Guilty Not Guilty

by Felix Francis

  ‘And you’re certain that that was done after she was dead?’ I asked.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Why are you not considering the possibility that Joe Bradbury broke into my house to kill his sister?’

  ‘Who says we’re not?’ he said. ‘We consider all possible scenarios.’

  At least that was a start.

  ‘So why are the newspapers reporting that I’m the murderer?’

  ‘I can’t speak for them.’

  ‘Why not? You’re giving them the information.’

  ‘I am not.’

  ‘Well, someone in the police is. Otherwise, how would two press photographers have known that I was at Banbury Police Station on Friday? They must have been tipped off.’

  ‘Perhaps it was a coincidence,’ the DS said.

  I snorted my disbelief but realised that continuing to argue the point would get me nowhere. ‘So how do I get the padlocks removed?’

  ‘I will get our works department to do it.’

  ‘When?’ I asked. ‘I’m on my way there now.’

  ‘It won’t be done right away. Probably tomorrow or the next day.’

  ‘Then can I come and collect the keys from you? I’m currently on a train to Banbury and I need access today.’

  There were more mumbling discussions in the background.

  ‘Yes, okay,’ said the DS finally. ‘The forensic team left the keys here. I’ll leave them at the front desk for you to collect, but we’ll need the locks and keys back after you’ve been to your house.’

  ‘I’ll be with you in half an hour,’ I said, and hung up.

  I stared out of the window as the world rushed by.

  Did I really want to go into my house? Especially into the kitchen.

  The very thought of it was making me shake but I needed some stuff apart from clothes, particularly the chargers for my phone and computer. I suppose I could have bought new ones but there were other things I needed too, not least the medication I took each night to keep my cholesterol in check, having now exhausted those that I’d had in my washbag.

  A previous passenger had left a copy of a newspaper on the table to my left and I glanced at the bold headline on its front page: STILL NO ARREST IN DOG-LEAD MURDER.

  For goodness’ sake! Is there still nothing more important to report?

  Even though I knew that I shouldn’t, I could not help but read the start of the article beneath the headline.

  ‘Thames Valley Police are coming under increasing pressure to make an arrest for the murder of Amelia Gordon-Russell, found strangled in her own home near Banbury last Wednesday. A police spokesman has told this newspaper that their investigation is proceeding and they expect to detain a suspect in the near future.’

  And we all knew who that would be, didn’t we?

  I tossed the paper back onto the table. I didn’t want to read any more. Police spokesman, my arse! Someone was making it up. But perhaps going to the police station was not such a good idea after all. The phrase ‘putting my head into a lion’s mouth’ sprang to mind.

  I might never get it out again.

  *

  I took one of the taxis waiting outside the railway station and asked the driver to wait outside while I went in to collect the padlock keys from the police. I didn’t really expect to be detained, did I? But my anxiety heightened somewhat when I found that the keys were not at the front desk as promised.

  ‘Are you sure?’ I asked the woman sitting behind the glass screen.

  ‘Quite sure,’ she replied.

  At that point DS Dowdeswell came into the foyer and my heartbeat ramped up a few notches.

  ‘Ah, there you are,’ he said.

  He came towards me but there were no handcuffs at the ready in his outstretched mitts, just the bunch of keys for the padlocks.

  ‘There are four of them,’ he said. ‘We put locks on all the doors including the conservatory, and the French windows in the dining room. I don’t know which key works which lock. You’ll have to try them.’

  He hesitated as if there was something else he wanted to say, but I wasn’t waiting around to give him time to change his mind. I took the keys from him and walked briskly out of the door, hardly daring to breathe, and quite expecting to be recalled. But I made it unchallenged to the taxi and we quickly set off with me sighing deeply on the back seat.

  Calm down, I told myself, you’ve done nothing wrong. I was glad to be away from there, nevertheless.

  ‘Hanwell village, please,’ I said to the driver. ‘Drop me outside the pub.’

  Which he duly did.

  I walked down the side of the building to my Jaguar, which was waiting in the corner of the car park where I’d left it.

  I was just turning it round when Mark Thornton, the publican, came out to see me.

  ‘I thought that must be yours,’ he said gruffly. ‘You’re lucky I didn’t call the police over the weekend to report an abandoned vehicle, but someone from the village recognised it.’

  ‘I didn’t think you’d mind,’ I said.

  He clearly did.

  ‘Don’t leave it here again, do you hear. Some of my regulars aren’t happy about it and nor am I. Not with everything about you in the papers.’

  I forced a laugh. ‘But surely, Mark, you don’t believe all that guff.’

  ‘You’re not welcome here and neither is your car,’ he said in all seriousness. ‘Amelia was very popular with people in the village and feelings are running high.’ There was no flicker of warmth and no hint of compassion for my loss. ‘Next time, I won’t be able to stop them scratching the paintwork or slashing your tyres.’

  ‘I didn’t kill her,’ I said for the umpteenth time, but I could see that I was wasting my breath. What chance did I have when even my closest friends thought I was guilty?

  *

  I drove the hundred and fifty yards up the road to the Old Forge.

  The yellow crime-scene tape of last week had been removed so I pulled the Jag into the driveway.

  Someone had sprayed the word KILLER in white paint in foot-high capital letters across the dark green of the garage door. Charming. Why was it that, with the emergence of social media, ordinary people, probably my kindly neighbours, who wouldn’t have dreamed of doing such a thing in the past, now felt that it was acceptable to vent their anger in such a fashion?

  Especially when it wasn’t true.

  But did they care?

  Not one bit. They had probably filmed themselves doing it, and shared the footage with their supposed ‘friends’ and ‘followers’ on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Snapchat, possibly all four.

  With mounting trepidation I walked over to the front door.

  As DS Dowdeswell had indicated, a large padlock hung on a shiny metal hasp that had been firmly attached to the heavy oak door and surround without any thought for the damage caused to the listed woodwork. English Heritage would have had a fit if they’d known.

  The third key I tried fitted and the shackle snapped up.

  I pushed open the door and stepped into what felt like an alien world of no warmth, no joyous delight at my arrival, no exclamation of love – no life.

  Amelia and I had adored this house. We had transformed the dark drab interior of our purchase into a bright vibrant living space where we loved to entertain or just have quiet dinners à deux on our laps, sitting side by side on the sofa facing a roaring log fire in the space that had once held the blacksmith’s furnace.

  But now it was cold and dark and silent – unwelcoming.

  I switched on the lights in the hall but it made little difference.

  It wasn’t so much the house that was dead, more my aching heart.

  I picked up the post that had accumulated on the mat, most of it online shopping brochures addressed to Amelia, many of them encouraging early purchases for Christmas. But among the other detritus were three white envelopes addressed to me. Bills, I thought, and stuffed them into my trouser pocket, unop
ened.

  Next I went upstairs to the master bedroom, collecting my black suitcase from a landing cupboard on the way.

  So far, I had held things together pretty well, but the sight of our bed made me gasp out loud. My side was undisturbed while the other was turned back as if Amelia had just got out to go to the bathroom, her reading glasses still on the bedside table where she would have put them after checking her emails, something she had done every night before she went to sleep.

  I lay down and wept, pushing my face deep into her pillow to try and detect her pheromones, to smell her scent one last time, but nothing remained. It was as if she had never been there.

  After a while, the bout of sobbing subsided and I was able to get up and continue my packing, but I had no heart for it.

  I wasn’t even fully aware of what I was putting in the suitcase, although I was careful to include my black tie. My father had a penchant for demanding that we dress for dinner, especially if there were guests in the castle. It was like travelling back to the 1920s.

  ‘One has to maintain standards,’ he would claim, as if what one wore made a huge difference.

  At least he didn’t insist on white tie and tails, even if he did sometimes wear them himself.

  I went into the bathroom.

  Every surface was covered in a fine silvery dust and I remembered back to my conversation with the dabs man, the fingerprint finder. I wondered what prints he’d been looking for. No one had taken mine to eliminate them.

  I collected my medication from the bathroom cabinet along with a fresh razor and a new tube of toothpaste, mundane necessities in extraordinary circumstances.

  I took the suitcase back down to the hall and left it ready by the front door, along with my wellington boots, waxed Barbour jacket and tweed cap – essentials for a trip to Wales in October.

  My computer charger was in the study so I went in there and collected it, along with some other bits and bobs from my desk. But I couldn’t find my phone charger.

  Where was it?

  I needed it as my phone was already running on reserve.

  Then I remembered that I had last used the charger in the kitchen on Tuesday afternoon before I’d left for Birmingham.

  The kitchen.

  I stood in the hall seriously considering leaving it where it was and buying a new one, but where would I find a charger shop on the rural roads between Hanwell and North Wales without going miles off my route, maybe into Telford or Shrewsbury?

  Perhaps I could use the internet to order one to be delivered direct to the castle, or simply go without. There was hardly ever any phone signal up there anyway.

  But I told myself I was just being silly.

  ‘Stop being such a wuss,’ I said out loud. ‘Just go in and get it.’

  So I went into the kitchen.

  It looked just as it always had, apart from the slimy fingerprint dust on every surface and the splintered wood around the back-door lock.

  I stared down at the floor but there was no sign of the horror that had occurred. No blood, no stains – nothing, just the washed flagstone floor, same as usual.

  I didn’t linger – I had done enough crying for one day – so I picked up the charger from the worktop and left, collecting my stuff from the hall on the way out.

  I reapplied the padlock to the front door – I may as well use the extra security – and loaded everything into the boot of the Jaguar. Then I drove out of the village, paused briefly at the main road before turning north, away from Banbury and towards Wales, with the padlock keys in my pocket.

  I couldn’t be bothered to take them back to Banbury Police Station.

  The police might arrest me for murder but they were unlikely to do so for stealing four keys.

  11

  Llanbron Castle sits in a commanding position on the top of a small hill overlooking a curve in the River Dee, just south of Wrexham in North Wales. It was constructed in the late thirteenth century as part of the ring of fortifications built by King Edward I of England to suppress and control the Welsh hordes.

  Over time the castle had undergone many changes, not least in the mid-seventeenth century when, after surviving the English Civil War intact, it was besieged and then sacked by parliamentarian forces as a reprisal for supporting the Cheshire Rebellion of 1659, when a group of English and Welsh noblemen unsuccessfully attempted to revive the monarchy.

  However, a year later, with Charles II now safely restored to the throne of England, Sir Thomas Humberly, owner of the castle at the time of the revolt, had his neck saved from the axe by the returning king, who then generously rewarded him for his loyalty. He was granted a sum sufficient to restore the structure to its former glory, with enough remaining to transform the former rather austere living quarters into something more luxurious for the period.

  Over the next hundred years or so, the castle had again fallen into disrepair before being acquired by the Gordon-Russell family in a somewhat questionable manner.

  My six-times-great-grandfather, Herbert Gordon-Russell, later created the first Earl of Wrexham in equally dubious circumstances, had reportedly accepted, unseen, the near-derelict castle as payment for a huge debt run up during a game of whist played in a London house of ill repute.

  *

  The afternoon light was beginning to fade as I drove up the long driveway, the sharply defined castle battlements silhouetted against the still-bright western sky.

  I wondered what my ancestor Herbert must have thought of his gambling acquisition when he came here for the very first time, taking almost a week to travel from his London home by horse-drawn carriage. Did he consider it a millstone round his neck, as my father did, or as a safe haven from the stresses of an unfair world, as I hoped it might be for me now?

  I pulled up in front of the imposing main entrance and my father came out to greet me, as if he’d been watching for my arrival.

  ‘Hi, Pa,’ I said, climbing out of the Jaguar.

  ‘William,’ he said, coming forward across the gravel to shake my hand. There were no hugs between male members of the Gordon-Russell family. Even as a small child, I’d only ever greeted my father by shaking his hand and it wasn’t about to change just because my wife was dead. ‘Good journey?’

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Just the usual heavy traffic around Birmingham.’

  I lifted my suitcase out of the car boot.

  ‘Here,’ I said. ‘I bought this for you.’

  I handed him a bottle of his favourite Glenmorangie ten-year-old single malt.

  ‘How lovely,’ he said, and he smiled broadly, which was quite an unusual occurrence. The way to my father’s heart was definitely through his whisky decanter.

  ‘I also have some flowers for Ma,’ I said, lifting them out of the boot and giving them to him. I’d picked them up from a petrol station on the way and had been careful to remove the price label.

  ‘You shouldn’t have.’

  But I always did. This was like a game and he would have been disappointed if I’d arrived empty-handed.

  ‘Let’s get in,’ my father said. ‘It’s getting cold out here.’

  But it would be no less cold inside. ‘Why spend money on heating the damn place,’ my father would often say, ‘when one can simply wear a sweater?’

  I was thankful that I’d remembered to pack one, and some fleecy pyjamas.

  We went in through the massive wooden door of the main castle entrance, my father slamming it shut and bolting it behind us as if still keeping out the barbarian mob beyond.

  My mother was waiting in the small sitting room, as it was known, and there was indeed a welcoming log fire in the grate.

  ‘Hello, my darling,’ she said, offering her cheek for a kiss. ‘I’m so glad you’ve come. I have some jobs for you to do.’

  I smiled at her. It wouldn’t have been the same if she hadn’t.

  ‘Be quiet, woman,’ my father said with a mixture of authority and tenderness. ‘Give the boy a chance to sit down
. He’s not here just to potter in your garden.’

  But why was I here if not to busy myself and keep my mind off the void?

  ‘I’ll be happy to help tomorrow,’ I said, and smiled at her again.

  For twenty minutes or so, we sat and drank cups of tea, making small talk and avoiding the elephant in the room until my father finally cut to the chase. ‘Now what’s all this stuff about you in the papers and on the television?’

  My mother gave him one of her how-dare-you-ask-that-question stares, but the subject had to be broached sooner or later. After all, that was the main reason I was here.

  In the least distressing terms I could muster, I outlined how Amelia had been murdered while I was away from home for the night, how she had been discovered lying on the kitchen floor of our house with a dog lead still round her neck. And I described how I had been informed of her death while at Warwick Races, and I told them of my subsequent interviews at Banbury Police Station.

  ‘The police are so certain that I’m guilty that they are telling it to the press, hence it’s all in the papers. But it’s all nonsense, of course.’

  ‘Of course,’ my mother echoed.

  My dear mother would never have believed that any of her children could do anything illegal, and especially not murder.

  ‘But why do the police think you did it?’ my father asked.

  ‘It’s a long story.’

  Up to that point I had kept my parents in the dark with respect to the trouble that Amelia and I had been having with her brother, and the effect it had had on her mental health. One’s wife having psychiatric problems was not the sort of thing one shouted about from the rooftops, or even to one’s parents. I was certain that my father would have considered it a weakness, so I hadn’t told him. But maybe now was the time.

  ‘It all started about three years ago,’ I said. ‘When Mary Bradbury moved out of their family home and into a quaint “chocolate-box” thatched cottage in West Oxfordshire to be closer to us. Joe didn’t like it and he’s been waging a war of abuse and vilification against me ever since, even though the move was not my idea or my doing. And every time he wrote his lies about me it was like a knife in the heart for Amelia. She became really upset that it was her brother who was attacking her husband.’