A Fatal Verdict (The Trials of Sarah Newby)

by Vicary, Tim

  An elderly couple on the city wall paused, entranced by the sight. The wife posed with her back to the Minster, while her husband photographed her. As she stood there, smiling, her eyes met Terry’s and he realized that she was watching him with the same idle curiosity that he was watching her. A thought came to him.

  ‘These curtains,’ he asked the uniformed constable. ‘Were they closed when you came in?’

  ‘No sir, don’t think so. Can’t have been. We haven’t touched anything at all.’

  ‘Then if she got undressed there, where you’re standing,’ he said to Tracy thoughtfully. ‘She would have run the risk of providing a free peepshow to anyone passing outside on the wall.’

  ‘That’s true, sir, yes,’ Tracy agreed. ‘Although there’s frosted glass and a blind in the bathroom. Fancy one too, if you like that sort of thing,’ she added, looking at the pattern of sea horses and ferns on the roller blind which was pulled halfway down.

  ‘Hm,’ said Terry thoughtfully. ‘Maybe if you’re going to kill yourself you’re past caring about modesty.’

  ‘Maybe.’ Tracy looked again into the bathroom and then wandered around the living room. There were several African masks on the wall, and framed photographs of lions and giraffes. ‘Looks like she didn’t care about drying herself either, sir. There’s no towel.’

  ‘Yes there is, in here.’ Terry’s voice came from the bedroom, on the opposite side of the living room from the bathroom. Like the rest of the flat, it was clean and neat, the furnishing new and well cared for. It contained a double bed, a wardrobe, and a chest of drawers. A green towel was flung over the end of the bed. The wardrobe and chest of drawers were both open, and on the floor at the foot of the bed there was a black holdall with clothes and books in it. Terry began unpacking it slowly.

  ‘All female clothes,’ he said, as Tracy watched. ‘A nightie, underwear, tights, blouses, makeup. Two university library books about the Bronte sisters, and last week’s copy of Cosmopolitan, presumably for light relief, main article ‘How to give a man multiple orgasms’.’ He looked up, clumsily trying to lighten the atmosphere. ‘I’m taking this in for closer examination, Tracy.’

  ‘Sir.’ Tracy favoured her superior officer with a deadpan stare, then relented. Terry was handsome enough for a man of his age, but had never been a great Lothario. Always a little too shy, uncertain how to act with women. Perhaps because he’d married so young, left the sexual battlefield early, and was at a loss now he’d suddenly returned to it. Anyway his children probably took up most of his social life. The corner of her mouth twitched slightly. ‘I think you need help.’

  ‘I suppose I would.’ Terry glanced at her, then sighed. ‘Anyway, what does this tell us? It rather looks as though the young lady was moving out, doesn’t it? In which case ...’

  ‘Why break off and kill yourself instead?’

  ‘Exactly.’ Their eyes met again, all traces of humour gone. ‘This begins to look strange, sir, doesn’t it. Unless ...’

  ‘What?’

  ‘She might have been moving in, rather than out. Unpacking that bag, rather than packing it, if you see what I mean.’

  ‘And then tried to kill herself because of what? Something her boyfriend said?’

  ‘Perhaps.’ Tracy gave a tiny shrug. ‘Either way, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. If you’re leaving, why not just go? And if you’re moving in, why start by getting in the bath to slash your wrists?’

  ‘Why indeed?’ Terry swung the knife thoughtfully in its plastic bag, as though it could give him inspiration. ‘Why, in any case, do it in your boyfriend’s flat? Was it a cry for help, perhaps? And if so, what was he doing, all the while?’

  ‘He did ring 999, sir,’ Bill Rankin volunteered. ‘And he claims he attempted first aid.’

  ‘The least he could do, in the circumstances,’ said Terry softly. He walked back across the living room into the kitchen, where there were some carrots, onions and mushrooms ready sliced in a saucepan, with a half-finished glass of red wine next to them. On the wall was a photo of a young man standing proudly beside a Lotus sports car. There was a telephone on the wall too, its receiver smeared with blood. ‘He had blood on his hands when he phoned, then.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Constable Rankin had followed him in. ‘He was soaking wet and covered with blood when we arrived. He said he’d found her like that in the bath and tried to get her out before he phoned. Or after - he wasn’t very clear. He was in a right panic, in fact. Couldn’t stop talking or flustering all the time he was here.’

  Terry noticed the number 1 flashing on the answerphone, and pressed the play button. A metallic voice began to speak from the tape. ‘You have ... one ... message. Message one.’ Then a girl’s voice; somewhat hesitant, Terry thought, with long pauses between each phrase as though she wasn’t quite sure what to say.

  ‘Hi. Dave, it’s me ... if you’re there pick this up, will you ... Dave? ... well I’m coming over this evening but don’t get your hopes up ... it’s just ... well I’ll see you if you’re around and if not it doesn’t matter ... just ... don’t let there be anyone else there, all right? ... bye.’ The phone clicked and began its mechanical recitation. ‘Sunday, three .. twenty .. seven.. p.m. End of messages. To delete all messages, press delete.’

  Terry looked thoughtfully at Tracy and Bill Rankin. ‘So, what do we make of that? She’s coming over, she wants him to be alone but not to get his hopes up, he starts to prepare a meal ...’ He glanced around the kitchen curiously, at the sliced vegetables, the half-finished glass of wine. There were drops of what looked like bloody water here and there on the floor. ‘Or at least one of them did. Was it him who did the cooking or her, do you think?’

  ‘Hardly likely to be her in the circumstances, sir, surely,’ Tracy said. ‘I mean, what are you saying - she stood here chopping vegetables and then thought, sod this for a lark, I’ll get in the bath and put an end to it all. Just like that?’

  ‘Not likely, is it?’ Terry agreed. ‘But then if it wasn’t her, it must have been him. He was standing here cooking while she was slicing her wrists in the bath. What sense does that make? Anyway, where’s the knife?’

  ‘Knife?’ Tracy gazed at him bemused. ‘In your hand, sir. In that evidence bag.’

  ‘Not this one, Trace.’ Terry waved an arm around the kitchen. ‘I mean the one in here. The one that chopped these vegetables. Where is it?’

  Tracy looked, and saw what he meant. There was no knife on the worktop, or in the sink, or on the floor. There was a knife block in a corner with three other knives in, but each, when she pulled it out, looked clean. There was one empty space in the block.

  ‘The knife that isn’t there,’ Terry said. ‘Now what does that tell you?’

  Tracy shook her head. ‘I’m not sure, sir. Either she was cutting the vegetables after all, or - what? She came in here to ask lover boy for a knife? Not very likely, is it? Can I borrow that for a moment, I’m in the bath and I need to cut my wrists? He must have known. Unless ...’ Her eyes met his, widening slightly as the same thought occurred to them both.

  ‘Unless he cut them for her,’ Terry nodded grimly. ‘It begins to look like that, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘He wasn’t here, sir,’ the young constable interrupted.

  ‘What?’ Terry turned away, surprised.

  ‘He wasn’t here. He was out when it happened, shopping, then he came back and found her like this. That’s his story, anyway. He told us, over and over again. Couldn’t stop saying it. He went to the corner shop on Bootham and bought those flowers.’ He indicated the vase on the table in the living room.

  ‘Ah. I see.’ Terry walked back into the living room and inspected them curiously. ‘Which you wouldn’t do, of course, if you were about to kill your girlfriend. Would you, constable?’

  ‘Me, sir? No!’ Bill Rankin looked shocked.

  ‘Unless he bought them to put them on her grave, but that’s too soon,’ Terry murmured to himself softly. ‘H
e came in with the flowers and found her, you say?’

  ‘So he said, sir, yes.’

  ‘Then he rang 999. Did he try to help her first?’

  ‘So he said, sir, yes. He was burbling something about sticking a plaster on her wrists. As if that would stop it. The paramedics were right sick of him.’

  ‘So at what point did he do the flower arranging, do you think, Trace?’ Terry studied the flowers curiously, then lifted them out of the vase. Water dripped from their stems. ‘No sign of blood on these.’

  ‘It’s a regular domestic scene, sir, isn’t it? Meal prepared, flowers on the table, glass of wine, and then this ...’

  Terry gestured towards the bloody bathroom. ‘Does it make sense to you?’

  Tracy shook her head. ‘Not as a normal suicide, sir, no. I mean, if you really mean to kill yourself, why go over to your boyfriend’s flat and do it in his bath? While he stands in the kitchen cooking a meal?’

  ‘Or goes out shopping,’ murmured Bill Rankin.

  ‘Maybe she didn’t like his ideas for the menu,’ Tracy suggested. ‘Or they had some kind of quarrel we don’t know about.’

  Terry shrugged. ‘So what are we looking at here? Cry for help, a serious attempt at suicide, or ...’

  ‘Attempted murder, disguised to look like suicide,’ said Tracy, completing his thought.

  ‘Exactly. In which case, we assume, until persuaded otherwise, that a serious crime may well have been committed here and get a SOCO team over here straight away to do a full examination. I want you, Bill, to put a guard on the door, make sure no one - including the owner - comes in or out until they arrive, okay? I’ll get on the phone to them right away. And then I think you and I’d best get over to the hospital and start asking a few questions, don’t you, Trace? If that young woman’s still alive maybe she can solve some of these mysteries for us. And if not ...’ He sighed, contemplating a long night’s work ahead, and the emotional strains it was likely to bring. ‘Well, either way, there’s going to be her family to contact, as well.’

  4. Phone call

  THE PHONE call came when Shelley’s mother, Kathryn Walters, was on the treadmill. A bouncy, energetic woman in her late forties, she had joined the health club three years ago after a cruel comment from her husband, and had found it so compulsive that she now came three or four times a week, as often as the demands of running her home and business would allow. She valued it equally for the warm comforting afterglow of the endorphins flooding through her brain, and for the physical results whose evidence she saw every day from her mirror and weighing scales. A determined woman, she had joined battle with the forces of ageing and was convinced that, for the moment at least, she had them well and truly on the run. Life, for Kathryn, had always been a struggle for achievement, and now that one daughter was married and the other settled at university she had time and energy to expend on herself.

  She had just completed ten minutes power walking and had switched the machine up to jog when her phone rang, its little extract from Don Giovanni, in her handbag on the floor in front of her. She always brought her small handbag in here with her; there had been a spate of thefts a few months back and she didn’t trust the lockers. Anyway her eldest daughter Miranda sometimes rang from America on Sunday nights and she wouldn’t want to miss that, wherever she was. So even though she was nicely warmed up, skin glowing and breath coming smoothly, she stopped the machine and picked up the phone, just in case.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Kath? Thank God you’re there.’ Kathryn recognized the voice of Jane Miller, a friend who was now a senior nurse in Accident and Emergency. The next words turned the sweat on her skin to ice. ‘It’s Shelley - she’s here in Casualty. It’s very serious, Kath, you’d better come at once.’

  ‘Shelley? Why, what’s happened?’

  ‘I can’t say for sure, but she’s lost a lot of blood. They’re doing all they can but it’s serious, Kath. It seems she cut her wrists.’

  ‘What? Shelley - no!’ At the tone of her voice heads turned on the exercise machines, some concerned, some irritated, others blankly incurious. Kathryn snatched up her bag and began to walk towards the changing room, her phone still at her ear. ‘What do you mean, cut her wrists? Has there been an accident?’

  ‘It’s hard to say, Kath. She was found in a bath. Look, where are you? Is there anyone who can drive you?’

  ‘I’m at the gym. No, that doesn’t matter, I’ll be OK.’ She was in the changing room as she spoke, fumbling for the key to her locker when she thought, what the hell am I doing, I don’t need to change, I’ll go as I am. ‘I’ll be there in ten minutes, Jane, I’m at the Swallow Chase. My God, Jane, how is she? How bad is it?’

  ‘It’s quite bad. She’s lost a lot of blood. They’re giving her a transfusion now. Her boyfriend’s here, at least.’

  ‘Christ, no! Not him!’ Kathryn was in the car park as she spoke, still in her tracksuit and trainers, squeezing the button on her keys to unlock the car, opening the door with one hand and talking into the phone with the other. ‘What’s he doing there? She’s left him!’

  This question was beyond Jane Miller, so she ignored it and responded instead to the panic in her friend’s voice. ‘Kath, for heaven’s sake drive carefully, will you? Think what you’re doing - you won’t help Shelley by causing another accident. Is Andrew there with you?’

  ‘No. I’ll call him.’ She clicked the phone off and drove out of the car park, not even noticing the young man who had to skip for safety into a rose bed as she spun the tyres on the gravel. Shelley, in Casualty, with cut wrists - a transfusion! Thank God she was so close. The health club was in the Swallow Chase hotel by York’s Knavesmire racecourse, only a couple of miles through the city centre to the hospital. It was a pleasant, sunny evening in May; as she accelerated towards the city she saw a father holding up his daughter to pat the noses of some horses under the trees, and children flying kites and playing football on the Knavesmire beyond. The sight seemed surreal to her, an insult - people casually going about their normal business while Shelley was bleeding to death. No, don’t say that! This can’t be happening, she thought - I’ll get there and find it’s all a joke, a misunderstanding.

  But Jane Miller wouldn’t joke about a thing like this, and the fact that Shelley’s boyfriend David was there in the hospital too added a macabre touch that terrified her as much as the news itself.. Ever since she had met that boy Kathryn had loathed him. He was rude, arrogant, idle, and apparently committed to turning Shelley not only against her own parents but also against all the habits of industry and self-reliance which she, with a little help from Andrew, had worked so hard for so many years to instill. In a few weeks, beginning last December, Shelley had changed from being a moderately confident, communicative young woman to someone they hardly recognized - anxious, withdrawn, obstinate, nervous as she had been in the worst of her teenage years, prone to increasingly wild mood swings and defiant in her defence of this new and unpleasant boyfriend.

  That, at least, was how Kathryn saw it. Shelley had begun at university last October, and all had gone well until six weeks later her steady boyfriend of several years, Graham, had met another girl from Sheffield and, in the cruel modern jargon, ‘dumped’ her. This, of course, had sent Shelley into a depression, but instead of seeking comfort from her mother, as she would have when younger, she set out to deal with matters on her own, and, to Kathryn’s horror, had somehow come up with this arrogant, manipulative, pretentious boy David Kidd. Every time she thought of him her blood boiled and her mind seethed with anger and frustration - how any daughter of hers could be duped by such a self-regarding, deceitful ... the adjectives piled up like stones she would hurl at him if only she could.

  And yet he was Shelley’s choice, so she had tried to respect it. And not everyone loathed him as she did. Shelley’s father Andrew, whom she worshipped, had welcomed David into their house at Christmas, being charming and pleasant as he so easily could. When David had
seemed rude, Andrew excused his lack of manners as mere awkwardness, telling Kathryn he hoped that Shelley’s love would transform him from a toad into a prince. It was a naive hope which had failed as Kathryn had always known it would. Even though, just as in the fairy tale, Shelley had not only kissed the toad but no doubt made love to him many times as well, it hadn’t transformed him at all; he remained just what he had always been: an arrogant, deceitful fraud who should have had no place whatsoever in their bright, intelligent daughter’s life. If any transformation had taken place it had been the other way: his slime, his idleness and cynicism had rubbed off on her, making her a stranger to her own mother - and to her liberal father too.

  Cut wrists ... suicide. Kathryn’s own hands trembled as she gripped the wheel and slammed through the gears with unaccustomed violence as the lights changed in Blossom Street. Surely that was impossible. However sulky and obstreperous her youngest daughter had become she had never harmed herself before. Quite the reverse - she had always turned her anger on her parents, teachers or friends, whoever was irritating her at the time. She was more likely to cut someone else’s throat than damage herself in any way, Kathryn thought. So this must be an accident; either that, or something worse. Even when her marks had gone down after Christmas she never turned things inwards to blame herself; her character wasn’t like that. She blamed her parents all over again, her tutors, everyone except herself and the real villain of the piece, that ghoul who was waiting with her at the hospital. Christ! Kathryn swung the car aggressively towards the station, thinking if only I was a man, if only Andrew had been tough enough to slam the door in that flashy young man’s face when he first appeared. If only I could get my daughter back again, healthy and sane ...

  But then that was exactly what had happened, a week ago. Shelley had come home in a tearful rage to say that she was leaving David, he had deceived her with another woman and it was over, it had all been a dreadful mistake. Joy had leaped in Kathryn’s heart and she had broken open a bottle of wine to celebrate. Shelley had embraced her mother for the first time for months. Her eyes were open now, Shelley told her, she understood how David had tried to manipulate her and draw her away from her own family while lying to her about his other girl, or girls, however many there were. He was history now, she was going to start her life again, change everything. She acknowledged the dreadful marks she had had this term but her last essay had been better and she was going to work hard from now on.