Remember, Remember

by Lisa Cutts

  48

  Eventually, Fitzhubert realised that his wife was weeping quietly next to him. He looked annoyed, but then made a show of producing a hanky from somewhere in his pockets.

  ‘I was on the train, you see,’ said Marilyn, biting her bottom lip. She held the handkerchief up to the side of her face nearest to her husband. It seemed as if she wanted to shield her words so that he couldn’t overhear. A totally pointless gesture, but it added to my mounting concern that all was not as it would seem in their happy home.

  It was time to put our cards on the table. I glanced at Wingsy and he gave me the tiniest of nods, the kind that only really good friends or very close colleagues might see and correctly interpret. I began.

  ‘We know you were on the train, Marilyn, and you too, Charles. We have the original police file from 1964, complete with officers’ notes and statements. We’re rechecking everything. Absolutely everything from the original file.’

  I was labouring the point because I could see how uncomfortable it was making Fitzhubert. He grabbed the handkerchief back from his wife and dabbed at his forehead with it. With that gesture I was able to see past the capped teeth and dark head of hair. It was either a remarkable wig or he’d gone prematurely mahogany. If he continued to sweat at the same rate, I might find out which. My mind dragged in a memory of Tommy Ross sitting on his own threadbare armchair, sweating in such a manner. It was funny how sorry I felt for him and how much loathing I was feeling for Fitzhubert. I couldn’t work out why that should be.

  Wingsy continued by adding, ‘What’s brought us here slightly earlier than our list of enquiries intended is Tommy’s emergency admission to the hospital and our subsequent discovery that you’re named as his next of kin.’ He paused, and, resting his elbows on his knees, held his palms out towards the pair of them. ‘Now would be the best time to talk to you both and get an account of what really happened on the train. Charles, how about I speak to you in another room? Nina and Marilyn, you stay here so we can all speak without interrupting one another.’

  I liked that plan a lot and it would have been exactly what I’d have suggested, especially as Marilyn looked relieved at the thought of her husband leaving us to it. Charles, however, stood up suddenly and said, ‘We should get to the hospital to see Tommy, if he’s in as bad a way as you say he is.’

  Marilyn looked up at her husband. ‘You go, then, Charlie. I’m going to stay here and speak to the officers.’ She held her chin high as she addressed him and met his gaze. After a second or two, Charles’s face relaxed for the first time since he’d opened the door to us. He placed his hand on his wife’s shoulder with the briefest of touches and nodded at her, as if he was accepting his fate.

  Marilyn and I remained on our respective sofas while Wingsy and Charles Fitzhubert took themselves off to the kitchen. Hearing them get settled in another part of the house, I opened my notebook and looked Marilyn in the eye. I waited for her to speak.

  ‘I was Marilyn Springate then. That was my maiden name. I had my whole future ahead of me: modelling career, good-looking boyfriend, Malcolm, and not a care in the world. You know what it’s like, Nina.’

  Actually, I had no idea what it was like to have a modelling career, or nothing to worry my waking thoughts, but I did have a good-looking boyfriend. One out of three wasn’t bad. I smiled at the thought of Bill and then realised that I shouldn’t be comparing my Bill to Malcolm Bring.

  I dropped the smile and said, ‘Tell me about Malcolm.’

  ‘I’d been going out with him for about twelve months at the time of the train crash. All was going well, up to a point. He liked to gamble. It seemed nothing to worry about to begin with. He’d have a flutter on the horses, win some, lose some. He was earning good money from his lorry, travelling all over, picking up fruit and vegetables and taking them to market. I had some money coming in from my modelling and we managed to put a bit aside to save up and get married. We were planning on starting a family as soon as we could. The problem was that the gambling started to become a problem, and a problem that he hid from me. Malcolm had an addictive personality. He couldn’t leave anything alone. He worked such long hours but then would gamble all the income away. I didn’t become aware of that until he’d spent all of our savings too.’

  Marilyn held out her left hand in front of her as she told me this. She used her right hand to turn the diamond ring next to her wedding band. I knew little about the price of diamonds, never having been in a position to purchase any, but if I were a gambler myself I’d have put a large stake on the price of her jewellery far outweighing any debt Malcolm had ever accrued.

  When she’d finished staring sadly at her own good fortune in life, Marilyn continued telling me how she’d ended up where she currently was.

  ‘When I found out that he’d spent all of our money, every penny we’d put away, plus he’d borrowed against his lorry and owed money to bookies, I was so angry with him. So, so angry.’ Her voice caught slightly on the words, but she did a very good job of maintaining her dignity. ‘It led to an enormous argument, the result of which made me think that I could do something to rectify the situation. I was so naïve.’

  Once more, Marilyn paused. I didn’t doubt that she’d finish the story, but sensed that she needed a push to do it.

  ‘What did you do?’ I asked.

  ‘I did a very foolish thing. I went to see the person Malcolm owed all of our money and future to. I went to see Leonard Rumbly. That was where our troubles really began.’

  49

  I waited for Marilyn to tell me something I didn’t know. I was waiting for her to tell me how she succumbed to Leonard Rumbly’s charms and found herself pregnant. I already knew all that, but I thought it only polite to let her say it; it was her story, after all.

  She smoothed her skirt a couple of times and cleared her throat before giving me a sad smile.

  ‘I was desperate to marry Malcolm. I was still so very annoyed at all he’d put me through with the lying and gambling, but it’s a disease at the end of the day. I justified what I did next by comparing it to cancer or any other debilitating illness Malc could have been suffering from. I went to see Rumbly to appeal to his better nature. I didn’t know then that he didn’t have one. You might never have met real evil in human form, Nina, but I have, and I met it that day. Being young and foolish, I thought that, if I showed him how desperate we really were, he would help us. Egotistically, I also thought he might take to me because, many years ago, I was an attractive woman. Vanity was partly to blame. Please understand, though, I only wanted to buy some time so that we could start again and salvage our relationship. It took a lot of guts for me to travel to Deptford and go to Leonard’s warehouse. He had an office at the back. It was fairly smart, with a carpet, a desk, a sofa and a safe.’

  Once more, Marilyn broke eye contact with me. She’d wavered at the word ‘sofa’, as if it had unpleasant memories for her, but bitten her lip after the word ‘safe’. I wanted to know more about the sofa and the safe but we were both distracted by the sound of chairs scraping on the floor in the kitchen next door. To focus her once more, I said, ‘Sofa and safe?’, leaving it there.

  ‘Gave too much away there, didn’t I?’ she said. ‘The safe was behind the sofa and on my first visit to see Leonard it was open. It was piled high with banknotes. It was the year that £10 notes were reintroduced after the war. Few people would ever have seen so much cash. If you can imagine today seeing a safe bursting with brand new £200 notes, if such a thing existed… Over all these years I’ve liked to kid myself that it wasn’t greed, but I saw an end to my and Malcolm’s plight. Maybe it was greed that made me act the way I did, but I like to dress it up as love.’ Once more she twisted the enormous diamond ring around her finger.

  ‘I got very irritated with Leonard very quickly. I could see he was attracted to me but I thought I could make him see how we could all come to an arrangement to settle the matter. I wasn’t going to be fobbed off, but I di
dn’t want to rush things either. He was toying with me. He was an up-and-coming criminal making his mark on the underworld. He had connections and I was desperate enough to go along with him. He suggested that I come back another time when he had a free afternoon. Well, I did as he asked, and we went out to dinner a few times, that sort of thing. I didn’t tell Malcolm any of this, of course. He was too busy lying low because he owed so many people money. He was working all over the southeast and parts of East Anglia too.’ She paused at this point and said, ‘I don’t know much about the law, but I suppose that after all this time I can still be arrested for theft?’

  I hadn’t seen this one coming. ‘Theft?’ I asked. ‘Of what?’

  A look of slight annoyance crossed her face and once again a crease in her forehead showed. I’d given her the impression that I wasn’t paying attention to her. Nothing could be further from the truth, but, if I wasn’t very much mistaken, she was about to confess to stealing from Leonard Rumbly. Sex I had been prepared for, so to speak – theft, I was not.

  ‘I took his money – Leonard Rumbly’s. I took his money from the safe. After that first time I was there, he kept the safe closed to begin with. After we’d been on a few dates, though, he started leaving it open. I suppose that he began to trust me. Or that’s what I thought anyway. After the event – and when I say “event” I mean my dalliance with grand larceny – when I reflected on what had happened, I could see that he set me up. I was so starry-eyed and full of innocence, certainly compared with women today; I had a foolish notion to trust people. You do learn the hard way, don’t you? What you think of as life’s ideals come back to you with a vengeance. I know what you’re thinking.’

  Marilyn actually had no idea what I was thinking. I was thinking, oh bloody hell, this was such a nightmare. For once, though, my thoughts couldn’t have been written all over my face, as she then said, ‘That’s right, you’re thinking, “How did Malcolm then find out about this?”’

  I nodded as wisely as I could manage, all the while wishing that the sound of trickling water from the fountain wasn’t blocking out any noise from Wingsy and Charles in the kitchen. I’d welcome the distraction. The enquiry was now heading in a whole new direction.

  50

  As if in answer to my wishes, the door opened to reveal Charles Fitzhubert, followed closely by Wingsy, who widened his eyes and gave a slight shake of his head. This had the hallmark of a detective constable who had been told the most fantastic piece of information he’d heard in a long time. At least we would both be startled together.

  ‘I’m sorry, Marilyn,’ said Charles before he was fully in the room, ‘I had to tell the officer. There seemed little point in lying, and it’s not as if Liam doesn’t know.’

  He sat beside his wife and took her hand. I watched as they grasped one another’s fingers again, but this time in a comfortable movement, though their eyes focused strictly on their hands. They were avoiding eye contact now, and I had no idea why. Or who Liam was.

  Wingsy sat beside me and began to tell me what Charles had been explaining to him in the kitchen. ‘Marilyn was pregnant at the time of the train crash.’ He paused, allowing the others in the room to glance up. ‘She didn’t have a chance to tell Malcolm this news before the derailment.’

  Marilyn gave a small smile – one she clearly didn’t mean. ‘I was going to tell him in person but someone else told him. I always had my suspicions it was Martin Withey, Leonard’s right-hand man at the time. He was always hanging around and trying to stir up trouble. He had a girlfriend around that time too, Dorothy something. She went off to live in Bristol, I think. I’d confided in her that I was pregnant. I can only think she told Withey, and not only did he tell my fiancé the news that I was expecting, he no doubt told him the father was Leonard. Withey hated Malcolm and never seemed fond of me, so, if he did tell Malcolm I was having an affair, he probably also told him I was going to be on the train. After nearly fifty years, I can still remember how I felt when I found out Malcolm was the cause of it all. I was lying in hospital and he came to see me…’

  Marilyn made a noise that sounded like the start of a sob but I was guessing that over the decades between the train wreck and today she’d tried unsuccessfully to distance herself from the memories. Trouble was, they wouldn’t always let us go. When we thought that they’d held on to us for long enough and wouldn’t notice we’d given them the slip, we realised that they’d never gone away after all; they were standing right behind us all along. It might sometimes only take the tiniest of triggers to hurtle Marilyn back to her former mentally battered self, but today she had two police officers in her living room. A very large trigger by anyone’s standards.

  Emotions once more in check, she continued. ‘We weren’t having an affair. We went out to dinner a few times, but that was only my attempt to get Malc some breathing space for the money he – well, I suppose by that time it was money that we owed. He’d pulled me into the mess of his gambling debt and I was doing the only thing I could think of to get us out. I made it worse. I caused Malc to think that I’d been sleeping with Rumbly but instead I was stealing from him. The ironic part is that, if I hadn’t stolen from Rumbly, things might have worked out very differently.’

  These words made me feel a little uncomfortable. Her husband was sitting next to her on the sofa and must have thought the same as me: did she regret her current life and the one she missed out on with Malcolm Bring?

  It seemed to me that, as a distraction from the awkward moment we were all feeling, Charles said, ‘Liam is our son. Well, strictly speaking he’s Marilyn’s son. I brought him up as my own and, while he knows that I’m not his biological father, as far as he’s concerned I’m his dad. He does know his actual father is Malcolm, but as far as we’re aware he did very little to trace him when he had the opportunity.’

  I was having trouble trying to work out why Marilyn had been pregnant with Malcolm’s child but had married Charles Fitzhubert instead. I steeled myself to ask a personal question of her. As a detective constable I had to know. As a very nosy person, I wanted to know.

  ‘So Malcolm knew you were pregnant?’ I asked.

  She nodded and tucked her hair behind her ears. ‘Yes, he did. The trouble was, he thought that the father of my child was Leonard Rumbly. It was difficult enough to come to terms with my fiancé thinking I was cheating on him, with Rumbly of all people, but his last words to me will always be the worst thing I will ever have to deal with.’ I watched her take a deep breath and press the bridge of her nose with her index finger. Up until now, Marilyn had remained almost motionless. I was seeing a woman struggle to form the words after so many years. Charles must have had an idea of what was coming as he sat stock still, idolising her from his seat. Yes, I was warming to him.

  ‘Malcolm came to see me in the hospital, stood by my bed and leaned down to my ear. I thought he was going to kiss the side of my face. It was about the only part of me that wasn’t bruised. He said to me, “I was supposed to hold the train up and delay it but I knocked it off its tracks. I wanted you and your bastard baby to die.’’’

  Marilyn looked from me to Wingsy and drove her point home.

  ‘Malcolm told me he tried to kill me and the baby. It wasn’t an accident – he deliberately caused the train to crash. He felt so much hatred, he wanted me dead.’

  51

  My reaction to this news was mixed: Malcolm Bring was clearly more of an abhorrent individual than I had previously thought. In comparison, his son, Joe, was looking like a remarkable man. OK, he’d been locked up for more burglaries than I could recall, but, with a father prepared to kill and injure hundreds to get even with a woman who had only tried to help him, he had little in the way of role models. Bring senior had been angry enough to kill, and I couldn’t begin to understand how Marilyn had felt all these years holding on to the memory of how much he had hated her. It didn’t seem like the right time to bring it up, but no doubt she also felt that the seven deaths were h
er fault in some way. I thought that would keep for now.

  Other than hatred for Malcolm Bring and admiration for Marilyn, my main emotion was one of cautious hope. We had a witness. Bring had told someone he’d caused the derailment on purpose. The only problem was, prosecution was far too late for Malcolm Bring, and Marilyn was telling us that this was all down to him. All we had so far was three people telling us that Leonard Rumbly had told Bring to hold the train up. He had never told him how to do it. I was getting a sinking feeling about how we took this further. I was desperate to know exactly what Rumbly and Malcolm Bring’s conversation had been about when the plan was made to stop the train. I tried to think back many years to my CID courses, where an impossible amount of law and its practical application was taught us in only a few weeks, to determine whether we had enough to prosecute Rumbly for conspiracy to murder with what we had. I was so tired that I wasn’t even able to work out if all the parties in a conspiracy had to be alive. That could cause a problem. The Crown Prosecution Service had standards, and that included only taking people to court who were still living. We had little, evidentially, to show that Rumbly had any knowledge that Bring had actually been going to kill people, but if we could somehow show Rumbly knew Bring would arrange for a five-ton truck to be on the line, we had him. This at least was a start.

  ‘Marilyn,’ I said, pitching myself as far forward as I could without falling at her feet, ‘I realise that it was a long time ago, but would you be prepared to make a witness statement about the crash? Most importantly, about what Malcolm said to you afterwards.’

  I regarded her with a look that I hoped would appeal to her sense of decency. She, in turn, looked at her husband.

  ‘It has to be your decision,’ he replied. ‘You know that I’ll stand by whatever you do. I always have and I always will.’

  ‘Will I have to go to court?’ Marilyn asked me.

  ‘There is every chance.’

  She blew a long breath through her barely parted lips. Then added a firm nod in my direction.