A Fatal Obsession

by Faith Martin

  ‘Then there was the curious fact that she had, in fact, left no suicide note behind at all – as most young girls who commit suicide nearly always do. And certainly not this trite little fancy of yours.’ He indicated the lavender missive with disdain.

  Beatrice drew in a ragged breath. They knew. Somehow, this awful man had found it all out.

  ‘Yes,’ she said helplessly.

  ‘Yes what, Mrs Fleet-Wright?’ Clement said, indicating furiously to Trudy to start taking down notes. Flustered, but quickly organising herself, Trudy began to do just that.

  Beatrice leaned back in the chair and let her hands lie limply on the armrests. She didn’t think she had the strength to raise them so much as an inch. She felt curiously boneless. And cold. And utterly weary. And, in some odd and curious way, also relieved. It was as if so much weight had left her, she could have floated up and away and drifted off into outer space, never to return.

  In truth, she had simply gone, in the matter of a few minutes, from a state where everything mattered and must be protected to a universe where nothing mattered at all.

  ‘Oh, yes to all of it,’ she agreed wearily. ‘When I found her, the pills were there, but they weren’t her own usual prescription. The name on the bottle wasn’t even hers. I couldn’t understand it. And then the diary was right there, lying out in the open… That was really the first thing that caught my eye.’ Beatrice frowned slightly, staring vaguely at a vase of dried grasses on the low coffee table. ‘Normally Gisela was so paranoid about her diary. She was always so very careful to keep it locked – it had one of those pretty little brass-banded frames around it with a heart-shaped lock. She’d always been adamant it was private and that nobody must ever read it.’

  Beatrice gave such a wry smile now that it sent chills down Trudy’s spine. ‘Now, of course, I know why.’

  ‘You read it that afternoon?’ Clement pressed her more gently now.

  ‘Yes. Not all of it, it was too long and detailed. But enough to understand… At first, when I picked it up and decided to read it, it was because I just wanted to understand why… why… she’d done such a thing. And if there had been any clues I had missed or something I should have seen… anything at all that I might have done to prevent it all. I expected to read that she’d been steadily losing her fight against the “Black Dog” of depression that had plagued her all her life. Or, perhaps, to find out what final straw had broken her… Instead… instead…’

  But Beatrice simply couldn’t continue.

  ‘Instead, you read a very careful, cunning, cold-blooded account of how she’d come to suspect that her former lover wanted to kill her,’ Clement finished for her softly.

  Trudy, furiously getting everything down in her neat, hard-learned Pitman’s shorthand, found her pencil stalling. Her head shot up.

  But Beatrice merely shook her head – not in denial of his words so much, as to indicate her continued inability to understand it. ‘It was awful. More awful because I knew none of it could possibly be true. At first, when I began to read it, I thought… perhaps… it was true. That for some reason Jonathan had fooled us all. But then… then I read parts where she’d said Jonathan had done something, and I knew he hadn’t. Or she’d give details of a conversation they’d had, when I knew Jonathan hadn’t even been in the gardens that day. And other things… impossible things. Oh, I don’t want to go into all that.’

  Clement knew she would have to, at some future point, but for now he didn’t want to push her too hard. Not when she was finally beginning to admit the truth.

  ‘I imagine that at some point,’ he mused, ‘it must have said something about how, if she were to be found dead, the police should look to Jonathan McGillicuddy for the blame?’

  Beatrice groaned.

  Trudy gasped. ‘You mean, she actually killed herself, but only so she could make it look as if she’d been murdered! As if Jonathan had murdered her?’ She looked aghast at Clement for confirmation, and he gave it with a curt nod. ‘She hated him so much, she was so obsessed with him, that she was willing to die in order to make him suffer? Her ego was that monstrous? But how on earth did she think she could get away with it?’

  ‘Imagine how things would have looked if her mother hadn’t interfered,’ Clement advised her grimly. ‘The police would have found a young woman dead of an overdose, but with no suicide note. They’d have read her diary, a no-doubt very convincing document, outlining her growing horror and suspicion that McGillicuddy wanted her dead. Don’t forget – we know Gisela was a very intelligent and erudite young lady. It wouldn’t have been hard for her to paint a convincing picture. Jonathan had grown jealous of her. She had been the one to break off the relationship, even though he’d gone around telling everyone it was him. And she had let him keep his pride and gone along with this fiction, in the vain hope that it would appease him. But it hadn’t and his bitterness and anger grew and grew. Am I right, Mrs Fleet-Wright?’ He suddenly threw the question at Beatrice, who merely nodded helplessly.

  ‘Yes. It went pretty much like that. She wrote that he’d started to follow her around, to threaten her with what he’d do if she didn’t come back to him. She claimed he’d sent her death threats she’d destroyed because she didn’t want me, her mother, finding them and being upset.’

  Beatrice sighed heavily. ‘But none of it happened. I’ve always been the first to get the mail and sort it out. There were no letters for her. And I was used to watching her, to seeing she was all right. There was no way Jonathan could have done any of the things she claimed he did, and for me to not know.’

  Clement nodded. ‘But you would have had a hard time convincing the police of that,’ he mused. ‘Especially when they would have had the evidence of the pill bottles to consider.’

  ‘When I read the diary… when I’d had time to absorb it… I was still in shock. But I couldn’t really believe… I thought she’d just been ill, that the whole diary was a fantasy of her own making. But then I remembered that the pill bottles on her bedside table were wrong. Different. That they weren’t her own.’

  ‘No. Because they’d been stolen a few days earlier from a chemist’s delivery boy,’ Clement said flatly. ‘No doubt by someone she’d paid very handsomely to do just that. They were to be the final nail in Jonathan’s coffin.’

  Trudy’s pen literally flew over the paper. But even as she took down every word, she wondered. How on earth could they prove any of this?

  ‘She must also have paid someone else to give false witness,’ Clement went on smoothly, ‘claiming to have seen Jonathan McGillicuddy actually commit the robbery. A witness, you won’t be surprised to hear, who now can’t be found, since he’d given a false name, address and place of employment.’

  Yes, Trudy thought grimly. No doubt Gisela had paid him a lot of money to testify to that in Jonathan’s subsequent murder trial. But there, she’d seriously underestimated the concept of honour among crooks, which was perhaps not surprising for someone like Gisela, who seemed to live in a fantasy world.

  She might have fondly believed that, after her death, he’d honour the contract they’d made, but in reality, whoever Finch had really been, he’d never intended to stick his neck out and perjure himself in court during a murder trial. Or else he’d have made sure to be available to the police and wouldn’t have disappeared so quickly after making his initial statement.

  Beatrice lifted her face from her hands and shook her head. ‘I don’t know all the details about that,’ she said simply. ‘But it doesn’t surprise me.’

  ‘No,’ Clement said flatly. ‘Your daughter wouldn’t have wanted to leave anything to chance. After all, she was making a huge gesture – the most final, dramatic and irrevocable of all gestures. She was going to die! And she wanted to make damned good and sure she was taking him with her. That was the whole point, after all. He’d rejected her, and for that he had to be made to suffer and pay.’

  The condemnation in his tone chilled both women, and large t
ears finally trickled down Beatrice Fleet-Wright’s cheeks. ‘You have to understand! Gisela was devastated when Jonathan left her. She truly loved him. And she loved so desperately, as she did in all things. She was fully committed, heart, body and soul, in a way that was truly terrifying. Her emotions weren’t the same as yours and mine – they were heightened, all-consuming. Her subsequent despair and rage were all-consuming too. I watched her growing more and more desperate, more and more disbelieving, more and more furious, as the truth sank in during those summer months. He’d left her and wasn’t coming back. She couldn’t believe it. She just… couldn’t… accept it.’

  Beatrice sighed and shook her head. ‘Oh, it’s no use, is it? I can’t expect you to understand. Or to forgive,’ she muttered dejectedly.

  ‘But you did understand. And you did forgive her,’ Clement said softly. ‘Because you were her mother, you had to save her. So you destroyed the diary and removed the pills. You faked her suicide note. You ensured, in fact, that she didn’t become a posthumous murderess.’

  Beatrice began to cry quietly and Trudy found herself swallowing a hard lump that had risen in her throat. ‘You make it sound so easy, but it wasn’t!’ the older woman cried. ‘Don’t you understand? Our family is Catholic. And the thought of suicide is utterly abhorrent to us, and goes against all our teachings. And yet I had to reveal that Gisela had indeed taken her own life. It was yet another betrayal of her. It was all so horrendous. I felt so guilty!’

  ‘They must have been the worst few hours of your life,’ Clement said compassionately. ‘First you find your beloved daughter dead. In spite of all your efforts, and the lifelong battle to look after her, she had defeated you. And then, as if that shock wasn’t enough, you read her diary and understood what fate she’d intended for Jonathan. Because, as sure as eggs are eggs, any jury being presented with the victim’s own fears and suspicions in a diary, coupled with the evidence of the stolen drugs, would have convicted him and had him hanged. I take it she made sure he’d have no alibi for that afternoon?’ he added, almost as an afterthought.

  ‘Yes,’ Beatrice said on a sigh. ‘Later, Jonathan told me that, on the day she died, he was gardening alone at a house where the owners were in Corfu for their summer holidays. So he had no witnesses. Which is something Gisela could have easily found out. I knew she watched him, sometimes, you see. Kept track of his movements.’

  In fact, she’d been guilty of stalking him, instead of the other way around, Trudy mused grimly.

  ‘You must have thought you’d managed to contain the situation, though,’ Clement said softly, and not without sympathy. ‘You’d got rid of all the incriminating and false evidence, and had cleverly faked a suicide note. All was in readiness, in fact, to present a neat, safe scenario. A young girl with a history of mental illness kills herself. Everything would play out as it had to, and then you could start to get on with your lives. It would be hard, but achievable. Then along comes greedy little PC Gordon and puts a spanner in the whole works by taking the note. You must have been terrified.’

  Beatrice managed a snort of laughter. ‘I couldn’t think, at first, what had gone wrong. Our doctor didn’t seem to notice the note, but I knew the police would find it. After they’d taken… Gisela from the house, I waited and waited. I thought, at any moment, someone would tell me she’d committed suicide and that the note had been found. Instead, my husband called me into his study and told me he’d fixed everything. That we’d say it was all accidental.’

  Beatrice again smothered a laugh. ‘I almost… well…’ She shrugged fatalistically. ‘It doesn’t matter now, does it?’ she asked rhetorically. ‘And after I’d had a chance to get over this latest shock and think about it, I realised it didn’t really matter whether we presented Gisela’s death as a suicide or an accident. So long as the truth was never discovered.’

  ‘Tell me about the day you had to give Jonathan an alibi for the robbery,’ Clement asked briskly, knowing it would be cruel to let her dwell on the fact that the truth had been uncovered anyway. And after all she had suffered to keep it buried.

  Glad to change the topic, Beatrice drew in a deep, wavering breath.

  ‘The day after Gisela died, I realised I simply had to tell Jonathan about all I’d found out,’ Beatrice said. ‘Not because I wanted to – my instinct was to keep it totally secret, with me the only one ever knowing. But the more I thought it over, the more I realised Jonathan had to know as well, just in case he was still in danger somehow. I couldn’t be sure what other plans Gisela had made. And if something else were to come to light that threw suspicion on him, he needed to be warned beforehand. I really didn’t want to do it, I’m sure you can understand that,’ Beatrice said, almost with a laugh. ‘I wanted her memory to remain… But… I suppose those pill bottles worried me. They seemed to me to be like a ticking time bomb, just waiting to explode. As it turned out, I had good cause to be worried. Anyway, I rang him at his house and told him I needed to meet up with him. We met at a small pub nearby, and I told him about her diary and what it said.’

  ‘He must have been very worried,’ Clement said dryly.

  ‘Of course he was! We both were. He wanted to go to the police, but I persuaded him it would only make matters worse. Things were already so complicated. Besides, as I pointed out, going to the police might serve to cast suspicion on him, whereas, as things stood, he was in the clear.’

  Beatrice shook her head. ‘I promised him that if anything were ever to happen or come up, I’d make sure he didn’t suffer because of it. Which was the least I could do. And sure enough, when he phoned the very next day, his first words to me were that he was at a police station and that someone thought he might have robbed a chemist’s delivery boy. And could I please come down and tell them he’d been working in the garden that day?’ Beatrice shrugged graphically. ‘Well, it was as clear as day what I needed to do.’

  ‘So you went and gave a false statement,’ Clement said mildly.

  Beatrice blinked. And oddly enough, it was only then, for the very first time, that she fully realised how culpable she was in the eyes of the law, and that she might actually be prosecuted for all these lies. Before, she’d always thought of herself simply as a mother protecting her child – and had never seen her actions as being in any way illegal or even wrong. What’s more, she’d always comforted herself with the fact that what she’d done had brought harm to no one but herself. But now she wondered. What was the penalty for perjury? And was it perjury if you lied for someone, when that person had been falsely accused? But then, she reminded herself wryly, she’d also lied under oath in a coroner’s court.

  She was probably going to go to prison.

  Such a thought, ten years ago, would have been unthinkable. Absurd. Nonsense. Things like that simply didn’t happen to people like her – people who’d been brought up to respect the law. Respectable, normal, law-abiding citizens. But now… her neighbours would watch her being taken away in a police car! But the truth would come out now. Reginald would know what his daughter had done. Rex’s life would be made a misery. The scandal…

  And yet, Beatrice couldn’t really find anything left inside of herself to worry about even that. It was as if she was running on empty now. She had no more pain or worry left to give.

  ‘What happened then? After you’d made your statement giving Jonathan his alibi and left the police station?’ The coroner’s words distracted her from her bout of self-contemplation.

  ‘What? Oh, we just went to the nearest park and talked things over. And we wondered if she might have done something else that proved his guilt. But it was Jonathan who actually figured it out,’ Beatrice acknowledged. ‘He said Gisela would want to prove, beyond all doubt, that he was behind the robbery. So perhaps she had hidden the rest of the stolen drugs or money somewhere compromising, where the police would be sure to find them. Anyway, we went to his home, intending to search it from top to bottom. But when we got there, Jonathan said his mother was alw
ays at home all day, so he didn’t think Gisela would have risked trying to get into the actual house itself. She would almost certainly have been seen or caught out. First, he checked his gardener’s van. But there was nothing there – which made sense, when we thought about it,’ Beatrice said, her voice now so exhausted she was almost slurring her words. ‘Gisela didn’t have a key to his van. And then we went to the shed in the McGillicuddys’ back garden. It was the only place left to look.’

  ‘And you found them?’ Clement guessed pityingly.

  ‘Yes. We found them in his toolbox. The rest of the stolen drugs haul and some money.’

  Beatrice hung her head in remembered shame. ‘He was so kind to me then. He had every right to be angry. To be really furious, in fact, after what Gisela had done to him. But he wasn’t. He told me he’d burn the drugs and we’d say nothing about it.’

  ‘And then there was only the inquest to get through,’ Clement said flatly. ‘And the lies you both told.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And that was that. Gisela was buried, and her lover was spared the noose,’ Trudy said wonderingly, feeling almost as emotionally wrung-out as Beatrice.

  ‘Yes!’ Another voice, young and shockingly loud, suddenly soared into the room, making them all jump in shock as the door slammed open and the furious, red-faced, wild-eyed figure of Rex Fleet-Wright stormed in. ‘And that should never have happened!’ he shouted into his mother’s astonished face.

  ‘Gisela deserved that he should die, damn him!’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  ‘Rex!’ Beatrice gasped, looking up at her son in blank-eyed shock. ‘What on earth’s got into you?’

  Trudy, who had leapt instinctively to her feet when the young man threw himself into the room, caught Clement Ryder’s surreptitious gesture that she should sit back down, and warily subsided back into her seat.

  Not that Rex Fleet-Wright noticed, as he was too fixated on berating his mother. Now, he bore a marked resemblance to the photographs they’d seen of his sister – he was also lean, with thick, dark-brown hair and vivid green eyes, and had a triangular-shaped face that was almost feminine. His lips, though, were currently twisted into a most unattractive snarl as he loomed over his mother. His face was flushed, and he was so emotionally overwrought, he was almost spitting as he talked.