by Nicola Upson
‘What does Phyllis know?’
‘She thinks her father died in the war. That’s what everyone thinks. It was such an easy lie to tell.’ For Bridget and for hundreds like her, Marta thought, but that didn’t make the consequences any less harsh. ‘So you see I can’t tell him – not now. It’s not just Archie who would never forgive me. Phyllis sees things in black and white, and for twenty years I’ve denied her a father and a different sort of life. How could she even begin to understand? I’d lose them both, and I can’t allow that to happen. Like I said, it’s too late.’
‘I had a daughter, Bridget. She was illegitimate, and when my husband found out, he had me locked up and he gave my daughter away to another family. I never knew her.’
‘I’m sorry, I . . .’
‘Don’t be. I’m not telling you this for sympathy.’ Marta opened the packet of cigarettes, wondering if she had the strength to finish what she had started. ‘She died when she was a little bit younger than Phyllis is now, and I never had the chance to find out who she was – or who I might have been, if I’d been allowed to be her mother. That really is too late. There’s nothing I can do now except torment myself with wondering. But you can do something. Archie can be part of Phyllis’s life if you let him – and part of your life.’
‘No.’ She shook her head, as much in fear as in certainty. ‘That’s the stuff of fairytales. Archie could never forgive me, even if he wanted to.’ In her heart, Marta suspected that she was right, and she said nothing. ‘And that’s my punishment, I suppose,’ Bridget added. ‘Knowing that I could have had his love all those years. I’ll never forgive myself for that. At least what Phyllis and Archie don’t know can’t hurt them.’
‘But how long do you really think you can go on like this? The way I see it, you have two choices. You take the risk and tell him, or you break it off with him now and lose him anyway.’
‘At least my daughter wouldn’t hate me.’
‘No, she wouldn’t. But how would you feel about yourself? And could you live with that?’ Bridget was silent. Out of the window, Marta saw the London train pull in, announcing its arrival with a flounce of steam and a lengthy groan of brakes. ‘I have to go,’ she said, standing up, ‘but think about what I’ve said.’
Bridget caught her hand. ‘Please don’t tell Josephine.’
‘You can’t ask me to keep something like that from her. You know how much she cares about Archie.’
‘Exactly. She’ll tell him straight away, and if he’s going to find out, it has to be from me.’
Marta hesitated, reluctant to allow anything else to come between her and Josephine when they were finally making sense of what they meant to each other. ‘I won’t keep it from her indefinitely,’ she said, determined not to gamble Josephine’s trust on someone else’s secret, ‘but I’ll give you some time to make a decision. Just don’t wait too long.’
8
‘No one ever tells you where you’re going in prison.’ Vivienne sat down opposite Josephine, looking less strained than the last time they had met. ‘Someone comes in and tells you to collect your things, then they take you somewhere which is marginally more frightful than the horror you’ve just got used to.’ She smiled, and placed a packet of cigarettes on the table between them. ‘I’m pleased this time it was different. I wasn’t really sure you’d keep your promise. I suppose I should have more faith.’
‘Yes, you should, if only in the lure of such irresistible surroundings.’ She nodded to the cigarettes. ‘Perks already? You must be settling in.’
‘Oh, I’ve got quite a routine. We make our beds before breakfast, then clean the ward and the lavatories – the lavatories are the long straw, because there’s invariably a fight going on in the ward. Then we sit by our beds, waiting to be asked if we’re all right by the sister, the doctor and the matron in turn. The answer is always yes, by the way – it’s so drilled into us that one poor girl has started saying it before she’s even asked the question. Oh, and the big news – I’ve learned to play whist since you were last here. It’s a peculiar game, but it passes the time between morning rounds and lunch.’ Josephine smiled and offered her a light for the cigarette. ‘These are from Julian,’ Vivienne added. ‘I hadn’t realised that remand prisoners can have things sent in. We get newspapers, too, but they cut out anything relevant to your case before they hand them over.’
‘Is there anything left in yours to read?’ Josephine asked. Since Vivienne’s name appeared in the papers for the first time on Sunday, the press had gone to town, covering everything from her background and her family connections to a rather lurid reconstruction of the murder. Some were cautious and speculative, others personal and vitriolic, but all were damning. It was probably just as well that she hadn’t seen them.
‘It’s funny you should say that, but there’s barely enough paper left to hold the pages together. I’m very grateful for the sports section. Most people’s have something missing, but mine is like one of those paper chains you cut out to amuse small children. Our parents used to do them for us on long journeys. My father was always particularly good with elephants. He promised to teach me one day, but he never did.’
It was the first time that Josephine had ever heard Vivienne refer to her wider family. ‘Are both your parents dead?’ she asked.
‘Yes, they died in the Salisbury rail crash when I was six. Their train derailed and collided with a milk train on a sharp bend. Twenty-eight people were killed that day. I’ll never forget it.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Josephine said. ‘That’s a very young age to have your whole world turned upside down.’
‘Yes, I suppose it is, but at least they never lived to see my shame – or Olivia’s.’
‘Who looked after you when they died?’
‘We moved round a few aunts and uncles, but it was Olivia who really brought me up. She was nine years older, and our parents’ death hit her hard. I think she decided then and there that she was going to control the world and not the other way round, and she did it well, at least for a while. And she gave me what she thought was a good life. It wasn’t her fault that I hated it, I suppose. She never forgave me for throwing it back in her face – as she saw it – when I met Anthony. And she loathed the fact that she could no longer control me, although she never gave up trying.’ Josephine was about to ask how those efforts had been made, but Vivienne didn’t give her the chance. ‘Anyway, we said we’d talk about you this time. Who was the affair with?’
The directness of the question took Josephine by surprise. Talking about Marta was the last thing she wanted to do when she was only just beginning to resolve her own guilt, and she had no intention of showing any sort of vulnerability in front of a woman she hardly knew. ‘It wasn’t an affair, exactly,’ she said, hoping to deflect the conversation before it started.
‘It never is when you’re the latecomer.’
‘I suppose that’s one way of putting it, but we don’t have much time today and your life feels rather more urgent than mine at the moment. There are things we need to talk about. Have you thought any more about what I asked you last time?’
Vivienne gave her a wry smile. ‘I’ve thought of very little else,’ she admitted, ‘and you’re right – it’s entirely possible that Anthony had moved onto someone different and left Millicent Gray behind. That would explain what she said to you, and his absence from her flat. But I really don’t think he killed her just because she was causing trouble with a new life he wanted to make for himself. He wasn’t that petty, Josephine, or that cruel. He didn’t need to be. He used people, casually and on a whim. For the most part, they were happy to be used and I turned a blind eye to it all just to keep him – in some sense of the word. We were all complicit in the situation, now I think about it, and when I look back over those years with the sort of detachment that prison gives you, I realise that none of us were very nice people. I’m not sure that anything we did was actually about love.’ She sighed and stubbed her cigare
tte out, barely touched. ‘And surely murder is about love, isn’t it? Not merely convenience.’
Josephine was tempted to point out that Vivienne would know more about that than she did, but she resisted. Instead, she thought about her conversation with Archie and all that the contents of that car implied. Nothing had been proved yet, but it was entirely possible that Vivienne was wrong and that her husband had known love – the love of another woman, perhaps even of a child. A love worth killing to protect. And if that were true, somebody, somewhere, was mourning Anthony Beresford’s death far more than Vivienne ever had. She still had no idea how she was going to break that particular revelation to the woman in front of her, but she wanted first to give Vivienne a glimmer of hope for her own future, a hope of proving the innocence that meant so much to her. ‘Would Anthony kill to protect a secret from his past, do you think?’
Her answer was an expression of incredulity. ‘A secret? What sort of secret?’
‘That he’d killed before.’
‘Josephine, don’t be ludicrous. Who on earth do you think he’s killed?’
‘Your sister.’
Vivienne gave a short, sharp laugh, but the smile soon left her face. ‘My God, you’re serious,’ she said. ‘I have absolutely no idea how you arrived at that ridiculous conclusion, but Anthony didn’t kill Olivia. He really didn’t.’
‘I know it’s a shock, but just listen for a moment. Did you know that Paradise House is for sale?’
‘No, but why would I? I haven’t had any connection to that place for ten years. And what’s Paradise House got to do with Millicent Gray?’
‘She made an appointment to go there just before she died.’
Vivienne hesitated. ‘How do you know?’
‘I went to her flat after we last spoke, and I found the details written down. She’d also been digging into Olivia’s death – collecting press cuttings from the time, asking Gerard Leaman questions about what happened that night. Other people as well, for all I know. Why would she do that, unless it was to find something that she could use against Anthony?’ She waited for a reason to be offered, but none was forthcoming. ‘And I think she did find something – enough to make her believe that Anthony had killed Olivia. That could explain why she asked you round – to expose him.’
‘That woman’s death has got nothing to do with Olivia’s,’ Vivienne said in a tone that left no room for argument.
‘You don’t know that.’
‘And you don’t know that it has. What you’ve come here with is all speculation, isn’t it? You haven’t got any proof. You haven’t stumbled across this mythical piece of information that came as such a revelation to Millicent Gray.’
Perhaps naively, Josephine had not expected such antagonism from a woman she was trying to help, but she had reckoned without the complexity of Vivienne’s feelings for her husband; even at the expense of her own life, she stubbornly refused to see him as a murderer. ‘All right, I can’t prove anything yet, but I was hoping that you might tell me something about that night . . .’
‘Anyway, why would Anthony possibly want to kill Olivia?’
It was spoken as a challenge, but there was a telltale note of fear in her voice now. In spite of Vivienne’s protestations, Josephine suspected that something she had said had hit a nerve, and she hammered home her point as best she could. ‘You told me yourself that Olivia resented your marriage and that she tried to control you. Anthony can’t have been happy about the way she treated you, or about the scandal that he had married into. The Golden Hat hardly sits well with a meteoric rise at the BBC, at least as far as the public is concerned. Olivia was a threat to both of you. Perhaps he tried to do something about her lifestyle, and perhaps he went too far.’
To her astonishment, Vivienne began to laugh. The tears ran down her face, and Josephine – offended at first by the easy dismissal of all she had said – suddenly realised that they were not tears of mirth. She waited for Vivienne to compose herself, feeling completely out of her depth. She had come to Holloway certain of her theory and confident of its reception; now, all she could do was wait for the other woman to offer some sort of direction. ‘Oh, that he were so protective,’ Vivienne said eventually. ‘Believe me, Josephine, you couldn’t be further from the truth.’ Her behaviour was drawing curious glances now from the warder on the other side of the door, and she lowered her voice to ensure that no one else would be able to hear. ‘I killed Olivia, Josephine. It’s not something that I ever wanted to admit to, especially now that the only other person who knew is dead, but I can’t let you go off on a wild goose chase that won’t help me and that might get you hurt. I didn’t kill Millicent Gray, and I doubt that Anthony did, so in all probability her killer is still free. Perhaps you’re right – perhaps she discovered what I’d done somehow, and was intending to blackmail me into letting Anthony go. Perhaps he even told her, for God’s sake – it’s not bad, as pillow talk goes. But none of that helps me. I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but all the delving you’ve done on my behalf will only tighten the rope around my neck if it ever becomes public.’ She waited while Josephine tried to come to terms with the shock of the confession. ‘And will it become public? Will you feel the need to share what I’ve just told you with your policeman friend?’
‘I don’t know,’ Josephine said truthfully, at a loss even to know how to feel, let alone what to do. In all the musing that she had done over the last few days, she had been certain of one thing – that Vivienne Beresford had, in some sense, been wronged. Suddenly, she was less sure. ‘Before I make any promises, I need to understand why you did it,’ she said.
‘Because she was sleeping with my husband.’ She saw the expression on Josephine’s face, and added: ‘That’s right – the first of Anthony’s sordid little affairs was with my own sister, for God’s sake.’
‘What happened?’
‘It was at the party, obviously. I didn’t really want to go, but Anthony said we should and I wasn’t bothered enough to argue. After all, Olivia couldn’t boss me around anymore because I’d left that life behind. Anthony and I had only been married for a few weeks – we weren’t long back from our honeymoon – and I was so happy. I didn’t think anything could touch me. Flaunting that in front of Olivia was tempting, so I agreed.’
‘How did you find out?’
‘I saw them together. The party was the usual affair – excess with no restraint, everything that the perfect hostess couldn’t quite get away with in a club. I suppose we’d been there about an hour when Anthony went off somewhere. I waited for him to come back, but he didn’t, so I went to look for him. He was nowhere in the house, so I went out to the garden, away from the crowd. I called his name but there was no answer, so I left the terrace and walked across the lawn to the shrubbery. There was a bench there, just beyond the reach of the lights from the house. That’s where they were, and it was perfectly obvious that they weren’t simply taking the air.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I didn’t know what to do at first. I was so shocked and upset that I couldn’t move and I couldn’t say anything. I just watched. Then I turned and ran back into the house.’
‘Did they know you’d seen them?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t think so, although they must have heard my footsteps on the gravel. Certainly, if they did know, Olivia didn’t show any sign of shame. I went back to the sitting room and sat down, and I was just numb, Josephine. It was as if no one else was there. Olivia came back inside a few minutes later, as blasé as ever, and Anthony followed shortly afterwards. She looked extraordinary, as if all the light in the room were concentrated on her, and on her alone. I remember watching her shadow on the wall, mesmerised by the way she moved, and I can still feel that searing, white hatred. I’ve never known anything like it, before or since. It was paralysing. Then the curtain knocked something off the windowsill, and it was as if something inside me had snapped. It brought me to my senses, and I knew then that I wo
uld kill her that night.’ Josephine said nothing, reluctant to reveal any sort of moral judgement, but it was becoming increasingly difficult to remain unbiased towards someone who had killed not once, but twice. ‘My chance soon came,’ Vivienne admitted. ‘After a while, Olivia announced that she was going out to swim and she wanted to be alone, so I followed her. The deep end of the pool couldn’t be seen from the house, so I knelt down by the side and waited for her to reach me, as if I were going to speak to her. It sounds strange now, but she looked at me as if she knew exactly what I was going to do, as if it was what she had wanted all along. I gave her time to say one last thing to me, then I put my hands on her shoulders and held her under. It was surprisingly easy.’
The story was being told in confidence and Josephine did her best to listen in the same spirit, but Vivienne’s anger – and its consequences – had begun to frighten her. ‘What did Olivia say to you?’ she asked.
‘That I would never make him happy. And she was right.’
In vain, Josephine tried to detach herself from the morality of what Vivienne had done and concentrate instead on how much it explained of all that had passed since. ‘I understand now why you said Anthony’s first betrayal was the one that really hurt you,’ she said. ‘But was there really no other way?’
She thought for a long time before answering. ‘I loved Olivia, but I always hoped she’d be different. I suppose I loved the sister I wanted, not the sister I had. So what I did was about her as much as him. That night, she destroyed everything, simply because she could, and when I killed her, I killed my own chances of ever really believing in anyone. I don’t know if there was another way. It didn’t feel like it at the time.’
‘How did it feel?’
‘Sickening. I couldn’t believe how easy it was. I remember thinking the same thing when I killed Anthony – just one shot, and that was it. I thought Olivia was stronger than that, but it was over so quickly. I was horrified by what I’d done, and I don’t remember much of what happened afterwards. I know I was screaming and I couldn’t control myself. Thank God Anthony got to me before anyone else.’