A Mind to Kill

by Brian Freemantle

  Hall nodded but didn’t speak.

  ‘I wanted you to know.’ Say something! Please say something!

  ‘And now I do.’

  Not enough. Still blank faced: non-committal. ‘And?’

  ‘I can understand it being your problem. It’s not mine.’

  There was a flood of relief. The smile was still hesitant. She had to get everything out of the way: a fresh start or whatever cliche it was. ‘And we haven’t talked about Gerald.’

  ‘Do we need to?’

  ‘I don’t want to begin with any…’ She stumbled to a halt, sniggering nervously.

  ‘… Ghosts?’ he suggested, smiling back.

  ‘I can’t imagine I was going to say that!’

  ‘Julian Mason would probably think it was good that you were.’

  Jennifer became serious again, her emotions on a switch-back. ‘I don’t feel anything. I supposed I should… wish almost that I did because it’s not right to feel nothing… but that’s what it is. Nothing. Not hate or sadness or regret. Nothing. It’s as if he never happened. Never existed… Does that make me strange…?’ She managed another faint smile. ‘… Stranger than I have been…?’

  ‘That is a question for Julian Mason.’

  ‘I’m asking you.’

  ‘You were married to a man you never knew: whom no-one knew. How can you feel something for someone you never knew?’

  Jennifer’s smile broadened. ‘Thank you. That makes some kind of sense… as much as anything does.’

  ‘Is that the end of the ground rules that never were?’

  ‘Yes.’ I don’t expect another miracle, God, but make this work: please make this work.

  ‘Do you want any more wine?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Neither do I.’

  ‘Your room. Emily’s taken to coming in to mine, if she wakes up.’

  It didn’t work. Jennifer was tense, rigid, and Hall couldn’t relax, either, and was too relaxed because of it.

  ‘It’s my fault,’ he apologized.

  ‘Mine.’

  ‘It’s no-one’s fault. It’ll be all right.’

  ‘It will be, won’t it?’ she said, anxiously. ‘You’re not frightened of… you know…?’

  ‘I’m not frightened of anything. I’m very excited, which is the problem and I love you and everything is going to be wonderful.’

  ‘There’s one more thing we haven’t talked about.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I think it’s time Emily knew about Gerald.’

  Hall felt an intruder when Jennifer discussed it with Annabelle, trying to decide a good time and concluding between them there wasn’t one, and even more awkward when Jennifer pulled the child on to her lap and said she had something important to tell her.

  ‘It’s about Daddy,’ Jennifer said. Would she feel anything about Gerald now? Not about Gerald, she thought. For Emily, about Gerald, perhaps.

  ‘When’s he coming home!’ demanded the child, pulling away from Jennifer and grinning up at her.

  ‘That’s what I’ve got to tell you. He won’t be coming home, darling.’

  ‘Not till when?’

  ‘Not ever.’

  ‘Not ever, ever? ’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He’s got to!’

  ‘You know when I came home, with the man who told you he knew God?’ began Jennifer, anxiously.

  Emily sat with her lip between her teeth, tiny face creased in uncertainty. She nodded.

  ‘And you told him about Miss Singleton and the picture of Him on the wall?’ It was becoming too long! Too convoluted!

  Emily nodded again.

  ‘Has Miss Singleton told you about Heaven.’

  ‘It’s where God lives.’

  ‘That’s right,’ encouraged Jennifer. ‘And that’s where Daddy is now. God needed someone to help him and asked Daddy to go. So he has.’

  That’s not fair!’ protested Emily, eyes brimming. ‘I want him! I want him to come back.’

  ‘He can’t, darling.’

  ‘Tell the man who knows God to make Him send Daddy back.’

  The tears started and Jennifer had to swallow, against her own. ‘He can’t do that.’

  ‘I want Daddy!’ demanded Emily, through the tears, slapping out rudely at Jennifer.

  ‘Daddy has gone,’ said Jennifer, as firm-voiced as she could manage. ‘He’s not coming back because he can’t.’

  ‘I want him!’

  ‘It’s just going to be the two of us now, you and me,’ said Jennifer, looking solemnly over Emily’s head to Jeremy Hall.

  Emily pulled away from her mother again, looking in the same direction. ‘You’re not going to be my Daddy!’

  ‘I know,’ said Hall.

  That night Emily wet the bed. Jennifer and Hall still didn’t manage to make love properly.

  Until that week Jennifer had not maintained her promise in a church: instead a priest in Alton, an anxious young man named Tomkins, had twice a week braved the outside multitude to come to her and with inadvertent naivety provided three days of tabloid headlines the worst of which had been ‘God to the Rescue’.

  That Sunday Jennifer decided to go to him and to his church for the first time.

  Considering himself a hardened expert, Hall warned Inspector Hughes – suspecting as he did so that police leaks resulted in the very media invasion he was seeking protection against – and there was a familiar cordon around the church when they arrived after battling through the throng immediately outside the house. In the pew Emily positioned herself very positively and suspiciously away from Jeremy Hall, between Annabelle and her mother. The row behind them remained empty. Only two people stayed in the one in front, crushed together at the far end. Tomkins took his sermon from the Book of Proverbs and quoted, ‘Let us solace ourselves with love, for the good man is not at home, he has gone on a long journey,’ which Hall thought appropriate for their reluctant acceptance by the congregation. He expected her to take communion but she didn’t. Seeming aware of his surprise she said on the chaotic ride back, ‘I’m not ready yet. My baptism and confirmation will be my acceptance.’

  Before he got into the helicopter that came that night to collect him Hall said, ‘It’s been quite a weekend.’

  Jennifer said, ‘I’d wanted it to be better.’

  ‘There’ll be a lot more that are.’

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Jeremy Hall did not consider himself a literary judge but he was impressed by what Jennifer had written when he got back to London that night. She wasn’t hurrying it: hadn’t, in the first seventy-five pages he’d brought back with him, yet reached the moment of Jane’s possession. Jennifer was being brutally, scathingly honest about herself and her affair with Lomax – a casual adventure to begin with, growing guiltily into love – and Hall accepted how fully her confidence had returned for her to want him to read it now that their affair had begun, if not yet been properly consummated.

  He amused himself with the impression of the President of the American publishing company trying to crawl down the telephone to get to him when he called to finalize the $8,000,000 contract. As it was the man insisted on catching an evening flight to London, despite Hall’s warning that he wouldn’t be available the following day because of a court appearance that might occupy him for the remainder of the week.

  In the event it didn’t. Humphrey Perry was again the instructing solicitor and had obtained copies of the National Front membership cards of two of the four white youths upon whom his black client was accused of inflicting grievous bodily harm. Hall broke one of the youths in cross-examination to admit setting out to ambush the boy, who in blind panic had stabbed one of his attackers with his own wrestled-away knife. A typical caption under his newspaper photograph the following day called him ‘Jeremy the Unbeatable’. He told Bert Feltham he didn’t really want to increase his fees to?2,000 a day so soon. They compromised by reserving the figure for lengthy cases to which he had to de
vote his entire time. Hall promised to tell the chief clerk by the end of the week whether he would defend a murder charge as mercy killing.

  Wilbur Blake reminded Hall of the American lawyer who’d provided so much valuable background defence material about Jane Lomax. Like Ross Hamilton Forest II, the patrician-like publisher wore his pure white hair long and had the same clipped, New England accent. The lawyer with him, Craig Beaumont, was an immaculately dressed and comparatively young black man whom Hall guessed from his height to have been a college basketball player.

  Blake put up only a token resistance against abandoning his demand for world rights – Hall surrendered the English-speaking provinces of Canada and South Africa but retained Australia – and Hall suspected he wouldn’t have attempted to reduce the $8,000,000 if Beaumont hadn’t prompted him. They ping-ponged figures across the table and settled at $7,250,000. Hall had been prepared to drop the further $250,000 and wished Jennifer had been there to witness the negotiation, particularly when he specifically excluded any film, television or video-recording rights. It had been Jennifer’s suggestion, to lessen the tax liability, for the money to be assigned, in tranches, to an acculumation and maintenance trust in Emily’s name. Hall allowed it to appear the American’s bargaining success.

  While Hall went legally, line by line, through the American contract he let Blake read Jennifer’s first seventy-five pages, occasionally distracted by the American’s very visible excitement.

  It was Beaumont who insisted Jennifer, not anyone with power of attorney, sign such a large contract and they flew down the following day. Blake was courtly and congratulatory about what he’d already read (‘It’s hardly going to need any editing at all,’) and the practical Beaumont worked hard to include a clause in their agreement guaranteeing Jennifer undertaking a countrywide promotional visit to the United States tied in with a lecture tour just prior to her book’s publication. It was left to Jennifer’s final decision, nearer the time.

  Neither American regarded or treated Jennifer as an oddity. Nor did the individual publishers who followed them in succeeding weeks, although the Japanese publisher wanted several photographs of himself with her.

  On the day of the American signing Hall issued a public statement detailing the deal, although withholding the figure. He repeated it with every contract in every country that followed and by the end of the first month had managed to divert the offers and the mob-like attention away from Jennifer and himself to the organizations with reproduction rights. A hard core of paparazzi remained but the siege was virtually lifted in London and Hampshire.

  Emily was even able to go back to Miss Singleton’s playschool, although driven by Annabelle and initially escorted by security men. Jennifer was no longer ostracized in church on Sunday. Her first public outing with Jeremy Hall in London – to a restaurant in Chelsea Harbour – was a mixed ordeal of curiosity, distancing apprehension and autograph demands but Jennifer confronted it then and every time afterwards until the intrusion became bearable. They adjusted to the need for permanent bodyguards. Inevitably, because Hall was always photographed with her, newspapers and magazines linked them romantically. They refused to deny or confirm it. He went with her to the plastic surgeon who advised that she wait another three months for cosmetic surgery to her arms.

  Hall’s plea of mitigation gained a suspended sentence for the mercy killing mother. He was almost glad to lose a case – a fraud charge against a company chairman whose lies he didn’t learn about until they were in court – and those that followed but on average he won more than he lost and the newspaper eulogies, and the briefs, continued unabated. Jennifer’s manuscript grew and grew.

  ‘It’s not perfect but out of ten I’ll score life at the moment at nine,’ said Jennifer.

  She made the remark on a Saturday, just the two of them at dinner but in the dining room because they were celebrating the completion of her manuscript. She’d refused to let him read any more than those first seventy-five pages. ‘It’s still rough. Needs polishing.’

  ‘You’ll have to let it go eventually.’ She’d already revised it once. The writing had consumed her – which was hardly surprising – but he suspected she was having second thoughts about the initial honesty. ‘Any particular problem?’

  ‘I’ve got two endings,’ she admitted.

  ‘Two?’

  ‘One, where Jane finally goes. The other with us. And we’re kind of in limbo, aren’t we?’ They’d become lovers, although still with difficulty, the weekend after the American visit. Now the sex was perfect every time but they still bed-hopped because of Emily’s nocturnal wandering.

  Hall recognized an awkward apology. ‘What makes you think I want to marry you anyway?’ he said, trying to lift the seriouness.

  Jennifer made the effort to respond. ‘I don’t give a damn about you. I want to marry you. And I’m going to.’

  ‘Let’s give her more time,’ he said, seriously. ‘She’s coming around, gradually: seeing me as part of the furniture.’

  ‘I want you to be more than that to her.’

  ‘I want that, too. But it’s got to be at her pace, not ours. We’ve got all the time in the world, haven’t we?’

  She smiled. ‘I hope so.’

  ‘You know so.’

  ‘I want to have a party!’ Jennifer announced excitedly, smiling at him eagerly. ‘I’m being baptized in two Sundays’ time. I’ve asked Dawson to do it: Tomkins understands. And I want Julian Mason and Dr Cox and Lloyd, too. Everyone who helped me as much as they did. And Humphrey and Geoffrey as well, I suppose. The house is big enough for everyone. How’s that sound!’ I’ll be keeping my promise, she thought: debt paid. To everyone.

  ‘Wonderful, if that’s what you want.’

  ‘You’re not keen?’

  ‘It’ll be another media bun fight if it leaks out when I ask the police for additional protection.’

  ‘I don’t see why it should be. And if it does I don’t give a damn about that, either.’

  It didn’t leak.

  The adhesive paparazzi were alerted by the sudden influx of helicopters and then the emerging convoy of cars but they’d resigned themselves to some media pursuit. At the church, with Dawson’s agreement, Jennifer actually invited three in to photograph the ceremony. Emily wore a new party dress and the laid-back Mason had made a supreme effort by wearing a suit. The pews were filled, all around them, and quite a few people came up to Jennifer afterwards to congratulate her. Some even shook hands.

  Emily was allowed to stay up for the start of the dinner and showed off, although not irritatingly so. The only dip was when she asked Dawson to tell God to send her Daddy back but Jennifer refused to be depressed even by that, agreeing when it was time for Emily to go to bed that as it was a special occasion Emily could sleep in her bed. Jennifer only just managed to avoid looking at Jeremy Hall as she did so. When she finally caught his eye Jennifer grinned and he grinned back and she didn’t care if anyone around the table saw the exchange or not. It had given her an idea.

  Hall perfectly performed the role of host but it was Jennifer who proposed the toast, with Roederer Crystal for Dawson’s benefit and enjoyment. She acknowledged each of the men around the table by name and reserved calling her recovery a miracle until she got to the urbane priest. Annabelle had been included in the dinner and Jennifer embraced her in the gratitude.

  ‘That’s all over now,’ she declared. ‘And because of you all I have a future. A future that I am looking forward to more than I can properly express in words, although I’ve tried to express everything else in words over these last few months…’ She hesitated, looking directly at Jeremy Hall. ‘… It’s a future I am going to share with the brilliant lawyer who, can you believe, I once told I didn’t want in my life. And now without whom I couldn’t live. So I am very glad I won’t have to…’ She raised her glass. ‘I’ve just drunk to you all so now I invite all of you to drink to Jeremy and I. And to our future together

  …�
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  There was a babble of congratulation and Dawson demanded to perform the wedding ceremony and they agreed at once. There were more toasts, to the success of the book, and it was gone midnight when the two doctors helped the unsteady priest to bed. Before he went upstairs Hall managed to separate himself sufficiently from those who remained downstairs to say he wouldn’t expect her that night. Jennifer, who was slightly and happily drunk, retorted that she wouldn’t be denied anything on her official engagement night and would come if she thought Emily was sleeping soundly enough.

  She’d had caterers in for the evening and spent some time seeing them off the premises, finally checking the kitchen before going upstairs herself.

  Emily still slept with a low night-light, which Annabelle had moved into Jennifer’s bedroom when she’d settled the child down. Emily was sprawled sideways across the bed and stirred and muttered something from her growing-up dream when Jennifer lifted her back to one side so that she could get into the other.

  Having done so Jennifer remained propped up on one arm, looking down. Emily’s hair was curled out, on the pillow, and she’d put her thumb in her mouth and was sucking, noisily. Jennifer felt an engulfing, overwhelming rush of love. So perfect, she thought: so perfect and beautiful and wonderful.

  ‘Emily,’ she whispered, softly. ‘My Emily. I love you, my darling.’

  Her arm began to numb, from the way she was supporting herself, so she lay back to take her weight off it. And then the numbness seized her, paralysing her.

  ‘ Hello Jennifer,’ said Jane.

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  ‘ Jesus, I’ve been bored! Almost couldn’t wait, several times. Glad I did though. This is perfect: everyone I want, all in the same place at the same time. Here, where it happened the first time…

  ‘ There have been a few bright moments, but not a lot: difficult not to have hysterics at all that exorcism shit from the priest…’ The voice deepened, mockingly. ‘… “ This, my child, is a miracle. Proof that God loves us. ” And what a hypocritical cow you turned out to be, pretending you believed it. I know what believing is and you sure as Hell haven’t got it. It was fun, conning the old motherfucker, though. Conning you all. Remember how clever I was! How I stopped swearing and pretended to be contrite, repentant…! ’ There was another voice change, deep again. ‘“ Pray with me, my child: seek God’s forgiveness