Seb lifted his head.
‘Why? What did she say?’
The DI slowly and deliberately pointed a finger at the reporter.
‘Meriel told Probus she thinks she’s still in love with you.’
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
JANUARY 1977
He took the whole day off on the morning she was due to be sentenced. He couldn’t bear to be in the newsroom, listening to all the gossip and sensationalised chit-chat as details of the hearing clattered in on the teleprinter in dribs and drabs.
He went fell-walking, far away from radios and televisions and early-edition evening papers.
Seb had only had one letter from Meriel since she was remanded for reports, and he hadn’t replied to it. She’d made it clear she’d send anything he wrote to her straight back to him, unread. He had understood.
Staring out high above little Buttermere, which wasn’t much bigger than the brave puddle nearby that called itself Rydal Water, he pushed the memory of that lonely letter away.
Forty miles to the north, in a dusty Carlisle courtroom, Meriel was learning her fate. He’d find out what it was soon enough. For now, it was enough to think of her as he sucked the freezing air into his lungs, the wind up here kicking up tiny blizzards in the powdery snow that settled into miniature snowdrifts around his feet.
Maybe he and Meriel would come up here together one day – a good day – and he could tell her how he had stood here, thinking of her, on a very bad day a long time ago.
The winter sun was beginning to set over Ennerdale over to the west.
It was time to go back down.
He saw the newspaper hoarding on the corner of Warwick Road, its banner a silent scream into the darkness of a midwinter’s evening.
DEATH BY ROLEX – BUT MERCY FOR MERIEL.
He stopped to buy a special edition of the Carlisle Evening News, but he didn’t want to sit alone in his flat reading it so he went to the pub instead. There, over a pint of Theakston’s and a stale ham sandwich, Seb learned what had befallen the woman he had loved, and then betrayed.
FIVE YEARS FOR MANSLAUGHTER – BUT JUDGE SAYS MERIEL A VICTIM TOO
By our special correspondent
Fallen radio star Meriel Kidd is tonight beginning a five-year sentence for the killing of her husband, millionaire businessman Cameron Bruton, who drowned last summer in Ullswater.
It is only now that the full facts of a death previously shrouded in mystery have come to light, and a gold Rolex watch emerged at the centre of the lethal drama.
After submissions this morning from both prosecution and defence counsels, Judge Susan Sladen said she accepted Kidd’s plea of guilty to the lesser charge of manslaughter, rather than murder.
Bruton drowned while swimming close to the couple’s boat. In a formal admission made by her QC, The Rt Hon. Crispin Bocage, Miss Kidd said she had deliberately thrown her husband’s expensive watch into the water in the hope he would dive after it. She said she was fully aware there had already been a spate of accidental drownings in the Lakes during last summer’s heatwave, when swimmers encountering icy water just below the superheated surface got into serious difficulties.
Judge Sladen said it was clear Miss Kidd had hoped the same thing would happen to her husband. But she continued: ‘Nevertheless, this was not a premeditated act. The accused was acting on a momentary impulse, and there was no certainty of what the outcome would be, hence my decision to accept a plea of manslaughter.’
Turning to motive, the judge said three separate psychiatric reports into Miss Kidd’s state of mind on the day of the killing showed ‘beyond doubt’ that she was under severe stress.
‘Mr Bruton had made specific threats of a sexual nature against his wife, threats which one could almost say were akin to blackmail, and she was extremely upset. I have seen documentary evidence for the basis of these threats and I believe they were serious and credible.’
Judge Sladen went on to say that despite public appearances to the contrary, the Brutons’ marriage was ‘deeply toxic’ and the couple had not slept in the same bed for months. She added: ‘I also accept that Miss Kidd’s husband was a profoundly controlling individual who sought to dominate every aspect of his wife’s daily life, checking up on the most minor of expenditures. Again, I have seen documents to support this; bank statements peppered with question marks, exclamation marks and highly critical comments over what were clearly innocent and modest transactions.’
In summary, Judge Sladen said that Meriel Kidd had ‘snapped when she was unable to take any more’.
However, attempting to induce her husband to drown was ‘completely unacceptable’.
‘That is what the divorce courts are for,’ the judge told her.
Meriel Kidd is expected to be transferred in due course from the remand wing where she is currently being held near Durham to an open prison in Kent. Legal commentators say that although she has been sentenced to five years, she is likely to be released on licence after serving three.
Her former employers, Lake District FM, refused to comment after today’s hearing.
Seb folded the paper and drank what was left of his beer.
Three years.
He would wait for her.
If she’d have him.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
Dear Miss Kidd,
I hope you don’t mind me writing to you like this, but I felt I finally had to after reading about the outcome of your case in the papers last month and seeing on the news what you have been through. As a matter of fact I don’t believe your ‘crime’ should have come to court at all, and if it did you should have been let off.
I am sure I am not the only woman who does not blame you for one second for doing what you did. I too am married to a horrible, domineering man who loves to bully and humiliate me at every opportunity. I too wish my husband were dead. We aren’t rich enough to own boats or expensive watches but if I had been in your shoes that day, I would have done exactly as you did.
The other night Hugh was drunk and I had to help him up to bed. Far from being grateful he insulted me and was foul to me all the way up the stairs. I don’t mind admitting when we got to the top I was of a mind to just push him back down again and hope he’d break his stupid neck at the bottom. I would have been glad if he had. I only just managed to stop myself, I can tell you.
You are far from being alone.
Yours sincerely,
Jane Smith. (Not my real name because maybe one day I really WILL do something I shouldn’t. Or rather SHOULD.)
Sitting on her bunk bed in the cell she shared with a quiet alcoholic convicted of arson – the woman had burned down her employer’s office after being sacked for poor timekeeping – Meriel was surprised they’d let that last letter through. Her post wasn’t particularly heavily censored, but the ones that contained threats against husbands or boyfriends usually had such references blacked out with thick felt-tip pen. A friendly warder had told her that the most explicit ones were destroyed – usually after spending a few days pinned to the staff canteen wall, where they met with general approval and were toasted in mugs of tea.
She slid another from its envelope. There were a lot that morning – a couple of dozen at least.
Dear Meriel (if I may presume to call you that),
I run a women’s discussion group in Plymouth and I can say hand on heart that I cannot remember a subject that has so unified us as has your plight.
The papers are saying that the judge was lenient with you partly because she was a woman, but actually we all thought she should have let you go free after hearing what you’d been put through for so many years. Yes, it is wrong to kill, but you didn’t exactly hold the swine under, did you? At the end of our discussion I asked for a show of hands to the question: ‘in the same circs., how many of you would have done the same?’
I’m not saying it was unanimous but you got a clear majority, Meriel. I think if you’d gone before a jury, you might well have g
ot off.
Chin up. There’s a lot of support waiting out here for you when you get out.
With warmest wishes,
Zelda Manning, chair, Plymouth Women Against Abuse.
Meriel sighed. Maybe she had been wrong to confess to manslaughter. Perhaps she should have fought her corner in open court in front of a jury of her peers. There were usually more women than men on juries. And with a woman judge . . .
There was no point agonising about it now. She reached for another letter.
Dear Miss Kidd, or should I say Miss Bitch?
I think what you did was despicable and my wife concurs wholeheartedly with me. She agrees that it is better I write this letter as I am considerably more fluent with words than she is.
Five years inside for being a murderous bitch? What a joke. You’ll be out in three, unless another bitch in there sticks a knife into you, which I definitely think they will, and so does my wife.
We both hope you rot in hell.
Yours, from someone who thinks we should never have got rid of the rope. (My wife concurs wholeheartedly with me on this also, you bitch.)
PS Do you sign autographs? In which case please send one to above address, made out to Henry and Tabitha. Thankyou. SAE enclosed.
Meriel smiled. There had been a few like that. Not many, but far from unsettling her, bonkers hate mail cheered her up for some reason. Something to do with the theatre of the absurd, perhaps.
Outside, above the walkway that ran along the length of the cell block, an electric bell rang loudly. It meant that in five minutes it would be time for free association. Meriel had only been transferred to this jail a week ago but already she was something of a folk heroine. Most of the other prisoners wanted to hear her story and yesterday one had confided that, years earlier, she had calmly watched her first husband choke to death ‘right in front of me at the kitchen table’.
‘It was a bit of brisket got stuck,’ she whispered. ‘I suppose I should have whacked him between the shoulder blades but as I’d never dared hit him back after one of his beatings, I didn’t see why I should start now.’
Already Meriel was beginning to assemble accounts such as this, and the letters that arrived every day, into the rough shape of a book. Probus had been right. Judging by the support she had received already, there really might be a way back for her when she eventually rejoined the outside world.
The one letter she yearned to receive more than any other was from Seb. It had yet to arrive.
But that was entirely down to her.
She’d kept a copy of the one she’d sent to him, shortly after she had been remanded to Durham. Meriel dug it out now from her foot-locker.
Seb
I want you to know that I forgive you for what you did. I have thought a great deal about it and I can see that you genuinely believed you had no other choice, and strange as it may sound, I respect you for it. It must have been extraordinarily difficult for you to decide what to do.
I am only sorry you felt unable to come to me first, but I truly understand and accept that the shock of reading the things I had written would have been devastating. When I think back to some of the descriptions on those pages I can scarcely credit that I was the person who wrote them. You must have been in turmoil as you read chapter after chapter after chapter. And of course, your instincts about what I had done (remember asking me outright if I’d killed Cameron?) were absolutely right.
Of course now I wish I had told you everything, right from the start, right from that night when you first came to Cathedral Crag after Cameron had drowned. But I was terrified of two things: being found out, and losing you.
And now look at me. Both those things have happened. Clever old Meriel, eh?
The one thing I never lied about, Seb, was that I loved you. And I think I still do, however hard that may be for you to believe.
But whatever your feelings are for me, please, please don’t come here. Don’t ever, ever visit me in prison. I couldn’t bear it. And please don’t write, either. I’m in a very strange place (I don’t mean this horrible remand wing, I mean in my mind) and I need to rediscover myself. Sorry if that sounds ridiculously Californian.
Perhaps we shall see each other again, my love (see: I DO still love you!) but not until all this is completely over and I am certain of myself again. Although to be honest, I’m not entirely sure that I ever will be. That’s another of the reasons I can’t see you, at least for a very long time.
Look after yourself.
All my love (there we are again!)
Your Meriel. x
PS I mean it, Seb. Please don’t reply to this. I’ll only send it back unopened. M x
EPILOGUE
APRIL 1980
He cursed his MGB roadster – an upgrade from the Spitfire – as it hurtled around a corner, almost on two wheels, before lurching back onto all four and fishtailing dangerously. A flat battery at the start of the drive here and then an even flatter tyre. Great! Thank you so bloody much, God.
He was late. The dashboard clock showed him it was now seven minutes past eight and she’d been due to be released on the hour, after an early breakfast and then signing for the return of her few possessions.
East Sutton Park women’s open prison was outside Maidstone in Kent and he’d planned to leave Carlisle shortly after midnight to be sure of getting there in plenty of time. That was before the delayed jump-start from the AA and then the blowout on the M1.
He saw the signs for HM Prison on his left and swerved violently. He just made the turn, and skidded to a halt almost directly outside the gates of the jail.
Almost, but not quite. A large silver Mercedes was parked on the single yellow line in front of the automatic barrier that controlled access in and out of the place.
There were two men inside it, sitting in the front seats. They were in dark suits and the one behind the wheel was smoking a fat cigar.
He slowly pulled past them. He’d never seen the driver before but he recognised the passenger. It took him a moment to place him, and then his memory engaged. Of course. Probus. The lawyer.
Seb’s heart missed a beat, partly from relief – he obviously wasn’t too late, after all – but also from a sudden, gnawing anxiety. What were they planning on doing? He pulled up again, this time just in front of the executive saloon.
He began drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. When Meriel emerged, which car would she choose to get into?
‘Here she comes.’
David Weir started the Mercedes’ engine and punched Probus lightly on the shoulder.
‘It’s payday, Max.’
The agent stepped out of the car and folded his arms on the roof, so that he could face Meriel as she walked through the barrier and down the last few yards of the prison drive that led to the main road. She was wearing the same suit she had on in her last appearance in court – black jacket, cream blouse, black pencil skirt and black heels – and she was carrying a black leather holdall.
‘Meriel! Over here! Welcome back to the world, honey. Look who’s with me! Boy, have we got a champagne breakfast lined up for you. I’ve booked you a suite at Claridge’s so you can sleep it off – you can’t have had a drop of anything stronger than coffee in the last three years. And then this afternoon we’ve got some seriously big meetings scheduled. I want to—’
He stopped. His client wasn’t even looking at him, still less listening to what he was saying.
Meriel Kidd was staring at the man sitting squarely on the bonnet of a sports car parked directly in front of the Mercedes.
He wore faded jeans and a brown leather flying jacket with a fur collar.
He had dirty-blond hair and three days’ worth of stubble.
He was smiling at her, shyly.
‘Hello, Meriel.’
‘Hello, Seb.’
‘Can I take you somewhere?’
‘I’d like that.’
David Weir smacked the roof of his Mercedes with the flat of h
is hand.
‘Meriel! Hey! For Christ’s sake! Hello? Where are you going? Who is this scruffbag? Probus and I need to—’
She appeared to notice him for the first time.
‘Oh, hello, David. Not today, I’m afraid. Not tomorrow, either. Not for a while, actually.’
The agent exploded with irritation.
‘I asked you a question! Where do you think you’re going?’
She looked at him in genuine surprise as Seb opened the door for her, took her bag and tossed it onto the tiny back seat.
‘Isn’t it obvious? But since you ask, David . . . About as far away from men like you as it’s possible to get.’
She slid into the passenger seat and Seb climbed in beside her. He started the engine and pulled away. The furious agent’s bellows faded swiftly behind them.
They drove in silence for a long time. It was Seb who spoke first.
‘You opened my letter.’ It was a statement, not a question. ‘The one I sent last week.’
‘Yes. How did you know I’d read it?’
‘Because you didn’t send it back. I’ve been in agonies every morning since I posted it, wondering if it would drop through my letterbox. I’ve had that bloody stupid song “Return to Sender” running through my head for days.’
She smiled.
‘Where are we going?’
‘Cornwall. I’ve rented a cottage.’
His left hand was resting on top of the gearstick. Very slowly, Meriel placed her hand over his.
He glanced at her.
‘You should put your seatbelt on. They’re getting really strict about it these days.’
‘Sorry.’ She clicked the clasp into place.
‘I waited,’ he continued in the same matter-of-fact voice. ‘I waited for you, Meriel. There’s been no one else.’
The Night Book Page 27