Guilty Not Guilty

by Felix Francis

  ‘Now,’ said Jim Wilson, cutting in. ‘What was so delicate you couldn’t . . .’ He stopped and stared at me with his mouth hanging open. ‘My God,’ he said with a trembling voice. ‘You’re him.’

  ‘Who?’ Gladys asked, clearly confused.

  ‘Amelia’s husband.’

  They both suddenly looked terrified, as if they had let a monster into their home.

  ‘Please don’t hurt us,’ Gladys wailed pitifully.

  ‘Get out of my house,’ her husband demanded, standing up and pulling himself to his full height, which was still an inch or two shorter even than I.

  I didn’t move but sat there in silence and, at that moment, the bagel popped up in the toaster, making all of us jump.

  ‘I didn’t kill Amelia,’ I said, for yet another time. ‘I can prove that I was fifty miles away in Birmingham at the time she was killed. Otherwise the police wouldn’t have let me go. It’s only the damn press that are still accusing me of murder, and it isn’t true.’

  It wasn’t quite the whole truth but . . . it seemed to do the trick. The Wilsons gradually relaxed and Gladys even took another bite of her bagel.

  ‘I loved Amelia,’ I went on. ‘I loved her with all my heart. And I want to see the person responsible brought to justice more than anyone.’

  Jim Wilson sat down again.

  ‘So why are you here?’ he asked.

  ‘I know this sounds strange,’ I said, ‘but I believe that, during your recent visit to Mary, you said something about the price that her house next door was sold for, and I think that could be relevant in determining who killed Amelia.’

  It was a tenuous connection but, if I could prove that Joe Bradbury was a liar and a fraudster, and one who would even steal from his own mother, then I might be some way to proving that he was a murderer too. If nothing else it would stop the police believing he was as honest as Mother Teresa.

  ‘I don’t know what that could be,’ Jim said. ‘We talked mostly about other long-standing friends of both ours and hers. I can’t see how that could help find Amelia’s killer.’

  ‘How about the couple that bought Mary’s house? Did you speak about them at all?’

  ‘Alan and Margaret Newbould,’ Gladys said. ‘Nice couple.’

  ‘Do you know them well?’ I asked.

  ‘Quite well,’ she replied. ‘They are friendly enough if we see them out somewhere or over the garden fence. But they’re not like Mary and Reg.’ She laughed. ‘With them, we almost lived in each other’s houses at times. Such a shock for us all when Reg died.’

  She sighed.

  Death was always a shock, all the more so when it was unexpected, sudden and violent. Worse still when it was at the hand of another.

  ‘Have you seen the Newboulds recently?’ I asked. ‘Perhaps that was what you told Mary about?’

  They both thought in silence for a moment.

  ‘I saw Margaret quite recently,’ Gladys said. ‘I was going for a walk and she was standing outside while some men were unloading a van. She waved at me and I stopped for a chat.’

  ‘What was being unloaded?’

  ‘Electrical goods, I think. A new washing machine and a dryer.’

  ‘That’s it,’ Jim said excitedly. ‘You were telling Mary that Alan wasn’t very pleased that the ones she’d left in the house had broken down so soon, particularly after he’d spent so much to buy them from her in the first place. And they weren’t still under an extended guarantee either, like he’d been promised.’

  I inwardly groaned. If all that Joe had done was misrepresent the age of his mother’s old washing machine, then it was hardly going to rate as grand theft auto.

  But Amelia would surely have realised that too. So why had she said what she had to Nancy?

  ‘A second-hand washing machine and tumble dryer can’t have been that expensive,’ I said.

  ‘It wasn’t just them,’ Jim said. ‘Alan Newbould told me he’d bought all sorts of other things too – carpets, curtains, light fittings, and so on. Even some nice pieces of furniture that Mary didn’t have room for in her new place. He told me he’d done a deal with young Joseph to buy it all at a grossly inflated price so that he could effectively reduce the stamp duty a bit on the true cost of the house. Seems everyone does it.’

  Indeed, they do. Amelia and I had done exactly the same when we’d bought the Old Forge. Stamp duty land tax was not levied on removable items such as white goods or wall and floor coverings, things that the taxman described as chattels, so why give the government more money than we had to?

  But there had been no mention of any chattels payment in the letter sent by the lawyers to Mary.

  ‘Do you know how he paid?’ I asked.

  ‘He wrote out a personal cheque to Joseph,’ Jim said. ‘Seems Joseph told him that it would be best if the lawyers on each side didn’t know anything about it.’

  ‘Do you happen to know how much the cheque was for?’

  ‘A hundred thousand pounds.’

  23

  No crime would have been committed if Joe had given the cheque to his mother to deposit into her bank account. No crime, that was, other than defrauding the taxman of a few thousand pounds in stamp duty. And that would be nothing for me to get excited about, especially when paying the duty was the purchaser’s responsibility, not the seller’s.

  But Nancy had told me that Amelia had been convinced that Joe had stolen the money from their mother.

  Ever since we’d been helping Mary with her day-to-day expenses, Amelia had had access to her mother’s online banking and she would have surely looked for the hundred thousand to have been paid in.

  By mid-afternoon, I was back at Hanwell and on my knees in front of the Queen Anne desk.

  When we were first married, Amelia had spent several weeks unsuccessfully trying to cancel an online film-streaming service for which she had forgotten the password and so, ever since then, she had kept a little blue-covered notebook, containing all her user names and passwords. With luck it would also contain her mother’s bank login details.

  All I had to do was find it.

  I rifled through the drawers of the desk but it was nowhere to be seen.

  In the end, I removed all the papers one by one, stacking them in piles on the sitting-room floor, but still there was no sign of the notebook.

  But I did find one thing that made me gasp in shock, or in horror.

  In the top right-hand drawer, hidden inside a cookery magazine, was a thin booklet entitled Living or Dying with My Friend Suicide.

  The booklet was not only extremely well thumbed but Amelia had written copious notes in the margins alongside the text.

  I couldn’t tell whether they were recent or not. Probably not. There had been a time when almost all Amelia would talk about was taking her own life, but I thought that time had passed. But, nevertheless, finding the booklet brought it all back to me.

  One of her notes caught my eye.

  ‘THIS IS ME’, she had written in large capital letters.

  According to the title page, the booklet had been written by someone called Richard Schneider, MD, professor of psychiatry at New York University.

  I sat on the floor with my back against the sofa and read it.

  The professor started by stating that, in his considerable clinical experience, there were only six basic reasons why people kill themselves:

  1. Psychosis – when schizophrenia or some other neurotic disorder generates ‘voices’ in the head telling sufferers to take their own lives, an instruction that is difficult or impossible for them to ignore.

  2. Impulse – when someone takes their life on little more than a careless whim, mostly due to excessive use of alcohol or drugs. The ‘watch me, I can fly’ leap from a hotel balcony, or the ‘I don’t want to live any more’ mournful cry of the maudlin drunk who then steps in front of a car or throws himself into a canal. These people wouldn’t have dreamed of killing themselves if they’d been clean or sober.


  3. Depression – when sufferers feel that they cannot bear for any longer the agony that it causes. Bizarrely, they often don’t really want to die, they just want to stop living in pain, as if there was some halfway house from which they could return at some later stage when things were better. Depression can also blur a person’s thinking, giving them the misplaced opinion that people would be better off without them and that they would be doing everyone a favour by ending it all.

  4. A cry for help that goes wrong. Taking an overdose and then telling someone so that medical attention can be sought is a prime example. Such people don’t really want to die, or expect to. They even frequently choose a method that they don’t think will actually kill, only intending to alert or cause suffering to someone who has previously hurt them. But, if the overdose is sufficient or the medical help is too slow in coming, then death can occur, rendering the cry for help as misplaced as it is heart-wrenching.

  5. Some people have a philosophical desire to die in a manner of their choosing. They often have a terminal illness, which may have future painful or debilitating consequences. They are not psychotic, impulsive, depressed or crying out for help, they simply wish to take control of where, when and how they pass on.

  6. By mistake – a few people will always stab or shoot themselves by accident and, a generally more recent phenomenon, some men, seeking sexual arousal by deprivation of oxygen to the brain, either attempt self-strangulation by hanging or they place a plastic bag over their heads. Occasionally, such practices simply go too far, resulting in their unwanted deaths. The actor David Carradine, of Kung Fu and Kill Bill fame, died from autoerotic asphyxiation caused by hanging from a rope in a hotel wardrobe in Bangkok. Although suspended at quite a low level, much lower than his own standing height, the conclusion was that he had accidentally become unconscious, causing the majority of his bodyweight then to hang on the rope, which had resulted in his death.

  Well, one lived and learned.

  Amelia had written ‘THIS IS ME’ in the margin alongside number 3 – Depression. She had then underlined it twice with such heavy strokes of the pen that they had almost torn right through the paper.

  I put the booklet down as tears again welled up in my eyes, not so much from grief at her loss, even though that was raw too, but at the frustration I felt that I hadn’t been more useful to her when she was alive. Why had she not shown me this? Why had we not talked about it more?

  But we had. Of course we had. All the time.

  If I’d told her once, I’d told her a million times that I would not be better off if she was dead, and here I was to prove it – blubbing like a baby and totally lost without her.

  Strangely, I clung to the fact that Amelia hadn’t killed herself. Autoerotic strangulation is almost exclusively a male activity and, anyway, it is impossible to kill yourself with a ligature without actually hanging from something. As soon as you become unconscious the pressure releases and you recover.

  I sat on the floor and read through the rest of the booklet.

  In its totality, it was far from being a manual of how to commit suicide, more it was a recipe for how to stay alive through difficult times, and I was glad of that. I hoped that Amelia had found some strength from its pages.

  The daylight was fading by the time I had finished reading so I stood up, turned on the electric replacement, and continued my search for Amelia’s notebook.

  I was sure it wasn’t in the desk so I did a systematic search of the rest of the house, opening every cupboard and drawer in the kitchen, emptying the sideboard in the dining room and going through all Amelia’s clothes in her wardrobes. I also searched her bedside cabinet and those in the bathroom, once again. I looked under all the beds and on top of all the bookcases. I even turned the pockets inside out in the coats hung near the back door.

  Nothing. At least, no blue-covered notebook.

  Amelia had always been extremely good at hiding things and I had never once come across my birthday or Christmas present by accident before the due day.

  I tried all her multitude of handbags but they were mostly empty, and those that weren’t contained such mundane items as tissues, hairclips and the ubiquitous lip salves. Hat boxes contained just hats, and there were no notebooks lurking in the depths of her boots, nor anything else for that matter.

  I even opened the fridge and the freezer again to see if she had wrapped it in a plastic bag and popped it behind the butter or under a bag of frozen peas.

  No joy.

  I couldn’t think of anywhere else to look.

  Perhaps I’d try her car.

  I was just collecting the keys when there was a knock on the front door.

  Wary of what had happened that very morning in Mary Bradbury’s cottage, and not wanting another confrontation with a knife-wielding Joe, I went into the sitting room and looked through the window to see who it was.

  Dave and Nancy Fadeley stood expectantly on my doorstep, each of them bearing gifts.

  ‘Hello, you two,’ I said, opening the door.

  ‘We thought you might need some company,’ Dave said. He held up a bottle of red wine. ‘And we can’t have you getting blind drunk on your own, now can we?’

  ‘And I thought you might need something more to eat,’ Nancy added. ‘So I’ve brought over a casserole for us all to share.’

  ‘How wonderful, thank you. Come on in.’

  I led them towards the kitchen but Nancy hung back.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said, but there were tears again in her eyes.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, wiping them away with her sleeve.

  ‘Don’t be. I’ve been crying all over this house. It’s very painful.’

  ‘Would you prefer to go back over to our place?’ Dave said. ‘We nearly called you but we thought you might not answer.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s fine. Somehow better to face the demons than to bury them. Let’s have some of that wine.’

  We went into the kitchen, Nancy included, and I fetched three glasses from a cupboard.

  ‘None for me,’ Nancy said. ‘I have a slight infection – women’s problem – and I’m on antibiotics. So I’m afraid it’s no booze for me for another week.’ She pulled a face.

  ‘What would you like instead?’ I asked. ‘I don’t have much that’s non-alcoholic.’

  ‘Tap water will do,’ she said. ‘Unless you have any coffee.’

  ‘Instant?’

  ‘Lovely.’

  Dave poured two glasses of red while I switched on the kettle.

  ‘I’m afraid I have no milk.’

  ‘Black will be fine,’ she said. ‘But I’ll have it with one sugar to take away the bitterness.’

  Sugar, I thought. She’d be lucky. Neither Amelia nor I ever took sugar.

  There were three white circular tins on the worktop behind the kettle with the words TEA, COFFEE and SUGAR painted on them.

  I spooned some instant granules from the COFFEE tin into a mug and picked up the SUGAR one. It felt worryingly light. I pulled off the lid and was relieved to see just a little of the sweet stuff at the bottom.

  And there, lying above it, was a small blue-covered notebook.

  I laughed out loud, which Dave and Nancy found rather disconcerting.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, lifting out the treasure and showing them. ‘I’ve been searching for this notebook all afternoon. I’ve turned the whole house upside down. And I’d have never found it if you two hadn’t come over. Thank the Lord for antibiotics.’

  *

  We sat on the bar stools at the kitchen counter and ate the casserole, which was excellent – would I expect anything else from Nancy? – and Dave and I drank all of his bottle of red wine and most of another of mine, with him consuming the lion’s share. Not that I hadn’t been a willing accomplice.

  ‘So the police let you go,’ Dave said when he had enough alcohol in his bloodstream to pluck up the courage.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I can prove th
at I was in Birmingham the whole time.’

  ‘So who the hell did kill her?’ he said, slightly slurring his words.

  Nancy gave him an exasperated look as if to express the view that he shouldn’t be mentioning such things, not here, not now, and especially not in this kitchen.

  But it was she who then answered the question.

  ‘Her brother,’ she said.

  ‘Exactly,’ I agreed, trying not to slide off my barstool. It had been some time since I had drunk so much claret.

  ‘Amelia often told me she was frightened of him.’

  ‘Did she really?’

  ‘Yes, and she said it to me again last week, on the night before she died. Perhaps I should have done something about it like mention it to the police. Maybe I still should. I would have done but they seemed so sure that . . .’

  ‘That it had been me who’d killed her,’ I said, finishing her sentence for her.

  ‘Yes,’ she said sheepishly. She sighed. ‘I wish so much that she had come to stay with us that night, with you being away and all. I asked her to. Then she would still be alive.’

  Her tears returned and we all sat in silence for a moment, lost in our own thoughts. Dave took another large gulp of wine.

  ‘Come on, Dave,’ Nancy said finally. ‘It’s high time we went home.’

  She collected her empty casserole dish and the plate that had held the cake, and then steered her unsteady husband across the hall and out through the front door. I smiled to myself. I reckoned he might be in for a bit of a roasting when they got back to the safety of their own home.

  It was a difficult time for all of us who were left behind and we all dealt with our grief in different ways. Dave’s method was clearly to hit the bottle, even though he didn’t usually need any excuse to do that at the weekends. For Nancy and me, however, it was mostly dealing with the anger and the guilt – anger that it had happened at all, and guilt that we’d been unable to prevent it.