Death Knocks Twice

by Robert Thorogood

  ‘I did visit him at the house once. Father said I had to go up to Fulham and try to convince Freddie to come back home to Saint-Marie. I was just this gauche thirteen-year-old boy up on a day trip from school, and Freddie introduced me to all of his friends, including this girl called Lady Helen Moncrieff. She was seventeen years old – just like Freddie – and to my thirteen-year old’s eyes, she was quite the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen in my life. But so fragile. That’s the word I’d use to describe her. When she spoke, it was barely in a whisper. In time, we’d all learn that she’d been addicted to Valium since she was fourteen years old. God knows what horrors she was taking painkillers for. None of us ever met her father, the Earl of Arlington. Or any of her family, for that matter. We later found out she’d been cut off without a penny long before she met Freddie. Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself.’ Hugh pushed his glasses up on his nose and took a deep breath, ordering his thoughts before pressing on. ‘But no-one knows what Helen saw in Freddie. I mean, he was seventeen years old, he’d been expelled from school and had no prospects, as he was the first to admit. But Helen fell in love with him and was absolutely under his spell from that moment on.’

  As Hugh paused again, Richard realised that he seemed to be telling the story of Freddie and Lady Helen to Lucy, Tom and Matthew, as much as he was telling it to the Police. It was clearly something that had been told many times before. Something they gathered around to hear.

  ‘But the more time Helen spent with Freddie, the more he became abusive towards her. And not just verbally. There was this time – when I was fifteen – and she came down to Eton to take me out for lunch. It was the only time I saw her alert and clear-eyed. She said she wanted to say goodbye to me. She couldn’t take any more of living with Freddie. He was a mean drunk, she said. And a cheat. And a thief. And he pushed pills on her, that was the other thing she said. He wanted to control her. And she didn’t say it in so many words, but I guessed that he was also hitting her. I was so angry. So angry with what my own brother was doing to this beautiful woman. But I was also relieved. Because Helen said she was finally going to escape Freddie’s clutches. She was going to pack her bags and leave. She should have done it years ago, she told me.

  ‘Then, two weeks later, Helen and Freddie turned up roaring drunk at my house at school. Helen told me she’d found out a couple of days before that she was pregnant, and she and Freddie had just got married at Chelsea registry office. I couldn’t believe it. Only a fortnight before, she’d been telling me how she was going to escape from Freddie, and now here she was, married to him. I felt so betrayed.’

  ‘And the baby was lost,’ Lucy said in a whisper.

  Hugh looked at Lucy.

  ‘And the baby was lost. That’s right.’ A moment of deep sadness passed between Hugh and Lucy, and then he turned back to the Police and carried on his story. ‘After my father found out that Freddie had married Helen, he went crazy. Mainly because Freddie – his eldest son – had married without his permission. Even if the woman he’d married was the daughter of an Earl. Because William was also a terrible snob. Social standing was paramount to him, although he was the first to say that it didn’t much matter how noble you were, if you were a “Pill Head” like Helen. That’s what he always called her. “The Pill Head”. Anyway, he finally booted Freddie out of the house in Fulham and let it to another family through a local estate agents. Freddie and Helen moved to a flat in Notting Hill, and it’s from this moment forwards that our knowledge of them becomes patchy. Freddie got a job for a while at a Bond Street auctioneers, but he got sacked from that. For thieving, I understand. He then became an estate agent for a spell, but that didn’t last, either. And within a few years, I’d left school and was back in the Caribbean.

  ‘So life fell into a pattern. I ran the plantation with my father. I met Sylvie, I got married. And, from time to time, we’d get slurred phone calls from Freddie, begging for money. He’d make up all these improbable stories of how his life was in danger. From gangsters sometimes. Or from the neighbours, or the Police. Or he’d suddenly claim that he had a mystery illness that required immediate treatment. But it was always about trying to trick more cash out of us. And he was always drunk. After a while, we got used to hanging up on him when he said he was at death’s door, or was about to kill himself. He’d always seem to survive, and be back to make another begging phone call a month or two later. And then, in 1987, Helen gave birth to Lucy. As I’m sure Rosie has told you – because Lucy, Tom and Matthew aren’t our natural children. They’re our adopted children.’

  Richard noticed how proudly Hugh said this, and was once again impressed with Hugh’s natural command of any situation, whether it was confronting a dead corpse in a shower room or announcing to the Police that his children were actually his nephews and niece.

  ‘Anyway, from the moment that Lucy was born, William became obsessed with getting his only granddaughter out to the safety of Saint-Marie. But Freddie had become seriously bitter by now. He was jealous of me for running the plantation, even though he didn’t want to run it himself. And he always complained that we were cutting him out of our lives even though we were desperate for him to relocate to Saint-Marie with Helen and Lucy. It was tragic, really. And it caused us so much pain. And then Tom was born, in 1995. And the mind boggles at how Freddie and Helen got through those years. I know at one stage father paid off all of their debts and gave them money to buy four single tickets to Saint-Marie. So they could finally come home here. But the money was just spent, and no aeroplane tickets were ever bought. And I think this happened more than once – with Freddie promising to bring his family out here if father paid off his debts – but he never did.’

  ‘And what was Helen’s role in all of this?’ Camille asked.

  ‘We don’t really know,’ Hugh said. ‘Because Freddie moved his family to Maze Hill in South East London in 1997. To a tiny two-up two-down. And for a spell we completely lost sight of them. They just vanished off the radar.

  ‘But things came to a crisis when father received a desperate phone call from Helen in 1999. She said she’d just given birth to her third child – Matthew – and she said she couldn’t take any more of life with Freddie. And there was no way she’d be able to raise three children. According to my father, she was pretty incoherent when he spoke to her that time – from drugs or alcohol, he couldn’t tell. But the point was, Helen told Father that she was going to walk out on her new-born baby. She was going to walk out on all of her children. Just to get away from Freddie.’

  A silence fell on the room that none of the witnesses wanted to break.

  ‘What happened?’ Camille asked.

  ‘Well,’ Hugh said, ‘Father put out the word on Saint-Marie that day. He needed a trained nanny he could hire immediately to go to London to save his grandchildren. By that evening, he’d found Rosie, and she was on a plane to Heathrow.’

  ‘Is that so?’ Camille asked Rosie.

  ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘I left for the UK the same day I was hired.’

  ‘And what happened when you arrived?’

  ‘In London?’ Rosie said, clearly uncomfortable at the idea of having to talk about the past in front of the children. ‘Well, after I got there, I took a taxi to Freddie’s house, and I have to admit that what I found deeply shocked me. They were a family living in squalor. I can’t pretend otherwise. There was food rotting in the fridge, nothing had been cleaned for months, and everywhere you looked there were empty wine bottles, dirt, filth and cigarette ash. It was just horrible. As for Helen, she looked like a ghost. And she had a big bruise by her left eye. And bruises up her left arm. And she didn’t even seem stable on her feet. I wondered at the time if she was stoned on something. Or drunk. I never found out, because the moment she realised that I was the nanny who’d been sent by her father-in-law to look after her children, she handed me her new-born baby, and told me his name was Matthew. She then said that she was going to visit her family, a
nd walked out of the door.’

  ‘She said she was going to visit her family?’ Camille asked.

  ‘That’s what she told me. She was going to visit her family, and then she walked out. I had no idea when she’d be back. But with her gone, the immediate problem became Freddie. When I found him, he was upstairs in a drunken stupor surrounded by bottles in his bedroom. The room stank. He stank. It was so very shocking to realise that this was a member of the Beaumont family. But I got Lucy and Tom in from playing outside in the street, and I told them that I was now in charge. I got them clean. I got baby Matthew clean. William had sent me over with an amount of money, so I was able to buy new nappies and take the children out to a local restaurant. I wasn’t sure when they’d last eaten a decent meal. Then I managed to get them to bed, and still Freddie was upstairs, fast asleep.

  ‘The next day I got the two older children to school in the cleanest clothes I could find, and I was looking after Matthew when Freddie came down the stairs. And if he looked at me for more than two seconds I’d be surprised. He didn’t care that I was there to help look after his children. He didn’t seem to care that his wife had walked out the day before and hadn’t yet come back. He just put on a coat, told me he was going out, and then left. So I went to a payphone in the street, rang William and reported what I’d found. He told me to take the children to the airport, and bring them back to Saint-Marie as soon as possible. I wasn’t sure if it was a good idea until Freddie got back from the pub that night.

  ‘He was drunk. And that’s when he got the scar on his left hand. Because it was as though this was the first time he’d realised I was in his house. And he got really angry. He started smashing empty wine bottles against the wall. There was glass everywhere. I was terrified. So I called the Police, but that just made him even angrier. And it was then that he went to grab a broken bottle, and he got that deep cut all along the length of his index finger. There was blood everywhere, so I told him to sit still, and I used an old cloth to staunch the blood while I called for an ambulance. Luckily for Freddie, I was a trained nurse. And also luckily for him, the ambulance arrived before the Police did. So he’d already gone to hospital when the Police got round to asking me if I wanted to press charges against him. And because I knew I would need Freddie’s co-operation to take his children out to Saint-Marie, I decided that I wouldn’t.

  ‘Freddie returned to the house the next morning, his left hand wrapped up in a bandage. He told me he’d be scarred for life. I told him I was taking his children to visit his grandparents in Saint-Marie. He asked for a fifty pound note to tide him over. I gave him one, and he left for the pub. And that was it, the last time I saw Freddie Beaumont. I arrived on Saint-Marie with Lucy, Tom and baby Matthew in my arms the following morning.’

  ‘And what about Lady Helen?’ Camille asked. ‘What happened to her?’

  ‘We don’t know. Nobody’s seen her from that day to this.’

  ‘They haven’t?’ Richard asked, surprised.

  ‘I tried to contact her family at the time,’ Hugh said. ‘Seeing as the last thing she said to Rosie was that she was going to visit her family, but the Earl and the Countess of Arlington didn’t seem to care what had happened to their daughter. All they’d tell me was that she hadn’t gone anywhere near them. And if she did turn up, she wouldn’t be welcome.’

  ‘And she really hasn’t been seen since then?’ Camille asked.

  ‘She hasn’t,’ Hugh said.

  Camille looked at Richard and knew that he was thinking the same thing. It seemed highly unlikely that a mother would walk out on her children and never make any attempt to contact them again. Especially now that they were all grown up, and had been out of the clutches of her alcoholic husband for decades. But then, Camille found herself wondering, if Lady Helen had really been destroyed by a marital life of abuse, maybe walking out forever was the only way of preserving whatever remaining sanity she had.

  ‘So what happened after you got the children to Saint-Marie?’ Richard asked.

  ‘Well that’s the thing,’ Sylvie said, before Rosie could continue with her story. ‘When the children got here, they were wild – just like Rosie is saying. Although not Matthew, of course. He was only a baby. But Lucy and Tom were out of control. They wet their beds at night. They couldn’t sleep. It took months for them even to look any of us in the eye.’

  Richard noticed Rosie squeeze Matthew and Lucy’s hands a bit tighter in support.

  ‘By the end of the year,’ Hugh said, trying to soften the impact of his wife’s words, ‘we’d reached a rapprochement of sorts. Matthew was six months old. Lucy and Tom were putting on a bit of weight and getting a bit of sunshine into their skin as well. They were healing. Physically perhaps more than psychologically, but they were still healing.

  ‘All this was about the same time that my father was diagnosed with cancer. It was hardly unexpected. He was 84. But as he declined, he tried to get his affairs in order, and he came up with a plan. You see, Sylvie and I had never had any children ourselves. We’d not been blessed that way. And here were three children who needed a mother and father who could give them the love they needed. It was only natural that Sylvie and I started to think about adoption. So we approached Father and asked for his blessing and help in getting Freddie to let us formally adopt his children.

  ‘Father thought it was a great idea right from the start. So his lawyers contacted Freddie in the UK. And they offered him twenty thousand pounds to cover his costs if he would let us adopt his children. It was an outright bribe, frankly, and Freddie rang us up the moment he received the letter and said that he accepted the deal. By the beginning of the following year, we’d adopted Lucy, Tom and Matthew, and it was the best thing that ever happened to us, wasn’t it?’

  Hugh had asked this last question of his wife, although it took her a moment to realise that she was being spoken to.

  ‘Of course,’ she said brightly. ‘And we kept Nanny Rosie on as well. We had to. She was part of the family by now.’

  Richard noticed Hugh’s brow furrow.

  ‘And then Father died,’ Hugh said.

  ‘And?’ Richard asked, waiting for Hugh to continue.

  ‘He left his entire estate to Freddie,’ Sylvie said bitterly.

  ‘He did?’ Richard asked, surprised.

  ‘Not quite, darling,’ Hugh said, but it was clear that he was only trying to correct his wife on a technicality.

  ‘You see,’ Hugh said to Richard, ‘our family can trace ourselves back to a Duke who came over to England with William the Conqueror. Which means our family tree stretches back the best part of a thousand years. And in all that time, the estate has always been inherited by the first-born child. Whether the first-born child was the best choice or not. So, as father saw it, he couldn’t possibly leave his estate to me. I was only his second-born son.’

  ‘And you’re still defending him!’ Sylvie said in exasperation.

  ‘He had no choice,’ Hugh said evenly. ‘The estate can only be passed on through primogeniture. So he did the next best thing he could. He put the estate into trust for the duration of Freddie’s life – which made sure that Freddie could never get his hands on even a cent of the family money. And he made me sole Trustee of that estate. That way I was still in charge. Still in control.’

  ‘Then hold on,’ Richard said, realising something. ‘What happens now?’

  ‘How do you mean?’ Hugh asked.

  ‘Because if you’re saying that the estate was in trust while Freddie was alive, what happens to it now that he’s died?’

  Richard could see that this point hadn’t occurred to the family before. They looked at each other, trying to work it out. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Hugh got there first.

  ‘Lucy inherits.’

  Everyone turned and looked at Lucy, and all Richard could see was confusion in her eyes.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘You inherit,’ Hugh said, and Richard could see that Hugh was t
rying to work out the ramifications of this as he spoke. ‘You’ve just inherited everything.’

  ‘I have?’

  ‘Yes. I mean, there were a few conditions in father’s will, but my memory is that they weren’t much. We’ll need to check with the family solicitor.’

  ‘What do you mean, there were conditions?’ Richard asked.

  ‘Well, just the standard stuff,’ Hugh said. ‘You know, that the estate could only be inherited by someone who was of sound mind and body, over the age of twenty-one, not serving a prison sentence, that sort of thing. As I say, I’m sure Lucy qualifies. Lucy, I think you’ve just inherited the Beaumont estate.’

  Richard thought he noticed a moment of understanding pass between Hugh and Lucy, but it was so fleeting that, just as he saw it, it seemed already to have gone.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Lucy said, as the full weight of what Hugh said hit her. And then she giggled to herself, the laughter erupting out of her before she could stop it.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said to the Police, although she didn’t appear to be sorry at all. ‘But is it true? Is Freddie really dead?’

  ‘It would appear so,’ Richard said.

  ‘And how does that make you feel?’ Camille asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Lucy said, but with a sense of wonder as she contemplated the new realities of her life. ‘Because I’ve wished that man dead my whole life. Every day. And now he’s really gone?’

  ‘You’ve wished him dead?’ Richard asked sharply.

  ‘Oh yes. And so would you if you’d seen how he treated my mother. Before she walked out on us all. That man deserved to die.’

  ‘She doesn’t mean that,’ Rosie said.

  ‘I do,’ Lucy said. ‘And if I’d known that it was him in the shower room this morning, I’d have happily killed him myself.’

  Lucy was looking hyper-excited – her eyes shining – and Richard was reminded of her skittish manner when she’d first come into the Police station. She’d been pumped up and jittery then, and she was looking similarly wild now. But was it because of the surprise of learning that she’d just inherited the family estate, or was it really because she loved imagining Freddie dead? Either way, it seemed a pretty bold move to admit to the Police that she’d happily kill her biological father, considering that it was her biological father who’d been killed that morning.