Sour Grapes

by Natasha Cooper

  Emma shook her head, but before she could speak, Willow said, ‘Do you really think, Mr Lutterworth, that Jemima is going to put off her garden labourers for six months until you get out, particularly with both of us encouraging her to start digging? And we will, believe me. Six months is a very long time to sit in your cell wondering which day is going to bring the news that the body’s been found. It’s only a question of time. You’re going to be exposed for what you really are: a bully, a liar—and a killer. There’s nothing you can do to prevent that, stuck in here as you are. You’ll emerge through that gate on the day of your release, and a polite man in civvies will ask your name and walk you gently over to an unmarked car. It’ll all happen all over again, Andrew, and this time it’ll be worse. Murder means you go down for life.’

  ‘Don’t be absurd,’ he said, turning to laugh in Emma’s face. ‘You poor silly child. Have you been trying to impress this friend of yours and make yourself interesting to her? Tut, tut. All you’ve done is make yourself look a complete fool.’

  Emma decided that she was not going to take any more. She started to tidy up her equipment, saying, ‘Fine. We’ll be off now. There’s nothing more for us to do, here, Willow. Let’s go. It’s not our problem to see that Jemima gets some warning of what her husband’s left in her garden. What it’s going to do to her I can’t imagine. Think of it: losing Pipp like that, being chucked into a mental hospital because Andrew was too selfish to give her the support she needed; and now discovering that he—the man she married, the man she slept with, whose child she bore—is a murderer. I’m not sure she’ll want to go on living. But it’s not our problem. We can go and leave them to their own damnation. Poor Jemima.’

  ‘Shut up.’ Andrew’s shout cut across Emma’s gentle voice.

  ‘If I were her, I think I’d be seriously tempted to kill myself,’ she went on, no longer at all sorry for him or in any way troubled about her assessment of him.

  ‘Shut the fuck up.’

  Emma looked at him and saw that his distorted face was plum-coloured. He was shaking. She could feel the fury that was charging his body like a surge of electricity. She thought she could also feel an agony of frustration in him.

  ‘Won’t you help us warn her?’ Willow asked, taking over the good cop’s part. She sounded as gentle as she would have been with Lucinda after a nightmare. ‘If you tell us, Andrew, we can at least get Jemima away from the house before anything’s found and make sure she’s looked after, not left alone to kill herself.’

  ‘Bitch!’ said Lutterworth. ‘Bitches, the pair of you.’

  ‘It’s going to come out. You might as well tell us,’ said Willow, putting a hand on Emma’s wrist to reassure her.

  ‘And take your filthy hands off Emma,’ Lutterworth shouted with supreme inconsistency. ‘Leave her alone. It’s your fault. She’d never have done anything like this without you. You sick bitch. Filthy dyke. Get out of here, the pair of you.’

  ‘We can’t go until you tell us who it is who’s buried in the garden,’ said Willow.

  Emma was not sure how much more she was going to be able to take and hoped he would break soon.

  ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake. It’s no one who matters. And it’s none of your fucking business. Just bugger off and leave me alone.’

  ‘Everyone matters,’ said Emma. ‘Who is she, Andrew?’

  ‘It’s not a woman, for Christ’s sake.’ He sounded tired suddenly, as though, like Emma, he would not be able to take much more.

  ‘Not a woman?’

  ‘No. A boy.’

  Emma looked quickly at Willow and saw her own terrible doubt reflected in Willow’s eyes.

  ‘Pipp?’ she whispered.

  ‘No,’ Andrew howled, burying his face in his hands. ‘Christ! You’re sick.’ Tufts of greying black hair protruded above his clasped hands. The muscles in his back were working as he fought to get his lungs under control. Eventually, his breathing grew calmer and he looked up again. His eyes were wet and his skin was even greyer, as though all the blood had left his head. He looked as though he might faint.

  ‘What boy?’ asked Willow.

  ‘I told you. No one who matters.’

  ‘How did you know him?’

  ‘I didn’t. He came up to me when I was at King’s Cross one afternoon.’

  ‘What were you doing there?’ asked Willow when he did not continue. She thought he looked as though he had given up and hoped that meant he would at last tell them everything they needed to know.

  ‘I’d been to see clients in Peterborough. I’d got off the train and suddenly it hit me all over again. Philip was dead and Jemima mad. My life was hell. There seemed no point in going on any longer. And then this boy came up to me. This child.’

  He stopped talking again. Emma saw that he had no idea that the tape recorder was still running. Until that moment she had not noticed it either. She was not sure whether to ask him anything or to wait for him to carry on of his own accord. She looked at Willow, who very slightly shook her head.

  Andrew shuddered. ‘He came up to me and said something. I didn’t hear it the first time so I bent down to find out what he wanted and I saw how like Philip he was. And like you, Emma. With that short black hair and the big blue eyes and that smile of yours, perky sometimes, but a bit afraid, too, you do look like Philip.’

  Emma turned away.

  ‘For a second I thought I was going as mad as Jemima. I thought it was Philip on the station. He even had on the same jeans and trainers.’

  ‘What did he say to you?’ asked Willow, thinking that Lutterworth was beginning to find some kind of relief in talking about what had really happened. If he had enough energy left to worry about the consequences, he must have been well aware that nothing he said to them would be admissible in court.

  ‘He asked me to go with him. And then I understood. He was a rent boy, trawling for clients. He’d come up to me to offer me filthy perverted sex for money. I wanted to shake him, rap his head against the station wall to shock him into reality. But I couldn’t move. I can still hear his voice, you know, whiny but knowing: “Come on, mister. No need to be shy. You’ve done it before, ain’cha? Ten quid and you can do what you want.”’

  Emma watched him in horror.

  ‘I was so revolted that all I could do was stand there. “Got a car?” he said. “Yes,” I said, “I’ve got a car.” And then he led me out of that station, asked where the car was, made me take him there, and hopped cheerfully into the front seat. “I know where we can go,” he said. “Just get us out of here. I’ll duck down when you go through the gate. You won’t be stopped. Go south straight over the river and I’ll tell you where to turn.”’

  ‘And did you?’ asked Willow.

  ‘No of course not,’ said Andrew, still looking at Emma. ‘I drove out of the car park and on to my usual route home. I think I had some notion of handing the child over to a policeman. He was a child, you see, a shockingly young child and vulnerable for all his disgusting knowingness.’ He gagged suddenly as though he was about to be sick. Emma looked wildly around for a wastepaper basket or anything that might do. There was nothing. Andrew put both hands over his mouth and gazed at her as though he expected her to help him.

  ‘So why didn’t you?’ At the sound of Willow’s voice, Lutterworth dragged his gaze away from Emma. She felt an intense relief at being released from his attention. He took his hands away from his mouth. ‘He was crouching down on the floor and I felt his hands on my flies,’ said Andrew with almost no expression in his voice at all. ‘I looked down and tried to push him off. I told him to stop it. He laughed at me and told me not to pretend. We both knew what I wanted, he said. If I wanted to make believe I wasn’t involved that was OK. Lots of his punters liked that, he said. He knew how to give me a good time. All I had to do was pull over and park. No one else need see what he was doing either. Then if I wanted the full whack when we got to the quiet place he knew, I could have it. I was trying to push him o
ff. I was revolted. I had one hand on the steering wheel and the other at his neck. And he looked up and said something so unspeakable that the obscenity that he was alive and my son, my clean, decent, honourable son, was dead, was too much.’

  He sat, saying no more, still staring at Willow.

  ‘And so you strangled him,’ she said in her most matter-of-fact voice. ‘Just him or are there more of them buried in Philip’s garden?’

  As tears spurted out of Andrew’s eyes, he collapsed forwards against the grey formica table. Emma pushed her chair back so that there was no risk of his touching her.

  ‘Are there more than one, Mr Lutterworth?’ asked Willow.

  ‘Four,’ he said, choking. He banged his fists on the table beyond his head. ‘It’s not my fault. I didn’t go looking for them. They were all the same. They offered themselves to me. I didn’t mean to do it. I love children. Decent children. But they weren’t. They were filth.’

  He sat up again, wiping his eyes and his nose on the back of his hand. When that was not enough to contain the fluids, he used his sleeve. Once more Emma, horrified though she was, recognised something Podley had said about the way arrogant men like Andrew Lutterworth can be made to collapse and give up all the information they have.

  ‘They were children,’ she said in disgust at what he had done. ‘Whatever they did, whatever they said, they were still only children, just like Philip. It wasn’t their fault someone had corrupted them. But you killed them.’

  Andrew shrugged. His tears were drying and he was beginning to look like himself again. Even his voice had regained a little of its old confidence as he said coldly, ‘They had no hope of a decent life. If I hadn’t done what I did, they’d probably have been sodomised and tortured by now. They’d be dead anyway and have felt both terrible pain and terror. I couldn’t let that happen to them. As it was, they didn’t suffer. They didn’t even know what was happening.’

  ‘Except that you were murdering them,’ said Willow tartly. She had had enough of Andrew Lutterworth, his manipulation of his own conscience and his attempted manipulation of their sympathies. ‘And then you buried them under the four trees, I take it, around the statue in the memorial garden?’

  As Willow allowed a certain satisfaction into her voice, the door of the interview room opened and a uniformed officer popped his head in to say brightly, ‘Everything all right, ladies?’

  ‘No. I think this interview should be terminated,’ said Willow, aware that Emma was on the point of collapse and longing to be shot of Lutterworth herself.

  He made no protest. When the officer had taken him away, Emma let herself sit down again, slipping back into the plastic chair as though her legs would not hold her up any longer.

  ‘I’m sorry, Willow,’ she said at last. ‘I didn’t know it was going to be as bad as that. I’m sorry I brought you here.’

  ‘Don’t be. I’m glad I was with you. I’d have hated you to have to face all that on your own.’ She breathed deeply and then said with a passion Emma had not seen in her before, ‘Let’s get out of here and into some decent air. Come on. Can you stand?’

  ‘Of course I can,’ Emma snapped. ‘I’m not as fragile as you think. Oh, I’m sorry, Willow. I didn’t mean it like that. I’m all over the place.’

  ‘I know. But you look very white. And you need air as much as I do. Come on. Let’s get all this packed up.’

  ‘I’d rather leave it.’

  ‘No, you wouldn’t. You need it and it’s important. How does this fit?’ Willow asked, trying to cram the blood-pressure cuff into its box.

  Emma took it from her and realised that she was not the only one with clammy hands. For all her sensible instructions and calm voice, Willow was just as much affected as she had been. That seemed comforting. Together they got everything packed away eventually and stumbled out of the prison.

  Epilogue

  ‘And so, Ladies and Gentlemen,’ said Emma, gripping her cue cards to stop her hands shaking, ‘I embarked on my researches, hoping to find some common factor or factors in the police interviews that had led to false confessions.’

  She glanced around the audience, collecting the attention of even the sleepiest, smiled at Tom Worth, who smiled warmly back, and then looked towards the left of the hall, where her mother was sitting in the front row.

  Emma had telephoned, begging her not to come to the lecture, explaining that she would very much dislike what she would hear.

  ‘But Emma, you’ve done so wonderfully well,’ her mother had said, by then aware that her daughter was an entirely different person from the one she thought she had known. ‘And to have been invited, out of your entire group, to give the Silver Memorial Lecture? You can’t really imagine that I’d stay away from that, can you?’

  ‘But you’ll hate it,’ Emma had wailed down the telephone, feeling about twelve again, instead of secure, almost twenty-seven, and the proud possessor of a doctorate and several job offers.

  ‘So what? The least I can do is listen to what you’ve been doing these last few years. Even if I don’t enjoy it much, I shall be interested, and I shall want to be there to support you.’

  ‘Oh, Mother, you are brave,’ Emma had said in genuine admiration. ‘But how will you get here?’

  ‘I’ll ask Anthony to drive me. I know he’ll do it even if you are determined to keep up this silly quarrel.’

  ‘I’d rather you didn’t do that.’ Emma had stuck by her agreement not to tell any of the rest of the family why she no longer had anything to do with her half-brother, which meant that both her mother and Sarah kept trying to bring them together again. ‘He and I have agreed that we will both be happier if we don’t see any more of each other. Please don’t try to change that. I mean it, Mother. It’s important to me not to have to worry about seeing or talking to him just now.’

  ‘Very well, Emma.’ She had sighed but added, ‘If that’s what you feel, I won’t try to interfere.’

  At that declaration, Emma had almost cheered, and she felt like cheering again as she saw her mother doing her best to look as though she was enjoying herself. There she was, dressed impeccably if far more formally than was necessary, sitting between two complete strangers of about her own age. Her back was perfectly straight and did not touch the chair. Her feet were planted squarely on the floor and her hands were crossed over her gloves, which lay neatly on her good leather handbag. She had her late husband’s regimental brooch in diamonds on her left shoulder and a little discreet make-up on her fine face.

  Proud of her, able to love her once again, Emma regretted the shock she was likely to feel before the end of the lecture, but there was nothing to be done about it. Emma could not fudge what she had discovered to protect anyone’s sensibilities.

  ‘At first I found nothing,’ she went on, turning again to address the less vulnerable people who were sitting on the opposite side of the room.

  Jag was sitting with Tom and Willow, dressed in a dark-blue cable sweater Emma had given him the previous Christmas. She could not see what trousers he was wearing, but she assumed he had left off his leathers for once. Every so often he allowed himself to catch her eye and smile encouragingly, but there was enough tension in his body to remind her of the conviction that had been growing in her for the past few months. Jag was restless. They still got on well together, and liked each other, but something had gone from their relationship.

  With her heart still pounding from nervousness, her hands and feet sweating profusely and the top of her head feeling as though it was being pushed off by the force of her anxiety about her lecture, Emma made herself concentrate on what she had to say. Jag and their feelings for each other had to wait. This was work. Her future might depend on it.

  Her voice sounded bizarre in her own ears, but her audience appeared to be listening and no one was rolling with laughter at her mistakes or quite comatose with boredom.

  ‘In all those interviews,’ she went on, ‘with men and women who had made confessi
ons they later retracted, I felt that I was finding nothing that would enable me to reach my conclusions at all. It was not until I had the good fortune to be introduced to the case of A, as I shall call him during this lecture, that I began to understand I might have been looking for something else.

  ‘What interested me, as I later realised, was not so much why people wrongly accused of crimes sometimes confess, but how often the truth of what has happened is missed, both because of our tendency to hear what we expect to hear and because of the way our legal system is organised. As you know, Ladies and Gentlemen, it is not the truth that our courts are set up to establish, but the guilt or innocence in law of people who are brought before a jury. I do not know whether the Continental system—that is the inquisitorial rather than the adversarial—results in more people being justly convicted or released. But I do know that with our way of operating justice, which pits clever barrister against clever barrister, truth is often of less importance than the legal game.’

  Emma caught sight of a sharp movement out of the corner of her left eye and could not stop herself looking sideways. An angry-looking man had bent down to pull a flat legal pad out of his black leather pilot case and was scribbling notes on it.

  ‘In the case of A, as you shall hear, he was arrested for a crime, interviewed quite properly, and quite properly offered legal advice and every other safeguard the law has set up for the protection of the innocent. One of the officers who questioned him has told me that he and his colleague “knew” the man to be guilty, and that their tactics were therefore directed to the end of persuading him to confirm it.