Guilty Not Guilty

by Felix Francis

  He handed me another strong gin and tonic.

  ‘Have you eaten?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ve not had anything since breakfast. But I’m not hungry.’

  ‘You need to eat, dear boy,’ he said. ‘It’s important to keep up your strength.’ He clapped his hands together. ‘Now, do you fancy taking a chance on my signature spaghetti Bolognese or shall we nip out for a Chinese?’

  Difficult choice.

  I didn’t really feel up to going out but the opportunity to sample Douglas’s culinary masterpiece didn’t particularly thrill me either. Whereas his former wife had been Cordon Bleu trained, Douglas had always boasted that he couldn’t even boil an egg.

  ‘How’s the cooking going?’ I asked.

  He pulled a face. ‘I miss Charlotte in many ways, but mostly for her food.’

  Charlotte had walked out on him four years previously, claiming that she could no longer live with a man who never stopped working, one who regularly left home at six in the morning and often didn’t return until nearly midnight, even at weekends. She wanted more romance in her life and had left him to find it.

  In truth, they had simply drifted apart after twelve years of marriage and, with their two sons away at prep school, Charlotte had become bored with preparing gourmet meals for a husband who never came home to eat them.

  In the end Douglas and I went to the Chinese, not least because, on close inspection, the minced beef in the fridge that he had planned to use in his Bolognese sauce was well past its use-by date and was looking a touch green.

  We didn’t have a reservation but that didn’t seem to worry Douglas.

  ‘The best Chinese restaurant in London,’ he informed me as we walked round the corner into Ebury Street and to Ken Lo’s Memories of China, where he was greeted like a long-lost family member.

  ‘So what do I do?’ I asked over crispy duck pancakes.

  ‘Nothing,’ Charles replied. ‘Other than grieve.’

  ‘What about funeral arrangements?’

  ‘There’s no hurry,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry to tell you this but, in murder cases, it is usually some considerable time before the victim’s body is released by the coroner. It can take several weeks or even longer.’

  ‘Oh.’

  The prospect of Amelia’s funeral was bad enough without having the agony prolonged.

  ‘As the next of kin, do I have to register the death?’

  ‘That will be a job for the coroner once the inquest has concluded. That too could be some time off as it would likely be after any criminal proceedings. There really isn’t anything you have to do. Just wait and see how the police investigation unfolds.’

  ‘It seems all wrong,’ I said. ‘I feel I ought to be doing something.’

  A waiter placed an iron plate of sizzling chicken in black-bean sauce down on the table between us. The smell was magnificent and I found that I was more hungry than I’d realised.

  ‘Can I stay tonight?’ I asked between mouthfuls. ‘I’ve got nowhere else to go.’

  ‘Of course you can,’ Douglas replied. ‘But you’ll have to go in one of the boys’ rooms. The spare is being redecorated. I had a leak from a pipe. Damn nuisance.’

  ‘I’ll find somewhere else tomorrow,’ I said.

  ‘No need. Stay as long as you like. I’d enjoy the company. I keep the boys’ beds made up ready, just in case, although they won’t be back until Christmas at the earliest, that’s if their mother lets them come at all.’ He smiled lopsidedly at me.

  In a strange way, I felt sorry for Douglas. Amelia and I had never enjoyed the delight of having children, not that we hadn’t tried. Five rounds of fertility treatment had ultimately proved fruitless and, by the time we reached our mid-thirties, we had reconciled ourselves to spending our lives childless. But Douglas had become accustomed to a house full of young voices only for them to be snatched away when custody of the boys had been awarded to their mother.

  ‘How frequently do you see your kids?’ I asked.

  ‘Not as often as I would like. They’re so far away.’

  Charlotte had not only left him but London too, choosing to spend a large portion of her divorce settlement purchasing a property in the Yorkshire Dales. She had also cancelled the boys’ registrations for Eton and had sent them instead to Sedbergh School, nearly three hundred miles north of Belgravia.

  ‘I do try to get up there to see them occasionally, especially if they are in a play or something, but I’m so busy. I have to work so hard down here just to pay the school fees.’

  I thought it was a poor excuse, but probably a true one with independent schools now charging a king’s ransom every term.

  We walked back to Chester Square for coffee, arriving in time to watch the BBC ten o’clock news on the television in Douglas’s sitting room.

  Amelia was the third item.

  ‘Mrs Gordon-Russell, the daughter-in-law of the Earl of Wrexham, has been found dead at her Oxfordshire home,’ voiced the newsreader over a photograph of Amelia taken by the paparazzi outside Royal Ascot the previous year – all smiles with a large hat. ‘Police inquiries are continuing at the house near Banbury after Mrs Gordon-Russell’s body was found at about ten o’clock this morning by her brother, Mr Joseph Bradbury.’ There was footage of some men in white overalls and masks going into the house while a uniformed policeman stood guard outside. ‘Sources have told the BBC that the death is being considered as suspicious and Thames Valley Police have confirmed this evening that they are conducting a murder investigation. Mr Bradbury made the following statement to journalists.’

  The shot showed Joe Bradbury standing on the road with my house clearly visible in the background.

  ‘The family are understandably devastated by the death of my darling sister,’ he said, self-assured and looking straight into the camera, his horn-rimmed spectacles reflecting the multiple flashes from the assembled press photographers. ‘We are helping the police in every way to bring the perpetrator of this horrendous crime to justice. I would ask that anyone who knows anything about my sister’s death to come forward and speak to the police.’

  It almost made me vomit just to watch it.

  Seeing the news report, with its happy-looking image of Amelia and the police activity at my house, seemed to bring home to me the appalling reality of the situation.

  My gorgeous loving wife was dead and I would never again see her smiling and laughing as she had done at Ascot in the summer, as in the photo.

  My eyes began to well up and my stiff upper lip started to tremble.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said to Douglas, trying hard to fight back the tears. ‘I need to go up.’

  I stumbled through the sitting-room door and almost ran up the stairs.

  ‘Second floor, on the right,’ Douglas shouted up after me.

  I didn’t quite make it.

  I lay down on the stairs and sobbed, my whole body convulsing as I gasped for air. I cried and cried for what seemed like an age, until I simply ran out of the energy to cry any more.

  When I had finished, Douglas came up, his eyes also showing red from weeping.

  ‘Come on, my dear chap,’ he said, putting a kindly hand on my shoulder. ‘Let’s get you to bed.’

  He almost lifted me to a standing position and guided me up the last few steps to the second floor and then into his elder son’s bedroom, the one with ‘Philip’s Room’ painted on a small oval ceramic plate screwed to the door.

  Philip may have now grown into a burly fifteen-year-old rugby-playing teenager but his room had changed little since he’d left it as an eleven-year-old child. Dozens of miniature Star Wars characters stood to attention, staring out from a shelf, while the bed was covered in soft toys, which Douglas now threw onto the carpet as I removed my shirt, trousers, shoes and socks.

  I climbed in between the sheets, exhausted.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said.

  ‘No problem,’ Douglas replied. ‘Sleep as late as you like. I’m curr
ently prosecuting a murder case at the Old Bailey and I have several meetings to attend before the court sits so I need to be gone from here by seven. I’ll see you tomorrow evening.’

  ‘Okay. Thanks again.’

  He started to go but turned back to me.

  ‘Be assured,’ he said, in a rare expression of raw emotion, ‘we’ll get even with the bastard who did this.’

  4

  In spite of my tiredness, sleep would not come and I lay awake in the darkness for hours longing so much for things to be different, to be as they had been just a couple of days ago.

  Why had I gone to the dinner? Why hadn’t I made her come with me? Why hadn’t I gone home afterwards? Why? Why? Why?

  Why was she dead?

  Was I somehow to blame?

  Before I eventually drifted off into restless and sporadic sleep, I experienced two more overwhelming bouts of sobbing.

  It felt like it was all too much to bear but I had no choice in the matter.

  Misery, it seemed, was not an option and I discovered that my former attempts at advance mental preparation were, in the end, of no benefit whatsoever in relieving the devastating heartbreak of the actual loss.

  Grief was the price we paid for love – the greater the love, the worse the grief.

  My love for Amelia had been absolute and, consequently, my grief was desperate.

  By the time the morning light began to show through the curtains, I was a wreck.

  I turned on the bedside light and looked at my watch. Seven-thirty. I may have been in bed for more than eight hours but I’d been asleep for less than half of that time. I did not feel rested.

  I dragged myself out of bed and walked across the landing to the bathroom.

  I had a vague recollection of having earlier heard Douglas leaving the house but he had not forgotten me. He had left a pile of clothes outside my door with a note on top – ‘hope these fit’. Pants, socks, blue corduroy trousers and a new checked shirt still wrapped in the maker’s plastic.

  I showered and put on the clothes. All was well except for the cords, which were far too long, so I replaced them with the trousers from my suit. It was not a surprise really. Douglas was a good five inches taller than I, although our upper bodies must have been similar as the shirt fitted fairly well.

  I went down to the kitchen where, once again, Douglas had come to my aid, leaving out the essentials for making breakfast. There was even a spare front-door key on the kitchen counter with another note saying that I could come and go as I pleased. He would be back later.

  I was so lucky to have such a brother. We had always been close, even though Douglas had been much nearer in age to Edward, the eldest son. Indeed, the two of us had often ganged up together against our elder brother on the grounds that, as the heir, he would have his day later. And he never let us forget it, reminding us constantly that, in time, it would be he who would become the earl and own the castle, and not us.

  Nevertheless, I smiled at the happy memories of our childhood spent largely in make-believe adventures within our grandfather’s medieval castle, with Edward always as the baddie – often the wicked Sheriff of Nottingham up against our Robin Hood and Little John, although, in our case, Little John really had been little, i.e. me.

  Somehow, I had not inherited from our father the ‘tall’ gene like my older six-foot-plus siblings but, overall, this omission to my genetic code had served me well. Not only had it helped make me the undisputed castle hide-and-seek champion but, in my twenties, it had enabled me to fulfil my ambition of becoming an amateur jockey.

  There had been a period of about eight years when my whole life had been determined by the date and venue of the amateur steeplechase races around the country. Saturdays and Sundays were fine but taking my annual leave as midweek days off work to ride half a ton of racehorse at thirty miles an hour over huge jumps without a seatbelt was not my boss’s idea of a sensible way to behave, especially since, as he often pointed out, my day job was to calculate the risks to other people’s lives, not to totally disregard those to my own.

  Nevertheless, he regularly released me to go to the big events like the Foxhunter Steeplechases at Aintree and Cheltenham, and he even seemed pleased one year when I won one of them. And he didn’t seem to mind too much when I had turned up on Monday mornings with a bruised and battered body after things had not gone quite as planned on the track.

  And it had been an injury rather than the pressure of work that had caused me to hang up my riding boots permanently. A horse I’d been on fell at the open ditch on the far side of Sandown Park in the early December of my thirtieth year. The fall itself had been easy enough but another horse behind had kicked me as he landed and had fractured two of the cervical vertebrae at the base of my neck.

  The surgeon who had operated informed me in no uncertain terms that a severe weakness now existed and another similar incident would probably result in me being paralysed from the shoulders down, that was if I lived at all.

  I had quickly done the maths and concluded that the gain-to-loss ratio was insufficient. Indeed, it was a no-brainer.

  I’d had a good run and had been contemplating my retirement from the saddle anyway, so it simply accelerated my decision, something that Amelia had been absolutely delighted about. As she had often said, she was fed up of picking up the pieces from whichever hospital I ended up in.

  And as one racing door closed, another magically opened when I was invited to attend an honorary stewards’ training day.

  I’d been on the stewards list now for five years and I greatly valued my continuing involvement in the sport.

  But neither the race riding nor the stewarding paid the bills. That was the role of my job as an actuary.

  I had joined Forehanded Life Ltd, one of the large London insurance companies, direct from Cambridge after their chairman had come to the university to give a careers talk to the third-year mathematics students. The firm had then sponsored me through a postgraduate master’s degree in Business Analytics at Imperial College, after which I entered their actuarial department as an eager young buck aged just twenty-two.

  Four more years of study on the job had led to a fully fledged qualification from the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries and a promotion into a new team within the same firm.

  ‘Your job is simply to predict the future,’ my new boss told me in all seriousness.

  ‘If I could do that,’ I said, smiling, ‘I’d have won the lottery by now.’

  He laughed. ‘You just have, by passing your exams.’

  And, in a way, he was right.

  On days when I wasn’t race riding, I had looked forward to going to work and being thrust into a world of probability and statistical analysis, financial planning and risk management – crunching numbers on a computer and then explaining my conclusions in simple terms to those who needed to know.

  I absolutely loved it.

  Insurance is all about spreading risk and we all use it on a daily basis, whether to insure our houses, our cars or our lives, to say nothing of our pensions and investments.

  My job was to study data from the past and the present for such things as the economy, interest rates and inflation, and to combine that with my judgement and experience to foresee what was likely to happen ahead, and hence to determine the premiums for life policies, or the contributions needed for a certain level of retirement income.

  If I got it right, everyone was happy and the company was profitable. But if I got it wrong then we might not have enough reserves to pay out our claims, or provide the level of pensions that we’d promised.

  And then I would get fired.

  Fortunately, that hadn’t occurred and I had steadily climbed up the greasy pole of the corporate structure.

  That was until Amelia had become unwell.

  She and I had first met at one of the regular dinners held in London for Cambridge alumni. The seating plan had us placed next to each other and we’d hit it off immediately.


  She was an art historian and was working as a curator in the historic royal palaces, maintaining the fabric not so much of the buildings themselves but of their contents – paintings, furniture and tapestries mostly, with the occasional sculpture or antique timepiece thrown in for good measure.

  At the end of the evening, we had swapped numbers and within a week we were an ‘item’, spending as much time together as our busy schedules would allow. Six months later she moved in to my flat in Harlesden and we started looking for a house to buy together in Wimbledon.

  We were married on her twenty-seventh birthday in the private chapel of my father’s castle and I’d never been so happy, before or since.

  The first years of our married life were blissful other than the fact that Amelia was failing to become pregnant as we had hoped and tried for. While most of her girlfriends seemed to be dropping babies left, right and centre, my wife was becoming more and more stressed by her own inability to conceive, all the more so when the doctors couldn’t identify the reason. ‘Maybe it’s an abnormality with your ovaries,’ they said, shaking their heads. So we had tried using donated eggs. They had fertilised happily in a petri dish but had failed to convert to a full-blown pregnancy.

  The situation was not aided by her mother, who kept going on at her about wanting grandchildren, while totally failing to grasp the fact that we were trying our best to do just that.

  Amelia became obsessed that I would leave her for someone more fertile, someone who could bear me children. I tried to reassure her that I wouldn’t but she didn’t really believe me.

  The issue affected her work, which began to suffer from inattention and carelessness, neither particularly helpful attributes when you were dealing with the nation’s priceless treasures, and she started coming home every night in tears. In the end she had no option but to resign from her job before she was dismissed.

  That made her deeply unhappy, so I decided we needed a complete change of scenery, a change of life.

  We went house-hunting and fell in love with a Grade II listed converted blacksmith’s workshop in the tiny village of Hanwell, a few miles north of Banbury in Oxfordshire. It meant my journey to my London office was much longer but it was all worth it as Amelia threw herself into village life and seemed so much happier.