Guilty Not Guilty

by Felix Francis

  Coming back to my empty house in the dead of winter, however, had been much harder than I had imagined, both physically and mentally.

  It was the human-to-human interaction, both with the staff and with the other patients, that I missed the most. For weeks, I had done my utmost to get myself out of hospital and now all I wanted to do was to go back in.

  I also found that I had to do for myself all the things that had previously been done for me. Simple tasks like turning on lights or drawing the curtains required a huge effort, not to mention the much more complicated pursuits of washing my clothes and preparing my own food.

  The supply of microwaveable frozen ready meals, which I’d so carefully selected at Waitrose on my big food-shopping trip, had disappeared on the back of the recovery truck along with Amelia’s broken and dismembered Fiat 500.

  Hence the cupboards were still almost bare.

  And, of course, to top it all, there was always the problem of the stairs.

  I had lied to the doctors, telling them I lived in a bungalow, just to ensure they would let me go. But now the reality of the undertaking faced me. Not just a single tread or two as I had been practising on, but a whole flight of them, twelve in all.

  They might as have well been the north face of the Eiger.

  On my first two nights back in the house, I had addressed all of these difficulties by simply sitting hungrily in the dark, and then sleeping fully dressed on the sofa in the sitting room with the curtains wide open.

  Thank goodness for remote-controlled television sets. As far as I was concerned, the inventor should have been awarded a Nobel Prize.

  But then, on the third morning back, Dave and Nancy had come to my rescue.

  Nancy had fed me while Dave had carried one of the twin beds down from the guest room and set it up in my study.

  ‘Only a temporary measure, mind,’ he’d said. ‘We want you up those stairs in no time.’

  I had smiled at him and almost cried at their kindness.

  But, all the while, and in spite of Dave and Nancy’s best efforts, the greatest agony was the loneliness and the unspeakable hole that remained in my heart.

  Even after more than three months, I found myself bursting into tears for the smallest of reasons, maybe catching a glimpse of the photo of Amelia pinned to the noticeboard in the kitchen, or coming across a lip salve, hidden between the seat cushions on the sofa.

  Both were more than enough to turn on the taps and leave me sobbing.

  *

  The church was packed, with even the standing room at the back overflowing out through the doors into the graveyard.

  My parents, together with my brother Edward and his wife Stella, had made the journey from Wales, and Douglas had come down from London.

  DS Dowdeswell and DCI Priestly were both present, representing Thames Valley Police in their dress blue uniforms, as were Fred and Jill Marchant, Mary’s current neighbours, and Gladys and Jim Wilson, her former ones from Weybridge.

  Jack Westcott, our GP and the doctor from Warwick Racecourse, was also there with his wife. As was Simon Bassett from Underwood, Duffin and Wimbourne of Chancery Lane.

  And, in death as they had done so in life, the village people of Hanwell did Amelia proud, gathering together in great numbers to bid her farewell.

  Even, oh, yes, well, solicitor James Fairbrother, MA (Oxon), TEP, had turned up to pay his respects to his ‘dear old lady’.

  For me, however, it felt like I existed in my own little bubble of solitude and isolation, an unreality that I found difficult to comprehend.

  But it was all too real.

  Three days earlier I had finally been taken by a police family-liaison officer to the John Radcliffe Hospital mortuary to say goodbye to my wife. It was a dreadful experience and, once again, I should have taken Douglas’s advice to stay away.

  ‘Remember her as she was,’ he had told me. ‘Not as she is now.’

  But it was something I had needed to do, if only to prove to myself that it really was her and that she was gone for good.

  More than three months in a deep freeze had done its worst but the body presented to me under a white sheet on a trolley in the mortuary chapel was undeniably that of Amelia Jane Gordon-Russell.

  But, somehow, it wasn’t her – it was just a shell of her.

  My vibrant, funny and beautiful wife, full of life and love, had departed long ago, and it was as close as I’d ever come to believing that the souls of the dead go elsewhere.

  I had taken her favourite dress with me to the hospital so that she could be buried in it and that was all I could now think of as I sat staring at the right-hand of the two coffins positioned side by side below the altar.

  I only half-heard the service although everyone told me afterwards that it was very moving.

  Douglas read a eulogy on my behalf.

  I had written it the previous afternoon but I had bottled out of delivering it as I wouldn’t have been able to do so without breaking down, and that would have displayed my raw emotions for everyone to see.

  ‘No one will mind a few tears,’ Douglas had said, but even he could see that it would be too much for me to bear.

  As it was, even he cried through the whole thing and maybe I was the only person in the church at that moment with dry eyes. I had done all my weeping as I’d written it, huge splashes of tears on the paper making the words so unclear that Douglas had had to copy the whole thing out again so he could read it.

  After forty minutes the sad little procession was reversed, with Mary carried out first and Amelia following, both coffins placed in the waiting hearses ready for the short trip to their final resting place.

  Long gone were the days when most village churchyards had the space available for modern burials.

  And, anyway, the two women had lived in different parishes. The solution had been to arrange for them to lie side by side in a single grave in the cemetery at Hardwick Hill on the edge of Banbury.

  Douglas pushed my wheelchair outside and I sat by the church door as all the mourners filed past in front of me, each one shaking my hand and expressing their condolences.

  It was another ordeal I could have done without, but it was also another that had to be done.

  How was it, I wondered, that convention and tradition forced a bereaved and broken-hearted husband to suffer the mental trauma of a public funeral of his recently departed lover, at the very moment when he was least able to cope with it?

  Mark Thornton came up and stood in front of me. He tentatively held out his hand towards me. I reached out and shook it. He nodded at me twice, before turning away. No words were necessary. We had both understood the significance of that moment.

  Mark had arranged that, while the immediate family went away to the cemetery for the burials, everyone else would go along the road to his pub for refreshments, all at his own expense.

  Maybe that was the price of a guilty conscience.

  At least Joseph Bradbury hadn’t been in the line but, at the very end, when I had thought that the church must be empty, his wife Rachael appeared. It was as if she had been hiding at the back and plucking up the courage to show herself.

  ‘Hello, Rachael,’ I said.

  ‘I wish you were dead too,’ she said acidly by way of a greeting.

  ‘If all you were going to do was to be unpleasant,’ I replied, ‘why did you bother to come?’

  ‘To tell you that Joe didn’t kill Amelia.’

  ‘How do you know?’ I said. ‘Were you there?’

  ‘No, of course not,’ she said. ‘But I still know he didn’t kill her. He wouldn’t have.’

  The ever-loyal wife, I thought. Still believing in her husband’s innocence in the face of overwhelming evidence. Like Primrose, wife of Harold Shipman, the UK’s most prolific serial killer, who persistently refused to believe that her husband had done anything wrong, and even offered chocolates to the families of his victims during breaks in his trial at Preston Crown Court.
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  ‘And do you also deny that Joe tried to kill me?’ I asked Rachael.

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘You just had a car accident.’

  ‘And stealing a hundred thousand pounds from his own mother? Was that an accident as well?’

  ‘She didn’t need it while we did. Stupid old bag was loaded.’

  I stared at Rachael and wondered if it had been she who had actually thought up that particular venture.

  ‘Go home,’ I said to her. ‘Before someone finds out that you are married to Joe. Your husband is not very popular hereabouts and I’d hate it to be taken out on you.’

  If she thought I was threatening her, she’d be right.

  And, as if to reinforce my threat, the two Thames Valley policemen came walking over towards me. Seeing them coming, Rachael scuttled away past the waiting hearses and out of sight along the road. I couldn’t imagine why she had come in the first place.

  ‘How’s it going?’ asked the chief inspector, shaking my hand.

  ‘You mean apart from being at the funeral of my wife and her mother?’

  If he’d expected me to make things easy for him, he was much mistaken.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said, looking appropriately contrite.

  If anything, his sidekick appeared slightly amused by the exchange, and I found that, somewhat surprisingly, I was becoming quite fond of Detective Sergeant Dowdeswell.

  ‘I want my car back,’ I said to the DCI.

  ‘But can you drive like that?’ he asked insensitively.

  ‘That’s not the point,’ I replied angrily. ‘I want my car back now, whether I can drive it or not. And my computer, and my mobile phone. I also want my wife’s things that you lot took away.’

  The DCI looked somewhat stunned that I was being so aggressive, but they’d been hanging on to my stuff now for three months and I felt that, if it didn’t come back very soon, it never would.

  ‘I’ll sort it,’ said the detective sergeant, getting his boss out of a hole. ‘I’ll get someone to drive the car over and leave it in your driveway. I’ll put the other things in the boot, that’s unless the CPS need to keep something for the trial. I’ll speak to them about it.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, and I smiled at him.

  Douglas came over and stood behind the wheelchair, ready for action.

  It was time to go.

  ‘Will you excuse me now?’ I said to the policemen. ‘I have to go and bury my wife.’

  33

  So here I was in June sitting in the witness services area of Oxford Crown Court.

  ‘How do you think it’s going so far?’ I asked the detective sergeant.

  ‘Much too early to say, and I shouldn’t be saying anyway, not to you as a witness.’ He paused for a moment, looking around him, but he then continued. ‘But I can tell you that most of the Monday was taken up with swearing in the jury, plus legal arguments and the other formal stuff. The defence were again doing their best to have the indictments separated so that Joe would face three trials instead of one.’

  ‘Why on earth would they want that?’ I said. ‘I would have thought three trials would be much more of an ordeal for their client.’

  ‘Yeah, but they think that the evidence for the theft and the attempted murder are much stronger than that for the murder. They are worried that if found guilty for the other two, it will taint the jury in making their decision on the murder. And they’re probably right, although attempted murder is notoriously difficult to prove. Did he really try to kill you or was he just wanting to cause you some pain and suffering? Difficult question to answer.’

  ‘Trust me,’ I said. ‘He was trying to kill me.’

  ‘Anyway, the Oxford resident judge had ruled back in March that all three counts should be tried together, but the Justice Department have parachuted in a High Court judge from London for this case because of its high media profile. So the defence tried again.’

  He smiled. ‘Thankfully, after hearing the arguments, the new judge agreed with the old one and made the same ruling. And he’s right. The indictments are all interconnected. The motive for the murder is related to the theft, and the motive for the attempted is related to the murder. The defence weren’t happy but we were delighted because we think it gives us a better chance of getting convictions on all three.’

  ‘How about the conspiracy to defraud the HMRC?’

  ‘That’s been dropped by the CPS. At least as far as Joseph Bradbury is concerned. They felt that it clouded the issue on the other charges.’

  I could understand that.

  ‘So, after all that was settled on Monday, there was the opening by the prosecution yesterday, laying out the case to the jury and giving an indication of the evidence that’s to come. That took several hours.’

  ‘So am I the first witness?’ I asked.

  ‘No, no. The Home Office pathologist was first up, yesterday afternoon. He would have given his findings from the post-mortem. The CPS thought it was a good idea to get that in early, to make the jury fully understand that this is a very nasty murder case.’

  I was very relieved that I hadn’t been in court for that. What I’d heard in the Coroner’s Court had been quite sufficient, thank you very much. It had been enough to give me nightmares for weeks, at least it would have if I hadn’t been in a coma for some of the time.

  ‘And then I’m on before you,’ said the DS. ‘And I’m afraid you might be waiting here for some time. In fact, I’m quite surprised they called you at all for today. I’m quite expecting to be in the witness box all day, and maybe for most of tomorrow as well. I’ve got lots to go over.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ I said. ‘I’m happy to wait.’

  I had lots to go over as well – in my mind.

  ‘Detective Sergeant Dowdeswell,’ shouted a voice. ‘You’ve been called.’

  ‘That’s me,’ replied the DS, standing up.

  ‘Good luck,’ I said.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said, and departed, presumably to go to the court.

  *

  I spent the next two complete days sitting in the witness suite waiting, thinking, and twiddling my thumbs.

  One of the idiosyncrasies of the British legal system is that witnesses who are yet to be called cannot listen to the evidence that others are giving before their turn, in case their accounts of events become tainted by, or are argumentative with, what someone else has said earlier.

  Only after having given their evidence are witnesses allowed to sit in the body of the court to observe further proceedings.

  Hence, I felt somewhat detached from the trial and that made me hugely frustrated, especially as everyone was in there talking about my wife and me.

  It was all too easy to speculate on what was being said in the courtroom and how the jury were reacting to it, so I tried to take my mind off things by thinking back to what had happened to me over the months since the funeral.

  I’d heard it often said that a funeral can bring some sort of closure to one’s grief, and I was certainly glad to have put the ordeal behind me, but in my case it did little to ease the pain of loss.

  I had spent weeks moping around the Old Forge feeling sorry for myself, eating little and sleeping less, but all the while my motor nerves had improved their communication skills and my mobility improved, such that I could finally manage the full flight of stairs and venture outside into the garden. I had even contemplated having a go at driving my car, which had been returned by the police along with all my other stuff.

  So my life went on, lonely, rudderless and miserable.

  But I had to earn a living.

  I had discovered that, while it could take many years, decades even, to establish a persuasive reputation within the insurance family as a highly accomplished actuary, it could all be undone almost overnight by a single false accusation and malicious gossip.

  Insurance, after all, was based on the assessment and control of risk, and hence underwriting companies and practitioners w
ere largely of the opinion that any potential risk to their business had to be mitigated. So it was easier not to employ someone against whom there existed any sort of black mark, real or imagined.

  And that was me.

  No matter that I had been released from any sort of investigation into Amelia’s murder, and that someone else had been charged with the crime; hiring me, it seemed, even on a freelance single-task basis, was a gamble not worth taking.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ said one of my regular account managers. ‘If it were up to me . . .’

  He had left the sentence up in the air because . . . it had been up to him.

  ‘Try again after the trial,’ he’d said. ‘Provided her brother gets convicted.’

  At least my enforced unemployment had given me time to sort out Mary Bradbury’s estate.

  I had placed her cottage with a local office of one of the national estate-agent chains and had almost instantly received an offer of the full asking price, on condition that it was immediately taken off the market.

  ‘No way,’ I’d said to the prospective buyer. ‘If you want it taken off the market, sign the contract and pay the deposit.’

  In the end, this had resulted in a bidding war between three interested parties and I had eventually agreed to accept the highest of three binding, sealed bids, which had resulted in the property raising more than twenty-five thousand pounds above the asking price.

  It had taken quite a lot of toing and froing from the agent, but it had all been worth it, not least because half of the sum raised would be coming in my direction. That was, after deduction of the fees, legal charges and inheritance taxes.

  As the completion date of the sale had approached, I’d sent an email to Rachael inviting her to come to the property and choose some of the contents for her daughters to have in memory of their grandmother, but she had sent me a rude message back telling me to get lost, and to do whatever I wanted with Mary’s ‘dreadful’ belongings. She also wrote in her missive that she’d never liked any of Mary’s stuff and, as far as she was concerned, ‘it could all go on a bloody big bonfire’.

  Charming, I thought.

  Needless to say, it hadn’t gone on a bonfire, bloody big or otherwise.