by Kate Helm
The painting is almost finished but I need one final session. Is there any way we could meet again? Ideally without interruptions.
Thirty seconds later, I jump when the reply comes through.
Let me see what I can do. JF
I shower away the headachy feeling, and return to work. Last night’s notes and sketches make more sense to me than I’d expected. My gut still tells me justice has not been done.
I got nowhere again searching for the Copse View girls, so I decide to focus on Sharon instead, looking for reports of her death in December 2001. The archives are limited but eventually I find a story from the Bristol evening paper, with the fuzzy image of a young Sharon that I half-recognise from a couple of the longer background reports around Jim the tragic hero. Her kids are a lot like her: their faces thin and thoughtful.
On the page opposite is a photograph of the Clifton Suspension Bridge, showing the stunning architecture, and the terrifying drop to the open gorge below.
The headline reads: Loving mum jumped from suicide bridge despite husband’s pleas, inquest hears.
I magnify the text and position the screen so I can just about read the newsprint.
A Gloucestershire mum-of-two, who travelled to Bristol specifically to commit suicide, ignored her husband’s desperate pleas and jumped to her death from a ledge as he watched helplessly, an inquest heard yesterday.
Sharon Fielding, from Ashdean in the Forest of Dean, had been suffering from depression for over a decade, the coroner was told. Her GP first prescribed anti-depressant medication after the birth of her son, now aged 15, and the treatment was effective for some years.
However, Mrs Fielding, aged 34, became depressed again approximately six months before her death and refused to seek help. On the day of her death, she waited until her son and elder daughter had left for school, and then took the train to Bristol.
In a statement read out at the inquest, James Fielding explained that he came home mid-morning to check on his wife, as he’d been concerned about her mood at breakfast. He found the house empty, and a note on the kitchen table which alarmed him. Remembering a previous conversation where she’d talked about taking her life, he drove to the notorious suicide spot over the Avon Gorge and searched for her.
Mr Fielding realised she had climbed up onto a ledge on the buttress wall on the Clifton side of the bridge, without being noticed by passers-by. He abandoned his car and climbed up beside her to try to talk to her. They had a conversation, but she then decided to jump.
Details of the conversation were not revealed in court, but a cyclist witness told how he saw two figures holding hands. He called 999 but before police arrived, the female figure disappeared from view.
Mrs Fielding’s body was found later that day. She had suffered multiple fractures and catastrophic injuries on impact, and was found to be twice the legal limit for drinking. The note Mrs Fielding left was lost in the struggle.
The coroner recorded a verdict of suicide. He noted that barriers newly erected along the sides of the bridge have reduced the number of attempts. The buttress walls are not currently protected in this way for architectural reasons, but this is under review.
I read the article three times. Poor Sharon was only three years older than I am now. And her life had been a struggle from the start. I remember Jim saying in our first sitting that they’d hoped to overcome all the – what did he call it? – ‘messed-up stuff’ from their childhoods to give their own children love.
It seemed so believable when he’d said it. Now I’m not so sure.
There’s nothing here to support Daniel’s accusation that his father pushed his mother to her death. But the photo of the bridge shows how hard it must have been for the witness or anyone else to get a clear view of what happened in her last moments.
And maybe it’s because I’ve spent my career listening to liars, but it seems a pretty big coincidence that Jim found his wife so easily. And an even bigger one that the note that explained why she killed herself blew away in the chaos.
Daniel knows more, he must do. He wouldn’t have set fire to Jim’s house if he hadn’t truly believed his father was a killer.
And that’s if he even did set fire to it. I never managed to ask him during my visit. Everything seems to shift from my grasp, as unfocused as my vision.
I need to ask him outright, but I’ll never get back inside the jail. Perhaps a letter could work – one that convinces him there could still be justice for his mother. I’ll have to pretend I believe everything he told me. The idea makes me uncomfortable but I need to make Daniel see I am the only person who cares.
Apart from whoever sent me these photos, of course.
As I grab a notebook to draft a letter, my phone buzzes.
The coast is clear on Saturday morning. Will that work for you? JF
The timing of his text unnerves me, although of course he is just responding to my own.
Saturday would only give me two days to get my act together, to build the evidence, so I can ask him the right questions. I find the idea of being alone with him in that glass house, behind those impenetrable white walls, scares me now.
But I can take precautions. Tell the publisher and Neena. Place all my evidence somewhere for safekeeping in case . . . Well, in case Daniel is right and his father does believe he can get away with murder.
I’ve seen enough psychopaths in the dock over the last thirteen years to know it’s their arrogance that makes them dangerous.
But I have one thing that makes me dangerous too.
I have nothing left to lose.
I’ll be there.
Dear Daniel,
I know you probably don’t want to hear from me again, but first of all, I wanted to apologise for cornering you after the art class. I thought you might have wanted to talk, but I should have realised how vulnerable you must be feeling.
So why am I not leaving you alone? Because what you said got me looking again at everything that has happened in Ashdean since your mother died, and before. And I think you might be right. There have been too many deaths.
I won’t write more because I know you fear others are watching or listening.
At our meeting, you wanted to know what your case had to do with me?
The truth is, I know what it is to lose those you love, under horrible circumstances. My father murdered my mother and my brother when I was eleven. Even now, I don’t know why he took them.
I’m not telling you to make you feel sorry for me. I just want you to know that I understand how impossible it is to put some things behind you. And it ought to be easier for me – my father is in prison, at least. Without justice, it must be even harder. You can’t let him get away with this.
I’m sorry for the drawings I did thirteen years ago. If you give me a chance to help you now, I can put some of that right. Make him pay. Please call or write back. I won’t let you down again.
Georgia Sage
51
Now I’m not allowed to drive – the thought of how dangerous I was behind the wheel makes me shudder – I take the train from Brighton to Bristol, a four-hour journey, leaving on the earliest route west. I’m travelling a day early: before I see Jim again, I have some research to do.
On the seat next to me is the canvas, already marked in pencil with a composition based on my initial studies and photographs: the ghost of the portrait to come. Not that it matters now, but I have to keep up the pretence.
In the painting that will never be finished, Jim Fielding would take up almost every inch of the space, with no more than a hint of the chair bearing his weight. Even for an artist with full sight, it would be a challenge to capture his complexities.
Can he be a hero and a psychopath?
I texted Benjamin the date and time of the next sitting, because I have no idea how Jim might react to my questions.
‘We apologise for the breakdown of the air conditioning system in Carriages E and H,’ the guard announces, soun
ding bored. ‘Like the rest of us, it’s struggling in the heat.’
My carriage fills up with a hen party travelling to Bristol. I’m shoehorned into a corner seat, facing backwards, and I have to put the canvas on my lap. The women laugh and pass around bottles of prosecco, even though it’s not even ten o’clock yet. My loneliness feels absolute – even Charlie and Pink are nowhere to be seen.
As I let my eyes half-close, the rural landscape beyond the glass shifts from soothing to extraordinary. Bright green serpents coil and hiss between the rows of crops on a distant hillside.
I hold my breath, startled but also awestruck. Dr Nash had warned me that this is ‘normal’ for Charles Bonnet patients. It explains the brick walls I saw on the train back from Devon, before I knew what was wrong with me.
Now I am no longer afraid of madness, I can appreciate their psychedelic beauty.
When I blink, they disappear.
‘We will shortly be arriving at Bristol Temple Meads, where this train terminates.’
Sweat drips down my forehead as I lift my backpack off the rack, hugging the canvas to my body as I leave the station. When I tell the taxi driver where I want to go, he gives me a nervous look.
‘Not planning to jump, are you, lover?’
I smile. No. But I want to try to understand why someone would.
*
He drops me next to a green on the Clifton side of the bridge. I’ve never been here before and that makes me edgy: since my diagnosis, I’ve avoided unfamiliar places.
At first, the structure doesn’t look impressive. But once I get past the modern toll booths and onto the bridge itself, everything changes. Giant piers made of huge stones rise up ahead of me, linked by white girders stretching the impossible gap between cliffs. We’re higher up than I expected and already just the thought of a person falling onto those unforgiving sandbanks below is giving me vertigo.
There’s a paved viewing area to the side of the pier: I can look directly into the void. The view is spectacular: little rows of rainbow cottages running up and down the hill like the keys of a child’s xylophone. Down below, the water snakes through brown mudflats. It looks soft, but I think of the broken bones Sharon Fielding suffered. It is anything but a gentle death.
I’ve been depressed, but I cannot imagine jumping, and definitely not if it meant leaving behind two children who needed me. What kind of a mother could do that?
But if Jim pushed her, knowing it would leave their kids motherless, what does that make him?
It’s such a long way to fall. There would have been enough time to think, to regret.
For a moment, I think I see two figures at the bottom – Charlie and Pink. I blink, and they’re gone.
I step back from the edge, vertigo making me nauseous. The visit has achieved nothing.
But I still have two more people to see before I confront Jim. I need everything I can get.
52
I take a cab back to Temple Meads: my journey the reverse of the last trip Sharon Fielding ever made.
Pink sits across the aisle from me on the train and then follows me onto the bus from Gloucester to Ashdean. There are seventy-three stops before I arrive back in Jim’s domain. Seventy-three chances for me to change my mind, turn back.
The road narrows and the forest encroaches on us so that the bus driver has to put his headlights on, though it’s still early afternoon. Finally, the road dips, as we travel down into Ashdean.
‘Your stop at last, darling,’ the driver calls out.
I get off at the square and walk towards the pub. A cabbie watches me, fanning his face with a copy of the Sun. Will he be reporting back to Jim later?
When I arrive at the pub the dog scrabbles against the door.
‘Rambo recognises you,’ the landlord says as the dog leaps up, trying to lick my face. ‘On your way to visit “family” again, is it?’
He winks, to show he’s seen through me.
‘I’ve come back to paint the landscape,’ I say, making sure the canvas is fully covered.
He raises an eyebrow but says nothing. Has he been speaking to Jim too?
At the top of the stairs, he takes me right instead of left. My room is higher up than the first time, and in the distance, I can just make out the blur of Jim’s house, surrounded by white walls.
I shower to get rid of the stickiness from my journey, then head right out again, a baseball cap pulled down low on my face. I don’t know if it makes me more obvious or less, but at least it stops the sun making my eyes even more useless.
The walk back towards Cherry Blossom Lane is unshaded and I’m soon as sweaty as I was before showering. When I arrive, the estate is quiet, as it was the first time I came. Then the nosy neighbour appears as though she’s been expecting me, dyed black hair tied back, an apron tight around her belly.
‘You again.’
‘Me again.’ I try to make out her expression. Can I trust her? A gossip is useful, but also likely to tell everyone about me as soon as I’ve gone. It’s a calculated risk. ‘I came to take you up on that cuppa.’
She chuckles. ‘That all, is it?’ But she turns back towards her house, and leads the way through the back door, into her kitchen. ‘I’m Chrissie. You?’
‘Georgia.’
Chrissie nods, and for a moment I wonder if she already knows that.
‘How do you take your tea?’
Not at all, if I can help it.
‘Weak. No milk or sugar.’
The room smells of minced beef and vanilla air freshener, sweet and cloying. She’s making a lasagne. I look around. It’s a tip, but homely. An imposing oak dresser stretches across one wall, covered in photos and postcards. There’s a wicker basket stuffed with children’s games and soft toys on the floor, and a battered high chair next to the wooden table.
‘The grandkids,’ she says. ‘Last one’s all but grown out of that now, but I can’t quite admit it to myself. Kept it in case one of my boys has another. Anyway, I think you told me a fib, last time.’
‘I’m sure I didn’t.’
‘You said you weren’t media. But you’re painting him, aren’t you?’
The room is airless.
‘It’s not for the news, it’s for a book.’
She gives me a long look.
‘Splitting hairs. Gonna be a pretty picture, is it?’
‘Not pretty, but interesting.’ I clear my throat. ‘I’m trying to build up some more background on . . . how Jim is seen. In the town. To make it a rounded portrait.’
She places a large teapot on the table, wrapped in a hand-knitted pink cosy with piggy ears, then returns to her work, spreading an earthenware dish with the last of some grey-brown mince.
‘Thought you’d get more gossip, you mean?’
‘I—’
‘I was surprised he let you do it, when I heard. He’s not a fan of snoopers. But I suspect you can be quite persuasive. He likes pretty things. As long as they stay pretty.’
I hear the innuendo.
‘Do you like Jim, Chrissie?’
She smiles as she arranges lasagne sheets so they form a solid layer, then pours over a thick white sauce.
‘What kind of a question is that?’
‘Because I’m not sure if I’m . . . safe with him.’
I hold my breath. I’d planned this as a gambit, but it is a risk. She could have a hotline to Fielding.
‘Safe? Well, are you planning to fall in love with him?’
She stops scattering grated cheese over the top of the dish while she waits for my answer.
‘No.’
‘Then you’re probably all right. It only seems to get dodgy for the women he cares about.’ She laughs. ‘Or their husbands.’
Robert O’Neill.
I picture my drawings, my mind map. I have to get her to say more.
‘I have heard rumours that Jim finds it hard to take no for an answer.’
‘You worried he won’t be able to resist y
ou, Georgia?’
She turns away and puts the food in the oven: the door snaps shut.
‘He’s been very kind,’ I say, ‘but I’ve heard people say stuff about him. Sometimes I think, no smoke without fire.’
Chrissie snorts. ‘Not the most delicate way of putting it, is it? When you think about what happened to his house. And his second wife.’
As I look up, embarrassed, I spot Charlie sitting next to the toy box, feet tapping on the tessellated vinyl floor. The burn scar on his face glows crimson.
‘But I hear you,’ she continues, taking off her apron and sitting down to pour herself a tea. ‘Truth is, the only people who really understood Jim Fielding are long gone.’
‘Dead?’
‘Or disappeared in a puff of smoke . . .’ Chrissie giggles at the unintended pun. ‘You got me putting my foot in it now.’
‘Who do you mean?’
‘His parents are dead, of course. And his wives. I don’t think poor Tessa knew much, mind. Sweet but not the sharpest knife in the drawer. But Sharon understood her husband better than anyone. Which means you have to ask yourself – what made her jump?’
‘Why do you think she died?’
Chrissie glances at my ring finger.
‘Ever been married?’ When I shake my head, she carries on. ‘Every marriage has its own rules. Not the ones you agree to in church. I watched them for years, Sharon and Jim Fielding, and I always thought they loved each other more than most.’
‘Watched them?’
‘Well, heard them, really. The walls in these houses are made of paper and glue. He’d be rough as you like outside the house, but inside, what I heard, he did his best to cope with her moods.
‘But then Robert showed up. Jim’s long-lost pal, come to raise a family round the corner from his old mate, with his new wife and little boy in tow. And Emma was cute as a button. What man wouldn’t have his head turned?’
Cute as a button? The woman I saw with Robert on the night of Jim’s engagement party looked washed out.