The Cradle in the Grave

by Sophie Hannah

  ‘I’ve always been in favour of telling her,’ Grace blurted out. ‘I was overruled.’

  ‘I wanted my daughter to have a regular, carefree childhood,’ Sebastian explained. ‘Not to grow up knowing she was the child of a murderer, someone who’d smothered two of her babies and would almost certainly have done the same to Hannah if Social Services hadn’t stepped in. What father would place a burden like that on his daughter’s shoulders, to be carried for life?’ He aimed this last word at Grace.

  ‘I take it you think Helen Yardley was guilty, then.’ Nothing depressed Sam more than bigotry. What made Sebastian Brownlee so sure he knew better than three court of appeal judges?

  ‘We know she was guilty,’ said Grace. ‘And I agree with everything Seb’s just said, except there’s something he always fails to take into consideration.’

  Sam wondered if it was therapeutic for the Brownlees to conduct this argument in front of him, a stranger. ‘What’s that?’ he asked.

  ‘A significant number of adopted children reach an age when it starts to matter to them to know where and who they come from. If I could guarantee Hannah would never be one of them, of course I wouldn’t be in favour of telling her, but there are no such guarantees in this world. I wish her birth mother had been anyone but Helen Yardley – anyone. If I could, I’d bury my head, and Hannah’s, deep in the sand and forget all about the truth, but I can’t, or at least I can’t be one hundred per cent certain that I’d get away with it, not for ever. If Hannah finds out when she’s older, the shock’ll be devastating. Whereas if we’d told her as soon as she was old enough to understand, if we even told her now . . .’ Grace shot a pleading look at her husband.

  ‘How old is old enough to understand that your natural mother wanted to kill you?’ said Sebastian angrily. ‘That she did kill your two brothers?’

  ‘What have you told Hannah, then?’ Sam asked. ‘About her birth parents.’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Grace. ‘We told her we knew nothing, that we asked the social workers not to tell us. She knows she was adopted, but that’s all.’

  If Simon Waterhouse were here, would he be thinking that, since Hannah was absent, it was impossible to verify what she did or didn’t know? What if she knew she was Helen Yardley’s daughter, and Grace and Sebastian were lying because . . .

  No. Impossible. Thirteen-year-old girls from Spilling didn’t tool up with M9 Berettas and murder their mothers. Sam made a mental note to check that Hannah had been at school all day on Monday. ‘What makes you so sure Helen Yardley was guilty?’ he asked Grace.

  Sebastian Brownlee touched his wife’s arm: a sign that she shouldn’t answer. ‘We’re busy people, Sergeant – as, I’m sure, are you,’ he said. ‘We’d like to go and collect our daughter, and you’re not here to debate Helen Yardley’s guilt. Shall we get on with what needs to be done?’

  ‘I’d like an answer to my question,’ said Sam. His throat was dry. The Brownlees hadn’t offered him a drink.

  Sebastian sighed heavily. ‘How do we know she’s guilty? All right, let’s start with baby Morgan, the first son she murdered. Leaving aside the massive amounts of haemosiderin found in his lungs, all of different ages – not just one bleed, in other words, but several distinct bleeds, a clear indicator of repeated smotherings – leaving that aside, and the fact that four medical experts who testified for the prosecution said there was no way that much haemosiderin would be present if the death was natural, there was also the small matter of Morgan’s serum sodium level, which was about five times what you’d expect for a child his age—’

  ‘The level of salt in his blood,’ Grace cut in with the explanation Sam needed. ‘She used salt to poison him.’

  Salt poisoning and smothering? Sam didn’t believe Helen Yardley had deliberately harmed either of her sons, but even if she had, why would she simultaneously try to kill them in two different ways? In the interests of fairness, he had to admit you could easily turn that around: if you really want to hurt someone, maybe you attack them in any and every way you can think of.

  ‘Morgan had been rushed to hospital more than once in his short life because he’d stopped breathing. Funny that, isn’t it?’ Sebastian Brownlee demanded. ‘A perfectly healthy baby just stops breathing—how convenient. Each time he decided to perform his stopping-breathing-for-no-reason trick, it was the same time of day—between five and six in the evening, at the end of a long day of his mother being at home alone with him while his father was at work. You tell me why a baby would stop breathing, over and over again, at the same time of day.’

  ‘Don’t shout at him,’ said Grace. Sam was about to tell her it was okay, but stopped himself.

  ‘The defence’s liar-for-hire doctors said maybe he had a respiratory disorder, maybe he was dehydrated, maybe he was suffering from nephrogenic diabetes insipidus – diabetes where your salt levels are up the pole instead of your sugars. They were making it up as they went along, and the jury knew it!’ Sebastian let go of his wife’s hand, stood up and started to pace. ‘Let’s move on to Rowan, baby number two. He also had too much salt in his blood. All the doctors agreed this was what killed him – the question was: had his mother poisoned him or did he have this rare form of diabetes? Or a faulty osmostat – that’s the mechanism that regulates sodium in the blood. I suppose you could say there was no way of telling for sure, but the medical experts who testified for the prosecution thought it fitting to point out that the post-mortem had turned up a skull fracture and several healing fractures, of different ages, at the ends of Rowan’s long bones. Metaphyseal fractures, they’re called. Ask any paediatrician, or any social worker for that matter – they’re the sort of fractures you get if you take a child by the wrist or the ankle and hurl it at the wall.’

  Grace Brownlee flinched.

  ‘The skull fracture was bi-lateral – also extremely rare for a non-inflicted injury,’ Sebastian continued loudly, as if he was in court rather than in his own living room, addressing a larger audience than his wife and Sam. He paced up and down, his hands stuffed in his trouser pockets. ‘Most skull fractures are simple and linear, confined to only one bone in the skull. Oh, the defence’s doctors had a field day! One had the nerve to say that the skull fracture couldn’t have caused Rowan’s death because there was no brain swelling.’

  ‘Seb, calm down,’ said Grace in a resigned voice, as if she didn’t expect him to take any notice.

  ‘It might not have killed him, but it’s still a fucking skull fracture!’ Having made this declaration, Sebastian sat down again, shaking his head. Was he done? Sam hoped so. His own fault for asking.

  ‘One expert witness for the defence said the fractures could have been caused by something called Transient Osteogenesis Imperfecta, but there’s no evidence that such a thing exists,’ said Grace. ‘OI’s real enough, though rare, but Transient OI? No proof whatsoever – not so much as one recorded case. As Judith Duffy pointed out at the trial, OI has other symptoms, none of which applied to Rowan Yardley – blue sclera, wormian bones . . .’

  ‘When Duffy said there was no such thing as Transient Osteogenesis Imperfecta, the defence QC tried to make her look arrogant by asking how she could possibly know that for sure,’ Sebastian took over. ‘Could she point to any research that proved OI could never take a transient form? Of course she couldn’t. How do you prove that something doesn’t exist?’

  ‘I can’t remember who’s supposed to have said it, but it’s true,’ Grace muttered. ‘“The greatest fool can ask a question that the wisest man cannot answer.”’

  ‘The defence tried everything. They even wheeled out the old chestnut of what-if-he-fell-off-the-sofa? I’m a lawyer,’ Sebastian announced, as if Sam might not already be aware of his occupation, ‘and if there’s one thing I know, it’s this: when you’re running more than one defence, it’s because you know you’ve got no single line of defence that’s going to work.’

  A loud sigh from Grace made him stop and look at her. ‘No
ne of this is how I know Helen Yardley was guilty,’ she said. ‘You can argue endlessly about medical evidence, but you can’t argue with an eye-witness account from someone who had no reason to lie.’

  ‘Leah Gould,’ said her husband, taking her hand again as if to thank her for reminding him. ‘The contact supervisor at the care centre where the Yardleys went to visit Hannah.’

  Paige, thought Sam. Not Hannah; not then.

  ‘Leah Gould saved our daughter’s life,’ said Sebastian.

  ‘Helen tried to smother Hannah in front of her,’ said Grace, her eyes filling with tears. ‘Pressing her face against her chest so she couldn’t breathe. Two other people saw it too – Paul Yardley and a detective sergeant called, of all things, Proust – but they lied in court.’

  Sam did his best not to react. The Snowman, lie under oath about having witnessed an attempted murder? No. Whatever other bad things he was capable of, he wouldn’t do that. Sam knew Helen Yardley had included her version of the incident in Nothing But Love – Simon Waterhouse had told him. Sam needed to read the book, however much he didn’t want to.

  ‘You’d expect her husband to lie,’ said Sebastian bitterly. ‘For better or for worse, even if you’re married to a killer, but a police officer?’ He shook his head. ‘Unfortunately, at the trial, DS Proust’s remembrance of things past was flawed to say the least. He testified that in his opinion Leah Gould had overreacted, that all Helen did was hug Hannah tightly, as any loving mother would if she thought she might be about to be separated from her daughter for years, if not for life. Eleven out of twelve jurors ignored him. They trusted Leah Gould not to have plucked an attempted murder out of thin air.’

  ‘Though that’s exactly what she herself ended up claiming to have done,’ said Grace bitterly. ‘That dreadful Nattrass man made so many waves in the media that everyone, even most of the original prosecution witnesses, ended up on the side of the convicted murderer against her victims. Nattrass made sure every tabloid scumbag got his very own Judith Duffy scoop, whether it was her promiscuity as a teenager, her callous childcare arrangements as a young mother, the job she’d been fired from as a student . . .’

  ‘It wasn’t about the evidence any more,’ said Sebastian, clutching his wife’s hand in a way that looked to Sam as if it might be painful for her. If it was, she said nothing. ‘It had become political. Helen Yardley had to get out of jail free, and quickly; she was becoming an embarrassment to the system, even though all Nattrass had in his arsenal was a case against Dr Duffy, one prosecution witness among many. All right, her behaviour was questionable, but she was only a small part of the case. Except, suddenly, she wasn’t. Some of the other doctors who’d testified against Helen Yardley changed their tune – none of them wanted to become Nattrass’s next victim. The prosecution team didn’t push for a retrial when they could and should have. Ivor Rudgard QC will have had it spelled out for him by someone from the Lord Chancellor’s office as was: drop this or you’ll never make red judge. So Rudgard dropped it.’

  ‘Next thing you know, Laurie Nattrass interviews Leah Gould in the Observer, and she says she’s no longer sure she saw Helen Yardley try to smother her daughter by pressing her face into her jumper. She now thinks it’s likely she panicked for no reason, and she deeply regrets the part she played in convicting an innocent woman.’ It was clear Grace could hardly bear to utter those words in connection with Helen Yardley.

  ‘Of course she’d say that once Helen Yardley’s free and everyone’s talking about witch-hunts and the persecution of grieving mothers,’ said Sebastian. ‘It isn’t easy to be the lone voice of dissent. More than ten years after the event, you can convince yourself that things were different from how they actually were, but the fact is that when she was in that room at the contact centre, Leah Gould pulled Hannah away from Helen Yardley and she believed that, in doing so, she saved Hannah’s life.’

  Sam was starting to feel sorry for the Brownlees. Their obsession was weighing them down, sucking the life out of them. He suspected they went over and over the story, feeling fresh outrage each time they reached the part where Helen Yardley was freed. ‘How long have you lived in this house?’ he asked.

  ‘Since 1989,’ said Grace. ‘Why?’

  ‘So before you adopted Hannah.’

  ‘I’ll ask again: why?’

  ‘The Yardleys’ house is on Bengeo Street, only about five minutes from here.’

  ‘In terms of distance, perhaps,’ said Sebastian. ‘In all ways that matter, Bengeo Street is worlds away.’

  ‘When you adopted Hannah, did you know where the Yardleys lived?’

  ‘Yes. There were . . .’ Grace stopped, closed her eyes. ‘There were some letters forwarded to us by social services. From Helen and Paul Yardley to Hannah. Their address was on the letters.’

  Needless to say, Hannah had never clapped eyes on them.

  ‘Did you consider moving?’ Sam asked. ‘Once you decided not to tell Hannah who her birth parents were, didn’t you think it might be a good idea to move out of Spilling – to Rawndesley, perhaps?’

  ‘Rawndesley?’ Sebastian reared in horror, as if Sam had suggested he move to the Congo.

  ‘Of course we didn’t,’ said Grace. ‘If you lived in this house, on this street, would you ever move?’ She gestured around the room.

  Did she want Sam to answer honestly? Had she really said that? Staring at her, wondering how to respond, he suddenly had it. He knew why he was suspicious of the Brownlees, in spite of their solid alibis and middle-class respectability: it was something Grace had said as she’d let him in. He’d shown her his ID, explained that he was DS Sam Kombothekra from Culver Valley CID, but that there was nothing to worry about, his visit was a formality, nothing more. Grace’s response had been almost exactly what you’d expect from a blameless woman. Almost, but not quite. She’d looked Sam in the eye and said, ‘We did nothing wrong.’

  It was dark by the time Simon got to Wolverhampton. Sarah and Glen Jaggard lived in a rented flat above a town-centre branch of Blockbusters on a busy main road. ‘You can’t miss it,’ Glen had said. ‘The sign’s been vandalised and someone’s scratched out the first “B”, so now it’s “Lockbusters”. Talk about sending the wrong message,’ he’d attempted a joke. ‘No wonder we’ve been burgled twice since moving here.’

  The Jaggards had been homeowners once, but had sold their house to cover Sarah’s legal costs. Simon hadn’t been convinced by Glen Jaggard’s determined cheeriness on the phone. He detected in it the underlying fatigue of someone who feels he has no alternative, in the face of life’s unremitting grimness, but to be upbeat all the time.

  The flat looked as if it had an upstairs and a downstairs, judging from the windows. It was a decent size: probably about the same square footage as Simon’s two-up two-down cottage, or Charlie’s two-bed terrace. We ought to sell the pair of them and buy a bigger place together, thought Simon, though he knew he’d never suggest it and that, if Charlie did, his first reaction would be fear.

  He remembered the Snowman jumping down his throat when he’d suggested Sarah Jaggard wasn’t the victim of a miscarriage of justice. How could she be, when she’d been unanimously acquitted? Proust evidently thought that to be tried for manslaughter constituted miscarriage of justice enough, and Simon wondered if the woman he was about to meet agreed. Did she see herself as a victim, rather than someone who had triumphed over adversity? The shabby exterior of her home and the deafening traffic noise outside it made Simon think that she might, and he wouldn’t blame her if she did.

  Rusty wrought-iron steps led up to the flat, speckled with the black paint that must once have covered them. There was no doorbell. Simon knocked, then watched through the panel of cracked opaque glass as a large shape lumbered towards him along the hall. Glen Jaggard threw open the door, grabbed Simon’s hand and shook it, simultaneously leaning forward to pat him on the back with his other hand, a manoeuvre that put the two men in awkward physical proximity. Simon
took in Jaggard’s checked shirt, jeans and walking boots. Was he planning on climbing a mountain later?

  ‘You found Lockbusters, then?’ Jaggard laughed. ‘I couldn’t believe it when our DVD player packed up about a week after we moved in. Talk about sod’s law: you move to a flat above a DVD rental place and your DVD player packs in!’

  Simon smiled politely.

  ‘Go through to the lounge.’ Jaggard pointed down the hall. ‘There’s tea and biscuits in there already. I’ll get Sarah.’ He took the stairs two at a time, calling out his wife’s name.

  Simon had been in many people’s homes over the years, but this was a first: tea being made before he arrived. If he’d been late, would he have had to down it cold?

  He was expecting the Jaggards’ lounge to have nobody in it, since Glen and Sarah were both upstairs, and was surprised to find Paul Yardley there, looking terrible. His eyes were puffy, his skin waxy and greasy. Like the congealed fat in a frying pan after you’ve cooked sausages. The first time Simon had interviewed him after his wife’s death, Yardley had said vehemently, ‘Most people in my position would be thinking about topping themselves. Not me. I fought for justice for Helen once, and I’ll do it again.’

  Now, with equal intensity, he said, ‘Don’t worry, I’m not staying,’ as if Simon had protested at his presence. ‘I only came here to talk to Glen and Sarah about Laurie.’

  ‘Laurie Nattrass?’ On the wall behind Simon there was a framed newspaper photograph of Nattrass, Yardley and a tearfully smiling Helen, holding hands like a row of paper dolls. Taken on the steps of the court building after Helen’s successful appeal, Simon guessed. It was the only picture the Jaggards had put up in the living room of their rented flat. Beneath the grainy black and white image was the headline ‘JUSTICE AT LAST FOR HELEN’.