Sour Grapes

by Natasha Cooper

  ‘Well, first I’d need to talk to whoever it is and do a polygraph test. Then I’d read up whatever I could find about the crime itself and the evidence the police had before they arrested him. And I’d try—but it might be difficult—to get them to talk to me and say what they did and said to make him confess… All that sort of thing.’

  Knowing that her voice sounded much less confident and knowledgeable than she would have liked, Emma stopped smiling and tried to add a little of Mrs Rusham’s briskness to her delivery. ‘Have you got any suitable cases in your files, Jane? Willow said you’d be bringing some notes with you tonight.’

  ‘I know. I told her I would, but then I thought I’d better find out a bit more about exactly what you wanted. You see, there is one particular man I thought you might consider, but I didn’t bring the file because I wasn’t sure he’d do for you, although…’

  As Jane stopped talking, Emma decided that she need not have worried so much about her own lack of confidence. For once Jane seemed to share it. The wicked glint in her brown eyes had gone completely and she seemed to be almost pleading with Emma as she added, ‘I must say it would be a help if you did think he was worth looking into.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Willow before Emma said it. ‘Have you been having legal problems with this one as well?’

  Emma made herself wait until Willow was satisfied.

  ‘No. Nothing like that,’ said Jane. ‘But in a way… I suppose you could say I’ve been having moral problems with it. Well, something like that.’

  Surprised, Emma glanced at Willow and saw that she was equally taken aback.

  ‘There’s a man called Andrew Lutterworth,’ Jane went on oblivious to their reaction, ‘who’s doing four years for causing death by dangerous driving. Two deaths in fact. He’s about to become eligible for parole. His wife talked to me recently and…’ She stopped talking so that she could drink, but she showed none of her usual pleasure in the wine and seemed hardly to have tasted it before she swallowed and put down her glass.

  Willow and Emma looked at each other again. Neither of them had ever seen Jane quite so tentative.

  ‘You probably remember,’ she went on, ‘the campaign we’ve been running on and off for years now about people who kill while driving and get off with a fine or a piddling little sentence?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Willow, ‘but four years isn’t exactly piddling for a driving offence, especially if it was his first.’

  ‘It seems quite piddling to me,’ said Emma. ‘Two people died.’

  ‘Yes, I know, but it’s not as though he was accused of murdering them—or even of manslaughter. If the crime was bad driving, four years does seem quite a lot. The effects of what happened were terrible, but that’s not the point. In this country punishment isn’t supposed to be a means of avenging the victims.’

  ‘Well, it should be,’ said Jane, sounding almost harsh. Before either of the others could protest, she added more calmly, ‘At least in a case like this. It was a particularly bad accident and he behaved outrageously. He ought to have got the maximum possible sentence.’

  ‘Which is what?’ asked Emma, anxious to take at least some part in the discussion about the material for her own thesis.

  ‘At the time he was convicted: five years. It’s more now, thanks to people like us pushing our outrage on the politicians. Don’t look at me like that, Willow. Whatever his intentions might have been, this man drove his car smash into a woman and her baby, and he didn’t even bother to call an ambulance. If he had, the mother at least might have lived, although the child was too badly mashed up to have had any chance at all. That was what we majored on in our stories: that she could have been saved if he’d had the decency to think of anyone but himself.’

  ‘So how was he caught and why did he confess?’ said Emma, still not sure why Jane thought the case would interest her and determined to find out before Willow thought of something else she wanted to ask or explain. ‘He did confess, didn’t he?’

  ‘Yes, he did eventually. Not at first. He was caught because he was stupid enough to forget that the car itself would identify him. I suppose, to be fair, he might have been too shocked to think. Anyway, he’d probably have got away with it if he’d driven off at once and had the car panel-beaten back into shape before anyone saw it. It was such a filthy night that there were very few people out and about, and no one’s ever found any witnesses to the crash. As it was, he tried to be that little bit too clever and tripped himself up. He abandoned the car at the scene of the accident and claimed that someone had stolen it earlier in the evening from outside his London office.’

  ‘Well, mightn’t it have been nicked?’ Willow’s voice sounded very cool after Jane’s impassioned one. ‘Cars often are.’

  ‘It’s possible, but the police didn’t believe him and nor did the jury, even though he went to some trouble to set up the alibi. In fact he managed to report the theft on his mobile, pretending to be still in London, before the police had even discovered the crash in Buckinghamshire. But after he’d been taken in for questioning, he did eventually tell the real story. Then when he’d had time to think about it again, and presumably listened to his lawyers, he changed his plea to not guilty and said he’d been too confused and fuddled to resist the police’s bullying. At that point he claimed he had been exhausted from not having had enough sleep for days because of his work and confessed just to get them off his back.’

  ‘It sounds relatively familiar from what you’ve been telling me, doesn’t it, Emma?’ said Willow, pouring more wine for them all. ‘Confessing to stop the hostile interrogation. Perhaps that, at least, was true.’

  Emma nodded. ‘Yes, it could have been. What kind of man is he, Jane? Likely to be a victim of bullying?’

  ‘Let’s eat while we talk,’ said Willow before Jane could answer. ‘Otherwise the food’ll dry out. Bring the glasses, will you, Em, while I go and fetch it?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Emma tried not to sound irritated and quickly turned back to look at Jane again: ‘So: what kind of man?’

  ‘An accountant in a big firm. Clever, knowledgeable, arrogant. Quite able to cope with bullying by anyone, I’d have thought, even if the police still went in for that sort of thing.’

  ‘Don’t they?’ asked Emma innocently as she obediently collected the glasses.

  Jane smiled. ‘Nowadays they go only as far as PACE allows, which isn’t very far.’

  ‘I can see your lawyers have got to you,’ said Emma, laughing as she thought of some of the things Jane’s newspaper had printed in the fairly recent past. ‘Have you been sued much recently? I don’t remember reading anything about libel for a while.’

  ‘No. We tend to settle these days.’ Jane ran both hands through her mop of orange hair and then held the back of her neck as though it was aching. ‘As soon as judges are allowed to fix damages, we’ll fight again, but not until then. Juries are far too generous with other people’s money; it’s just not worth it. And with the wretched lottery making them all used to thinking in millions, it’s going to get even worse.’

  They walked together into Willow’s apricot-coloured dining room, where she had lit the six candles that stood clustered together in the middle of the table. Mrs Rusham had put small glass pots of early white jonquils between the silver candlesticks, and laid the three places with what Emma recognised as the best china. She was touched to see how much effort Willow and Mrs Rusham had made for her weekend holiday and all her irritation disappeared in a wave of gratitude.

  ‘Do sit down, both of you,’ said Willow as she disappeared through the door that led into the kitchen. She returned with a tray a minute or two later. ‘Could you take the plates, Em?’

  As Emma distributed them, Willow took two covered dishes off the tray and put them beside Jane’s place.

  ‘Help yourself,’ she said, ‘while I fetch the spuds.’

  The ‘spuds’turned out to be a gloriously savoury dish of potato slices layered with white on
ion and garlic cooked in strong veal stock, and the contents of the covered dishes were revealed as venison casserole and a mixture of celeriac, carrot and parsnip cut into thin batons. It was all the most wonderful change from the diet of instant soup and noodles, cottage cheese and perfunctory canteen food to which Emma had become accustomed.

  ‘You said you’d talked to this Lutterworth’s wife,’ she said to Jane when they had finished giving the venison the awed attention it deserved. ‘Why?’

  ‘She came to see me,’ said Jane as her expression turned from satisfaction to something much bleaker. ‘I’m not sure how she ever got into the building, let alone up to my floor, but she did. I heard my name and when I looked up there she was, this completely unknown, utterly respectable-looking woman standing in the doorway of my office, telling me that she must have three minutes of my time. I had no idea what she wanted.’ Jane slopped some more wine into her glass, but she did not drink. Staring at the flowers and candles in the middle of the table, she went on in a hard, flat voice, ‘As soon as she saw she’d got my attention she told me who she was. And then before I could get her thrown out she said that she’d simply come to ask me not to print anything about car crashes and unfair sentences for drivers who kill until after her husband’s parole hearing.’

  ‘Wasn’t that a trifle cheeky?’ said Willow, knowing how much Jane resented any attempt to censor what she put in the paper, or in fact anything she might want to write or say to anyone.

  ‘Oh, sure. To start with I was furious: you know, someone trying to interfere with my editorial independence, but then I started to have…if not exactly doubts, at least second thoughts about what we’d been doing.’

  ‘You?’ Willow sounded flabbergasted. ‘But why?’

  Jane did drink then. A moment later she said, ‘She told me that her husband was innocent and that he’d never have been convicted if we hadn’t reported his case so angrily and printed such violent denunciations of drivers who kill people. She thought we’d whipped up such hatred that the jurors didn’t even bother to think about the evidence. I protested, obviously, but she said they couldn’t have; if they had, they’d have seen that there wasn’t nearly enough to convict anyone on. Later, after she’d gone, I started to look at some of the background stuff in the files and I saw that in a way she was right: there wasn’t actually all that much real evidence that he had been the driver.’

  ‘But she didn’t really make you believe he was innocent, did she?’ said Willow, frowning. She could not see why the case should have had such a strong effect on Jane.

  ‘Not exactly, but she did shake me. I’m not sure I’d have thought twice about it if she hadn’t been so quiet in her protest and so bloody reasonable. If she’d wanted money out of us, I’d have felt happier. But she didn’t. She didn’t even want a retraction or an apology in the paper. All she wanted was for me to listen to what she said, admit that we might have done her husband an injustice, and lay off our campaign. There was something about her that made her impossible to ignore—or forget, unfortunately.’

  ‘D’you know what it was?’ asked Emma, who was thoroughly puzzled by the whole story.

  Jane turned her head slowly, almost as though she was reluctant to think too hard about Mrs Lutterworth.

  ‘Not really. She was very dignified, and we don’t see a whole lot of dignity at the Mercury.’

  ‘I can imagine,’ said Willow at her driest.

  ‘But it wasn’t just that. She was so rational. I think that must have been what threw me, and now I can’t get it out of my head. She’d been writing to me at intervals ever since her husband was convicted and I’d disregarded all the letters on the grounds that she must be a silly little woman who had no idea what he got up to while he was out of sight, but she wasn’t like that at all.’

  ‘What was she like?’ asked Willow. She collected the empty plates to take out to the kitchen and waited in the doorway to hear Jane’s reply. ‘Apart from being rational.’

  ‘One of us,’ said Jane at last. Then she produced an unconvincing laugh: ‘You know, Willow: intelligent, attractive, woman-in-her-own-right, even though she doesn’t have a career, and thoroughly grown up. All that sort of thing. I liked her, you see. Perhaps it was that more even than the rationality. Anyway, as I say, she almost convinced me.’

  ‘A cynic like you! I can hardly believe it!’ said Emma in an attempt to lighten the atmosphere and take back some of the control Willow kept assuming.

  Jane shrugged, not looking at all happy. ‘So you see, Emma,’ she said eventually, swirling the last of the wine round and round in her glass. ‘I’m being selfish. If you could use the case for your thesis and find out whether he did or didn’t do it, I’d be in your debt.’

  Chapter Four

  Emma returned to St Albans on Sunday evening, feeling much better than when she had left. In encouraging her to talk about her work, Willow had shown so clearly that she believed it would have real value that she had bolstered Emma’s shaky confidence. And the case of Jane’s killer-driver seemed quite promising.

  Jane had had a large file sent round to Willow’s house from the Daily Mercury’s offices just before Emma had left to catch her train. Her first quick glance at the file had shown her that it was full of press cuttings and all kinds of supporting documents, but she had not had time to read any of them properly. The knowledge of their presence in her bag was making her positively eager to get back to work. A few days earlier she would not have believed it possible and she was passionately grateful to Willow for that as well as everything else.

  Only two other people got off the train ahead of Emma, and she was surprised to see them both flinch as they reached the platform and hurry away into the darkness. When she got to the doorway herself, she looked to her left to see what had bothered them and laughed. Jag was standing there waiting for her, with two huge yellow helmets dangling from his left hand.

  He was startling enough to have given anyone a fright, she thought. Huge and dangerous-looking in his leathers, he had longish dark hair and an impressive face with powerful features and straight dark eyebrows almost meeting across his handsome nose.

  ‘How did you know I was going to be on this train?’ Emma asked, stretching up to kiss his cheek.

  Jag bent down obligingly so that her lips could touch his face. It felt harshly scratchy, but then he often did not bother to shave for a couple of a days at a time. That gave Emma a terrific kick of satisfaction, as did the noisiness of his big motorbike and his absolute directness. Having grown up among people who controlled every aspect of their clothes and bodies and rarely said what they meant, she found it refreshing to be with someone like Jag, who appeared to have no taboos of any kind. She was convinced that she could never embarrass him, whatever she did, and could hardly believe how liberating that felt.

  ‘I didn’t,’ he said, ‘but I thought it was worth the gamble when you didn’t answer your phone after the last one. How was the weekend?’

  ‘Great, actually, even though Tom was away. I’ve told you about him, haven’t I?’

  ‘Just once or twice,’ said Jag, looking much less alarming as he started to laugh. ‘But not as often as this Willow of yours. Did she cheer you up? It looks like it. Here, take this.’

  He held out one of the helmets. Emma obediently buckled it over her black hair as they walked out into the car park and then with some difficulty swung her leg over the pillion of Jag’s enormous motorcycle, glad that she was wearing her jeans. Jag strapped her small squashy bag on to the back, efficiently straddled the bike, bounced himself into a comfortable position and roared off towards the campus and Emma’s room.

  With her leg muscles still quivering and the engine noise reverberating in her brain, she asked him if he would like to come up for coffee.

  ‘Great,’ he said with all his usual simplicity, turning away to lock up the bike.

  He followed her up the narrow outside staircase to her corridor on the second floor of the red-bri
ck building, pausing to allow her to collect her mail from the pigeonholes at the top of the stairs. When she had unlocked the door to her room, he stood just inside, shaking out his black curls and kicking one great boot against the other. Thinking that the noise of the rattling buckles was almost enough for a small percussion band, Emma dumped her letters on the desk and went to fill the kettle.

  ‘Although I don’t drink coffee at night,’ he said, still clanking. ‘Have you got anything I might like in that English chillybin of yours?’

  Emma, her hand on the kettle lead, stood absolutely still.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked.

  She turned to face him, trying to decide how to play it, and saw that he was looking at her in blank surprise.

  ‘Is that some kind of Antipodean come-on?’ she asked at last, trying to sound lightly teasing, and was disconcerted when he began to laugh. He came right into the room, shutting the door behind him.

  ‘No, Sunshine,’ he said when he had got his amusement under control, ‘it was not. I was asking if you had any cold drinks. A chillybin is a fridge where I come from. Have you got anything I might like in yours?’

  ‘Lots’, she said at once. ‘Oh, Jag, I’m so sorry. That was silly of me and…and ludicrously vain.’

  ‘No reason I can see why you shouldn’t think I’m after your body,’ he said as she found him a glass and a quarter-litre bottle of French beer from the local supermarket ‘I imagine most men are. But that’s not how we proposition women in the Antipodes, you know.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said Emma, half relieved that she had not shown how much she would welcome a proposition and half wishing that she was sure enough to make the first move herself. Since she was not, she cleared the sofa so that he could sit down and politely asked how his weekend had been.

  ‘Fine.’ He settled himself on the sofa and started to drink straight from the bottle. ‘I got a lot of work done, but I missed you. What did you get up to in London?’