The Cradle in the Grave

by Sophie Hannah

  ‘As a result?’ Charlie prompted gently.

  ‘I made a dreadful error in Ray’s case. She didn’t murder either of her children, but I told the court she did. My defensiveness was partly to blame.’ Duffy smiled. ‘I used to be very defensive. By the time Nathaniel Hines died, Laurie Nattrass’s media onslaught against me had been raging for some time. I was determined not to be cowed by him. To say Nathaniel Hines was a crib death when I had doubts would have felt like a defeat. I suppose I wanted to show the world that mothers can be a very real danger to babies, and it’s not just something I invented out of wickedness and because I enjoy ruining people’s lives. And I did have doubts – I was told on good authority that Ray had suffered from post-natal depression and nearly jumped off a window ledge. What if I’d said natural causes, and the Hineses had had another baby and it had ended up dead too?’

  ‘You and Ray had lunch together on Monday,’ said Charlie. Seeing Duffy’s surprise, she added, ‘That’s one of the reasons I’m here. The DI who’s SIO on Helen Yardley’s murder thinks it’s odd that the two of you would spend time together.’

  ‘It’s only odd if you look at the world in a limited and limiting way,’ said Duffy.

  ‘Yup, that would be our DI.’

  ‘Believe it or not, Ray and I are now good friends. I contacted her when she got out of prison, via her solicitor.’

  ‘Why?’ Charlie asked.

  ‘To apologise. To admit that I’d been less than objective in her case. She was the one who suggested meeting. She wanted to tell me the truth about what had killed her babies. She believed it was the DTP-Hib vaccine, in both cases. After listening to her for half an hour, I was inclined to think so too.’

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘Her lawyers didn’t bring it up at the trial because all their expert witnesses threatened to deny it, and, with no medical expert to say it was a possible cause of death, they’d have looked stupid. Ironically, if they’d come to me, I’d instantly have thought twice about Marcella and Nathaniel’s deaths being murder. At least I hope I would,’ Duffy amended. ‘I like to think I would have woken up at that point.’

  ‘But Ray’s lawyers didn’t go to you, because you were the bad guy, giving evidence for the other side.’

  Duffy nodded. ‘Angus Hines’ mother has Lupus. There’s a history of crib death in his extended family. That suggests a hereditary auto-immune problem. Plus, a reliable witness saw both Marcella and Nathaniel have a seizure almost straight after they were vaccinated. Vaccine damage – fitting, in particular – would account for all the things I saw: brain swelling, bleeding in the brain . . .’

  ‘That ought to have come out in court. Even if they thought all the doctors would disagree with it.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure Julian Lance was right about that – that’s Ray’s lawyer. Everyone admits in theory that a small percentage of babies will react badly to a vaccine and in some cases die – there’s even a body called the Vaccine Damage Payment Unit – but when it actually happens, in my experience, everyone closes ranks and says, “It wasn’t the vaccine – that’s perfectly safe, trialled and tested.”’

  Duffy smiles suddenly. ‘You know, the first time I met Ray after she was released, she thanked me for caring enough about her children not to bow to the pressure I was under – Laurie Nattrass’s pressure – and say they died naturally when it wasn’t what I believed. That’s what she said, even though she ended up going to prison because of my testimony.’

  ‘Do you know where Ray’s staying at the moment?’ Charlie asked.

  ‘Not the address,’ said Duffy. She patted her knees. For a second, Charlie mistook it for an invitation to sit on her lap. Then Duffy said, ‘I feel as if I’ve been talking about myself for an awfully long time. I’d like to hear about you.’

  ‘I’ve told you about my fall from grace.’

  ‘I’m sorry you had to yell the details through my letterbox,’ said Duffy. ‘Do you want to talk about it? Have you ever talked about it? I don’t mean the bare bones of what happened, I mean the emotional impact—’

  ‘No,’ Charlie cut her off.

  ‘You should.’

  ‘Even if I don’t want to?’

  ‘Especially then.’ Duffy looked alarmed, as if a reluctance to discuss past traumas was a symptom of a fatal illness. ‘Keeping any kind of emotional damage locked inside you is a big mistake. Pain has to be expressed and really felt before it can dissolve.’ Duffy half rose from her chair and moved it closer to Charlie’s before sitting again. ‘It was two years before I could bring myself to talk about Sarah Jaggard’s trial,’ she said. ‘I had to be taken to court in an armoured van and escorted in through a back entrance. I knew then that there was no way she’d be convicted. By 2005, Laurie Nattrass had made me a household name, and not in a good way. My presence as an expert witness for the prosecution was enough to secure an acquittal for Jaggard. People screamed abuse at me in court, the jury stared at me as if they wanted me dead...’

  A loud ringing sound interrupted her: the doorbell.

  ‘I’ll leave it. I’m not expecting anyone. I’d rather talk to you, and listen to you.’

  Charlie hesitated. Could she tell this virtual stranger how she’d spent most of the past three years feeling? Should she? ‘No, get it,’ she said.

  Duffy looked disappointed, but she didn’t argue. Once she’d gone, Charlie stood up and put on her jacket quickly, before she could change her mind. She grabbed her bag and made her way towards the kitchen. She heard Duffy in the hall, sounding polite but firm, saying, ‘No, thanks,’ and ‘Really, I’m sure. Thank you.’

  Charlie stepped out into the hall at exactly the same moment as she heard the shot, saw the gun, and saw Duffy fall backwards, her head cracking on the uncarpeted stairs.

  The man in the doorway turned and pointed his gun at Charlie. ‘Get on the floor! Don’t move!’

  ‘I can’t have seen it, can I? She was innocent all along.’ Leah Gould raised her voice to make herself heard above the noise in the café. She’d told Simon to meet her here – across the road from her office. Gould hadn’t worked for Social Services for seven years. She’d taken maternity leave, then, when her daughter went to school, she’d got a job as a receptionist for a timber company, where she still worked.

  ‘Only you know what you saw,’ said Simon.

  ‘But why would she have tried to smother her daughter if she didn’t kill her two boys? She wouldn’t, would she? Either she’s a killer or she’s not, and she wouldn’t have had her convictions cancelled or whatever if she was guilty.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  Leah Gould took a bite of her cheese and onion toastie as she considered the question. Simon was starving. Soon as he was alone, he’d get himself something to eat. He hated eating in front of strangers.

  ‘It’s like Laurie Nattrass says: the courts’ll do anything to avoid saying they made a mistake. They only admit they’re wrong when they’re forced to, when it’s such a bad mistake that they can’t deny it.’

  ‘So because Helen Yardley won her appeal, she must have been innocent?’

  Leah Gould nodded.

  ‘Before the appeal – what did you think then?’

  ‘Oh, I thought she’d done it. Definitely.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘Because of what I saw her do.’ More chomping on the toastie.

  ‘What you didn’t see her do, you mean?’

  ‘Yeah. But I thought I did. It was only later I realised I couldn’t have.’

  Simon’s hunger was making him more impatient than he would have been otherwise. ‘Do you know anything about any of the three judges that heard Helen’s appeal?’

  Leah Gould looked at him as if he was crazy. ‘Why would I know about any judges?’

  ‘Do you even know their names?’

  ‘Why would I?’

  ‘Yet you trust them more than you trust your own eyes.’

  Leah Gould blinked at him. ‘What
do you mean?’

  Simon would have liked to prise the toastie from her fingers and kick it across the room. ‘Helen Yardley’s convictions were overturned because they were deemed unsafe. It’s not the same thing as saying she’s innocent. The appeal judges didn’t necessarily think she was innocent of murder, though they might have done. One might have done, or two, or all three – they could have had the same opinion or different opinions.’ This was useless. ‘I’m interested in what you believe, based on what you saw.’

  ‘I think she must have been giving her baby a cuddle, like she said.’

  Something was missing here. Leah Gould had expressed no regret whatsoever. ‘The evidence you gave in court was a big part of the prosecution’s case,’ said Simon. ‘You claimed you saw Helen Yardley try to smother her daughter. You were asked if it could have been a cuddle – a mother in turmoil at being separated from her only surviving child, clinging on to that child – you said no.’

  ‘Because that was what I thought at the time.’

  Was guilt an emotion that only intelligent people felt?

  ‘It wasn’t just me. There was a policeman there. He saw it too.’

  ‘Giles Proust?’

  ‘I can’t remember his name.’

  ‘His name was Giles Proust. He disagreed with you in court. He described what he witnessed that day as an ordinary cuddle.’

  Leah Gould shook her head. ‘I was looking at him, not at Helen Yardley. He was watching her with Paige. That’s when I first knew something was wrong. I saw his eyes change, and he looked at me, like he couldn’t do anything and wanted me to stop it. That’s when I looked at Helen and the baby and . . . saw what I saw. And I did stop it.’

  ‘You stopped an attempted smothering? By taking Paige Yardley away from her mother?’

  Leah Gould’s lips thinned in disapproval. ‘Are you winding me up? I’ve told you, I don’t think that now. I’m telling you what I thought then.’

  ‘And you thought, then, that DS Proust saw what you saw?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Then why did he say the opposite in court? Why say he saw only a cuddle?’

  ‘You’d have to ask him.’ No curiosity in her expression; not even a flicker of interest.

  ‘I suppose if you could be wrong about what you saw Helen Yardley do, you could equally be wrong about Giles Proust. Maybe you misinterpreted the look he gave you; maybe he was thinking about what he was going to have for his tea that night.’

  ‘No, because he looked petrified. I thought: what kind of policeman can he be if he gets the willies so easily?’ She shook her head, her mouth assuming the shape of disapproval once again. ‘I mean, he should have stopped it, really. He shouldn’t have relied on me.’

  ‘Though now you believe there was no “it” to stop,’ Simon reminded her.

  ‘No,’ she agreed, looking uncertain for a second. She pushed the last corner of the toastie into her mouth.

  ‘In that case, what would have made Proust look so scared?’

  ‘You’d have to ask him that.’ Chew, chew, chew.

  Simon thanked her and left, couldn’t wait to get away. He turned on his mobile. Sam Kombothekra had left a message. Simon rang him back from the car. ‘What happened with Leah Gould?’ Sam asked.

  ‘She’s a bovine waste of space.’

  ‘Nothing useful, then?’

  ‘Not really,’ Simon lied. He felt as if a huge weight had been lifted. He’d got exactly what he’d been hoping for. Leah Gould had changed her mind because it was no longer fashionable to believe Helen Yardley was a murderer – simple as that. Simon was certain Gould had seen Helen try to smother Paige, and that Proust had seen it too.

  Proust must have fallen for Helen’s grieving mother act at the first time of exposure, fallen for her. He believed she was innocent, and he was always right – that was the one fact he knew about himself, above all others. And he had to stay right, even when he witnessed the attempted murder of Helen’s third child. His preconceived ideas made it impossible for him to take the action that needed to be taken; he was powerless – as powerless as he’d been making everyone around him feel ever since. With one frantic look, he put the responsibility for saving Paige Yardley’s life onto Leah Gould, then resumed the pretence: Helen’s innocence, his rightness. He lied at the trial, but told himself he was doing the opposite.

  In his heart, he must have known the truth. If he hadn’t once visited Helen in prison, as Laurie Nattrass claimed . . .

  Deep down, the Snowman had to know how grievously wrong he’d been. Was he afraid of it happening again, in as serious a situation? Was that why he needed everyone to pretend his judgement was flawless?

  Knowing all this – knowing the Snowman didn’t know he knew – had shifted the balance of power between them in Simon’s mind. He no longer felt sullied and threatened by the dinner invitation. Charlie was right: he could easily say he didn’t want to have dinner with Proust. Or he could accept, turn up with a bottle of wine and tell Lizzie Proust the truth about the man she’d married.

  He had the power now – ammunition. It didn’t matter that he couldn’t prove it; he knew he could destroy the Snowman any time he wanted to.

  ‘You on your way back, then?’ Sam asked, pulling Simon out of his victory trance.

  ‘After I’ve grabbed a sarnie, yeah.’

  ‘Gibbs spoke to Paul Yardley.’

  ‘Poor sod.’

  ‘Gibbs?’

  ‘Yardley. First he loses three kids, then someone offs his wife, then Gibbs engages him in conversation.’

  ‘He’s now admitting he rang Laurie Nattrass before he rang an ambulance. Apparently Nattrass told him to say he rang the ambulance first.’

  ‘Did he, now?’ said Simon thoughtfully.

  ‘Not ringing the ambulance straight away looks bad, he said. He told Yardley we’d do everything we could to pin Helen’s murder on him. “The filth always frame the husband if they can, and in your case they’ll be especially keen to.”’

  ‘For fuck’s sake!’

  ‘Gibbs thought Yardley was telling the truth,’ said Sam. ‘Nattrass isn’t stupid – he must have known we’d do a telephony check on the Yardleys’ line.’

  ‘You think he told Paul Yardley to lie because he wanted us to suspect him? He says to Yardley, “Say this and they won’t suspect you”, while secretly thinking, “Say this and they will suspect you”?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Sam sounded worn out. ‘What I do know is that in the course of their conversation, Yardley told Nattrass about the strange card he’d found on Helen’s body, sticking out of her pocket. And wait till you hear this: Sellers spoke to Tamsin Waddington, Fliss Benson’s friend, who told him Nattrass had been sent the sixteen numbers too – she saw the card on his desk on 2 September, a month before Helen Yardley was shot. He said he had no idea who’d sent it to him.’

  ‘What?’ Simon leaned forward in his car seat, sounding the horn by mistake. He mouthed, ‘Sorry,’ at two women who turned to glare at him. ‘So when Paul Yardley rang Nattrass and told him about the card in his dead wife’s pocket . . .?’

  ‘Nattrass should have been straight on the phone to us, scared of being the killer’s next victim, yes. Even if he wasn’t afraid for himself, when he found out Fliss Benson had been sent a similar card, he should have . . .’

  ‘I spoke to Benson about the card,’ said Simon. ‘She took it into Nattrass’s office and showed it to him, asked him what he thought it meant. He can’t have told her about the card Paul Yardley found on Helen’s body – Benson didn’t mention it to me, and I think she would have. Come to think of it, Nattrass can’t have told her about the card he’d been sent – she’d have mentioned that too.’

  ‘Would she?’ said Sam dejectedly. ‘Fliss Benson’s agenda in all this is starting to worry me. We can’t find her, we can’t alibi her for Monday . . .’

  ‘If Benson’s a killer, I’m Barack Obama.’

  ‘Sellers and I were in he
r office this morning. She’d left her email inbox up on the screen. While we were there, someone emailed her a photo of Helen Yardley’s hand, holding a card like the others – same numbers, same layout – and a copy of Nothing But Love.’

  ‘What?’ First a card, then a photograph of a card . . .

  ‘You said Benson was odd,’ said Sam. ‘Do you think there’s a chance she could be sending these things to herself?’

  Simon thought about it. ‘No.’

  ‘I’ve just got off the phone with Tamsin Waddington,’ Sam told him. ‘She’s worried Benson’s losing her grip on reality – that’s how she put it. Benson rang her with a story about having locked Angus Hines in her flat, and could Tamsin go round with the spare key and let him out. When Tamsin got there half an hour later, the flat was empty – no Angus Hines in sight, no broken windows, everything the same as always. Hines couldn’t have opened a window and climbed out – Tamsin found them all closed and locked, which could only be done from inside. Benson also apparently claimed she’d been to Rachel Hines’ parents’ house in Twickenham.’

  ‘Did she lock them in too?’

  ‘Rachel Hines’ parents don’t live in Twickenham, never have. I’ve just spoken to them. They live in Winchester.’

  ‘So Laurie Nattrass and Fliss Benson join a police artist’s drawing of a skinhead with bad teeth at the top of our “most wanted” list. Are we stepping up our efforts to track them down?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘There’s one more thing I need to do, then I’m straight back,’ Simon told him.

  ‘A sandwich, right?’ Sam sounded suspicious. ‘Please tell me you’re talking about buying a sandwich.’