Prey to All

by Cooper, Natasha

  He was wearing clean cream-coloured cord trousers, but they were split at the hem and beginning to fray. His shirt was made from dark green and blue checked cotton, like a primitive tartan. It seemed too vigorous a colour combination for his wattled neck and worried face. She thought he’d come over quite well on screen.

  ‘Come on in. Kate’s been determined to cook you a traditional Sunday lunch with all the trimmings, so it may be a bit late. But we can have a drink straight away.’

  ‘Lovely. I brought some wine.’ Trish leaned back into the car to find the bottle that had been rolling about under the passenger seat. She hoped it would be drinkable, and that he wouldn’t be insulted by it. Knowing that he was strapped for cash and trying to bring up four children while their mother served out her sentence, Trish hadn’t wanted to take lunch off him without giving something in return. Gibbert looked at the label with real interest and then glanced up, smiling shyly. ‘It’ll be a treat to drink something like this again. How very kind of you! Now, come on in and meet Kate and the rest of the family.’

  He stroked his elder daughter’s back as he introduced her to Trish and she saw the girl smile at him. But the smile seemed forced. She didn’t look happy. Her oval face was still plump, but the shape of the appley cheeks suggested there might be striking bones under the puppy fat, and her long-tailed eyes were a deep, shining brown with glossy mink-like lashes.

  ‘Would you like some help?’ Trish asked, when they’d shaken hands. ‘Or would the greatest help be our getting out of the way?’

  A flashing smile transformed the weary patience in Kate’s eyes. Her face was shiny with sweat and there was flour all down the front of her sagging black T-shirt, and in her long brown hair. She was in the process of putting a pastry lid on a pie dish full of browning lumpy chunks of cooking apple.

  ‘Do you know how to make gravy?’

  ‘In fact I do,’ Trish said. ‘The man I live with has managed to teach me after about three years together.’

  ‘Oh, brilliant. Could you do that, then? And, Dad, will you get the little ones washed? They’re mucking about in the garden and it always takes ages to clean the mud off.’ She brushed the lank fringe out of her eyes with a floury wrist, sighing. A small piece of rolled dough fell off one of her fingers and lodged in her hair. She didn’t notice.

  When her father had gone, Kate sighed again and rubbed her forehead, as though it was aching. ‘The potatoes have been in for ages.’

  Trish knew the state of complete absorption in a tricky task that made you assume everyone nearby had taken each step with you and knew exactly what you were talking about.

  ‘But I don’t think they’re going to be properly crisp. I can’t work out how to get them like that. And the lamb will be done …’ Kate looked at the clock. ‘Oh, no! It was ready five minutes ago. But the pie …’ She bit her lips. Trish saw her battling for control.

  ‘Shall I get the lamb out?’ Trish said, careful not to sound as though she was taking over. ‘It won’t have spoiled, I’m sure. And it’ll do it good to rest while we get everything else done. In this weather, it won’t get cold. I think you’re amazing to cook a proper lunch for everyone like this.’

  ‘Thanks.’ The girl’s taut shoulders relaxed a little and a sloppy grin made her look much younger. ‘D’you think you could put a pan of water on? We’re going to have peas. They take five minutes, I think. I’ll just finish the pie.’

  Trish did her best not to get in the way. When Adam Gibbert came in with the rest of his family and proceeded to stand over them while they washed their hands at the kitchen sink, forcing Kate to walk right round the kitchen table to put the pie in the oven, Trish wanted to shake him. Couldn’t he see what he was doing? There must be other places in the house where they could wash.

  She looked at Kate and saw a remarkable tolerance in her face. Her smile was almost maternal as she watched his back. Then she looked up and apparently read Trish’s expression without difficulty.

  As Gibbert took the younger three children into the dining room with a tray of cutlery, Trish remembered that Kate was just seventeen and in the first year of her A level course. What could Adam Gibbert have been thinking of to make her do the family’s cooking at such a stage? Trish stirred the gravy with such vigour that some splashed up over the side of the old-fashioned ridged cream enamel roasting pan.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said at once. ‘I’ll mop that up when it’s cool.’

  ‘You know, you’re really kind.’

  ‘Oh, Kate,’ Trish said, laughing over her shoulder. ‘You shouldn’t sound so surprised.’

  The girl blushed. ‘No. I mean I’m sorry. It’s just that a barrister, you know … I was expecting you to be frightening. D’you think you will be able to get my mother out?’ Suddenly she looked terrified and started to brush the flour off her front. ‘That was a stupid thing to say. Sorry. I’m in a real mess. Sorry.’

  Trish put down the big spoon and abandoned the gravy for the moment. ‘Listen, Kate. Obviously I’m going to do my best for your mother. But you must face the fact that there isn’t a lot—’

  ‘Oh, I know. Please don’t think I’m expecting you to get her out next week. I know things don’t …’ She was crying, the tears puddling with the flour on her face to make flat greyish cakes on her skin. ‘I know I mustn’t build too much on the TV programme.’ Kate wiped her face with a tea-towel. ‘Sorry. I’ll be all right in a minute. It’s just that I know she didn’t do it. I know it. If the law wasn’t such a lottery, she wouldn’t be in prison now. And Anna’s told me that you’re the best, that if anyone can prove the legal system got it wrong, you will. But, honestly, I promise I’m not going to blame you if you don’t. I know it’s like moving the Taj Mahal with a knitting needle. I know it is.’

  Her tears were falling faster than she could mop them up. It looked as though her attempt to reassure Trish was one more burden than she could bear. She started howling like a much younger child. Trish found a clean tea-towel and offered it silently, waiting until the storm was passing. When Kate was fairly quiet again, Trish took the towel back.

  ‘Kate, your mother is lucky to have a daughter like you.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she whispered, then turned aside to pour a shower of frozen peas into the boiling water. Some of them bounced into Trish’s gravy pan.

  ‘And so are the rest of your family. Now, shall we put the case to one side while we get lunch on the table? Then perhaps you and I can have a private talk afterwards. How would that be?’

  ‘That would be great. You are kind. I do try not to cry in front of the little ones, but when I talk about her, I can’t always help it. She’s so …’

  ‘As I say, she’s lucky to have you. Now, I think this gravy’s done. What shall I put it in?’

  After lunch, while Adam took the boys and Millie out to play football, Trish and Kate did the washing-up and talked. Kate cried occasionally, but for most of the time she achieved impressive self-control. Trish didn’t discover any new facts, but she did get a better picture of the dead man.

  ‘He used to make such a fuss about all the pills he had to take,’ Kate said at one moment, as she carried the clean meat plates to their appointed cupboard.

  Trish, who was doing the washing because she didn’t know where anything went, asked if there had been many pills.

  ‘Oh, millions. There were so many things wrong with him, you see. And he hated swallowing them. And he hated being told what to do, specially by Granny and Mum. When it was Cordelia looking after him, he took everything without fuss. But she didn’t do it any differently from Mum and Granny. He just behaved better with her.’

  ‘D’you know why?’

  Kate pushed away her fringe again. Her eyes were shrewd. Now that she had recovered and was letting her mind run ahead of her emotions, she looked quite different from the beleaguered cook who’d first greeted Trish: older and more sophisticated, but also slightly out of place in this old-fashioned kitchen with its
metal cupboards, battered saucepans and blue-and-white marbled lino floor.

  ‘I think he felt she did him credit, so he liked her better, and he didn’t get anything out of making her miserable. My English teacher would say that there wasn’t any psychological advantage in turning her into the enemy.’

  ‘Whereas there was with your mother and grandmother?’ Trish suggested, impressed.

  ‘Yes, I think so. I’ve thought about it a lot, you see. He despised them, so he had to put himself above them. Making them scared and miserable was a way of doing that. He could feel bigger and better.’ Kate frowned, looking unhappy but a lot tougher. ‘But he wasn’t. He might have been cleverer, although I don’t think he was as clever as he thought. And Mum isn’t nearly as stupid as he made her think she was.’

  ‘I think you’re right.’ Trish meant it. ‘What do you think happened to your grandfather?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Kate picked up the roasting tin that Trish had laboriously scoured and thrust it into the oven to dry in the residual heat. ‘I really don’t. If it wasn’t for the fact that they didn’t find the plastic bag on his head, I’d have said he must have committed suicide. But the bag was in Mum’s room.’

  ‘And there was really no one else in the house?’ Trish watched closely for the betraying blush. She couldn’t help it. Here was a bright girl, who clearly adored her mother; a girl who could easily have retrieved the spare antihistamines from the rubbish bin, and known enough to check out the pills’ potential for damage. But no blush came.

  ‘No one any of us knew about,’ Kate said. ‘I suppose there could have been a burglar, but there was no sign of a break-in and nothing was taken.’

  As she saw Kate frown, Trish hurried to ask another question before the girl could guess what she was thinking. ‘Can you remember when your mother had bad hay fever that last summer before your grandparents died?’

  ‘Of course. She was sneezing and wheezing and her eyes watered all the time. It was awful. I made her go to the doctor to get some pills, and she did in the end. They were called ast-something. I can’t remember exactly what.’

  ‘Astemizole.’

  ‘Yes. That’s right, I think. But she wouldn’t have taken them to my grandparents’ house. The hay-fever season was long over and she’d have no need to take them. I know she wouldn’t. She said she didn’t and she doesn’t lie. Ever.’

  ‘Do you know what she did with the spare pills?’

  Kate shook her head. Her eyes welled with tears. But she didn’t look away. ‘She didn’t tell me and I didn’t ask. Why would I?’

  ‘No, of course you wouldn’t. Now, where should I put this saucepan?’ Trish asked. Kate took it from her, wiped it, and bent down to put it in its place at the back of a cupboard. Then she started knotting the black plastic rubbish bag before hauling the whole thing out and carrying it outside.

  When she came back, Trish said, ‘You’re very good at all this domesticity, Kate. You must have had a lot of practice. Have you always done such a lot in the kitchen?’

  ‘No, of course not. Only since the trial. Mum always did it. I’m only trying to copy her. But there’s so much I don’t know how to do: cooking and things. The rubbish is easy.’

  ‘Did she do that, too?’

  ‘Of course. Except sometimes at weekends when Dad helped.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘You want to know if I can swear she’d thrown away the pills, don’t you?’

  Trish nodded.

  ‘Well, like I said. I don’t know. I wish I could tell you something that would be useful, but I don’t know anything. I’ve racked and racked my brains, and I can’t think of anything.’ Kate’s voice had been rising with every word, but now she was breathing slowly, obviously trying to get herself back together. ‘You see, you’ve come all this way for nothing.’

  ‘It hasn’t been for nothing, Kate. For one thing, I had a delicious lunch. And for another, I’ve got yet more support for my own certainty that your mother didn’t do it.’

  Kate put down the bundle of knives she was drying and hugged Trish. Over Kate’s shoulder, Trish saw Adam Gibbert coming back into the house with the other children. He looked surprised to see them, and worried, too. Trish tried to signal reassurance. It didn’t seem to work.

  Later, he left the rest of the brood with Kate while he escorted Trish back to her car. On the way he told her, while tears welled in his eyes, that he knew what all the extra work was doing to Kate and that she oughtn’t to have to do it when she was working so hard for her A levels, but that he didn’t see what else was to be done. He helped her with the subjects he knew, and he took on as much of the childcare as he could, all the shopping and a lot of the cooking. But it was still far too much of a burden for a girl of her age.

  ‘Maybe you need some paid help.’ Trish tried not to sound critical.

  He bit his lip, still looking unhappy rather than ashamed. After a moment he said he couldn’t afford it, adding, ‘For a time I thought Deb’s sister might help out, but she won’t. And I can’t borrow – I’ve nothing except the house to borrow against and I can’t risk that. It’s the kids’ only security.’

  ‘I must say I’d have thought Cordelia might have helped out in the circumstances. She is the children’s aunt, after all.’

  ‘I know. I’d have hated to accept anything from her after the way she treated Deb in court – and when they were teenagers – but we need help so badly I’d have forced myself to take anything she offered for the children’s sake. But she never offered anything. And when I abased myself and actually asked for help, she turned us down flat.’

  ‘Even though she’s rich?’

  He nodded. ‘All she would offer was to take Millie and bring her up as her own – you know, with a nanny and private schools and all that.’

  Trish felt her eyes stretch at the thought of Deb’s reaction to such a proposition.

  ‘I know,’ Adam said, once more displaying more sensitivity than his behaviour in the kitchen had suggested, ‘it was a pretty aggressive move, wasn’t it? I didn’t tell Deb. I knew how much she’d hate it. It could have been generously meant, but it …’ His voice, which had hoarsened as he wrestled with his indignation, dwindled into a dry cough and then nothing.

  ‘Have you any theories about what really happened to your father-in-law?’

  Adam rubbed both hands over his lined, greying face as though he was washing. ‘None.’ He sounded so hopeless, so tired, that Trish believed him. ‘All I can assume is that there was some kind of accident. But then that doesn’t fit with the evidence of the bag.’

  He leaned against Trish’s car, propping his arm on the roof and rubbing his head with his free hand.

  ‘What is your wife’s greatest fault?’ she said abruptly.

  Gibbert stood up, moving away from the car as though it was coated with anthrax. ‘What do you mean?’ Clearly angry, he wouldn’t meet her eyes, looking from side to side as though he was searching for something easy to fix on.

  ‘Everyone has faults,’ Trish said gently, ‘and no one knows them better than a spouse. If I’m to understand Deb, I need to know what hers are. What came into your mind the instant I asked my question?’

  ‘Outrage.’ For a moment he did look directly at her. Then he twitched his gaze away and stared at some straggling petunias that had been planted in a shell-edged plot beside the edge of the drive. The wobbliness of the lines and an arrangement of random sticks suggested it could be Millie’s private garden. Adam bent down to straighten one of the sticks.

  ‘Apart from outrage,’ Trish said, not letting him distract her, ‘it may feel disloyal to talk about her faults, but honesty, real, complete honesty, is the only thing that’s going to help me help her now.’

  ‘Temper.’ Adam stood up again with a scarlet petunia between his hands. Shredding the petals and dropping the bits like gouts of blood around his feet, he looked over Trish’s head to the far distance, where a pinkish haze hovered over a
n ugly conifer forest. ‘Deb doesn’t get angry like everyone else. She’s miles more patient than anybody I know. But when something does eventually get to her, she blows up more quickly and vio—and fiercely than other people. And she …’ He covered his face again. There was still some of the mangled petunia sticking to his fingers. His voice came out muffled and worrying: ‘I can’t do this.’

  ‘Has Deborah ever, to your knowledge, taken impulsive action in a temper that she’s later come to regret?’ Trish was implacable.

  ‘Once or twice.’ The words were wrenched out of him. He turned away and stumbled back towards the house, tripping and sliding through the gravel as he went.

  Trish watched as the front door opened. Kate stood there with the other children. Millie was clinging to Kate’s leg, crying into the stiff black denim of her jeans. Kate took her hand from Millie’s blonde head and held out her arms to her father. He lurched forwards as though he was another child she had to comfort. Trish was too short-sighted to see the expression on Kate’s face, but she recognised the helpless guilty misery of his hunched shoulders and the protectiveness of Kate’s stroking hands.

  No wonder he doesn’t want any paid help, Trish thought, as she soberly unlocked her car and slid into the driving seat. She sat, without putting the key into the ignition, trying to imagine what it must be like to believe your wife guilty of murdering her father and yet have to keep up a pretence of believing in her innocence.

  Chapter 7

  Adam pulled himself together and hustled Kate upstairs to her room to work or rest. ‘I don’t mind which,’ he said, pushing her towards the stairs. ‘But you need time to yourself.’

  ‘But tea,’ she protested. ‘And then baths. You need—’

  ‘No, Kate, I’ll be fine. You go on. I can manage.’ He smiled at her and saw relief chasing doubt to and fro in her eyes. ‘Honestly.’