Guilty Not Guilty

by Felix Francis

  ‘They are ongoing,’ he said in true police avoidance-of-detail speak, but I wasn’t going to let him off that easily.

  ‘In what way are they ongoing?’ I asked. ‘Have you interviewed Mrs Bradbury yet?’

  ‘We may have done.’

  ‘What sort of answer is that?’ I said. ‘Either you have or you haven’t.’

  ‘I am not at liberty to discuss the matter with you.’

  ‘Don’t be so stupid,’ I said. ‘If it wasn’t for Nancy Fadeley and me, you’d have nothing to go on. You’d still be floundering in the dark trying your utmost to stick a murder charge on me when you’ve known all along that I couldn’t have done it. I’ve given you Joe Bradbury on a plate – intent, opportunity and motive. What more do you want?’

  ‘Intent?’

  ‘Have you read the vile emails he’s been sending my wife and me over the past three years? You still have our computers. Look at them. If those emails aren’t a portent to murder, I don’t know what is.’

  There was a long silent pause from the other end of the line.

  ‘Okay,’ the DS said eventually. ‘Yes, I have interviewed Mrs Mary Bradbury. I went to see her yesterday afternoon. And we have also removed from her premises an eight-inch carving knife for analysis.’

  ‘And?’ I said, encouraging him to go on.

  ‘Mrs Bradbury was somewhat confused.’

  Tell me about it.

  ‘Initially she confirmed your version of events but, later, she said that her son was only kidding and he hadn’t meant anything by it. Then, later still, she said that she couldn’t in fact remember which of you had been holding the knife, and what did it matter anyway, as no one had been hurt.’

  Silly old bat.

  ‘I’m afraid,’ the DS went on, ‘that she would be a completely hopeless witness in any proceedings, so it is simply your word against his.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen,’ I said.

  ‘That’s as maybe,’ he said.

  ‘How about the knife?’ I asked. ‘I assume you are testing that for fingerprints.’

  ‘We are,’ he said. ‘But, according to Mrs Bradbury, it has since been through the dishwasher. Seems Mr Joseph Bradbury put it in there and set the thing off.’

  I knew the police should have gone and got the knife straight away last Saturday, but even then they might have been too late.

  ‘Did you ask her about the money from the house sale?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ he said.

  ‘What is that supposed to mean?’

  ‘I didn’t mention the house sale specifically but I did ask her for written permission for us to access her bank account. I told her that there had been several local cases of elderly people, especially elderly widows, having had their accounts remotely hacked and emptied by criminals. I offered to ensure that it couldn’t happened to her, and to put her bank on notice that we were on watch.’

  Sneaky, I thought. ‘And did she agree?’

  ‘Readily.’ I could detect some amusement in his voice. ‘But it was important for us to get her permission as the access you had previously made was illegal and hence anything you found would have been inadmissible as evidence in court.’

  ‘But won’t someone argue that you gained access to her bank accounts by somewhat dubious means?’

  ‘They might,’ he said. ‘But what I told her was completely true, there have been some local cases of fraud from people’s bank accounts, and she did sign a wide-ranging permission. So the fact that we can look further than any potential hack is quite legal.’

  ‘So have you looked?’ I asked.

  ‘We don’t have online access to the account. We have had to make an application to her bank. We are still awaiting their response.’

  ‘I hope Joe Bradbury doesn’t find out in the meantime. Two years ago, he forced Mary to sign a power of attorney to give him sole responsibility over her finances. Cut Amelia out of the loop completely in spite of the fact that she had done everything for her mother for years. He convinced Mary that Amelia was crazy and not be trusted. That’s a joke. But perhaps it’s Joe that you need to get the permission from. I hope the bank don’t ask you for it or, worse still, ask him directly.’

  ‘So do I,’ said the DS. ‘He already knows I was there.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘He called his mother while I was talking to her.’

  Bloody hell.

  ‘Did she tell him why you were there?’

  ‘She said that I was asking questions about the knife incident.’

  ‘What did he say?’ I asked.

  ‘I couldn’t hear him, only her, but it was after the call that she decided she couldn’t remember which of you had been holding the knife.’

  Unbelievable.

  ‘He also told her to ask me why you weren’t still in custody.’

  ‘I hope you didn’t tell her that I was no longer a suspect.’

  There was a deafening silence from the other end of the line.

  Oh, my God.

  26

  I walked round the house, checking that all the doors and windows were locked.

  Was I frightened of Joe Bradbury and what he might do?

  You bet I was.

  The most certain way of getting away with murder was to ensure that someone else was convicted of the crime and now, for him, the chances of that happening had greatly diminished.

  I went into the kitchen.

  I still hadn’t replaced the lock on the back door, nor the splintered wood surrounding it. Something about leaving it hanging there, twisted and broken, was important to me, perhaps as a reminder of what had occurred. Not that I really needed reminding – the appalling absence in my bed at night was more than enough for that.

  But the broken lock also stood as a sign that matters remained unresolved and they would continue to be so until Joe was finally brought to book.

  I had removed the police padlock and clasp from the outside of the door but had installed new bolts, top and bottom, on the inside. I now checked that they were fully slid over.

  I also checked the French windows in the dining room and the door out into the garden from the conservatory. They still had the padlocks and clasps in place on the outside and both were secure, the snap-shut shackles clearly visible through the glass.

  The front door was also locked but all of that hardly made the house totally impenetrable from the most determined would-be intruder. The ground-floor windows were comfortably accessible from outside and the glass in them could easily be smashed. For the first time ever, I wished I was living once more in a thirteenth-century castle with four-feet-thick fortified walls and high-up windows.

  I wondered about going back to stay with my parents, but I felt I needed to be here, close to the action as it were, ready to assist the police as necessary.

  I did another circuit of the ground floor to check everything was still in place and then propped the back of a chair under the handle on the inside of the front door, just in case someone tried to break the whole thing down.

  ‘Pull yourself together,’ I said out loud to myself. ‘He’s hardly likely to come here to try anything. It would simply prove his guilt.’

  But I wasn’t at all sure that Joe could think that rationally. In all his dealings with Amelia and with me in recent years, he had shown himself to be conspicuously short of logic and reason, and I had no grounds to imagine he would have suddenly changed now.

  Not to mention the carving knife incident at his mother’s house, which was still very fresh in my memory.

  I would have felt so much safer if he was in one of the cells at Banbury Police Station, savouring the delights of a thin blue plastic-covered mattress, a musty blanket, lumpy pillow and one main meal a day.

  Once I was happy that the Old Forge was as fortress-like as I could make it, I took a cup of coffee into my study, sat down at the desk, and took stock.

  I had always felt huge sympathy for those people whose hus
band, wife or child had been murdered and that singular dreadful event had then defined their lives for ever more. For some, it was compounded by the killer never being identified or, worse still, the body never being found.

  Suzy Lamplugh had been twenty-five years old when she disappeared in July 1986 from outside a house in Fulham. Numerous police searches spanning more than thirty years, including the dismantling of a whole building in October 2018, have failed to find a single trace of her.

  Eight years after her disappearance, she was officially declared dead, probably murdered, but no evidence has ever been obtained to directly link any suspect to the crime.

  Suzy’s parents devoted the rest of their lives to keeping the search for her alive in the minds of both the police and the public but, nevertheless, they both went to their graves not knowing what had befallen their beautiful daughter, or where her remains now lie.

  There have been others, too, for whom not knowing who killed their loved ones has resulted in a life of misery and despair. It has torn families apart, driven formerly quite perceptive and cogent individuals into gibbering wrecks, and laced them with an intensity of anger, with no target against which it could be vented.

  In short, the murder had destroyed them as human beings as much as it had the victim.

  Murder is a very special crime, uniquely evil.

  Robbery, theft, fraud, and online hacking of old ladies’ bank accounts are all despicable acts for which the perpetrator should be rightly punished and the funds recovered, but murder crosses a totally different line altogether.

  By murder, you take away something that can never be given back.

  I drank the rest of my coffee and resolved not to join the list of murder-family casualties. Not that I didn’t miss Amelia terribly. I did. But she would not have wanted my life to stop with hers, whatever the circumstances. And I at least knew where her body lay, even if I hadn’t actually seen it, and I also knew who was responsible. All I had to do now was help prove it.

  *

  By mid-afternoon, my security frenzy had subsided somewhat with me only doing a round of the house every half-hour rather than the every five minutes of this morning.

  And I was hungry.

  It was a Wednesday.

  In order to keep life moving on in some semblance of normality, I decided that a trip to Waitrose in Banbury was called for.

  I went into the kitchen and made a list of essentials such as bread, coffee, milk, butter and eggs. I decided I would also buy a large supply of individual frozen ready meals to pop in the microwave whenever I needed one. It was so much easier for someone else to have done the cooking.

  Not that I couldn’t cook if required to, and I had been known to often, even when we’d had guests, but the kitchen had mostly been Amelia’s domain, and I had no desire to cook for just myself anyway.

  With my list complete, I now had the problem of leaving my fortress and venturing out into the big bad world, albeit only as far as Amelia’s Fiat 500 parked on the driveway.

  I again went round the house looking out of every window, searching for anyone lurking in the bushes. I even went upstairs and hung out of those windows to see if anyone was standing up close to the house waiting to lunge at me with a knife as I left.

  There was no one.

  However, my heart was still pumping rather faster than usual as I grabbed the keys, removed the chair from the front door, opened it, stepped out, slammed it shut again and ran to the car.

  There was no shout, no call, and no one pounced from hiding to try and do me injury.

  As I locked the car doors from the inside, I laughed at myself, but it was only the sort of laughter that comes from the sudden relaxation of stress.

  I backed out onto the road and looked both ways, searching for Joe’s black Nissan, but there was nothing, just a courier’s white van delivering to another house down the road. Not to me, I thought. I’ve ordered nothing.

  Mind you, I still drove with my eyes almost as much on the rear-view mirror as they were on the road ahead and, when I arrived at Waitrose, I parked in one of the large parent-with-child spaces near the main door.

  There were six such spaces and only one other was filled. I know that more room around the car makes it easier to get toddlers out and pushchairs in, but it also means it would be more difficult for someone to hide unnoticed when I came back.

  No one gave me an accusing stare when I collected a trolley and walked into the shop without a small child in tow; indeed, no one took much notice of me at all, which was a huge improvement over my last excursion out in public.

  I pushed the trolley up and down the aisles, collecting the items on my list from the shelves and much more besides, all the while being careful not to leave myself alone in the dark recesses of the beers, wines and spirits department, or in some quiet corner behind the shampoo and toothpaste section.

  I had broken the cardinal rule of weekly food shopping, which was that one shouldn’t do it while hungry. Hence, by the time I had finished, I had a huge load of food that included, in addition to the ready meals, many things I didn’t really want or need, such as a large pack of freshly dressed Cornish crab, something that Amelia had absolutely loved but I was fairly indifferent towards. It was another example of me trying to make my life go on, if not quite as before, then in some sort of ‘normal’ fashion.

  And it was not that I was unaccepting of the fact that Amelia had gone for good, it was more that I found some comfort in familiarity. To that end, I also bought some flowers to put in a vase on our hall table, as she had always done.

  By the time I had put everything through the checkout and bagged it all up, it was getting dark outside. The clocks had now gone back and the long months of dark winter evenings had begun in earnest. How I wish I could have put the clocks back, not by just one single hour, but by two whole weeks, and thus prevented all this suffering.

  I hung around in the well-lit entrance to the store until a group of other shoppers were also on the way out, and then I joined them as they walked back to their cars, keeping a keen lookout for any black Nissan lurking in dark corners of the car park.

  Nothing happened and I managed to load everything onto the back seat of the Fiat without being attacked. But I was worried that getting it all out again safely at the other end might be a different matter. At home there would be no security in numbers.

  I set off and thought about calling Nancy and asking her if she would come over and help me unload. Or would she think that I was a bit of a wuss, unable to carry a dozen or so shopping bags in on my own.

  It would be completely insane for Joe to attack me, right?

  Everyone would instantly know who was responsible, right?

  It would be utter madness, right?

  But I firmly believed that Joe was indeed mad.

  So should I call Nancy?

  Was it better to be a safe wuss or a brave corpse? Or was I just being over-dramatic?

  All of these thoughts were going through my head as I drove out of Banbury.

  Hanwell was to the right-hand side of the Warwick road, going north, and, whereas it had once sat isolated in the middle of the countryside, the village was now almost a part of Banbury itself.

  Ever since Amelia and I had first arrived here just five or so years ago, the building of a thousand new homes on the northern edge of the town had gathered apace and now just a solitary green field stood between the new housing estates and the old village. It was only a matter of time, and a very short period of time at that, before the whole place was swallowed up by the tide of red brick sweeping up from the south. It was something we all, as village folk, were doing our best to resist, but with about as much chance of success as King Canute.

  The closer I got to home, the more nervous I became, so I decided that I would call Nancy after all.

  I reached down for my phone in the car’s central console at the same time as I was slowing down to turn right into the village.

 
Only then did I notice a pair of headlights coming up very fast behind me. It was sadly not an uncommon occurrence at this particular junction due to the speed de-restriction signs just a short distance before.

  Stupid man, I thought, can’t he see that I’m indicating to turn right?

  Only at the very last moment did it register in my crowded thinking that it wasn’t stupidity that was causing the lights not to slow down. It was a deliberate act and I should get out of the way.

  But I was too slow. Much too slow.

  Before I even had a chance to engage a gear, the vehicle behind ploughed into the back of Amelia’s car, shunting it forward fast across the road. The Fiat then hit the raised grass verge and took off.

  My very last thought before the car hit the tree was that my neck had been broken before and it was about to happen again, and I really didn’t want to be paralysed from the shoulders down.

  PART TWO

  June the following year – eight months later

  ‘How are you getting on?’ asked Detective Sergeant Dowdeswell.

  ‘Slowly,’ I said. ‘Rehab is a very lengthy and painful process.’

  ‘But I see you’re now walking,’ he said.

  There was no wheelchair.

  ‘After a fashion, but only with the help of these damn things.’ I indicated towards the pair of crutches that were leaning up against the wall to my side.

  ‘They might be a help,’ he said with a forced smile. ‘You may get more sympathy from the jury, and we could certainly do with all the help we can get.’

  ‘Why?’ I said with concern. ‘Don’t you think we have a strong case?’

  ‘I’ve seen much stronger cases than this fail before now. Most of what we have is only circumstantial. There’s not a lot of meat on the bones. It will all depend on how the jury react to it in its totality.’

  I was sitting on a blue metal seat in the witness services suite of the Oxford Combined Court building. It was the third day of Joseph Bradbury’s trial and I had been summonsed to appear for the prosecution.