Once he had established Lucy was not breathing, the operator talked Mike through how to administer CPR. He tipped her little head back, put his mouth over her nose and open mouth and breathed twice into his own flesh and blood. He depressed her soft little chest with two fingers, thirty times between breaths. He carried on with that routine until finally Bette brought the paramedics, a man and a woman, into the room. The man knelt on the floor and felt for a pulse. Then he set up a defibrillator with little pads he attached to either side of Lucy’s chest. He delivered electric shocks to the teeny heart, checking in between to see if she was breathing. They tried a few more times then picked up their gear and took Lucy to the ambulance where the woman drove while the man carried on trying with the defibrillator. Bette went with them in the ambulance while Mike followed them in the car. He jumped into the BMW and stayed close behind as they put on the light and siren and raced across the city to Addenbrooke’s hospital.
He followed the ambulance and when it drove up to the accident and emergency department, he saw the female driver jump out, run around the back of the ambulance, pull the doors open and help the man out holding his baby. They ran into the building with her and Bette on their heels.
Parking the car in a place reserved for hospital staff, Mike ran to the A&E. There were rows of cubicles, some that had drawn curtains, others that didn’t. They were all occupied. His eyes wild, his hair dishevelled, he scanned the room but there was no sign of the ambulance crew or Bette and Lucy.
He ran to the nurses’ desk and apologising to others queueing, barged in front, whispering, ‘Where have they taken my baby? Tell me, tell me please.’ When the nurse asked him to wait a moment, he lost all sense of decent behaviour and screamed at her, ‘Tell me now, you fucking bitch. My baby was brought in here a few minutes ago. She was not breathing. I need to be with her, NOW!’
Realising she was about to be attacked, the shocked woman pointed to a cubicle. Mike followed the direction her finger pointed and tore across the room to pull back the pale-green curtains where the ambulance crew were waiting outside.
Lucy was immobile on the narrow bed. The silence was deafening. A nurse stood mutely beside the bed, small defibrillators in her hands while a doctor listened for a heartbeat through a stethoscope.
Bette, her hands holding her head as though it might fall off, stood at the end of the bed. She had no words and there was no expression on her face. She was clearly in deep shock.
The doctor knew he was only going through the motions. It was clear to him that the baby had been dead for some time. When he saw Mike, he asked if he was the father. On his confirmation, he was asked his name. He then attempted to lead Mike out of the cubicle to a private room where he could break the news, but Mike insisted on picking up the still little body off the bed. Her head, that he and Bette had recently been so thrilled she had learnt to hold up, lolled forward. He held Lucy close to him but there was no warmth, no sound, no movement. She was limp. She was dead. The light of his life was gone.
He said things to her, he whispered things to her, he sung things to her, but his words and songs went unheard.
The doctor pulled up the chair beside the bed and gestured for both of them to sit down. The nurse gently took Lucy from his numb arms while the doctor spoke. ‘Ms Davies, Mr Hanson, I am terribly sorry to inform you that at 9.43am today, your daughter was pronounced dead. We tried everything in our power to help her back to life. I’m so very sorry.’
Bette spoke. ‘She’s seventeen weeks old tomorrow.’
By this time, the hospital was following the rapid response protocol to a case of sudden infant death syndrome. The coroner and the pathologist must be informed as well as the police. The consultant paediatrician was at this moment examining the tiny body in minute detail for signs of injury or interference. Watching this stranger handle his darling made Mike intensely angry. It also made him feel as though he had done something wrong… that he had hurt Lucy or neglected her.
He thought back to last night. He suffered a spasm of guilt that he and Bette had had sex. It just seemed so wrong.
Lucy had seemed fine earlier and they had heard nothing through the baby alarm.
He pushed the invidious thought away.
Bette kept repeating over and over again, ‘She was sleeping…’ Tears rolled down her cheeks and when her puzzled eyes focused on Mike, she saw reddened, crazed ones staring back at her from a distraught face.
‘She died, Bette. Lucy died.’ He turned his face away, bent forward and bawled into his cupped hands.
Bette stood up. She lashed out at him and hit him across the head. When he stood up, she slapped him across the face and yelled, ‘What have you done to her, you bastard?’
The doctor and a policeman glanced at one another. Mike put one arm tightly around Bette’s waist and held her still. ‘I have done nothing, Bette. Nothing that you didn’t do. This is something that sometimes happens with no explanation.’ He held her until she calmed down.
But Bette could only see Lucy’s blue-tinged face and naked body with red patches either side of her little chest. This was the child she hadn’t wanted.
She stood rock still, staring at her baby. Then, slowly, she crossed to the bed where she lifted and held the little corpse. She stood for a while in the same place, unmoving.
When this showed no sign of changing, the doctor put his hand on her arm and said quietly, ‘Better put her down now, Ms Davies.’ His soothing voice seemed to work and Bette carefully lowered Lucy back onto the bed. That was when the mother of the child fell to the floor, rolled into a ball and wailed.
After another twenty minutes passed where the parents sat beside their baby, each holding a tiny hand with their tightly-curled, shrimp-like fingers until the support nurse who had been with them from the start, put her arm round Bette and said, ‘I’m so sorry but it’s time to take Lucy away. You may both visit her again but it will be in a different place. We have to take her to the morgue now. I’m afraid there will need to be an inquest.’ She addressed this to Mike who appeared to be more aware than his partner. ‘It is likely this will prove to be a case of sudden infant death syndrome, the cause of which will probably be decided as “unknown”. But in these cases, we have to be thoroughly careful that the facts are established. The police will want to examine your home as soon as possible. In fact, they would like to do so today, so would you please accompany Police Constable Morgan Tree who will drive you back to your house?’ She looked embarrassed to have to say this. ‘It’s just protocol, I’m so sorry.’ Then, she handed a leaflet to Bette who pushed it away. ‘I think this might be helpful, Ms Davies. Perhaps you might look at it another time?’
The young police constable escorted Bette slowly to his car. He was red-faced from the horror of his first involvement with a cot death, and hardly knew what to say to the poor woman. Fortunately for him, Bette had clammed up again. They got into his car and Bette rode in the back, stony-faced while Mike followed in his car which, miraculously, had not been towed away.
When they arrived back in their street, Bette guided the policeman to the house. Mike parked nearby and they all went inside. Their stomachs churned with the pain of the situation. They could not look at one another, nor at anything inside since the whole place now reminded them of what was lost. The young copper apologised profusely and stumbled over his words when he said, ‘I’m really sorry but I am obliged to call crime scene – it’s just procedure you understand – but they will need to examine the baby’s room, cot, et cetera.’
‘But we’ve done nothing wrong!’ Mike was now enraged and squared up to the constable. Having to deal with traumatised people was bad enough and the young man himself was not unaffected by what he had seen in the hospital.
‘Of course you haven’t, sir, it’s purely procedural. I wish it wasn’t and I hate having to tell you this.’
Eventually, Bette pulled Mike back. ‘He’s only doing his job.’ She was icy-calm again.
&
nbsp; The crime-scene team soon arrived. Their work was meticulous. Everything was measured and photographed. The room temperature was taken, windows examined, furniture dusted, bottles, blankets, bedding, clothes – all bagged as exhibits. This took about three hours.
The distressed, grieving and exhausted parents now had to go to the police station where they were interviewed and had to make separate statements. The police also knocked on nearby doors to see if anyone had heard anything unusual the night before.
Once the twenty-four-year-old PC was able to finish that shift, he sat in his car, emotional and tearful. He knew the force deliberately sent childless officers to deal with cot death cases and he had no children himself. But he hadn’t expected to be so affected and couldn’t get the image out of his mind of the father with his arms outstretched, asking ‘why’ while the mother wailed, her head hidden within her hunched body on the cubicle floor.
The masterpiece that had been the happiness of Michael Hanson and Bette Davies had disappeared and as a pair they now only worked on a superficial level. The initial agony of the police visiting their house, taking statements and photos of Lucy’s cot was over. So was the horrible delay for the post-mortem result, during which their stomachs had heaved with the thought of what the pathologist had done to their beautiful little girl. The result was that nothing untoward was found.
In a sense, that made things worse for Mike and Bette.
He had never thought he would be squeamish about using the words ‘death’ or ‘dead’ but when it came to Lucy, Mike avoided them at all costs. For her it was ‘gone’ or ‘her loss’ or any of the terms people use to dodge the fact of fatality.
To have had a cause on which to hang the sudden death could have made the thing easier to come to terms with, but instead they were left with nothing to blame. Because of this they blamed both themselves and one another.
Mike had seen Lucy in the morning and hadn’t realised there was a problem, but then Bette had checked on her in the late evening and in the early morning and had seen nothing to alert her either.
For the first three months, Mike was almost numb with grief. Not helped by time which crept pointlessly forward; everything became irrelevant to him, his own survival incidental.
Bette appeared to have taken it differently. She simply clammed up. At times, she almost seemed oblivious to what had happened but Mike knew she had donned the hard shell she had cultivated for so long to protect herself, against others and her own feelings.
Somehow, over the months they returned to some kind of forced normality. But they were going through the actions, they were making the gestures, they said and did the right things. But their mutual love had become a hollow memory, physically celebrating it a distant recollection and they now avoided touching one another as much as they could. At first, the distance between them made them even more miserable but they grew used to it and became happier with their own company.
Bette withdrew into herself but found it hard to sleep as her brain would not rest. She asked the doctor for and was given some strong sleeping pills.
Mike was depressed and this demonstrated itself in bitter antagonism. The more he thought about it, the more he started to wonder whether his partner had not been careful enough when checking the baby that morning. His mind churned with misery and that was how he was beginning to think of her, not by her name but by that distant, formal word.
His distorted mind looked back to why he had so loved her once and decided she had somehow tricked him into falling for her. He began to regret that he had been so eager to get her pregnant and more so that deep down his reasons for doing so had been based on jealousy. Perhaps his own guilt for enjoying the company of other women and flirting with them had exacerbated his own well-hidden mistrustfulness. If I was Bette, he thought, I would have been suspicious of me, and the time I spent in the office with various females. This had triggered his idea that if Bette’s time was taken up with a baby, it would keep her away from contact with other men and work. Mike had seen the way they looked at his beautiful woman and lived in perpetual anxiety that someone would try to steal her away from him. He had never been happy with her working, especially in her job that involved meeting new people all the time. It had threatened his happiness.
He would always have preferred to have Bette waiting for him at home just as his mother had waited for his father. She had been so patient with the man who had always seemed to be either away or late home from his job. When finally he had run away with a younger woman, Mike’s heartbroken mother had somehow found it within herself to forgive the man. This was the sort of woman Mike would like to have had.
But anyone with common sense could have told him that Bette was the last woman on earth who was ever going to follow that pattern.
If Mike could be called at all fortunate at this point in his life, providence did help him by landing his firm the major job of building a large, new, private school on the western outskirts of the city. This would put his company well and truly on the map and help make them very rich in the process.
In spite of his personal wealth, or indeed perhaps because of it, Mike wanted to prove he was as good as his dead father at making money and he now buried himself in the work.
Meanwhile, Bette didn’t feel enough emotion to really care whether he was there or not. She resented that he had taken to coming home later and later. She didn’t even bother to ask, but it did irritate her and she felt the loss of the devoted love he had had for her.
Her ego was badly damaged and she ruminated about what to do. Since she had lost the desire to work, she had taken to living off Mike’s money and the prospect of being without that was not what she had in mind for the moment.
Mike’s heart felt constant pain and the loss stirred his mind to believe the worst. At weekends he had taken to walking long distances alone, without ever inviting Bette to go too.
Staying indoors, Bette buried her head in books, reading more and more crime stories. They were all that interested her these days. Her interest in interior design had gone. Her website had become badly out of date. She had turned down work and lately it had dried up altogether. They didn’t need the money so that was not a problem. The problem was how to find something to make life fun again.
They had never married but what happened to them had definitely put them asunder. They separately wondered would they ever get back that old feeling? Neither knew what to do about it.
25 July 2017. Bette Davies’ Five-Year Diary
I am so sick of this ache. It’s with me all the time. The missing Lucy ache I cannot get rid of. Some days it hurts a little less, so perhaps this means that in time it will fade but for now it drags me down. My heart hurts but I can’t cry any more. I just wish I could. I feel it would help. But I can’t. I’m too sad for tears.
Bette didn’t want to continue being where she was or with the way things were, but she was stuck. She couldn’t just run away. She had given up her rented flat and had no one to turn to.
That was when she had an idea. She was lacking companionship and missed being loved. When she recalled her childhood, the best companion she ever had had been the collie. That was when she decided to get another. That’s what she needed. A collie in her life. She immediately felt alive again.
She surfed her computer for local breeders but then thought, Why not get one in Wales? That was where the best dogs came from. She made a call and a breeder she had heard of who produced good dogs happened to have a litter more than ready to go to new homes.
She also decided that if she was going to have a dog, because Mike was so fussy about keeping his car clean, she would need to have her own car for herself and the dog. Besides, it was time she had more independence from the man. So, she bought herself an estate car and drove it down to stay in a Swansea hotel overnight. That next day she drove to the breeder’s place not far from Swansea. The pups were well overdue to leave their mother and were already house-trained. This was important as Bett
e knew the one thing that would aggravate Mike most would be a pup peeing on his immaculate wooden floors and white carpets. Even though he had long ago employed a cleaner since Bette had not proved good enough to keep his house to the standard he liked, a peeing pup would not go down well.
Having chosen the pup that looked most like her first dog, Bette brought him home with her that day. She naturally named him Brynn. The little dog immediately gave her the unconditional love she so missed and craved.
10
7 January 2018, 7.30am. Llangunnor to Fishguard
Driving from her home to Fishguard that morning, Jane passes the Dyfed-Powys Police HQ building, that always surprises with its size. The enormous, red-brick, two-storey building looks incongruous sitting in what are usually green fields on the edge of Llangunnor. Today, although some snow has melted in the valley, pockets of slush remain and the landscape looks grey and dirty-white and messy. As she drives through the Welsh countryside, through villages and small towns towards Haverfordwest, Jane allows her thoughts to wander.
She goes around the details of the case so far. But she has learnt you can overthink a case and confuse yourself if you’re not careful. So she forces her mind away from it and for some reason, probably sexual since she hasn’t seen Gareth for a while, it takes her back to Swansea University where she studied criminology and criminal justice.
She sees herself in bed with the student she loved. That he loved her too was never in doubt. She remembers how her body tingled and responded to his touch and the swooning feeling she had experienced when their bodies had wrapped around each other and how they quivered together at the climax.
She wonders where that lover is now. Does he miss her? She certainly misses him. She wishes so much she could just talk to him, find out how he was. But when they had parted, they had agreed then to cut off completely as they knew they would never get over one another if they did not.
Cliff Edge: a gripping psychological mystery Page 8