A Room Swept White

by Sophie Hannah

  ‘You keep saying that,’ Charlie told him. ‘Warren Gruff is talking up to a point, Angus Hines was controlling Gruff up to a point . . .’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Simon defensively. ‘Up to the point that as soon as we hint that we’re on to them, both Warren Gruff and Carl Chappell give up Angus Hines. Hines is smart: he knew that’d happen, knew he couldn’t rely on Gruff and Chappell to keep their mouths shut. He doesn’t care. He wants us to know it’s him – always has, right from the start. Hence the cards. He wanted to draw our attention to page 214 of Nothing But Love because he knew it would lead us to him, assuming we picked up on his clues, which we didn’t at first. As I say, he’s clever. As a nickname for him, I was spot on with “the Brain”. He’s got a master plan and he’s looking forward to bragging about it – I only wish I knew what the fuck it is, and whether it involves killing Ray. If Sellers doesn’t get to Twickenham in time, or if Hines has taken Ray somewhere else . . .’

  ‘Sellers will get there in time,’ said Charlie automatically. She had no idea whether he would or not.

  Simon shifted in his seat, rubbing the small of his back. ‘Hines must have guessed that Gruff and/or Chappell would give up not only him but Laurie Nattrass. I reckon he likes the idea of Nattrass getting done for perverting the course of justice – the irony would appeal to him. Nattrass supported Ray when Hines didn’t, he attacked Hines publicly for his failure to support her.’

  ‘It’d be his word against Gruff’s and Chappell’s, though, wouldn’t it?’ said Charlie. ‘It’s a non-starter. Laurie Nattrass’ll be just fine – his sort always land on their feet.’ There was something niggling at the back of her mind. She was about to give up trying to pin it down when it suddenly came into sharp focus. ‘How does page 214 of Nothing But Love lead back to Angus Hines?’ she asked.

  ‘The third phone call was from Klair Williamson,’ said Simon.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘She’s one of the detectives on the Yardley–Duffy murders. I asked her to speak to Rahila Yunis, the journalist who interviewed Helen Yardley at Geddham Hall prison and says Yardley lied about the poem.’

  ‘Didn’t Sam say Yunis seemed reluctant to talk at first?’

  ‘Right.’ Simon nodded. ‘Well, now we know why: Yunis was withholding the most important part of the story. Angus Hines was there that day too, at Geddham Hall. He wasn’t supposed to be. The rules said no photographers, but Laurie Nattrass and Helen Yardley had briefed Yunis and Hines on how to break those rules, who to talk to at the prison to make it happen. A lot of the guards liked Helen and believed she was innocent, so they bent the rules for her – Hines and his camera were allowed in. The powers-that-be at the Telegraph were worried about Hines being the photographer on this particular job, given that he was famous at the time for denouncing his wife as guilty and Helen was equally famous for proclaiming Ray Hines’ innocence.’

  ‘Understandable,’ said Charlie.

  ‘Yeah. Except, according to Yunis via Klair Williamson, Helen Yardley only agreed to the interview on the condition that there’d be a photographer present. A particular photographer – none other than Angus Hines. Hines was equally enthusiastic. He and Helen Yardley were keen to encounter one another, it seems. When they did, each seemed so focused on the other that they barely noticed Yunis was there, according to her. For nearly half an hour she couldn’t get a word in edgeways.’

  ‘What were they talking about?’ Charlie asked.

  ‘Ray Hines. Helen accused Hines of disloyalty and tried to convince him of the error of his ways. Hines accused Helen of supporting Ray only as a way of furthering her own cause and underlining her own innocence, using Ray as a symbol for herself, or words to that effect.’

  ‘Interesting,’ said Charlie. ‘How do the two poems come into it, “The Microbe” and the “room swept white” poem?’

  ‘When Helen presented “The Microbe” as her favourite poem, Hines burst out laughing and accused her of being stupid. “But scientists, who ought to know, / Assure us that they must be so . . . / Oh! Let us never, never doubt / What nobody is sure about!” ’ Simon recited. ‘For Helen, the poem was about Judith Duffy’s arrogance in thinking her guilty, but Angus Hines pointed out that it could equally apply to Russell Meredew and the other doctors who testified in Helen’s favour. They were as convinced of their monopoly on the truth as Duffy was. The experts on both sides told the jury never, never to doubt what nobody was sure about. According to Rahila Yunis, Hines thanked Helen for introducing him to “The Microbe” and told her it was now also his favourite poem, because it validated all the doubts he’d ever had about Ray, Helen, Sarah Jaggard – all the women who cried cot death when accused of murder. Yunis told Klair Williamson that Helen was visibly disturbed when Hines said this, though until that point none of his comments seemed to have bothered her at all. Shortly after he mocked her choice of poem, she put an end to the interview. A couple of hours later, Laurie Nattrass was on the phone to Yunis, saying: “I don’t know what Angus Hines said to Helen because she won’t tell me, but I’ve never seen her so angry.” All Helen had told Nattrass, apparently, was that Hines had made a fool of her, humiliated her. There was no feature in the Telegraph – Nattrass told Yunis to pull it, or she’d very quickly find herself out of a job. She believed he meant it, so she did as she was told. She doesn’t like talking about it because Nattrass humiliated her – terrorised her into dropping a good story.’

  ‘So Helen lied in her book about the poem that was supposedly so important to her,’ said Charlie thoughtfully.

  ‘She didn’t only lie,’ said Simon. ‘She stole. Well, sort of. “Room Swept White” is Rahila Yunis’s favourite poem. She told Helen that, before Angus Hines chipped in and pointed out that “The Microbe” didn’t mean what Helen thought it meant. Shit.’ Stella White had appeared on the doorstep of number 16 and was staring at them, a quizzical expression on her face. ‘She must be wondering why we’re parked outside and not coming in,’ said Simon. ‘Have you got the photos?’

  ‘Yep.’ Charlie climbed out of the car and stretched. Her knees creaked, as if she hadn’t moved for years. She was heading for Stella’s house when Simon pulled her back. ‘Once we’re finished here, you and I are going home,’ he said. ‘Straight home.’

  ‘Okay. Mind if I ask why?’

  ‘Yes.’ He turned away from her, shouted a hello to Stella.

  ‘Is it anything bad?’ Charlie called after him.

  ‘Hopefully not that bad,’ he said over his shoulder.

  And then he was in the house and she couldn’t ask him anything else, not without being overheard.

  Dillon sat hunched on the sofa, kicking it with his heels. ‘I dragged him away from his horse-racing,’ said Stella. ‘I thought you deserved his full attention for a change.’ Her son looked as if he thought otherwise, but he said nothing.

  ‘You look very well,’ Simon told Stella. ‘Better than when I last saw you.’

  ‘I’m in remission,’ she said. ‘Just found out today. Can’t quite believe it, but there you go.’

  ‘Well done.’ Charlie beamed at her. Straight home: it could only mean one thing . . .

  ‘Hi, Dillon,’ said Simon awkwardly.

  ‘Hello,’ the boy replied in a monotone. Charlie wasn’t sure which of them was winning on the social skills front.

  Simon held out his hand for the photos and she gave them to him. ‘I’m going to show you some photographs,’ he told Dillon. ‘I’d like you to tell me who they are.’

  Dillon nodded. One by one, Simon showed him the pictures, starting with Glen Jaggard. ‘Don’t know,’ he said. Sebastian Brownlee also got a ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘What about this one?’ Simon held up a picture of Paul Yardley.

  ‘Uncle Paul.’

  ‘And this one?’ Laurie Nattrass.

  ‘I’ve seen him,’ said Dillon, suddenly animated. ‘He went to Auntie Helen’s house lots of times. Once I was playing outside and he told me to look whe
re I was going and he said a very rude word to me.’

  ‘And this one?’

  Dillon’s eyes lit up. ‘That’s him,’ he said, smiling up at Simon. ‘That’s the man with the magic umbrella.’

  The photograph was of Angus Hines.

  23

  Monday 12 October 2009

  ‘When Ray turned up on my doorstep after she’d been released—’

  ‘It was my doorstep too,’ she cuts in.

  ‘Our doorstep,’ Angus corrects himself. ‘When she turned up, I was happy to let her in. While she was in prison, I’d devised the perfect test. Hines’ Test of Guilt, I call it.’ Ray’s eyes are pleading with me: listen to him, give him a chance. However awful this sounds, don’t walk away.

  I remind myself that Hugo is in the next room. That’s not as close as it would be in most houses, but it’s close enough. If I screamed, he’d hear me. Any time I can’t stand this any more, he’ll drive me away from here and from Angus, who I’m now certain is a murderer.

  Angus Hines: maker of probability tables, arranger of numbers in squares. He sent me the cards. I was supposed to guess what they meant, just as I was supposed to guess his meaning when he sent me the list of people Judith Duffy had testified against in the criminal and family courts. He sent me the two photographs of Helen Yardley’s hands. Did he take them just before he shot her?

  I had a bad feeling about him from the moment I met him: so bad I locked him up. My instincts must have been screaming at me that he was dangerous. Ray was scared of him too, at one time. Why isn’t she still?

  ‘I took Ray up to what had once been our bedroom,’ he says. ‘The room where years before she’d climbed out of the window and smoked a cigarette sitting on the ledge. I opened the window, grabbed her and dragged her over to it. I pushed her head out, and the top half of her body, and I held her there: half out, half in. She knew I could easily have pushed her out if I’d wanted to. There’s no way she’d have survived the fall.’

  ‘You told me you didn’t try to kill her,’ I say, keeping my voice steady.

  ‘I didn’t. As Ray said, if I’d tried I’d have succeeded. What I tried to do was make her believe I’d kill her if she didn’t tell me the truth. And I would have done.’

  ‘And then you asked her if she’d killed Marcella and Nathaniel.’

  ‘Hines’ Test of Guilt: put a woman who might or might not be guilty of murdering her children in a life-threatening situation. Convince her you’ll kill her if she doesn’t tell the truth, but that you’ll let her live if she does. Whatever the truth is, you’ll let her live – tell her that. Then ask her if she committed the murders. Whatever her first answer is, don’t accept it. Keep ordering her to tell you the truth, as if you don’t believe what she’s said. If she changes her answer, do it again. Keep doing it – keep ordering her to tell you the truth, and eventually she’ll be so scared and so unable to work out what the right answer is, you’ll get the truth out of her. At that point, she’ll stop chopping and changing: she’ll stick to her story, and that story will be the true version of events. If she continues to chop and change in a way that makes it impossible for you to identify the truth, kill her as you threatened to.’

  Don’t interrupt him. Don’t argue with him.

  ‘Ray passed with flying colours.’ Angus smiles at her, as if this is all perfectly normal. Ray keeps her eyes fixed on the camera. ‘She didn’t chop and change, not at all. She really believed I was going to kill her, yet not once did she say she was guilty. That’s what proved to me that I’d been wrong about her.’

  ‘I couldn’t have said I’d killed my babies when I hadn’t,’ says Ray quietly. ‘Not for anyone or anything. Not even if Angus was going to kill me if I didn’t.’

  ‘Did you tell the police what Angus did to you?’

  ‘No. It’ll be difficult for you to understand, but . . . I knew it wasn’t Angus who opened the window and . . . It wasn’t him. It was his pain and his grief that did it, not the real Angus, the one that existed before the grief. I also . . . You won’t understand this either, but I respected him for doubting my innocence. His duty as a father was to do his absolute best for Marcella and Nathaniel, even after they were gone. Especially once they were gone. If so many intelligent people thought I’d killed them, how could he not take that seriously? He’d have been letting them down. And . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I understood exactly how he felt about me, because it was how I felt about all the other women: Helen Yardley, Sarah Jaggard . . .’

  ‘I asked you before if you thought Helen was guilty. You said no.’

  ‘I never thought she was guilty.’ Ray leans forward. ‘I thought she might be guilty. Same with Sarah Jaggard. There’s a big difference. I agree with Angus: the more of these supposed miscarriage-of-justice victims there are, the more guilty ones there must be among them, using innocent women like me as their camouflage.’

  Hines’ Theorem of Probability. I think of Joanne Bew. Lorna Keast.

  ‘I didn’t want anything to do with Helen or Sarah, inside or outside of a TV documentary, because I didn’t know if they were murderers,’ says Ray.

  Yet you know Angus is a murderer, and you’re planning to marry him.

  ‘You wanted to find out, didn’t you?’ I ask him. ‘Your Test of Guilt had worked on Ray, so you decided to try it on Helen.’

  ‘Ray had nothing to do with it,’ says Angus. ‘I discussed my Theorem of Probability with her, but I didn’t tell her what I intended to do.’

  ‘You wanted to make someone pay for your pain and suffering, but Ray was innocent, so she couldn’t pay. And even if by then you were convinced your children had died from a vaccine, who could you punish for that? Wendy Whitehead? No, she was on Ray’s side, against the vaccine. It would have been hard to settle on an individual or individuals to blame. Much easier to use your test of guilt to find a baby-killer: Helen Yardley, or Sarah Jaggard. They might be guilty even if Ray wasn’t – you could make them pay.’

  ‘I delegated Sarah Jaggard to somebody else,’ says Angus. ‘He made a hash of it – did it in broad daylight in a public place and was interrupted. That’s why I did the Test on Helen myself, though I probably would have anyway. Sarah Jaggard killed – or didn’t kill – a child that wasn’t her own. I was less interested in her.’

  ‘You murdered Helen Yardley,’ I say, feeling sick. ‘You shot her in the head.’

  ‘I did, yes.’ He said it. He confessed to the camera.

  ‘And you killed Judith Duffy.’

  ‘Yes. The police seemed determined to mistake me for a pro-Duffy vigilante. I had to set them straight. They needed a lesson in truth and fairness. Impartiality. Unless you’re impartial, how can you judge? Duffy made some bad mistakes – she was the first to admit it.’

  Next to him, Ray is crying.

  ‘Why didn’t you go to the police?’ I ask her. ‘You must have known as soon as Helen died . . .’

  ‘I had no proof.’

  ‘You knew what he’d done to you.’

  ‘His word against mine.’ She wipes her eyes. ‘He could have accused me of lying, and . . . I didn’t want to hurt him or damage him any more than he’s already been damaged. This is what I wanted: for him to tell his own story. I knew he couldn’t be allowed to carry on, but . . . I wanted it to end in the right way, and I thought I could persuade him.’

  ‘Marriage and a new baby in exchange for a confession and no more killing?’ I say. Laurie Nattrass’s baby.

  Ray winces, hearing me put it so starkly.

  ‘Ray’s right,’ says Angus, taking her hand. She leans into him. She still loves him. ‘This way’s better. I needed to be ready to tell the story.’

  Is that what he was doing upstairs, all the time Ray and I were talking? Readying himself?

  ‘Judith Duffy died while you waited for him to be ready,’ I tell her.

  ‘I know that, Fliss. How do you think that makes me feel?’

  ‘
Judith wouldn’t have minded,’ Angus says.

  I stare at him in utter disbelief. ‘Wouldn’t have minded being murdered?’

  ‘No. Her children had disowned her, she’d lost her professional credibility – she was about to be struck off, in all probability. She had nothing to live for apart from what she’d always lived for: protecting children, bringing their killers to justice. I think she’d have approved of Hines’ Test of Guilt.’

  ‘Fliss, listen,’ says Ray. I hear desperation in her voice. ‘I know what you’re thinking, but everything’s going to be okay now. It’s finished. Angus’s . . . test, it’s over. He knows that; he accepts it. I know you think I ought to abandon him and hate him, but I can’t, because this isn’t him .’

  ‘Do you agree with that?’ I ask him.

  ‘Yes,’ he says without hesitation. ‘I didn’t used to be like this. I used to be Angus Hines. Now I’m . . . something else, I don’t know what.’

  A chill runs all the way through me. How terrifying to turn into something you recognise as not yourself – something uncontrollable and horrifying – and yet not be able to define that thing or feel the horror.

  ‘Angus will go to prison, but he won’t be alone in the world,’ says Ray. ‘He’ll be punished as he should be for what he’s done, but he’ll have hope too, and a reason to carry on – a new child to love, me. Even though we won’t be together maybe for years, I can write to him, visit him, take our baby . . .’