A Room Swept White

by Sophie Hannah

  Does that mean I want to make Laurie’s film? No. No, no, no.

  ‘I won’t let her in,’ I say, certain this is the best idea I’ve ever had.

  ‘There’s nothing to be scared of,’ says Tamsin unhelpfully.

  ‘Easy for you to say. When was the last time you were visited by a murderer in the middle of the night?’ I’m not sure Rachel Hines killed her babies – how can I be? – but it makes me feel better to pretend that I am.

  ‘She isn’t a murderer any more,’ says Tamsin. Automatically, I think of the woman I overheard on the tube: I can believe Helen Yardley was innocent all along. ‘Even before she appealed and won, Justice Geilow made a point of saying she didn’t think Ray Hines would ever pose a threat to anyone in the future. She as good as said in her sentencing remarks that, though murder carries a mandatory life sentence, she didn’t feel it was appropriate, and implied that cases of this sort shouldn’t be a matter for the criminal courts at all. It caused an uproar in legal circles. God, I feel sober. It’s your fault.’

  ‘Justice who?’

  Tamsin sighs. ‘Don’t you ever read anything apart from heat? If you’re making the film, you’re going to need to familiarise yourself with—’

  ‘I’m not making the film. I’m bolting my door and going to bed. First thing tomorrow morning I’m handing in my resignation.’

  ‘Fine, do that. You’ll never know what Ray Hines wanted to talk to you about.’

  Good.

  ‘One of her objections to the film was sharing it with the other two women,’ says Tamsin. ‘Now that Helen’s dead and Sarah’s pulled out, Ray could be the main focus. Her case. It’s the most interesting of the three by far, though I once said that to Laurie and he almost had me hung, drawn and quartered for treason. Helen was always his favourite.’

  Helen’s case, or Helen the woman? I manage to stop myself from asking. I can’t be jealous of a murder victim who lost all three of her children and spent nearly a decade in jail. Even if it turns out Laurie’s spent years crying into his pillow on her account, jealousy is not an acceptable option, not if I want to be able to live with myself.

  I hear a car pulling up outside. My hand tightens around the phone. ‘I think she’s here. I’ve got to go.’ I hover uselessly by my front door, trying to contain myself until I hear the bell. When I can’t stand it any longer, I open the door.

  There’s a black car outside my house, with its lights on and its engine running. I climb the five steps that lead from my basement flat up to the pavement, and see that it’s a Jaguar. From her telephone voice, Rachel Hines sounded like the sort of person who might own one. I wonder how this fits in with her being a drug addict. Maybe she isn’t one any more, or maybe she’s a heaps-of-cocaine-off-platinum-edged-mirrors junkie, not your bog-standard shooting-up-in-a-dirty-squat smackhead. God, if I was any more prejudiced . . .

  I plaster a non-threatening smile on my face and walk towards the car. It can’t be her; she’d have got out by now. Suddenly, the engine and lights cut out and I see her clearly in the street-lamp’s glow. Even knowing as little as I do about her case, she’s totally familiar to me. Hers is a household face, like Helen Yardley’s – one that’s been on the news and in the papers so often that most people in Britain would recognise her. No wonder she didn’t want to meet me in the pub.

  I can’t believe she wants to meet me at all.

  Her face is slightly too long and her features too blunt, otherwise she’d be stunning. As it is, she’s the sort of plain that has missed attractive by a hair’s breadth. Her thick wavy hair makes me look again at her face, thinking she must be attractive; it’s the sort of hair you’d expect to frame the face of a beauty: well cut, lustrous, golden blonde. She looks like somebody important; it’s in her eyes and the way she holds herself. Nothing like Helen Yardley, whose absolute ordinariness and accessible friendly-neighbour smile made it easy for most people to believe in her innocence, once her convictions were quashed.

  Rachel Hines opens her car door, but still doesn’t get out. Tentatively, I approach the Jaguar. She slams the door shut. The engine starts up, and the headlights come back on, blinding me. ‘What . . .?’ I start to say, but she’s pulling away. As she draws level with me, she slows down, turns to face me. I see her look past me at the house and turn, in case there’s someone behind me, though I know there isn’t. It’ll be just the two of us, won’t it?

  By the time I’ve turned back, she’s halfway down the road, speeding up as she drives away.

  What did I do wrong? My mobile phone starts to ring in my pocket. ‘You’re not going to believe this,’ I say, assuming it’s Tamsin calling for an update. ‘She was here about ten seconds ago, and she’s just driven off without saying anything, without even getting out of the car.’

  ‘It’s me. Ray. I’m sorry about . . . what just happened.’

  ‘Forget it,’ I say, grudgingly. Why is it so unacceptable, if you’re a decent human being, to say, ‘Actually, it’s not okay, even though you’ve apologised. I don’t forgive you’? Why do I care what’s socially acceptable, given who I’m dealing with? ‘Can I go to bed now?’

  ‘You’ll have to come to me,’ she says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Not now. I’ve inconvenienced you enough for one day. Tell me a time and date that suit you.’

  ‘No time, no date,’ I say. ‘Look, you caught me off-guard in the pub tonight. If you want to talk to someone at Binary Star, ring Maya Jacques and—’

  ‘I didn’t kill my daughter. Or my son.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘I can tell you the name of the person who did, if you want: Wendy Whitehead. Though it wasn’t—’

  ‘I don’t want you to tell me anything,’ I say, my heart pounding. ‘I want you to leave me alone.’ I press the ‘end call’ button hard. It’s several seconds before I dare to breathe again.

  Back in my flat, I lock and bolt the door, turn off my mobile phone and unplug the landline. Five minutes later I’m rigid and wide awake in bed, the name Wendy Whitehead going round and round in my brain.

  From Nothing But Love

  by Helen Yardley with Gaynor Mundy

  21 July 1995

  On the twenty-first of July, when the police came, I knew straight away that this time was different from all the other times. It was three weeks to the day since Rowan had died, and I’d become an expert at reading the detectives’ moods. I was usually able to tell from their faces whether the questioning on that particular day would be relentless or sympathetic. One detective who had always been kind to me was DS Giles Proust. He always looked uncomfortable when I was being interviewed and left most of the questions to his junior colleagues. On and on they would go: did I have a happy childhood? What was it like being the middle sibling? Did I ever feel jealous of my sisters? Am I close to my parents? Did I ever have babysitting jobs as a teenager? Did I love Morgan? Did I love Rowan? Did I welcome both pregnancies? I wanted to scream at them, ‘Of course I bloody well did, and if you can’t see that with your own eyes and ears then you don’t deserve the title of detective!’

  I always had the impression that Giles Proust alone among the police didn’t merely believe that I was innocent of the murder of my babies, but knew it, in the way that I knew it and Paul knew it. He could see I was no baby-killer, and understood how much I’d loved my two precious boys. Now here he was at my door again, with a woman I didn’t recognise, and I could see at once from his facial expression that this was going to be very bad. ‘Just tell me,’ I said, wanting to get it over with.

  ‘This is DC Ursula Shearer from Child Protection,’ said DS Proust. ‘I’m sorry, Helen. I’m here to arrest you for the murders of Morgan and Rowan Yardley. I don’t have any choice. I’m so sorry.’

  His regret was absolutely genuine. I could see from his face that it was breaking him up to have to do this to me. At that moment, I think I hated his superior officers more for his sake than for my own. Hadn’t they listened to h
im, all those times he must have told them they were hounding a grief-stricken mother who’d done nothing wrong? I was as much a victim of my boys’ deaths as they were.

  However terrible the moment of my arrest was for me, I can never think of it without also thinking of Giles Proust and how terrible it must have been for him. He must have felt as helpless as I did, powerless to make the people in charge see and hear the truth. Paul had urged me many times not to assume anybody official was on my side. He was scared I might be naïvely deluding myself, storing up more pain for the future. ‘However decent Proust seems, he’s a policeman, don’t forget,’ he would tell me. ‘The sympathy could be a tactic. We’ve got to assume they’re all against us.’

  Although I didn’t agree with Paul, I could understand his attitude. For him it was a way of staying strong. At first he didn’t even trust our close families, our parents, brothers and sisters, to be fully on our side. ‘They say they’re sure you didn’t do it,’ he would say, ‘but how do we know they’re not just saying that because it’s what’s expected of them? What if some of them have doubts?’ To this day I am convinced that none of my relatives or Paul’s ever thought I could be guilty. They had all seen me with Morgan and Rowan and seen my passionate love for them.

  Paul would face no criminal charges, we were told, but he was allowed to come with me in the police car, which was a great comfort to me. He sat on one side of me, DS Proust sat on the other, and DC Shearer drove us to Spilling police station. I sobbed as I was forcibly taken away from my beloved house where I’d been so happy – first with Paul, then with Paul and Morgan, then again when Rowan came along. So many beautiful memories! How could they do this to me after what I’d suffered already? For a moment, I was consumed with hatred for everything and everyone. I had no use for a world that could inflict such terrible suffering. Then I felt an arm round my shoulder and DS Proust said, ‘Helen, listen to me. I know you didn’t kill Morgan or Rowan. Things are looking bleak for you now, but the truth will come out. If I can see the truth, others will too. Any fool can see you were a good, loving mother.’

  DC Shearer muttered something sarcastic under her breath, from which I gathered that she disapproved of what DS Proust had said. Maybe she thought I was guilty, or that DS Proust had breached some sort of protocol by saying what he said to me, but I didn’t care. Paul was smiling. He finally recognised Giles Proust for the ally that he was. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘It means everything to us to have your support. Doesn’t it, Helen?’

  I nodded. DC Shearer made another snide remark under her breath. DS Proust could have left it at that, having made his point, but instead he said, ‘If this goes as far as a trial, which I very much doubt it will, then I’ll be called as a witness. By the time I step down from the box, the jury will be as convinced as I am that you’re innocent.’

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’ DC Shearer snapped. Paul and I shrank down in our seats, taken aback by her harsh tone, but Giles Proust remained unfazed.

  ‘I’m doing the right thing,’ he said. ‘Somebody has to.’

  I became aware that I had stopped crying. A wave of what can only be described as utmost peace washed over me, and I stopped worrying obsessively about what would happen to me. It was like magic: I was no longer afraid. Whether Giles Proust was right or wrong about my chances of standing trial or what a hypothetical jury would think, it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that as I looked out of the window of the police car and watched the post-boxes and trees and shops whizzing by, I loved the world I had hated only a few moments earlier. I felt part of something good and whole and light, something that Paul and Giles Proust and Morgan and Rowan were also part of. It’s very hard to explain the feeling in words because it was so much stronger than words.

  I didn’t know, as we drove to the police station that day, how bad things were going to get for me and Paul, how much more agonising suffering lay in store for us. But as fate went on to rain down blow after blow upon us, even when my spirits were at their very lowest and there seemed no hope of any respite, that peaceful sensation that came over me in the police car on the day of my arrest never left me, even though there were times when I had to struggle to find it inside myself. It’s the same positive energy that has spurred me on in the work I have done on behalf of other women in similar situations to mine, and that has been the driving force behind my contribution to JIPAC. DS Proust taught me a valuable lesson that day: that you can always, and easily, give somebody the gift of hope and faith, even in the midst of despair.

  12 September 1996

  The contact centre was a horrible, soulless place, an ugly grey one-storey prefab that looked lost and forlorn in a vast, mostly empty car park. I hated it on sight. There weren’t enough windows, and those there were seemed too small. I said to Paul, ‘It looks like a building that’s keeping lots of unpleasant secrets.’ He knew exactly what I meant. I shuddered and said, ‘I can’t do it. I just can’t. I can’t go in there.’ He told me I had to, because Paige was inside.

  I wanted to see her more than anything but I was scared of the joy I would feel as soon as we were together, because I knew it was something that the social workers could and would take away from me. If I came here for two hours every weekday, which was the deal Ned and Gillian had negotiated for me, that meant I would have to endure some Social Services flunky taking Paige away from me five times each week until my trial, and who knew what would happen after that? Even if I was acquitted, as Giles Proust kept reassuring me I would be, Paul and I still might not be allowed to keep Paige. Ned had explained to me about the difference between the burden of proof in a criminal case, where guilt must be proven beyond reasonable doubt, and the courts that steal children from their parents behind closed doors and under a veil of secrecy. In the family courts, all that needs to happen is for the judge to decide that the child is better off without his or her parents on the balance of probabilities, which means nobody needs to prove anything. All it will take is for someone who doesn’t know me from Adam or Eve to decide I’m probably a murderer, and I’ll lose my daughter. ‘I’ve never heard of anything so cruel and unfair in my life,’ I told Ned. ‘To lose Paige would be unbearable, and what if I go to prison, and Paul loses both me and her?’ Ned looked me in the eye and said, ‘I can’t lie to you, Helen. That might happen.’

  ‘Take me home,’ I told Paul as we sat in the car park outside the contact centre. ‘I’ve already suffered three terrible losses and I can’t cope with any more.’ That was how I truly felt. Paige was alive and well, but I lost her when she was wrenched from my arms an hour after her birth to be taken into care. ‘I can’t lose my daughter all over again every day this week, and next week, and for God knows how long. I won’t let them do that to me, or to her.’ Up until this point I had been timid and cooperative, and it had got me nowhere. Let them see exactly what they’re doing, I thought: depriving a baby of her mother. Why should I turn up and make Social Services feel good about themselves for ‘letting’ me have contact with my own daughter? They were tearing apart what was left of my family and I wanted them to realise it.

  The drive back to Bengeo Street was the most miserable journey of my life. Paul and I didn’t speak a single word to one another. At home we made a pot of hot, strong tea. ‘You should go back there,’ I told him. ‘You need to make sure that you get to keep Paige, no matter what happens to me. You’ll have to lie, but it’s a price worth paying.’ Paul asked me what I meant and I spelled it out for him. ‘You must pretend to doubt me. Act like you’re as worried as the social workers are about me being alone with Paige. Convince them that if they let you keep her, you’ll make sure she’s never alone with me.’

  No words can express how much I hated saying this to Paul. He was my absolute rock and had stood by me unswervingly throughout my ordeal. His loyalty was the main thing sustaining me, yet here I was asking him to pretend to be a worse man than he truly was – a disloyal husband instead of a wonderful brave one. But I kne
w it was the right thing to do. The only thing that mattered now was stopping those child-snatcher social workers from giving our beloved Paige to another family.

  When I lost first Morgan and then Rowan, I didn’t think anything worse could ever happen to me, but to lose Paige in this way would be worse, because it would be somebody’s fault. The injustice would destroy me, and I feared it might actually kill Paul, however melodramatic that sounds.

  ‘Please,’ I begged him. ‘Drive back there and see Paige. Ring them now and tell them you’re coming.’

  ‘No,’ he said flatly. ‘I’m not lying to anyone and nor are you. That would make us as bad as them. We’ll fight evil with good and lies with truth and we’ll win. DS Proust says we’ll win and I believe him.’

  ‘Ned and Gillian say we might not,’ I reminded him, my eyes full of tears. ‘And even if I’m found not guilty in the criminal court, the family court’s a different matter.’

  ‘Shut up!’ Paul yelled. ‘I don’t want to hear it.’ It was the first time since tragedy had struck our lives that he’d raised his voice to me, and I’m ashamed to say that I took the opportunity to give back as good as I got and vent some of the misery and despair that had built up inside me. The two of us were still screaming at each other ten minutes later when the doorbell rang.

  I threw myself into Giles Proust’s arms, and must have absolutely terrified the poor man as I shrieked at him that he had to help me make Paul see sense. ‘You’re the one who needs to see sense, Helen, and quickly,’ he said sternly. ‘Why aren’t you at the contact centre? You’re supposed to be there now, but I’ve just had a call saying you didn’t turn up.’ I did my best to explain my reasons to him. ‘Listen carefully, Helen,’ he said. ‘However hard it is, you’ve got to spend as much time as you can with Paige. Don’t miss a single visit, or they’ll use it against you. I understand what you’re scared of, but do you really want to turn your worst fears into reality by giving them ammunition? How do you think it looks if you don’t even bother to turn up for the few hours a week you’re allowed to spend with Paige?’