‘That’s very profound,’ Kate said.
‘But true. Hitler got so angry when he was told things were going badly that his generals simply stopped passing on the bad news. He still believed he was winning the war right up to the point where the Russian army was fighting in the streets of Berlin. And, in England years ago, it was considered treason to attack a town crier because you didn’t like the news he was shouting.’
‘Perhaps we could get Ryan hung, drawn and quartered,’ Kate said with a laugh.
‘Too good for him,’ Janie said, which I thought just about answered the question about her going back to work at Castleton House Stables.
Leaving both Kate and Janie in far better humour than I’d found them, I walked back to the Bedford Lodge and checked in with the Simpson White office.
‘ASW is out to lunch,’ Georgina said. ‘But he left you a message.’ I could hear her rustling papers. ‘Here it is. He says you only have until the end of this week as he needs you back here because other projects are looming on the horizon. He’s fixed it all with the Sheikh, who is happy with the arrangement.’
‘Is that all?’ I asked. I’d rather hoped that the research wizards might have discovered a smoking gun by now, preferably one nestling in a Chadwick hand.
‘No, it’s not all,’ Georgina replied. ‘He also said to tell you to get an effing move on, stop pissing around, and put a thunderflash up their arses . . . there’s a good chap.’
I laughed at her impression. I could almost hear ASW saying it.
ASW loved his thunderflashes, metaphorically speaking that was. A real thunderflash was a pyrotechnic used for training in the army. It was like a firework ‘banger’ only bigger and louder. But an ASW thunderflash was anything that produced an explosive reaction.
‘Right,’ I said. ‘I’ll do all three.’
I was still laughing when I checked my emails.
And there were two of interest. Big interest.
The first was from DCI Eastwood with Zoe Robertson’s medical records as an attachment.
Declan had said that Zoe suffered from psychosis, and Yvonne had told Kate that she had been initially hospitalised for schizophrenia, but her latest diagnosis, from the time of her most recent in-patient stay, was for BPD – borderline personality disorder. It was contained in a scanned letter from a Dr Alan Cazalet, consultant in psychiatry at University College Hospital, London.
I looked up BPD on the internet. In spite of its name, there was absolutely nothing borderline about it. It was a most serious condition characterised by long-term patterns of abnormal behaviour including difficult relationships with other people, inadequate sense of self, and unstable emotions. Sufferers frequently self-harmed and also regularly acted without any apparent concern for their own welfare.
Zoe had indeed been a troubled soul.
I searched back through the file for any triggers for her condition but, whereas the recent ten years of her medical history were covered in some detail, the older records were brief only to the point of providing just an illness title and a date, such as ‘Pertussis – May 1992’.
Whereas it was of some mild interest that Zoe had contracted whooping cough at age three and a half, there were no details of the severity of the infection or what treatment had been given.
Equally, her first admittance to a psychiatric hospital in February 2007 was recorded as just that, without clarification that she’d been sectioned, and certainly without any indication that it had been her father’s doing, as Yvonne had claimed. It made me think that only the bare facts of the pre-computer era had been transcribed onto the digital record, and maybe there were greater details to be found elsewhere.
I read through it all for a second time to ensure I hadn’t missed something, but there was nothing important that I didn’t already know.
However, the second email, the one from the Simpson White research team, was far more sensational.
Even though they had been unable to break into the online banking system, the wizards had somehow acquired a loan request from Peter to a finance company to buy a car. Attached to the application form were copies of three of the Robertsons’ joint-account bank statements from the previous autumn.
They weren’t so much the single smoking gun I’d been hoping for, more like a whole firing squad of them.
For all his lack of gainful employment, Peter Robertson was clearly no mug. He seemed to be making a good living from blackmailing his in-laws, all of them.
No wonder he hadn’t wanted to talk to me, even after the death of his wife. He probably had every intention of continuing the blackmail, and maybe upping the ante to cover murder.
But how was he doing it?
What was the hold he seemed to have over them all?
The bank statements clearly showed regular payments into his account not only from Oliver Chadwick but also from Ryan, Declan and Tony.
Not too much, of course. Just enough so that they would pay without squealing.
It was definitely time to put a thunderflash up their arses.
I went to see Oliver first but he was out.
‘Come on in,’ Maria said, opening the front door wide. ‘Oliver’s gone to see some foal or other at a stud farm out near Cheveley. He went some time ago. Probably won’t be much longer. Do you fancy a drink?’
She was already holding a glass of what I assumed was white wine.
‘Coffee would be nice,’ I said, stepping through the doorway.
She wrinkled her nose in distaste but led the way into the kitchen.
‘Help yourself,’ she said, waving at the kettle, and then poured herself a top-up from an open bottle of Chardonnay on the kitchen table.
I put the kettle on the Aga.
‘How about Ryan?’ I asked. ‘Is he about?’
‘No idea,’ she said. ‘I’m not his bloody keeper.’
There was clearly no love lost between them.
‘Why didn’t Ryan move in here when he took over the stables?’ I asked, spooning instant coffee into a cup.
‘Don’t be bloody stupid,’ Maria said. ‘Oliver didn’t want to give up his stables. He wasn’t about to hand over his house as well.’
‘Then why did he give up the stables?’ I asked. ‘Ryan could surely have started up somewhere else. Like Declan did.’
‘Apparently, it was always accepted that Ryan would eventually take over the yard from Oliver. But no one expected it to be quite so soon. Ryan broke his knee badly in a fall at Newbury and was forced to stop riding when he was only thirty-six. Most flat jockeys go on much longer than that, some well into their fifties.’
I poured boiling water over the coffee, and took some milk from the fridge.
‘Surely Oliver could still have said no.’
‘He should have done,’ Maria said with feeling. ‘Ryan taking over has been a disaster. If we’re not careful we’ll lose the whole bloody lot.’
I marvelled at her ability to be so indiscreet. Probably something to do with the wine. But I wasn’t about to stop her just to spare her blushes.
‘How well did you know Zoe?’ I asked.
‘Not at all,’ she said. ‘I knew of her, of course. Everyone round here knows of Zoe Chadwick. Silly little bitch. Given us nothing but grief even in death.’
‘It was hardly her fault she was murdered,’ I said.
‘No? Whose fault is it, then? She should have stayed in London.’
‘What were you doing on Sunday afternoon and evening?’
‘What’s this,’ Maria said with a hollow laugh. ‘The bloody Spanish Inquisition? You can’t think I had anything to do with it?’
Did I?
‘In that case you won’t mind telling me where you were.’
‘The police have already asked me that.’
‘So what did you tell them?’
‘The truth,’ she said. ‘I woke on Sunday morning with a migraine so I took some strong painkillers and stayed in bed all day with a cold compre
ss on my head.’
I unkindly wondered if it had been a hangover rather than a migraine.
‘Didn’t you eat anything?’ I asked.
‘I can’t really remember. I know I was zonked out for most of the day. Those painkillers are pretty strong, especially when you wash them down with Chardonnay.’ She laughed and raised her glass towards me.
‘Didn’t Oliver come and see you at all?’
‘He brought me up some tomato soup for lunch.’
‘Anything else?’ I asked.
‘Anything else what?’ she asked belligerently. ‘Don’t you believe me?’
‘I didn’t say that,’ I said. ‘I just wondered if Oliver had spent any of the afternoon with you.’
‘Not that I can remember,’ she said. ‘I think he was catching up with EastEnders in the snug. He often does on Sunday afternoons. I could hear it coming up through the floorboards. He probably thought that, with me in bed, it was a good opportunity. I hate the damn programme. There are enough arguments and misery in my life already without having to watch more of it in a bloody soap opera.’
I looked at her. How sad, I thought.
‘How about during the evening?’ I asked.
‘More painkillers,’ she said. ‘First thing I knew Oliver was banging on the door shouting at me to get up because the stables were on fire.’
‘Was Oliver at home all evening?’
‘How the hell would I know? I was out of it.’ She smiled at me. ‘But you can’t possibly think that he’d burn down his own stables? Not with Prince of bloody Troy in there?’
‘Didn’t you like the horse?’ I asked, surprised at her outburst.
‘I had nothing against the horse, per se. I just wished I’d received half as much love and attention as it did. Bloody mollycoddled, it was.’
‘But the future of Ryan’s training business may have depended on it,’ I said.
‘Yeah, well, the horse has gone now so we’ll never know, will we?’
She didn’t sound especially sorry.
‘Did Oliver ever mention Zoe?’
‘Not recently, that’s for sure,’ Maria said. ‘A long time ago he told me that he no longer considered Zoe his daughter. He said she was not a part of his life and never would be again.’
‘Then why was he giving her five hundred pounds every month?’
27
Oliver returned from seeing the foal at the stud farm near Cheveley to be met by stony silence from his wife in the kitchen. I was there too.
‘What’s up?’ he asked, sensing the cool atmosphere.
Maria remained silent so I jumped right in to insert my first thunderflash. ‘Maria is wondering why you’ve been paying five hundred pounds a month to Zoe and Peter Robertson.’
If I thought he’d flinched when I’d asked him why Ryan had broken Declan’s nose, it was nothing compared to how he reacted now.
The blood drained out of his face and he stumbled slightly, grabbing hold of a chair to lean on.
But his mind was clearly still working.
‘For my grandchildren, of course,’ he said, recovering some of his composure. ‘I can’t penalise them just because their mother was a tramp.’
But Maria was not placated in the least.
‘You bastard,’ she shouted. ‘You’ve been telling me we’re so hard up that I can’t afford even to have my hair done, and all the while you’ve been giving away our cash. Are you saying those bloody children are more important than me?’
Oliver turned to me and, for the very first time, his veneer of politeness cracked.
‘Get out of my house,’ he said angrily.
I made what ASW would call a ‘tactical withdrawal’ back to the Bedford Lodge to take stock and determine my next move.
First I called DCI Eastwood.
‘Thank you for the medical records,’ I said. ‘But is there any more? They seem incomplete.’
‘That’s what we got from her doctor,’ he said.
‘Could you check if there’s anything else? What you sent doesn’t detail anything more than ten years old. There must be some records from before that.’
I could hear him sigh. ‘I have other things to do, you know. I thought you wanted to determine if there was any remote chance that she’d dropped down dead of natural causes. Surely you have enough for that?’
‘It would be negligent on my part if I didn’t check everything that was available.’ I said it in my best courtroom lawyer voice.
‘I’ll ask my sergeant,’ he said with resignation. ‘It was he who got them in the first place.’
‘Good,’ I said. ‘I’ll wait.’
I don’t think he was expecting to have to ask his sergeant straight away but I gave him little choice.
‘Right,’ he said again, with more resignation. ‘I’ll go and ask him now and call you straight back.’
Reluctantly, I hung up but, true to his word, the chief inspector called back within ten minutes.
‘It appears we do have some paper records as well,’ he said.
‘Can they be scanned and sent over?’ I asked.
‘It would seem there are rather a lot. Could you not just come over and see them here? It would save a lot of time and effort, and we are short of both.’
Limited resources again, I thought.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘Where is here?’
‘The Bury St Edmunds investigation centre. We’ve closed the temporary incident room at Newmarket.’
‘I’ll come right away.’
Better to do it now before he changed his mind.
‘Ask for DS Venables. He’ll be expecting you.’
I rustled up my driver and his Mercedes and we were soon on our way to Bury St Edmunds.
I don’t know why I thought that Zoe’s medical records were important. Perhaps it was because Yvonne had told Kate about Oliver having arranged for Zoe to be sectioned under the Mental Health Act, and that it was shown in her notes.
Had Oliver lied to get Zoe put away in a mental hospital? Was that what he was being blackmailed over? But would he really pay five hundred pounds a month to keep that a secret? Surely not, not after all the years that had passed since.
DS Venables took me down a windowless corridor and into a room with a round table and four chairs. On the table was a cardboard box containing a number of special envelopes standing up side by side with open tops.
‘Apparently they’re called Lloyd George envelopes,’ the DS said flatly. ‘After the politician that introduced them. According to the doctor that sent them to me, they’ve now been superseded by computers.’
He stood to one side, leaning on the wall with his hands in his pockets, while I sat down at the table and reached for the box.
‘I don’t approve,’ the sergeant said.
‘You don’t approve of what?’ I asked.
‘My boss letting you see these records.’
‘Why not?’
‘Stands to reason,’ he said. ‘Why should we be helping the defence?’
‘I thought we were both interested in justice.’
He sniffed his disagreement. He was clearly only interested in a conviction.
‘What are you looking for?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Not unless I find it.’
The box contained four of the Lloyd George envelopes, each one stuffed full of folded papers. They were marked 1 to 4 and were in date order. I started with envelope 1, emptying the contents onto the table.
‘There’s no need to stay,’ I said to DS Venables. ‘I’m not going to take anything. I just want to read it all.’ I took my mobile phone out of my pocket and put it down on the table. ‘I’ll just take photos of anything I want to look at again later.’
The detective reluctantly pushed himself off the wall by his elbows.
‘I’ll come back in half an hour.’
‘Make it an hour,’ I said. ‘There’s a lot here. I promise I won’t wander off.’
He l
eft the room and closed the door.
I was surprised how much information was logged in our medical records, and how they obviously follow us around from one surgery to another as we move. There were even allocated spaces on the front of the first envelope to record any such changes and, for Zoe, three different addresses were listed along with five separate doctors, together with the date of each change.
I started reading from the beginning.
Zoe Chadwick had been fifty-one centimetres long and had weighed 3.8 kilograms at birth. Every visit she made to a doctor was logged, along with such things as dates of immunisations and her weight at each postnatal clinic visit.
In all, Zoe had been taken to see a doctor thirteen times in her first year of life and ten times in her second. I wondered if that was common or if she was a particularly sickly child. However, at no point had her doctor indicated in the plethora of his notes that it was unusual.
Her whooping cough infection aged three and a half was well documented as having been quite severe. There was even a record of the antibiotic drugs given to her at the time to prevent any secondary complications such as pneumonia.
Also in envelope 1 was a letter from a minor injuries unit in Cromer that had treated Zoe for a cut left foot during a holiday stay in the town when she’d been four. It stated that the wound had needed two stitches but no further treatment as Zoe’s mother had confirmed that the child’s tetanus vaccinations were up to date.
All very mundane, and rather boring.
I decided that, at this rate, going through every envelope from start to finish, every doctor’s note, every hospital letter, was going to take me far too long.
I skimmed through the other three envelopes, looking for the notes relating to Zoe’s first psychiatric hospital admission in early 2007.
They were in envelope 4, obviously shortly before the records became computerised, and there were lots of them, including several letters from both psychiatrists and psychotherapists.
Yvonne hadn’t been quite right.
The initial letter had not been from a psychiatrist, as she had said to Kate, but from a professor of psychology at York University who stated that, at the request of her father, he had studied Zoe Chadwick’s behaviour patterns and had concluded that she was suffering from schizophrenia and should be considered at risk of harming both herself and others.
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