For Death Comes Softly

by Hilary Bonner

  All in all, the findings were just a tremendous relief – although nothing would ever lessen for Robin the blow of having irrevocably lost Abri. He had devoted his life to preserving Abri Island for his family, and now it was gone for good.

  Five days later the body of Stephen Jeffries was found in a shallow grave high in the Mendip hills, just over a year after the boy had disappeared. A dog being taken for a walk by its owner had unearthed Stephen’s remains. Unusually heavy rain had caused the various water sources in the higher regions of the hills to flood and pour down towards the lower regions, washing away much of the top soil which had effectively covered the boy for so long. Without the intervention of British weather the body might never have been found. I heard about it on the TV news. I was not involved any more. It was no longer my case – but the news devastated me.

  Chief Superintendent Titmuss announced that he was now heading a murder enquiry. I suppose it had been a foregone conclusion that, after all this time, young Stephen had to be dead, but with all the other trauma in my life I had tried not to think about that. Instead, like a distraught relative, I had willed the boy to be somehow, somewhere, still alive.

  He wasn’t. He had been killed and unceremoniously left to rot in a moorland pit. It sent shivers down my spine. This was yet another death for which I felt I had to take at least some responsibility.

  Eighteen

  Robin and I were married. We went to Barbados to do the deed, just the two of us, and we told nobody of our intentions until our return. We flew out of the UK just a week after young Stephen Jeffries’ body had been discovered, and for me it was the best therapy there could ever have been. We stayed in the Coral Reef Hotel on St James Beach in a little bungalow in the midst of tropical gardens and wed on the beach two days after arriving. I wore a simple cream linen dress and Robin wore white canvas trousers and a bright yellow shirt without a tie. Two other guests, people we hardly knew, were our witnesses. We celebrated alone over a long lingering dinner and then we danced bare-footed in the moonlight. Nothing could have been more removed from the wedding we had expected to have on Abri.

  We remained in Barbados for a magical fortnight, and for fourteen glorious days we thought of nothing but each other. We were helped, of course, by the fact that nobody we encountered knew anything about us nor the terrible tragedy we had experienced. One of the worst aspects of being involved in something so appalling is the public knowledge of it. The way you cannot meet with friends or even buy a newspaper in the corner shop without being aware of watchful eyes, and carefully tactful words. Other people’s awareness, and indeed their concern, can actually make it impossible for you to move forward. On Barbados, albeit only fleetingly, it felt in a way as if life returned to a kind of normality – although I suppose holidays are never really normality.

  Robin and I were blissfully happy together. The old companionship returned, and we talked endlessly about anything and everything, and most importantly, for the first time probably since the disaster, not always coming back to Abri. In fact I don’t think we ever mentioned it. It was as if we had an unspoken agreement that we would not discuss it. There really was nothing left to say. No tears left to be shed.

  Robin and I had to look to the future not the past, and I for one, was quite determined that we would do just that. The truth, of course, was that Robin had become just about all I ever thought about. It was almost as if I were hypnotised.

  Our happiness continued undisturbed during our first week back in Bristol. At last our beautiful Clifton house began to feel like a real home. Robin went straight back to work, which was a good sign. I knew by now that he was at his happiest when he was working. Alone during the day I was even able at last to keep the nightmares at bay. And I continued in my attempts to learn to cook, actually producing one or two meals which were almost edible.

  Then I had a call from Julia. She had yet to learn that I had married Robin. In fact the last time I had talked to her about him it had been to confide that things weren’t so good between us, and that I wondered if we were ever going to recover from the disaster. When we began to build our bridges and eventually planned our wedding, I don’t know why I didn’t call her straight away, to give her the good news. I had told her we were going on holiday, of course, but nothing more. I think I just hadn’t wanted to break the spell, or maybe I was afraid of tempting providence. And now, before I had a chance to confide in her she began to speak.

  ‘Rose, I’ve got something I must tell you . . .’

  ‘Snap!’ I said.

  ‘Rose, please,’ she said. She sounded very serious, I suppose. But I was on a high, the first one in a long time, and I wasn’t interested in a word she had to say until I had imparted my news.

  ‘Shut up, Julia, and listen,’ I instructed imperiously. ‘Robin and I are married. We did the deed in Barbados.’ There was a long silence. ‘Well, aren’t you going to congratulate me?’

  ‘Congratulations,’ said Julia flatly.

  ‘Don’t sound so bloody enthusiastic,’ I grumbled.

  I thought that I detected a sigh down the line.

  ‘Darling, if you’re happy then I’m happy, you must know that by now,’ said Julia. ‘And God knows you deserve some happiness.’

  ‘We all do, Julia,’ I said sombrely. ‘And I’m going to grasp it now, I really am. Robin and I just have to somehow overcome our guilt and our grief, we have to, and get on with our lives.’

  They were heavy words, but there was a new lightness in my heart. Had been since the wedding.

  ‘Oh Julia, I do love him so,’ I blurted out. ‘I’m sure we can be happy together again, in spite of everything, I’m sure of it.’

  ‘I hope so, Rose,’ replied Julia.

  ‘No doubt about it,’ I responded.

  Again Julia didn’t say anything. It was not like her to go in for long telephone silences. Normally she gossiped for England, even the disaster had not changed that.

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’ I asked eventually.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘A bit tired, that’s all. Overworked and underpaid, you know.’

  ‘I do – but you don’t,’ I said. ‘Underpaid is not the way I would describe your job exactly.’

  She managed a wry laugh.

  ‘So come on, let’s have it,’ I encouraged. ‘What is it you want to tell me, then?’

  ‘Oh, nothing, darling,’ she replied. ‘Your news has completely overshadowed it.’

  ‘Tell me anyway,’ I commanded.

  ‘Rose, to be truthful, I can’t even remember what I was going to say,’ she told me. And, rather curiously, I didn’t think she was being truthful at all. But I was quite untroubled. I had married my Robin at last. I was quite sure that he loved me every bit as much as I loved him. Nothing else mattered.

  During the next month our lives seemed to improve daily. I really did begin to believe in the future. There even seemed to be a chance at last of rebuilding my shattered relationship with my sister Clem. It was my niece’s ninth birthday at the end of November, and I decided to take a risk and call around unannounced with a present and a card.

  Young Ruth seemed, on the surface at least, to be exactly the same as she had been before the disaster which claimed her little brother’s life. She greeted me with a big hug and a kiss the way she always had, even though it was the first time I had seen her since that terrible day. Clem, who had for so long refused even to speak to me, at least let me in through the door.

  The old warmth was sorely missing, but for the first time I felt this might not always be so.

  I told her about my marriage, and, while she did not offer congratulations, neither did she display any particularly adverse reaction. We talked about our mother for a bit, who had predictably displayed wonderful powers of recovery and taken off to New Zealand to stay with a cousin neither of us had ever heard of before. We even managed a weak half-joke about how long the cousin would be able to stand it.

  When I left I sp
ontaneously reached out and touched Clem’s hand. Very briefly her fingers tightened around mine, then she withdrew.

  ‘Maybe you’ll let me visit again?’ I enquired tentatively.

  She did not reply directly. ‘Just do not ask me to ever see Robin again, that’s all,’ she said.

  I winced. My mother had said much the same thing to me when she had phoned briefly to say goodbye before leaving on her big trip. It had been almost funny coming from mother when you considered the way she had once been all over Robin just because of who he was. Certainly there was little my mother could ever say which would really upset me. With Clem it was different. I was deeply hurt.

  ‘Clem, Robin will never get over the guilt he feels,’ I told her. ‘But there is no logical reason for him to bear any guilt, you must believe that. Robin lost his brother and so many friends . . .’

  She looked at me with deep sorrow in her eyes. ‘I don’t know what I believe, to be honest, Rose,’ she said.

  I left her then, my heart heavy, but I was no longer without hope. Certainly I felt able at last to deal with some of the legacies of Abri. Maybe I was finally healing. And there was no doubt that marrying Robin had been a major part of the healing process. Since the wedding we had become very close again, perhaps almost as close as we had been before the disaster. I had realised a long time ago, or I would never have agreed to marry him the first time around, that there was much more than sex, sensational as it was, to Robin and I. In between our more passionate moments we were actually quite cosy together. During that really quite idyllic month at home after our exotic wedding we would spend evening after evening alone in the Clifton house, cuddled up on the sofa like a couple of lovesick kids, watching TV or listening to music. Somehow or other we had got some peace back into our lives, if nothing else.

  Maude’s affliction was a major sadness, but Roger insisted on taking her home to Exmoor where he looked after her, almost single-handedly, with great devotion. There seemed little hope of much improvement and I suspected that this wonderfully independent woman would probably have preferred the stroke to have killed her rather than leave her in this condition. Robin and I visited at least once a week, and one Saturday immediately after we had got back home to Bristol he broke down in tears in my arms, so upset was he at seeing his mother the way she was. It was the first time he had shown how he felt about Maude, the first time he had cried, in front of me, anyway, since the disaster, and I was so relieved that he was able to display his emotions again and to allow me to share his distress and give him what comfort I could.

  Apart from that there was no doubting our happiness together. The Abri Island disaster would always be a great shadow over our lives. We could never conquer the grim memories, but we began, I suppose, to learn to live with them.

  Robin continued to make casual remarks about ‘our children’ and I continued to show no signs of becoming pregnant. However I told myself that considering the three months of enforced celibacy I had endured after the disaster that was not surprising. I could not really be expected to fall at the first opportunity at my age, and Robin was so sure that it would happen sooner or later that I determined that I really would not worry about it.

  In fact I determined to put everything that bothered me out of my mind as much as possible. I began to understand the true meaning behind the expression ‘past worrying’. I really was past worrying. I even refused to think about my job – and particularly not the Stephen Jeffries case which had so haunted me. I was asked to see a police doctor who seemed to have no doubt that I qualified to remain on fully paid sick leave. I suppose I vaguely assumed I would end up going back to work one day, but I knew I was still far from ready for it.

  I had seen Julia only once since the days immediately after the disaster – at the enquiry when she had been required to give evidence – and I kept trying to persuade her to come and spend a weekend with us. I so wanted her to get to know Robin better. I felt we were at last able to cope with visitors again, and I missed her. But she continued to make one excuse after another until eventually I invited myself to lunch with her, travelling up to London, one chilly day in early December, by train from Bristol Temple Meads.

  We arranged to meet at her club, the Soho House in Greek Street, and it was great to see her again although I had a feeling that all was not entirely well with her.

  We ordered champagne. ‘What the hell else?’ muttered Julia, and that, at least, was utterly true to form. We gossiped about mutual friends, and I tried to tell her about my life now with Robin, but she seemed to have little interest in any of it, which was not like her at all.

  There was a disturbing unease in her. Eventually I just had to confront her.

  ‘What’s wrong, please tell me, Julia,’ I said.

  She sighed, put down her knife and fork, and pushed away her plate of only half-eaten seafood risotto.

  ‘Rose, you’re not going to like it . . .’ she replied.

  I gestured for her to continue. She took a deep breath and began.

  It seemed she had been to one of her impossibly trendy Hampstead dinner parties full of divorcees and second timers where the late-night conversation turned to marital betrayal. Everybody told a story.

  ‘There was a BBC producer there who told a story about Jeremy Cole. Do you know who I mean?’ Julia enquired.

  I nodded. Sir Jeremy, knighted by the last Tory government, was a geologist who had become a TV personality and rarely seemed to be off the box.

  ‘Apparently Cole had this affair and used to take his girlfriend away with him when he was filming or whatever, the usual crap,’ Julia continued. ‘His wife got suspicious and one night turned up unexpectedly on some location and discovered that Sir Jeremy was indeed booked into a hotel room with another woman. She conned her way into the room while the erring couple were having dinner, stripped off and got into bed. BBC legend has it that when the pair returned she invited them both to join her – the girl fled and Sir Jeremy returned, suitably chastened, to the straight and narrow.’

  There was a brief silence. I waited, puzzled.

  Julia reached across the table and touched my hand. ‘Rose, get ready for the punchline. Apparently a year or so later Marjorie Cole, who they say is a real tough cookie and also filthy rich which is one reason why her husband returned to the nest, turned up at the Beeb tiddly and announced that she was celebrating what she considered to be the ultimate triumph because the girlfriend, in her words “had been dumped by some lunatic on a rock in the middle of the Bristol Channel and drowned”.’

  I didn’t want to understand what she was getting at, although I was beginning to have a pretty good idea.

  ‘So?’ I responded quite aggressively.

  ‘Rose, Jeremy Cole specialises in the history of mining. You can’t have missed his programmes, there’ve been enough of them. Jewels in the Ground, Cole on Coal – and then there was Falling Houses. You must remember Falling Houses.’

  I did. The programme had caused quite a stir. It had investigated what it called the scandal of how properties in long-time mining areas would every so often just be swallowed up into disused workings. I did not speak.

  ‘Cole is a recognised leading expert on the dangers of old mining complexes, Rose, that is his speciality. And it had to be Natasha Felks who had this affair with him. She went filming with him. She visited mines with him.’

  I felt my stomach lurch.

  ‘That doesn’t make her an expert too,’ I snapped. ‘Natasha Felks was a debbie bimbo, I shouldn’t think she ever learned a damn thing about anything in her life.’

  A waiter came and collected our discarded plates. Julia did not reply until he had walked away.

  ‘You’re being ridiculous, Rose,’ she said. ‘Natasha had a long affair with Cole, apparently – we aren’t talking about a one-night stand. She must have picked up something about his work, it must have been in her mind, surely, and there she was spending half her life on an island with a bloody great gold
mine underneath it. Don’t you think it’s possible that she may have suspected they could be dangerous and even suggested that to Robin . . .’

  I’d had enough. I glowered at her over my champagne glass for a few seconds. Then I stood up.

  ‘No, Julia,’ I said. ‘Robin never had any idea the mines might be dangerous, as, I’m sure, neither did Natasha Felks. You’re the one being ridiculous if you even think I’m going to sit and listen to this nonsense. I just don’t want to hear any more.’

  With that I turned on my heel and swept out of the restaurant, down the narrow staircase and out on to the crowded pavement of Greek Street. I don’t sweep terribly well, being only five foot three tall, but I did my best.

  Julia did not try to stop me. She knew me too well. But I could feel her eyes on my back. We had known each other for virtually all our lives and as far as I could remember this was the first time we had ever parted on bad terms. Yet in the heat of the moment, I really didn’t give a damn.

  Nineteen

  The train journey from Paddington to Temple Meads takes an hour and three-quarters. After leaving Julia at the Soho House it felt like several days long. I tried to dismiss what she had told me from my mind, as I had rather successfully with several of my other worries. But in this I did not succeed so well.

  Robin was surprised to see me already home from London when he returned from work. I fibbed that Julia had been unexpectedly called back to her office.

  ‘Well, I’m delighted you’re here so early,’ he said. ‘I have something to tell you.’

  I was beginning to wish nobody would tell me anything more about anything – ever.

  ‘First, we need champagne,’ he said, and set off for the kitchen. I gazed out through the living-room window over the rooftops of the city and tried to suppress the premonition that, in spite of his obvious excitement, I wasn’t going to want to hear Robin’s news.