A Mind to Kill

by Brian Freemantle

  ‘“… who was conceived by the Holy Ghost…”’ Dawson pressed on.

  ‘ Stop! I won’t listen! ’

  As well as pain Jennifer felt frightened, although strangely not for herself. She couldn’t – wouldn’t – think it was for Jane.

  Dawson ignored the interruptions, ‘“… From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead…”’

  It was a discordant, moaning chant, a rhythmless noise to drown out any other sound.

  ‘“… I believe in the Holy Ghost; the Holy Catholic Church; the Communion of Saints; the Forgiveness of sin; the Resurrection of the body and the life everlasting…”’ The priest’s face ran with sweat, like his hand against Jennifer’s head. ‘God can forgive the most terrible sin: any sin…’ He hesitated again, remembering Jeremy Hall’s account of the Hampshire visit. ‘You know that, Jane. You don’t believe in one creed, one denomination. You believe in God: the total love of God-’

  ‘ No! ’

  ‘Yes! Pray with me, Jane. “Our Father, which art in Heaven, Hallowed be thy name…”’

  The moaning chant started again.

  ‘“… Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done…”’

  The closing-out sound in Jennifer’s head wavered.

  “‘… as it is in Heaven. Give us this day our daily bread…”’

  ‘ And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, hut deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, for ever…’

  ‘We can do it, Jane!’ said the priest, exultant but physically as close to the exhaustion that Jennifer now felt. He was crying. ‘We’ll pray together. Worship together. And find your way back.’

  ‘ I’m frightened,’ confessed Jane, the voice distant, like somebody hiding.

  So quickly – and at times so confusingly – did events unfold that day that even for someone with a trained lawyer’s mind it was difficult for Jeremy Hall to differentiate explicable inconsistency from outright contradiction. And before he reached that comparable analysis there was the first telephone call from Humphrey Perry, which began with an apology for questioning the check Hall had asked for the previous day.

  ‘It’s not important,’ dismissed the barrister. ‘It’s what you found that matters.’

  ‘And I think it matters a great deal,’ said Perry.

  ‘You’ve got the doctor’s name?’ demanded Hall, the moment the solicitor finished telling him.

  ‘Ian Halliday.’

  ‘I can be there…’

  ‘… You don’t need to be,’ stopped Perry. ‘I spoke to Halliday an hour ago. Harley Street, naturally.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘Lomax had always been a private patient. He was an American, remember. Didn’t qualify for National Health, even if he’d wanted it.’

  ‘The prescription was filled on the same day as the temazepam?’

  ‘And collected by the same person,’ confirmed Perry. ‘It should have been obvious to me but it wasn’t. Hemels is an independent chemist, not part of a chain. Been there for more than fifty years. And they still keep their records on the premises: part of their history.’

  Hall paused, curious at the strange hollowness in his stomach.

  ‘Who collected it?’

  ‘I didn’t need the photograph of Jennifer. It was Elizabeth McIntyre. And I’ve got a photostat of her signature, from the ledger. She’s…’

  ‘… I know who she is,’ said Hall, as impatient as the other man. ‘She was one of the ones never called.’

  ‘You’re assuming it’s the basis for Jane’s accusation.’

  ‘You’ve read everything I have. Did you find another?’

  ‘No.’

  Hall accepted Perry’s insistence it was impossible for them properly to discuss the latest responses from Washington DC from Ross Hamilton Forest II without having a transcript in front of him. He had the solicitor fax it personally to the clinic to prevent its location becoming known throughout the solicitor’s office. That morning’s media coverage maintained the hysteria – and the pursuit – at fever pitch: he’d succeeded in causing some confusion by the different stories he’d given but the consensus was that the death of Jane Lomax was being reopened as a murder inquiry, although the police and the coroner denied it. Pathologist Michael Bailey had been traced, as well as Inspector Hughes and PC Elroyd. Everyone was photographed and extensively quoted. Hall felt sorry for the avalanche that would have engulfed Elspeth Simpson. Fred Knowland appeared on all five breakfast television channels.

  Forest’s report from America ran to twenty-five A4 pages, including two signed affidavits, and took the barrister two hours to digest as fully as he wanted.

  When they spoke again Perry, who had monitored the media as closely as Hall, said, ‘We probably could get an investigation reopened on the strength of what we’ve found out. I’d take a bet on a posthumous murder verdict.’

  ‘That’s not what we’re trying to prove,’ reminded Hall.

  ‘What do you want me to say if there’s an official approach from Hampshire?’

  ‘Let’s hear what it is, first. We wouldn’t be legally bound to hand our evidence over but I don’t see any reason why we shouldn’t. Jennifer wouldn’t be involved any more.’

  ‘They might try to involve her. Don’t forget the motive of an affair.’

  ‘Let’s wait for an approach.’

  ‘You think you’re ready?’

  ‘As ready as I’ll ever be.’

  ‘You thought what life’s going to be like when it’s all over?’

  ‘No,’ admitted Hall, honestly. ‘Sometimes I can’t imagine that it ever will be.’ Or, he mentally added in a thought that surprised him, that he particularly wanted it to be. He was certainly anxious to get rid of Jane, but not Jennifer.

  Dr Cox confirmed the priest’s insistence that Jennifer was too exhausted by being Jane’s conduit to face what amounted to a quasi-trial and Mason deferred to their opinion and also abandoned any analysis that day. They used Hall’s room to talk through what he intended and Cox said he’d wait until tomorrow before deciding whether Jennifer would even then be able to stand the strain.

  ‘It’s an attempt to persuade Jane to go, after all,’ the doctor reminded, unnecessarily. ‘The most important thing in her life. She’ll be wound up tighter than a spring.’

  ‘I couldn’t be more encouraged by how she’s responding,’ enthused Dawson. ‘I know I can exorcize Jane, if this doesn’t work.’

  ‘It’s not important which of us does it, as long as it’s done,’ said Hall.

  ‘Jane prayed with me,’ said the priest. ‘And there’s no obscenity, not any more.’

  ‘I wonder if it’ll be any different when she’s talking to me?’ said Hall.

  ‘Gerald Lomax was quite a bastard, wasn’t he?’ said Cox.

  Mason sniggered, cynically. ‘I think he had more of a Multiple Personality Disorder than some people suspected Jennifer of suffering.’

  Chapter Thirty-three

  That evening they walked together in the grounds, the first time Jennifer had ventured outside the clinic: her first unguarded outing, in fact, since the murder. It was her suggestion, seized by the psychiatrist, whom she pointedly told she didn’t want to come with her. Just Hall: just the two of them. Jennifer held his right hand tightly in her left and reached across herself to clutch at his arm with the other, so that he was always close, their bodies touching. There was still a faint shimmer from the heat of the day encouraging insect clouds: encouraging, too, other patients out into the grounds. Hall started out carefully to avoid getting recognizably close to anyone before realizing Jennifer was being just as cautious, always keeping anyone else at a distance. He noticed, too, that in whichever direction they went she always kept the buildings in sight, needing their reassuring nearness.

  ‘Jane isn’t here.’

  ‘No reason to think about her then: nor talk about
her.’ It had been a prompt from Julian Mason, before they’d set out. There had been others. He felt her shrug, beside him.

  ‘Do you know what this is?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Being normal. Ordinary.’ It was blissful, almost as if she was floating. She tried to hold the sensation, her own special drug blocking out the reality of the unreal.

  He squeezed the hand holding his arm against his body, rehearsing what he was going to say, not wanting to break her mood with the wrong word. ‘It’s a good feeling. I’d forgotten it.’

  She squeezed back. ‘Were you angry at me?’

  ‘When?’

  ‘At the beginning, when I said I didn’t want you: that I wanted a

  QC.’

  ‘No. That was professional: your choice.’

  ‘Can you always be impartial, like that?’

  ‘It’s an essential of the job.’

  ‘Are you impartial now?’ She looked intently sideways at him.

  He wasn’t sure how to answer: wasn’t sure what she even meant by the question. ‘I’m not going to abandon you: leave you by yourself.’

  She looked away and walked without speaking for several moments. ‘Thank you, for what you did then. At the trial I mean. I haven’t thanked you before, have I?’

  ‘You haven’t seen my fee yet,’ he said, trying for lightness.

  ‘Did you always believe me?’

  Truth or lie? Truth, Mason had dictated: no other way, blunt truth in fact. ‘Of course not, not at first. It was too absurd.’

  ‘What did you think was going to happen?’

  Keep to the truth. ‘That the judge would stop the trial. Order the jury to return a verdict on mental incapacity.’

  ‘Which would have achieved what you wanted all along?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Sneaky bastard!’

  She actually laughed, the first time he’d ever seen her do that – the first time since they’d met that she’d ever had the slightest cause, he supposed – and Hall came close to faltering. ‘I thought it was the best outcome. The only outcome.’ And still might be, he thought, worriedly.

  ‘The television is saying that you’re famous now. In demand.’ She veered off the path, on to the grass, to avoid a rapidly approaching track-suited jogger.

  ‘We’ll see.’ Bert Feltham hadn’t been happy at his continuing to delay a response to the offered briefs: the total, as of the previous evening, stood at twelve.

  They walked unspeaking again, in the general direction of a display of oaks, bowed and gnarled by age.

  ‘They were there hundreds of years before we were born and they’ll be there after we die,’ she said.

  The remark unsettled him. He said, ‘But in between we have a life,’ and at once regretted the remark.

  ‘Do we?’ She turned away from the tree-line, towards the clinic. To have gone around the coppice the other way would have taken the refuge out of sight. ‘Do you know what I thought, on the day it happened? Before it happened: before Jane? I remember thinking that I was the happiest, luckiest, most contented woman in the world…’ She snorted an empty laugh. ‘… Can you believe that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you believe Rebecca in court? That he was going to divorce me and take Emily away?’

  ‘I thought we were trying to forget things, just for a moment.’

  ‘We can’t, can we?’

  Honesty, he reminded himself. ‘Not for very long.’

  ‘So what’s the answer?’

  ‘She was performing: wanting the jury to make a comparison. She couldn’t be challenged.’

  ‘Still not an answer.’

  ‘I can’t give you one. If I’d had anything to challenge her with, I would have done.’

  He followed her lead again, accepting they were returning to the clinic. He waited for her to lead the conversation, too.

  ‘Did Gerald do it?’ she demanded, abruptly.

  Gently to warn her might lessen the shock, according to the psychiatrist. ‘There are a lot of things that don’t add up: things the police would have investigated, if they’d known.’

  ‘Do you believe I wasn’t involved.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can you prove it to her?’

  ‘If it’s based on the remark I think it is, yes.’

  ‘What if it isn’t?’

  ‘Then at least I’ll know where to go on looking.’

  ‘Why is she letting me alone, now?’

  ‘Because of what happened in the chapel?’ he suggested.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be…?’ Jennifer began, then stopped.

  ‘Yes,’ he agreed, not needing her to finish.

  Jane wasn’t there the following morning. Of all the setbacks and reversals Jeremy Hall attempted to anticipate – accepting as he tried to forearm himself there were too many unknowns possibly to insure against – he’d never imagined that when he came to argue Jane’s possession with legal objectivity she wouldn’t be there to argue back.

  Cox had declared Jennifer fit for the ordeal and all of them – Hall, Dawson and Julian Mason – were startled by the visibly obvious recovery. It was not so much physical although her face, still free of make-up, had for the first time in weeks a glow about it and her freshly washed hair still hung with the flow of expensive, if long past, attention. It was more in Jennifer’s demeanour. The apathy had lessened – lessened, not gone completely – to give way to something Hall held back from identifying as an eagerness for the confrontation.

  Jeremy Hall was frightened, far more apprehensive than he had been entering the Old Bailey that first day to argue ghostly possession as a murder defence to a hostile, God-fearing judge. The desperation of the whole idea, which had seemed reasonable, even logical, in those adrenalin-exploding first hours of their anything’s-possible escape from hospital now seemed preposterously absurd.

  Jennifer’s words the previous night – normal, ordinary – echoed in his mind. Which Hall acknowledged to be his difficulty. For two days – three because to begin with night had merged into new day and new day into night – he’d been normal and ordinary, a lawyer immersed in the normal and ordinary defence of a client. So immersed, inconceivable though it now was for him to concede, that he’d dismissed from conscious thought who that client was and the circumstances and to whom he would be presenting her defence. He’d lapsed – relaxed – into becoming ordinarily normal. Which nothing was. Or could be. He had to step back into the supernatural, into the unknown and the unpredictable, unable to judge anything by the safe and logically enshrined rules and process of law.

  And now he was being off-balanced before he’d started.

  ‘I reached her,’ argued Dawson, hopefully. ‘She prayed. Renounced evil.’

  ‘She didn’t come afterwards. Not at all during the night,’ agreed Jennifer, just as hopefully, eager for omens.

  ‘She was devout, before she died,’ accepted Hall, although less convinced. ‘Incredibly so. But I can’t imagine it could have been this easy.’

  ‘You hadn’t tried God before,’ reminded the priest, critically.

  ‘We hardly had the opportunity!’ protested the barrister. ‘We were arguing a murder charge.’

  ‘What do we do?’ demanded Mason, delighted at Jennifer’s very obvious mental recovery although secretly disappointed there wouldn’t be more to take to its exaggerated limit his participation and the honour-awarding thesis that would come from it.

  ‘We wait,’ decided Hall.

  ‘For how long?’ asked the priest.

  ‘As long as it takes.’

  Mason was about to protest the glib near-cliche but stopped at the thought of how it might sound to Jennifer. Instead he said, ‘Yes. We wait.’

  Which they did. Every day Jennifer attended services in the chapel and underwent analysis, sometimes under hypnosis, with Julian Mason, who even – dangerously – invited Jane to join them. Jeremy Hall read and re-read everything he’d assembled, actually glad of
the opportunity the delay gave him to search for something that incriminated Jennifer that he might have missed. And found nothing.

  His solitary walks with Jennifer in the clinic grounds, each evening, grew longer – the building not needing to be in view any more – and afterwards the four of them ate together, sometimes joined by Cox. And Jennifer did eat, hungrily, and the priest boasted his knowledge of the wine list, showing off in front of a beautiful woman.

  On the second day Hall had Bert Feltham send him the outlines of the four most urgent briefs, simply by posting them care of Dr Cox. He instructed Geoffrey Johnson to arrange the private security protection for the Hampshire mansion. He didn’t even consider telling Jennifer of the problems with Emily or of Annabelle’s growing reluctance to continue the role of surrogate mother.

  All five of them were at dinner on the sixth night, as usual in Jennifer’s suite. It was Dawson who ordered the Roederer Crystal with the promise to pay for it himself, declaring a celebration for the complete return of Jennifer’s physical health that had just been announced by Dr Cox.

  Jennifer insisted upon joining in her own toast. ‘Here’s to Jane’s departure. I know she’s left me.’

  ‘ I haven’t,’ said the familiar American voice. ‘ I’ve had a lot to think about.’

  Depression swamped them. Jennifer was devastated although she didn’t fall back into immediate apathy. Legally it was a recognized ploy, acknowledged Hall: protract a case to unsettle its participants and then spring the surprise of a hearing.

  ‘ I’ve been looking forward to this ’ It was virtually automatic for Jennifer to mouth the words, as Jane’s puppet.

  ‘So have we,’ said Hall.

  ‘ I’m right, aren’t If I was murdered. ’

  Jennifer sat with her head slightly bowed, both hands gripping the table edge. If Jane threw Jennifer into a fit she’d probably upend the table over all of them, Hall calculated. How they would stage this was something else he hadn’t anticipated: as they were, encircling a table, actually made it look like a seance. Or what he imagined a seance to be like, although he thought people were supposed to link hands. ‘I’m not sure. I haven’t heard your argument.’