace lawn, on learning who I was. Later his male secretary had rung me to arrange the visit, gushing ‘Oh, the Bish will be chuffed!’, when we had fixed on a date.

  As we wandered about the infirmary, I noticed how closely he peered at every woman worker under thirty. Clearly he had read in the newspapers that it was in the infirmary that Helen Thompson worked. Eventually, not to my surprise, he had come to the conclusion that one girl, with a provocatively flouncing walk and an air of sulky defiance, must be her.

  He lowered his voice, bending his silvery head close to mine. ‘Would I be right in thinking that that, er, girl would be Helen Thompson?’

  ‘Which?’ But I already knew which one he meant.

  ‘The dark one with the tray over there.’

  ‘Good heavens, no! She’s not a murderess. She’s back in here for burglary.’

  ‘Burglary! Really? She hardly seems the type …’

  ‘Over there. With the syringe.’

  ‘That one!’ He was astounded. ‘But she doesn’t look as if she’d ever have been capable …’ He had difficulty in not continuing to stare at her. ‘So insignificant, so – so apparently inoffensive.’

  Not for the first time I thought that for Helen to efface herself so completely argued, paradoxically, a tremendous strength of will.

  ‘Unfortunately, people don’t always look what they are,’ I told him drily. ‘If they did, more criminals would be caught. And some prison officers would never be appointed.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so, I suppose so.’ Furtively glancing at Helen once again, under those extraordinarily long lashes of his, each so distinct that they might have been stiffened and darkened with mascara, he had hardly taken in what I had said to him. That was probably just as well since, even then, I had realized that, if he had a sense of humour, it was one totally different from mine. He turned, with all the elegant, easy authority not so much of his position as of some actor-manager, a Beerbohm Tree or a Forbes-Robertson, of the past, to say, in a voice which a faint, not unattractive impediment made emerge as though he were constantly sucking on a cachou: ‘Then she’s allowed to, er, practise while she’s in here.’

  ‘As a doctor? No. But she’s allowed to help our medical staff.’ I thought it more prudent not to reveal that, due to our chronic shortage of staff, she was performing many of the duties of a doctor.

  ‘That seems rather hard. After all, even in the concentration camps the doctors were allowed to follow their profession.’

  ‘And in some cases performed experiments on their patients,’ I reminded him.

  He gave a queasy smile.

  At that, I conducted him over to the bed of a dying patient, having explained her condition. Long, bony, beautifully manicured hands clasped before him, he looked down at her with what struck me – perhaps I was misjudging him, in my dislike of him – as a purely professional compassion, so that once again I was reminded of one of those great actor-managers of the past, to whose performances my grandmother, a former Gaiety Girl, would take me as a child. The wretched woman, now reduced to no more than a rag and a bone and hank of hair, stared up at his apparition, in pale grey suit, silk shirt and lavender tie, with disbelieving awe. He began to talk to her about God’s infinite mercy and love.

  When we walked out of the infirmary, he gently took my arm, just above the elbow, between thumb and forefinger – I have always hated to be touched even by members of my family – and asked: ‘What precisely is the attitude of the other women to the presence of a child-murderer among them?’

  Managing to disengage myself on the pretext of picking up a used bus ticket and a paper bag littering our path, I explained how, when Helen had first been admitted, I had asked if she wished, at least in her initial weeks, to be kept in solitary confinement under Rule 14; but in a calm, clear voice, head erect, she had replied: ‘No, thank you. I don’t think that’s necessary.’ There had been a single incident two or three days later, when some scalding tea had been ‘accidentally’ tipped over her by one of the women – it was never clearly established which – in charge of the trolley. Then, amazingly, her fellow prisoners seemed to have accepted her, if not as one of themselves, then at least as a human being and not as a monster.

  ‘How do you account for that?’ By now we had returned to my office and he was sipping daintily at a glass of sherry.

  ‘It’s a mystery.’

  I went on to tell him how even women who had done nothing more atrocious than batter their babies at some moment of inadequacy, frustration or rage, were either constantly assaulted or relentlessly cold-shouldered. It might be that Helen, for all her apparent docility, had a personality so strong that she could mesmerize the other women into an unwilling respect for her. It might be – and here I hesitated, since the possibility had already begun to disturb me – that they sensed that she was innocent.

  ‘Innocent!’ He pounced, as
I had expected him to do.

  I shrugged. ‘ So many women who come in here constantly proclaim their innocence. But no one believes them. It would be ironic if the women should have come to believe that Thompson is innocent, even though, so far from ever having made that claim, she has always proclaimed her guilt.’

  ‘I remember the trial. There was something … The judge’s summing-up was scrupulous in its fairness, her confession was fully confirmed by evidence – above all, by the finding of that nightdress and the knife. And yet … yet …’

  As he once again sipped his sherry, lowering his head of thick, grey hair, the waves so deeply and regularly indented that they hardly seemed natural, I almost told him that I, too, had had the same instinct when reading of the trial and that that instinct had been strengthened each time that I had seen Helen, blank-faced and rigid-backed, moving efficiently and silently about her tasks in the infirmary.

  That was the beginning of the Bishop’s crusade, one of many similar ones over a period of years on behalf of prisoners usually far less plausible, to procure either her pardon or, if not her pardon, at least her early release on parole. He would have long sessions with her, from which he would emerge in a strange condition, both baffled and exalted. He wrote letters and gave interviews to the press. Once he confided in me: ‘I was having dinner at No 10 the evening before last and I managed to say a word to the PM about our Helen.’ He was certain, he declared, that she had confessed solely in order to shield someone else. It was clear that by this ‘someone else’ he meant her father; but since, though mortally ill, Thompson was still living, this was something which he could hardly make explicit. At one moment of hyperbole, in a letter to The Guardian, the Bishop had even described Helen as ‘saint-like’.