Guilty Not Guilty

by Felix Francis

  ‘I hope you’re right,’ I said. ‘I told him to check Joe Bradbury’s phone records for the non-existent call he claims he received from Amelia.’

  ‘That’s a start,’ Douglas agreed. ‘But they will need more than that to charge him with her murder.’

  ‘But, if nothing else, it will show him to be a liar and that might just stop them believing every word he says against me, and especially all that claptrap about me abusing his daughter.’

  ‘I agree that is bizarre,’ Douglas said. ‘Why would he say such a thing without any evidence?’

  ‘Because he’s obsessed. He hates me so much that it clouds his judgement over everything. And I don’t know why. He accuses me of bullying his mother but he’s the real bully. Take all that nonsense over selling the family home a few years ago. He claimed that he was the world’s expert on selling houses and then he made a complete cock-up of it. He berated Amelia for her choice of estate agent and then ended up appointing a cheap one who tried to mislead potential buyers with incomplete information. It would be a joke if it weren’t so serious. The house was eventually sold for a hundred thousand pounds less than we believe it should have raised. All due to his incompetence. The man’s an idiot.’

  ‘I can tell that you don’t like him much either,’ Douglas said with a laugh.

  ‘You’re dead right there,’ I agreed. ‘But what he did to Amelia was even worse. I blame him completely for her mental illness and for putting her in hospital. He’s done nothing except continually undermine her confidence for years and then he drove a wedge between her and their mother. And now he’s killed her.’ I choked back the emotion. ‘I intend to nail him for that.’

  But I felt better for having had a bit of a broadside against my brother-in-law and it was with a lighter heart that I packed up my stuff and caught the train from London to Banbury.

  20

  The first thing I did on arriving home was to paint over the ‘killer’ graffiti on the garage door.

  I’d taken a taxi from Banbury station and had asked the driver to wait at a DIY superstore while I went in and bought some dark-green paint and a paintbrush.

  I stood back and surveyed my handiwork.

  The paint I had bought wasn’t exactly the same shade of dark green as the rest of it but it would do. I would repaint the whole thing at another time.

  Next I opened the padlock on the front door and went in.

  As before, the house was cold and lifeless but, this time, I didn’t dilly-dally in the hall but forced myself to go straight into the kitchen and then through into the utility room.

  The central heating had been switched off by someone so I turned it back on again and the boiler sprang into action, bringing a sense of life back to the house as the pipework creaked as it heated.

  I went round the house switching on all the lights and even set the music system in the sitting room so that Adele’s ‘Someone Like You’ blared out of the speakers at full volume.

  Adele had been Amelia’s absolute favourite singer and we had been lucky enough to catch her final live concert at Wembley Stadium, buying horrendously inflated tickets off the internet with gay abandon. But it had been worth every penny to see my wife happy after so many desperate months of psychiatric treatments and mental institutions. Even Adele’s mournful lyrics couldn’t prevent me from now smiling at the memory.

  For the next two and a half hours, I busied myself clearing up the mess left by the police forensic team, wiping away the mass of fine metallic fingerprint powder left on every surface, exercising the vacuum cleaner all around the house and tidying away stuff into the wardrobes and bathroom cabinet. I re-laid the fire in the hearth, plumped up all the cushions on the sofa, discarded a vase of flowers that were well past their best, and, finally, I swept up the broken wood by the back door and washed the kitchen floor, which I found very difficult.

  I realised what I was doing.

  I was keeping myself busy so as not to dwell on the fact that I was alone in this house and evermore would be.

  It was the little things that I found the hardest to bear – Amelia’s toothbrush still in a tumbler next to the bathroom sink; her shampoo in the shower; and particularly her multiple lip salves left at strategic points all over the house. Dry lips had always been a problem for her, however much I had tried to kiss them better.

  Finally, when there was nothing left to clean and I was pooped, I made myself a cup of instant black coffee and sat down in the sitting room, flicking on an afternoon TV programme about buying antiques to further distract my mind.

  So far, so good.

  But then there was a heavy knock on the front door.

  Who could that be? I rather hoped it wasn’t either the police or the press.

  It was neither.

  Standing on my doorstep was a smartly dressed slim woman with long blonde hair. She was holding a large plate on which sat a sponge cake, and she was fiddling nervously with a string of large pearls around her neck.

  ‘Hello, Bill,’ said Nancy Fadeley. ‘I saw you earlier painting the garage door. I thought you might need something to eat. This is all I could think of. I’ve just baked it myself.’

  She held out the plate and I took it.

  ‘How lovely, Nancy,’ I said. ‘Thank you so much. Please come in.’

  She hesitated, looking past me towards the kitchen, and fiddled some more with her pearls.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘Amelia would have been so happy that you’ve come over.’

  Just my mention of Amelia set her off crying, huge tears rolling down her face and dripping onto the doormat. I handed her my handkerchief.

  ‘I can’t believe she’s gone,’ she said between snuffles. ‘I loved her so much.’

  ‘So did I,’ I said with a sigh.

  ‘I know you did,’ she said with more sniffs. ‘You absolutely adored each other. That’s why I can’t believe what everyone in the village is saying. People can be so nasty.’

  Tell me about it.

  The two women had been best friends ever since we had first arrived in the village. I had also become friendly with her husband, Dave, a London-based jewellery dealer, and the four of us had regularly had boozy suppers in each other’s homes, and had even once rented a villa together for a week in Greece.

  ‘Won’t you come in?’ I said.

  Nancy hesitated again and I wondered if she was worried about coming into a house alone with someone that everyone else in the village was calling a murderer. Hence I didn’t push the point, remaining standing in the doorway.

  ‘Amelia told me on the day before she died that she was going to have a drink with you at the pub.’

  ‘Oh, yes, that’s right,’ Nancy said. ‘She called me. But we only had a quick one. I had to get back to finish cooking supper for Dave. I asked her to join us, seeing that you were away, but she refused. She said she had some things to do and she wanted to have an early night.’

  ‘What did you talk about?’

  ‘Oh, you know, the usual.’

  The ‘usual’ was the state of Amelia’s health. Nancy and Dave had been there for us during the bad times as well as the good. Indeed, Nancy had been Amelia’s rock and mainstay even in her darkest hours, and she was also well up to speed with all the problems between the Bradbury siblings.

  ‘Was there any specific reason why she wanted to meet you that particular evening?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ She put her head on one side as if thinking back. ‘We initially chatted about all sorts of mundane stuff but I now remember that there was one thing she told me as we were walking back that I thought was quite interesting.’

  ‘Which was?’ I asked.

  ‘She said that her brother would soon be getting his comeuppance. She was convinced that he’d stolen some money from his mother during the sale of their family home. Something about him and the estate agent conspiring together to lower the reported sale price so that they could pocket the difference.’

&
nbsp; Wow! Now, that really was interesting.

  ‘I wonder why she didn’t mention it to me.’

  ‘She said was going to just as soon as she was sure of it. Seems she didn’t want you going off half-cocked before she had the proof.’

  ‘Did she tell you how she knew?’ I asked.

  ‘Not exactly,’ Nancy said. ‘It was something to do with a couple who were her parents’ old neighbours in Surrey. Seems they came to visit her mum and it was something they said that made her wonder, but I don’t know what it was.’

  ‘Did you tell the police about this?’ I asked.

  ‘The police?’

  ‘Yes. They told me that you were interviewed on the morning they found Amelia.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘So they did. A man in uniform knocked on our door to ask if we’d seen anyone unfamiliar in the village during the previous twenty-four hours. Or anyone at all near your house.’

  ‘And had you?’ I asked.

  ‘No. We’d seen nothing. Not until an ambulance and the police turned up anyway. I remember asking him why he wanted to know but he wouldn’t say. I only found out what had happened to Amelia much later, when all the TV people started arriving.’

  I thought she was going to cry again.

  ‘But you didn’t say anything to the police about Amelia’s suspicions that Joe Bradbury stole the money?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I didn’t even tell Dave. It didn’t seem important compared to . . .’ She tailed off.

  I personally thought it might be very important but I didn’t say so to Nancy. She was distressed enough.

  ‘Do you think that I should tell them?’ she asked.

  ‘No, not just yet,’ I said. ‘I’ll do a bit of digging first and find out if there’s anything to it.’

  She seemed relieved. ‘I don’t want to make an unsubstantiated accusation to the police, now do I?’

  ‘No,’ I agreed. ‘You don’t.’

  We’d had quite enough of those already.

  But what if this one wasn’t unsubstantiated?

  What if it were true?

  *

  Nancy never did come in. Instead, she made her excuses and went back across the road to her own house, no doubt to prepare a sumptuous supper for Dave, for when he came home from work after another busy day buying and selling jewellery in Hatton Garden.

  Her obsession with food preparation had been a source of secret amusement between Amelia and myself but there was no question that she was an excellent cook, and I greatly enjoyed some of her delicious sponge cake while I continued to watch afternoon TV.

  But I found I couldn’t concentrate on anything except what Nancy had told me.

  What if the hundred thousand shortfall in the sale price of Mary Bradbury’s home had not been down to Joe’s incompetence, as I’d imagined, but was really due to him stealing the difference?

  I wanted to believe it. Of course I did. But I couldn’t see how it could have been done without the collusion of both the purchasers and the lawyers. Not that that would stop me investigating.

  I had nothing else to do.

  There was no sign of any paid employment coming my way. My email inbox, as accessed via my new phone, remained stubbornly empty, and the old phone, with the number that everyone knew, resided unanswered in some police forensic laboratory.

  And on this day, I had originally been scheduled to be acting as a steward at Stratford-on-Avon Races, but I feared that that aspect of my life had now gone forever. Even if I could establish my innocence beyond any doubt, and find the true killer of Amelia, the horseracing authority was looking for a way to ‘retire’ most, if not all, its volunteer honorary stewards and to make the whole thing appear more businesslike, and I was likely to be a permanent casualty of that plan.

  It was a move that many people in racing had been trying to resist, not least the honorary stewards themselves. It was felt that we brought a wealth of different experiences to the sport but, while there was no suggestion that our integrity was in question, the powers that be had decided that full-time ‘professional’ stewards were the best way forward.

  I, personally, thought it would be a shame and a major loss. Many of the honoraries, myself included, had been former active participants in the sport rather than purely lifelong administrators, and I believed that a combination of the two should be the preferred solution, whether or not I was involved.

  So here I was at a loose end, flapping wildly in the wind, and anything I could get my teeth into would be a distraction from the dreadful heartache in my chest.

  I ate another slice of Nancy’s cake but I was still hungry. I’d had no lunch, and breakfast seemed nothing more than a distant memory. I went back into the kitchen and opened the fridge, but I was out of luck. There was very little and what there was had a ring of green mould round the edges.

  The freezer was not much better.

  As I’d told the detective, Wednesday had always been Amelia’s favourite day for food shopping. She would maintain that, by then, all the supermarket shelves had been restocked after the previous weekend’s rush and it wasn’t yet close to the following weekend to make the store too busy.

  Hence, the fact that she had died early on a Wednesday morning meant that the cupboards, while not being totally bare, were severely limited.

  I took out a frozen loaf and put it on the worktop to defrost, but man shall not live by bread alone, nor even by cake, so I backed Amelia’s much-loved cream Fiat 500 out of the garage and went into Banbury for some fish and chips.

  21

  Early on Saturday morning I went to see Mary Bradbury after yet another restless night.

  I had, of course, often slept alone in our house, not least when Amelia had been in hospital, but this time it was totally different. There had been no one to call to say good night to, no loving moments on the telephone to make up for her absence, no warmth in my bed, or in my heart.

  I had cried myself to sleep and then, to compound my suffering, I had dreamed about her murder, reliving the horrors that must have occurred in our kitchen on that awful morning.

  I woke suddenly, in a cold sweat, and then I cried some more, so much so that I ended up with a thumping headache.

  I got up and went to the medicine cabinet in the bathroom looking for some painkillers and, after much rummaging among tubes of foot cream, sticky plasters, eye makeup removal pads and numerous other bits and bobs, I found a bubble pack of paracetamol at the back with a couple of pills still left in it.

  I swallowed them.

  Having a supply of painkillers in the house had always been an area of contention between Amelia and myself, and I had finally tried to lay down the law by banning her from buying them.

  I had not taken that step without good reason.

  Twice she had tried to do herself harm by swallowing handfuls of pills and, thankfully, the only ones she could find at the time were her own anti-depressants and my statins, neither of which did her any permanent damage.

  I thought about going back to bed but it was already getting light and I didn’t want a repeat performance of the nightmare. So I had a shower, got dressed and went downstairs.

  I then spent some time searching through the Queen Anne kneehole desk in the sitting room, which Amelia had used to store all her papers. I was looking for something specific and I found it at the back of the second drawer down on the left-hand side – information concerning the sale of her parents’ Weybridge home.

  There was a copy of a letter sent to Mary from the lawyer that Joe had engaged, together with the final statement of price and fees, both theirs and those of the estate agent.

  The original listing had been at £3.2million but the final agreed purchase price, as I’d remembered, had been a hundred thousand less than that. The letter further stated that that amount had been paid to Mary Bradbury’s bank account, minus the combined fees and disbursement charges of almost fifty thousand pounds.

  I sat for a while memorising
the figures and then, with my headache now fading away, I backed Amelia’s Fiat out of the driveway and set off to Mary’s cottage.

  She had moved to a village near Chipping Norton, twenty-five minutes drive from us. ‘Close but not too close,’ she’d said at the time. ‘Otherwise neither of us will get any privacy.’

  It had been an excellent choice with good friends made among her new neighbours.

  I parked on the driveway and rang the doorbell, hoping that she wasn’t still in bed. She wasn’t. The door slowly opened.

  I hadn’t seen her for some time, as I had decided that it was better to keep away rather than antagonise Joe, so I was shocked by her appearance. She had clearly aged considerably and her skin had a touch of yellow about it from jaundice, no doubt brought on by the cancer in her pancreas, or its treatment.

  ‘Hello, Mary,’ I said.

  ‘What do you want?’ she asked in an unfriendly tone. ‘You should be in prison.’

  ‘I didn’t kill your daughter,’ I said. ‘I loved her.’

  I could tell that she didn’t believe me.

  ‘Can I come in?’

  ‘What for? To kill me as well?’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ I said. ‘I loved Amelia with all my heart. I would never have hurt a single hair on her head and, if you think hard enough, you would realise that.’

  ‘But Joe says . . .’

  ‘Joe is lying to you,’ I said.

  ‘Why would he?’

  It was a good question.

  She was confused and I waited in silence. Eventually she stepped to one side to let me in.

  ‘Do you want a coffee?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, please. That would be lovely.’

  We went through to her kitchen and she put the kettle on to boil.

  ‘How are you?’ I asked tentatively.

  ‘Don’t ask,’ she said, throwing her hands up. ‘The doctors have told me I should have three months but I feel so weak right now that I think it could be just three days.’

  ‘I’m so sorry.’