Gently, he pointed inside the hallway. “Perhaps I could come in?”
Flustered, unable to comprehend his belief in her, she muttered an apology and let him in, closing the door rather louder than she might have intended. She led him into a cosy sitting room, which was newly decorated but which betrayed an old fashioned taste, as though the house were desperate to return to how it looked in happier times. Elizabeth offered him coffee, which he accepted, sitting down in an armchair at her invitation, whilst she tottered out of the room to make the drink. Rathe looked around the place, unengaged by it until he saw the photographs on the sideboard. He saw a collection of images of the family. In some, Elizabeth seemed to be a different woman, her face full of humour and eager vitality, and Rathe remembered what Cook had said about her manner before the death of the baby. Here, as large as life, was that energy and liveliness facing him behind the glass of the frame. But next to it, in so many of the images, was the same dour expression which he had seen on Edward Newsome’s face the previous night. The man was smiling for the camera, but the twist of the lips was forced and uncomfortable, as though his body were present at the occasion but his mind and spirit were somewhere far away, somewhere where his smile would not be forced and his manner not reserved. There were photographs of the son, Sean, sometimes between them and sometimes alone, but always with the same expression of happiness and freedom on his face. He was a good looking boy, his features a perfect blend of Elizabeth’s old good humour and Edward’s self-control. In age, across the photographs, he ranged from perhaps four to sixteen, no older, but it was clear from the projected maturing of his face that nature would continue to mould him into a handsome and impressive man.
Above the sideboard, there was a crucifix. Rathe found himself staring at it for some time, and the sound of the coffee being made in the kitchen appeared to slip away from him. As fanciful as it sounded, even in his own head, it seemed to him that the image of Christ on the cross had been placed above the photographs of the family deliberately, and the small hole in the opposite wall, where a nail perhaps had once protruded, suggested that the crucifix indeed had been moved recently. Stretched out in front of the photo frames, too, he saw a rosary. It might have been a coincidence, the beads placed there when Elizabeth went to answer the door, but they were laid out neatly, not dropped in the urgency of a moment, and Rathe had the distinct impression that these two symbols of the family’s faith had been set down purposefully, in order to protect the family from further sorrow. Almost unwittingly, he remembered again that people thought Elizabeth Newsome was paranoid and delusional, if not mad, and the apparent deliberate placing of those trappings of worship seemed to confirm it, so that suddenly Rathe had a crisis of faith in his own instincts and he wondered whether he had made a mistake in coming here.
But he had no time to allow those doubts to fester, because no sooner had they sparked into life than she was back in the room, carrying what he suspected was a tray of the best china which surrounded a silver plated coffee pot. It may not have been her intention to be fulsome, but Rathe was at once embarrassed at the idea that her display of sophistication had been for his benefit alone, perhaps as an overstated gesture of gratitude for his taking her distress seriously.
She poured the coffee as she spoke. “I thought you’d ignore what I said to you, Mr Rathe. I wouldn’t have blamed you. I’m used to people dismissing me as a neurotic fantasist.”
“I’m afraid I was told to do just that,” he felt compelled to confess, accepting the coffee with a smile. It was good: strong, black, bitter.
She was not offended by his words. “When you hear something consistently, you either begin to believe it or you become immune to it. But I refuse to believe that I am what they say.”
Rathe shifted in his chair. “You’ll have to accept, though, that people won’t take what you say about your husband seriously if you have nothing to back it up with.”
She looked across at him, an eyebrow raised not in defiance but in hope. “You came here today, so you must believe me.”
He lowered his gaze from hers. “I came here because I wanted to ask you to support what you said. I haven’t necessarily said I believe you and it’d be wrong of me to allow you to think so until I’ve said it outright.”
“Of course, I understand that,” she said, sipping some coffee but making it seem as though she were distracting herself from the instinct to weep.
“Why would your husband want to harm you in any way, let alone to… ?” He felt unable to finish the sentence, as though the words required were so outrageous that they could never make sense.
She did not look back to him. Instead, she replaced the coffee cup on the tray and placed her hands in her lap. “Why? You ask why he wants me gone?”
“I think I have to,” replied Rathe.
Now she did look at him, her eyes dampened with sadness, but her voice hardened with bitterness. “For love, Mr Rathe. It’s all for love.”
He was fully aware of the implications of her words, his mind making connections and forming suppositions with a speed which in retrospect even he found startling, but the simplicity of his next words belied his understanding of the situation. “I don’t understand, Mrs Newsome. If your husband loves you… ”
She rose from the settee, as though his apparent stupidity had offended her. “It isn’t me he loves, Mr Rathe. Not any more. I am sure that at one point he did love me and I will never believe it wasn’t true once. But I know that it’s no longer true. To say otherwise would only be lying to myself. Do those sound like the words of a woman under a delusion?”
Rathe shook his head, feeling something close to shame. “No.”
She pointed to the crucifix and rosary. “They give me peace, comfort, and hope. Without faith perhaps I would lose my mind. It isn’t very fashionable today to be sure of the existence of God, but if there is no such thing as His comfort and grace after death, then the lives we lead now are all there is to the world. Don’t you find that a depressing thought?”
Rathe remained silent. She gave him a brief, unhappy smile of what he thought was disappointment that his own beliefs must seem to her to be no different to the majority of lost souls she had referenced. She did not press the point. “I say that faith and the rosary give me comfort and peace. To Edward, they are nothing less than chains around his ankles. To him, they’re an unbreakable tie which binds us together in misery.”
“Because your faith forbids you to divorce?”
“Marriage is a promise made to God as well as to each other.”
Rathe got up from his chair and walked towards her. This honesty she had demonstrated, the sensitivity of her words and emotions, had tipped his balance back into believing that she was far from mad. He could not accept that someone who was deceiving themselves into unfounded ideas of murder could be so honest as to confess what she had done. He was no psychologist, but it seemed unlikely that a person could be so detached from reality in one respect yet so clearly aware of it in another.
“Tell me more about your husband, Mrs Newsome,” said Rathe, his voice gentle and trustworthy.
Elizabeth appeared not to have heard him. “Her name is Michelle Leverton. I don’t think I’ve ever said her name out loud before, but it has burned in my mind constantly for six months. I don’t really know anything about her but I despise everything there is about her. Perhaps that does make me sound like a lunatic.”
“No,” muttered Rathe. “I think it makes you sound human.”
She thanked him silently, with a smile which showed appreciation and gratitude. “I’d suspected something for a long time. You don’t share your life with somebody for almost twenty years and not learn enough about them to know when they are keeping secrets from you.”
“What made you suspicious?”
She lowered her head, as though the memory and its recollection were two distinct sources of physical pain which she was forcing herself to suppress. “Late nights at work, sudden
weekend conferences, never letting his phone out of his sights. Silly lies which he contradicted without knowing it. The way he looked at her at the company Christmas party last year, even when she was throwing countless glasses of Bacardi and Coke down her throat and dancing like a maniac. How he would talk about her, saying what an asset to the firm she was, how clever she had been on this account or that contract. Taken on their own, they don’t mean infidelity, but when you put them together they turn your suspicions into certainty.”
“Did you confront him?”
Elizabeth gave an adamant shake of her head. “I wasn’t so direct, Mr Rathe. He had gone in the bath, but left his phone in the bedroom. I found her number in it and I changed it to mine. You don’t think to check the number of the person you’re calling on a mobile, do you? The next text he sent to her came to me.”
Despite the tragedy of her situation, Rathe found himself impressed by her ingenuity. It had been a simple but effective ruse. Deceitful and underhand, certainly, but no less devious than Edward Newsome had been and Rathe felt Elizabeth’s actions had not been entirely unjustified. Once again, he found himself doubting that a woman capable of such a trick was in any way as feeble minded as Cook and the rest of their circle of friends labelled her. “You confronted him after that, surely?”
She nodded, biting her lip in remembrance of the sting of betrayal which she had felt so prominently. “He didn’t deny it. You probably think he had no way of denying it after the way I had caught him and perhaps you’re right about it. But I prefer to think that not denying it was a small shred of respect which he still had for me. Lying to my face after what I had done would have been one insult too many. Do you think I’m foolish for thinking that way?”
Rathe held her gaze. “I think you’re anything but foolish.”
She continued to stare at him for longer than felt comfortable for him. “You’re a kind man, Mr Rathe. It seems a long time since I felt kindness.”
He did not feel it prudent to reply directly to that. “How did your husband react when you said you could never grant him a divorce?”
She rolled her eyes to the ceiling. “You don’t know Edward or else you wouldn’t ask that. He acted exactly as Edward would be expected to act. With solemn resolve and a complete lack of anything approaching emotion. Edward is a distant man, Mr Rathe, dispassionate and aloof. Once, I thought it was an attractive quality, his ability to remain unflustered by the world. His composure seemed to me to be a strength. But, as time has gone on, I have come to think of it as almost inhuman. I’m not sure I wouldn’t have preferred him to shout in my face, call me every name he could think of, or even sobbed on his knees and begged me to let him go. I think sometimes I might have preferred that to his cold, arrogant acceptance of the situation. As though he were the victim in this and he was bearing his suffering with dignity.”
The tears had welled up in her eyes as she had spoken and now they fell without apology. She took a handkerchief from her sleeve and clutched it to her face, muffling the sound of her weeping into a distorted version of itself which was somehow more terrible than the reality. Unsure of how he should respond, Rathe remained motionless. He doubted that she required any physical comfort from him and he thought that an arm around the shoulders might be an invasion of her privacy. If he had changed his mind, however, he would not have been able to offer any comfort in any event, because she composed herself in a matter of moments, the burst of sobbing burning which such intensity that it exhausted itself almost as soon as it began.
“I’m sorry,” she muttered, as much to herself as to him. “Sometimes, it just comes over me.”
“You have no reason to apologise for that,” Rathe replied. “Certainly not to a stranger.”
She looked back to him. “I don’t think of you as a stranger somehow. Is that presumptuous?”
Rathe did not know how best to respond to that, so he lowered his head and allowed the moment to pass. “What you said to me last night… Do you think it’s true solely because of your husband and this Leverton girl?”
“Isn’t it reason enough to want me out of the way?”
“But if your husband is, as you say, willing to accept the situation for what it is, that would remove any suggestion of motive, wouldn’t it?” Rathe spoke carefully, so as not to appear offensive.
“I didn’t say he was willing to accept it,” she replied with a harder edge to her voice than he had heard before. “I said he didn’t argue with me about it.”
Rathe rolled his tongue across his bottom lip as understanding seeped into his brain. “You’re saying that, privately, he might try to come up with another way of ending the marriage but, publicly, he would want to avoid any form of unpleasantness.”
She nodded. “Wouldn’t that be a sensible plan, if he did intend to do something horrific to me? As you’ve just said, if he could make people believe that my refusal to divorce him didn’t matter to him, it would look as though the idea that my stance on divorce and his feelings about Michelle Leverton were groundless.”
Rathe nodded. It was the thought he had formed himself in the last few seconds of their discussion. He knew it was inevitable that a detective like Cook would suspect Edward Newsome as a matter of routine in the face of the murder of his wife, especially if there was a vivid and unshakeable motive for the crime. But if Edward Newsome had said that the question of the divorce was of no importance to him or Michelle Leverton then that would seem to dilute the power of that motive, sufficiently perhaps for the purpose of a skilful defence Counsel. Rathe had a series of swift but intense images of what havoc he would cause to that motive at a trial with the assistance of Edward Newsome’s reticence.
“There are such things as still waters and they often run deep,” he said.
“More coffee?” she asked, as though it was an invitation to celebrate her victory on the question of motive.
Rathe declined the offer. “Do you have any other reason to suspect your husband is planning what you think?”
She was pouring more coffee for herself, but she stopped doing so as soon as the question was asked. Rathe sensed her discomfort, her sudden tightening of her shoulders and tense straightening of her spine, as though she feared that her next words, unless chosen very carefully, would drive him from the room and her life and any hope of his help would drop through her fingers like falling sand.
For a moment, he mistook her anxious hesitation for reluctance to speak. “I’ve got to ask, Mrs Newsome, you understand that.”
She nodded violently, dismissing his words. “It’s not that I don’t want to tell you, Mr Rathe, it’s that I’m afraid you’ll dismiss me. And I think, so far, you’re sympathetic to my situation. I don’t want to lose that sympathy.”
“But if you say nothing else about it, I won’t know the full story, so I can’t be fully on your side or not,” he argued.
She looked up at him now, her eyes once more damp with sadness and despair. “When I met Edward, he was with someone else. It wasn’t serious; at least, he’s always claimed it was never serious. But as soon as he got with me, any memory of his previous girlfriend was gone. Thrown out. All the photos, the clothes she’d chosen, and books or films which reminded him of her. Everything, gone. As though she was never a part of his life at all. I wanted to go to Rome for a weekend many years ago, but Edward wouldn’t go because he’d been there before, with her. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“I do,” confessed Rathe, “but it seems an extreme view to have.”
“But it’s Edward all over. When he moves on, he moves on completely. But now, with me, with a marriage, it isn’t that easy, is it? You can’t erase twenty years like you can six months. Half of everything is mine. So, he has to do it some other way.”
Rathe began to pace the room, clasping his chin in concentration. “Are you telling me that this side of his character is so strong that you think he’ll turn to murder in order to satisfy it?”
“I know it sou
nds ridiculous,” she said, “but it’s easier to know I am scared of him than to explain why properly. Like explaining two and two makes four. It just does, it’s a fact. And it’s a fact that Edward will want to remove himself from his present life completely so that he can have a new one with her. But this time, it’s not throwing out old shirts and CDs because there is too much history to throw away. But he can do one thing, Mr Rathe” – she held up an index finger – “just one thing which will erase all of that time at one go.”
“That’s not proof of intent, Mrs Newsome,” Rathe had said, almost hating himself for it.
“What about sleeping pills? Are they proof of intent?” She made the phrase sound ludicrous to his ears, as though it were something he should be ashamed of saying, and her eyes remained defiant, daring him to contradict her.
“Sleeping pills?”
“Edward has never had trouble sleeping. Never.” Her voice was becoming hysterical without rising above a hissing whisper. “But I found a whole load of sleeping tablets and prescriptions for more of them in the bathroom cabinet. Edward’s no insomniac, Mr Rathe, so what is he doing with those tablets?”
He would have replied, but he became aware suddenly of the presence of another person in the room. There had been no sound of the living room door opening, not that he remembered at least, and yet his attention was diverted now from Elizabeth’s eyes to the young boy who peered from behind the door, his brow creased in concern and his eyes dimmed with confusion. A shock of dark hair fell over one eye and there was a faint glow of nervousness about the otherwise pallid cheeks. He had aged since the photographs on the sideboard but it was unmistakably the same child who stood in front of Rathe now, having taken yet a further step on the path to maturity. His clothes were casual but smart, the jeans as loose around his waist as the T-shirt was tight against his chest, but he wore them with an easy confidence which suggested that he knew he was handsome and so there was no reason to draw attention to it. Elizabeth Newsome stood up and went to her son, her arms going around his broad shoulders in an instinctive display of maternal protection.
When Anthony Rathe Investigates Page 12