The Kindest Thing

by Cath Staincliffe

  When Briony Webber stands up and launches into me she is crisp and professional, just the right side of hostile. ‘Ms Shelley, you say you feel terrible about your involvement in your husband’s death. Is that because you were caught?’ There’s an intake of breath from someone in the gallery.

  ‘No.’ My cheeks glow with heat.

  ‘If you’d got away with it, would you still feel so terrible?’

  ‘No. Yes. It’s not like that.’

  ‘I think we’ll let the jury judge for itself what it’s like, whether the picture you paint of someone driven to lose reason is only that, a picture, a fiction.’

  Mr Latimer bolts to his feet: this sort of language should be saved for the closing speeches but Miss Webber’s ahead of the game and moves on. ‘Tell me, Ms Shelley, you were still working in the weeks leading up to Mr Draper’s death?

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did any of your clients complain about your work?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Anyone cancel a project, dispense with your services?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did any of your clients give you bad feedback about your attitude or behaviour?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So, as far as your clients were concerned you were performing your work perfectly well.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And home. You were still looking after your house and family?’

  Someone had to. ‘Yes.’

  ‘And apart from a spat with your neighbour we have nothing to indicate you were not in sound mind and coping admirably with a difficult situation? Is that true?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ It’s a weak answer and my mind darts about, desperate for a better one.

  ‘Oh, I think you do, Ms Shelley. Let me take you back to the events of that fateful morning. According to your own testimony, your husband did not specifically ask you to do anything that morning, did he, apart from fetch some wine?’

  ‘Not as such.’

  ‘But you inferred that he was desperate to commit suicide?’

  Her tone riles me and I feel a tide of anger mounting beneath my fear. ‘He had said, ‘‘Tomorrow.’’ I knew what he meant.’

  ‘Did you check? Did you ask him outright?’

  ‘No.’ My blood boils.

  ‘You just chose to interpret it that way.’

  ‘Why?’ I yell, knowing as I do that this is folly. ‘Why the hell would I want to do that? I wanted him to live.’

  In the aftershock there is a deep silence. Briony Webber doesn’t reply but pauses, gives a tight smile of forgiveness before she sallies forth. ‘I put it to you that you knew full well what you were doing. That you believed your husband had a right to die and that you supported him to the hilt.’

  ‘No!’ My face is hot, my composure lost.

  ‘And that when the medicine failed to work as quickly as you expected, you had the plastic bag at hand to complete what you had started. Is that not the case?’

  ‘I didn’t know what I was doing.’ I force down my fickle temper, mute my tone.

  ‘I say you did. And having carried out your promise to the bitter end, you then made every attempt to cover your tracks, did you not?’

  ‘Yes.’ I can hardly say otherwise.

  ‘You hid the evidence. You lied to your family, then to the police. I put it to you that had you been incapable of responsible thought, as my learned friend suggests, you would not have then had the wherewithal to maintain this fabric of lies. You knew exactly what you were doing when you fed those drugs to your husband, when you selected that plastic bag and held it over his face until he suffocated. When you hid the evidence.’

  ‘No. I was wrong. I was so mixed up.’

  ‘Ms Shelley, you were able to withstand hours of questioning with little evident distress. How do you account for that?’

  I wear it well, I want to say, but simply shake my head. The more I say the more she will devour me.

  ‘Only when the evidence against you became overwhelming, when you were told that your own daughter was a witness for the prosecution, did you even admit to any complicity in Mr Draper’s death. I suggest your change of tack was simply a tactic to try to save your own skin.’

  Of course it bloody was, you daft bitch. What else could I do? There is no other defence they will let me make. ‘I’m telling the truth,’ my voice rings out, a tremor of rage in it.

  ‘Now, when it suits. But we have heard different versions of events. You lied in order to acquire the drugs in the first place, you lied to your own children, to Neil’s parents, you lied time and again. If you lied then, how do we know you are not lying now? Lying to the court, lying to this jury. There is precious little in what we have heard to suggest you are a credible witness.’

  I look directly across at the jury, feeling miserable, bullied. ‘I’m telling the truth,’ I say to them.

  Mousy drops her gaze, most of the others look away but some people meet my eye in that moment: the Cook and Dolly. And that humanity helps ground me.

  Miss Webber finally drops me, a dog tired of its chewing slipper. She leaves them with the accusation ‘liar’ pervading the air. This is the word stamped on each of her bullets, carved on the shafts of her arrows, engraved on her knuckle dusters. Say it enough times and it will gather weight, gain credence.

  A shaft of light, pale golden sunshine, gains admittance through the large window high in the walls and floods the ceiling. My neck is fused with tension. I can smell my own terror, a sharp musk.

  There is a brief pause while Mr Latimer confers with Ms Gleason. From the gallery Jane smiles at me, an open, warm smile. The worst is over. Is it? I bite my tongue and suck in my cheeks.

  Mr Latimer calls my neighbour Pauline Corby. There was never any love lost between us, though relations were more or less civil until the hammer incident. My defence team think this distance will give her testimony clout, as it were. This is no fawning friend or loyal relative but a mere acquaintance who can tell it like it is, no punches barred. And Pauline Corby does her stuff. Particularly when Mr Latimer asks her about my aggression.

  ‘She was like a mad woman. Completely off her rocker. I thought we should get the police, have her sectioned.’

  ‘And when later you heard that there were suspicious circumstances surrounding Neil Draper’s death, what did you think?’

  ‘I wasn’t surprised. I’d already said as much to Barry’ – Barry is a short, fair Londoner with all the social graces of a wasp – ‘ ‘‘The woman’s not safe. She’ll swing for somebody.’’’

  Hah! A hundred years ago I would have swung for this. Women standing here, men too, would have been taken from here to the gallows at Strangeways prison. That please you, Neil? A little historical perspective? My skin feels clammy as though the ghosts are with me now pat-a-caking my arms and cheeks, grinning slyly with black, bloated tongues and blood-red eyes.

  If they find me guilty how will I bear it?

  ‘Was her behaviour out of the ordinary, different from normal?’

  ‘Oh, yes. She was like a different person. She was just crazy.’

  ‘And apart from this incident did the situation return to normal?’

  ‘Hardly. She was always wandering about the garden at night, going out to her conservatory.’

  Workshop, Pauline. Workshop.

  ‘The security light would come on and wake us up. I don’t think she ever slept after that. We didn’t know what to do.’

  Miss Webber thanks Mr Latimer and approaches the witness box.

  ‘Mrs Corby. It’s true, is it not, that you have had previous problems with your neighbours and their children?’

  ‘Some.’

  ‘Could you give us an example?’

  ‘Well, the son Adam, he damaged the car. We had to ask for money to get it fixed.’

  Adam, stoned, had found it amusing to walk over the Corbys’ Golf. The dents in the roof cost a small fortune to repair. ‘It’s only a car,’ Adam had protested, when Neil
and I had hauled him into the kitchen to sort it out. ‘It’s not like I barbecued the cat or something.’

  ‘Anything else?’ Miss Webber asks.

  ‘We had to complain about the noise sometimes. Loud music going on half the night.’

  ‘And wasn’t this incident simply one more confrontation in the series?’

  ‘No,’ Pauline says stoutly. ‘This was different. She threatened me with a hammer. She was abusive.’

  ‘Did she raise the hammer?’

  ‘A little.’ She sounds defensive, unsure. ‘She was off her head.’

  ‘You’re a housewife, Mrs Corby?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Do you think that qualifies you to assess someone’s mental health?’

  ‘Maybe not,’ she says bluntly. ‘But I was a psychiatric nurse before I got married and I reckon that does.’

  Oh, bless you, Mrs Corby.

  There’s a moment’s silence, then the court erupts with laughter. Dolly cackles and Hilda and Flo giggle and Alice whoops. Even Miss Webber has the grace to smile and gives up on Pauline before she digs a deeper hole.

  The judge decides we will break for lunch. I realize, with a swirl of vertigo, that by the end of the day my trial will be over. There is only Don Petty, my shrink, to give evidence and then there will be the closing speeches. As the jury file out, I watch them go, the Callow Youth hunched but any attempt at looking cool compromised by his gait – he bounces on his toes like a kid as he walks. Flo has to help Hilda up. I see them as lifelong friends, like Jane and me. But they met for the first time last week, selected at random. The Sailor wears the same clothes again. It strikes me that I have never heard any of these people speak. They are silent in the court, eyes and ears. Once out of the room their chatter will flow, conversation and anecdotes with which they oil the lunches and coffee breaks, the times they wait for the call of the ushers, the partings at the end of the day.

  I have absolutely no idea how we are faring. When the court is almost empty Mr Latimer comes over. ‘That was a gem,’ he tells me. ‘She doubled the weight of that witness’s evidence.’

  ‘Can you tell,’ I ask him, ‘what the jury are thinking?’

  He shook his head. ‘Never can. Not worth a moment’s speculation. Only time I ever did, I was wrong.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘for shouting.’

  He dipped his head. ‘Hard to resist. Could have been worse.’

  ‘I could have gone for her with a hammer,’ I murmur.

  His eyes glint. He purses his lips. The smile is in his voice. ‘That would never do. I will see you after lunch.’

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Don Petty, the shrink for my defence, is a tall gangly fellow, close to my age, I guess, with a bald head, beaky nose and an insignificant chin, giving him the cast of a tortoise. He speaks in a precise Edinburgh accent and never smiles (now, I have to appear suitably glum and contrite but surely he could afford to crack a grin now and then).

  Mr Latimer establishes his manifold qualifications and his extensive experience. He has been selected as our expert witness because he measures up to Dolores Cabril and then some. Though not, I fear, in the personality stakes.

  Now Mr Latimer winds him up and sets him off, asking him about his assessment of me.

  ‘Our mental health operates in similar ways to our physical health,’ Don Petty begins. ‘And the two are closely intertwined. The balance of health can be compromised by sudden attacks to the system such as bereavement, redundancy, the end of a relationship. These are the equivalent of the broken leg or the heart-attack. But mental health is also undermined where there are ongoing long-term factors – say, an unhappy marriage, a stressful job, a lack of self-esteem. In addition, there are the factors we inherit. Just as some cancers or allergic complaints run in families, so do mental health diseases.’

  ‘And h-how does this relate to Deborah’s situation?’ Mr Latimer asks, with a flourish of his arm in my direction.

  ‘Inheritance first. Deborah’s parents both suffered from depression.’

  I am surprised to consider my mother in this light. But it makes perfect sense. Her cold reserve, her distraction, her continuing failure to engage with me, with the world, her disaffection: these could all be symptoms of depression. Had she ever sought help herself? Gone to the doctor about her nerves, exhausted by the heavy cloak of misery she carted about? Should I have seen this? Understood it, done something about it? Always too lost in my own disappointment with her, I’d not had the objectivity to do so. How different things might have been. Perhaps I could have forgiven her, absolved myself. But the past is done. The tide went out, leaving us marooned on opposite sides of the same island. Cast away.

  ‘Her father was also an alcoholic,’ Don Petty carries on. ‘This alone predisposes Deborah to depression. On top of that, the death of her father at a formative age would have been a huge shock to the system. The loss of a parent in childhood remains the single most influential factor in the development of mental illness.’

  Adam and Sophie are teenagers: when does childhood end? Will Neil’s death add to the risk for them? Does the cruel snare of depression lie in wait for Sophie? And Adam, who has been amazing in these past months, functioning better than I could ever have hoped: as time passes, will Neil’s death magnify his problems?

  ‘The loss of her mother and Neil’s diagnosis were two other significant attacks on Deborah’s mental health,’ says Don Petty.

  ‘But her mother died many years ago,’ Mr Latimer points out – best to get that cleared up before Miss Webber gets her claws out.

  ‘True,’ says Mr Petty. ‘However, Deborah’s relationship with her mother was a troubled one. Difficulties within it were neither addressed nor resolved and this can arrest the grieving process and store up problems that later emerge at stressful times.’

  ‘It was then, after her mother died, that Deborah sought medical help for her illness?’ Mr Latimer asks.

  ‘That’s correct. And her GP was concerned enough to treat her for clinical depression by prescribing anti-depressants. So we have a prior incident of serious mental illness. Now, more recently, the constant strain of caring for her terminally ill partner while also coping with her son’s mental illness, and dealing with her own insomnia and panic attacks, caused Deborah to become seriously ill.’

  ‘Ill enough to lose the ability to distinguish between right and wrong?’

  ‘Yes,’ confirms Don Petty. It’s a bald reply and I expect him to elaborate but he just stares impassively at Mr Latimer.

  ‘The insomnia,’ Mr Latimer asks, ‘how would that affect Deborah’s state of mind?’

  ‘Insomnia has a direct adverse impact on the amount of stress we experience, and how we cope with that stress. It also makes it hard for people to concentrate, to think rationally. In more severe cases insomnia can lead to delusions and other severe mental states. We now know insomnia can increase the risk of depression and contribute to recurrent depression.’

  ‘And the panic attacks?’

  ‘These episodes are extremely frightening for anybody: palpitations of the heart, inability to breathe, feelings of terror, of losing control. They are disturbing, debilitating and would have increased her sense of being out of control.’

  Mr Latimer nods thoughtfully, ‘So, given her history of depression and insomnia and the other stresses in the family, when Neil repeatedly asked Deborah to help him die, her mental state meant that she was not able to make a sound judgement?’

  ‘Not in the end. Though she did refuse him twice, which indicates that it was the mounting pressure and the deterioration of her own mental health that destroyed her ability to make a reasoned decision.’

  ‘And her actions afterwards,’ asks Mr Latimer, ‘her attempts to conceal the facts of the situation?’

  ‘Deborah would be the first to admit that she was horrified, sickened by the reality of Neil’s death. The nightmare had come true for her. Grief-stricken and de
pressed, she did all she could to minimize the damage to her family. She knew that she had done wrong and was desperate to protect her children.’

  ‘Was Deborah Shelley mad when she helped Neil die?’

  ‘Mad isn’t a word I would use but the balance of her mind was disturbed to such an extent that she could not be held responsible for her actions.’

  Cross-examining, Miss Webber picks away at him like some starving crow. She starts by trying to get Don Petty to admit that my actions before, during and after Neil’s death would equally well fit the profile of a sane woman who simply believed in her husband’s right to die, and who, however reluctantly, went along with it.

  He’s having none of it. ‘In such cases,’ he expounds, ‘the person responsible makes no attempt to hide the matter but freely discloses their involvement to the family and to the authorities. They are morally secure and prepared to risk prison for their convictions.’

  She comes at him from another angle. ‘Deborah Shelley agreed to her husband’s request on Friday, the third of April, is that your understanding?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And on the fifteenth of June she went though with it: administering a massive dose of morphine and then smothering Neil Draper with a plastic bag?’

  Again and again the plastic bag is raised, flagged up and waved in the jury’s faces. An obscene image. Each time, I see Neil’s face darkening, feel that sickening panic, the terror in my bowels, in my heart.

  ‘Ten weeks separate those dates,’ she presses on, ‘during which time Ms Shelley continued to care for her children, run a household, attend meetings with her clients. Are you seriously suggesting that Deborah Shelley was mentally incompetent for ten weeks and yet no one noticed?’ Miss Webber’s voice rises with incredulity.