The Cradle in the Grave

by Sophie Hannah

  ‘Just because I’m drinking Diet Coke and I’m not skinny like you doesn’t mean I’m on a diet,’ Sellers muttered to Charlie. He tilted his head, inspecting his belly from a different angle.

  ‘I think we’ve got a solid lead on Ray Hines’ whereabouts.’ Sam sounded excited. ‘Laurie Nattrass has a brother, Hugo, who owns a house in Twickenham. He doesn’t live there – he lives in Streatham – which is why it’s taken this long to unearth it, but . . . Simon?’

  Charlie clicked her fingers in front of his face. ‘Wake up. Sam’s trying to tell you something.’

  Simon turned to Sellers. ‘What did you just say? About the Diet Coke. Whatever you said, say it again.’

  Sellers gave up trying to pull in his stomach muscles. He sighed. ‘Just because I’m drinking Diet Coke and I’m a bit on the heavy side doesn’t mean I’m on a diet.’

  ‘That’s it.’ Simon spun round to face Charlie. He stared at her as if he’d forgotten Sellers and Sam were there. ‘That’s it. A thin person with a diet drink might just like the taste of it, but a fat person with a diet drink . . .’

  ‘Fat?’ Sellers sounded outraged.

  ‘So the alibi’s bullshit.’

  ‘What alibi?’ Sam asked.

  ‘I need to talk to Dillon White again.’ Simon’s words tumbled out as his thought process speeded up. ‘And Rahila Yunis.’

  ‘The journalist who interviewed Helen Yardley in prison?’ asked Charlie.

  ‘I need her to tell me why she withheld the most important part of the story about her visit to Geddham Hall. I know why, but I want to hear it from her. Sam, I need photographs: Laurie Nattrass, Angus Hines, Glen Jaggard, Paul Yardley, Sebastian Brownlee.’

  Sam nodded. He could have pointed out that, as skipper, he was the one who ought to have been assigning the tasks; he was wise enough not to.

  ‘Whose alibi’s bullshit?’ Charlie asked, knowing the chances of getting an answer at this point were considerably slimmer than Colin Sellers.

  ‘Sellers, you check out the Twickenham address,’ said Simon, his eyes darting back and forth as he pieced together the story in his mind. ‘If you find Ray Hines there, don’t let her out of your sight.’

  21

  Monday 12 October 2009

  ‘He suspected me from the first time the police came to the house,’ Ray says to the camera. I nod, willing her to carry on, to tell me as much as she can before Angus joins us. I’m afraid she won’t be quite so open once he’s listening. ‘He changed towards me, became horribly cold and remote, but at the same time he wouldn’t let me out of his sight. He moved into one of the many spare rooms we’d at one point hoped to fill with children . . .’ She stops. ‘You know we wanted to have lots?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Angus is one of six. We wanted at least four.’ She falls silent.

  ‘He wouldn’t let you out of his sight,’ I say, prompting her.

  ‘He . . . monitored me. It was as if someone had asked him to spy on my every move and report back. In my most paranoid moments, I wondered if that might be the case. It wasn’t, of course. The police would have assumed – did assume, in fact – that Angus and I would stick together. He was watching me closely for his own purposes, no one else’s. He was trying to gather evidence of my guilt or innocence.’

  ‘He didn’t believe Marcella and Nathaniel reacted badly to the vaccine?’

  Ray shakes her head. ‘I don’t blame him. All the experts tell you vaccines are safe, and he wasn’t there when both children had fits. Only Wendy and I saw what happened. For all Angus knew, I was a murderer who’d persuaded Wendy to lie.’

  ‘You were his wife,’ I remind her. ‘He should have known you wouldn’t kill your children.’

  ‘Maybe he would have, if it hadn’t been for the zombie-like depression I faked in order to go to Switzerland with Fiona. That made him doubt everything he thought he knew about me. I can’t blame him for that – it was my fault. I didn’t blame him even then, but—’ She breaks off, eyeing the ceiling as if afraid he might burst through it at any moment. She can’t be frightened of him, not if she’s planning to marry him again.

  ‘I quickly became terrified of him,’ she says. ‘He wouldn’t talk to me – that was the scariest thing. I kept asking if he thought I’d killed Marcella and Nathaniel, and he wouldn’t answer. All he ever said was, “Only you know what you’ve done, Ray.” He was so blank, so horrendously . . . calm. I couldn’t believe how composed he was when our lives were falling apart – me charged with murder, maybe going to prison. Looking back, I think he had a breakdown. I’m sure it was that. People never tell you it’s possible to go mad in a quiet, orderly way, but it is. That’s what happened to Angus. He didn’t think he’d broken down with grief, he thought he was in full possession of his faculties and responding in the only rational way: I’m accused of murder, so it’s his job to watch me and record my behaviour in order to ascertain whether there’s any factual basis to the accusation – that’s how he’d have put it to himself, I’m sure.’

  ‘When you say “record” . . . You mean he wrote it down?’

  ‘Eventually I got desperate, when he point blank refused to communicate with me. I searched the room he was sleeping in and found all this . . . terrible stuff in one of the drawers: a notebook describing my behaviour, reams and reams of articles he’d downloaded from the internet about the importance of vaccination and the corrupt self-publicists who claim the jabs are dangerous . . .’

  ‘What did he write about you in the notebook?’ I ask.

  ‘Oh, nothing interesting. “Breakfast 8 a.m.: one weetabix. Sits on sofa crying, one hour.” That sort of thing. I didn’t do anything much at that point in my life, apart from cry, answer the police’s endless questions and try to talk to Angus. One day, when I couldn’t take his staring silence any more, I said to him, “If a jury finds me innocent, will that convince you I’m telling the truth?” He laughed so horribly . . .’ She shudders. ‘I’ll never forget that laugh.’

  And yet you’re willing to marry him for a second time.

  ‘He said, “You seriously expect me to base my opinion on the views of twelve strangers, most of whom probably aren’t educated? Do you think Marcella and Nathaniel meant that little to me?” I completely lost it, then. I screamed at him that he’d never know, in that case, if he wouldn’t believe me and wouldn’t believe a jury. He very calmly told me I was wrong. One day, he said, he would know. “How?” I asked, but he wouldn’t tell me. He walked away. Every time I asked him that question, he turned his back on me.’ Ray pinches the top of her nose, then moves her hand as if she’s suddenly remembered the camera. ‘That’s why I lied in court,’ she tells it. ‘That’s why I started being as inconsistent as I could, contradicting myself whenever I could. I didn’t know what Angus’s plan was, but I knew he had one, and that I had to escape from him and . . . whatever he intended to do to me.’

  I nod. I know all about needing to escape from Angus Hines. Turning round, finding him right behind me in the doorway of my flat . . .

  Where is he? What’s he doing upstairs that’s taking so long?

  ‘I couldn’t bear another day with him,’ says Ray. ‘He’d become this terrifying . . . thing, not my husband at all, not the man I loved. Prison would be nothing compared to the horror of living with that any longer – at least in prison no one would try to kill me, and that’s what I became increasingly certain Angus would do. That was how insane he seemed.’

  ‘You lied so that the jury would think you were untrustworthy.’

  ‘So that they’d dismiss me as a liar, yes. I knew that once they thought that, a guilty verdict was a done deal. You have to understand, I didn’t care where I lived. I’d already lost everything: my husband, my two children. And my home – it was worse than hell. I couldn’t breathe there, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat. Prison would be a welcome relief, I thought. And it was. It really was. I wasn’t scared all the time, or under surveillance. I was able to sp
end my time doing the only thing I wanted to do: thinking about Marcella and Nathaniel in peace. Missing them in peace.’

  ‘But you made the world believe you’d murdered them. Didn’t that bother you?’

  Ray gives me an odd look, as if I’ve made a freakish suggestion. ‘Why would it? I knew the truth. And the only three people whose opinions would have mattered to me were gone. Marcella and Nathaniel were dead, and the Angus I loved . . . I felt as if he’d died with them.’

  ‘So after you found Nathaniel, when you said you let the health visitor in immediately . . .’

  ‘I knew perfectly well that I didn’t. I made her wait on the doorstep for at least ten minutes, exactly as she said in court.’

  ‘Why?’

  She doesn’t answer straight away. When she speaks, it’s a whisper, ‘Nathaniel was dead. I knew the health visitor would see that as soon as she came in. I knew she’d say it out loud. I didn’t want him to be dead. The longer she waited outside, the longer I could pretend.’

  ‘Do you want to take a break?’ I ask.

  ‘No. Thanks, but I’ll carry on.’ She leans into the camera. ‘Angus will be down in a minute. I’m hoping that talking about what happened will be the beginning of his recovery. I had therapy in prison, but Angus has never opened up to anyone. He’s never been ready before, but he is now. That’s why this documentary’s so important – not only as a way of telling and explaining . . .’ She covers her stomach with her hands.

  The baby. That’s who Ray wants to talk to – not me, not the viewing public. Her child. The film is her gift to the baby: the family story.

  ‘Angus lied, too,’ says Ray. ‘When I was found guilty, he told the press that he’d made a decision before the verdict came in: he would believe the jury whatever they said, guilty or innocent. I knew that was a lie, and Angus knew I knew it. He was mocking me from a distance, reminding me of his scorn for the inadequately educated jury and his promise that one day he would find out if I was guilty or not through his own efforts. He knew I’d understand the hidden message behind his official words. For as long as I stayed in prison, though, he couldn’t get to me.’

  ‘Did he visit you?’

  ‘I refused to see him. I was so scared of him that when Laurie Nattrass and Helen Yardley first took an interest in me, I wished they’d leave me alone. It took a lot of therapy to persuade me that since I wasn’t a murderer, I probably shouldn’t be in jail.’

  ‘If you wanted to guarantee you’d go to prison and stay there, why didn’t you plead guilty?’

  ‘Because I was innocent.’ She sighs. ‘As long as I said clearly that I hadn’t killed Marcella and Nathaniel, I wasn’t letting them down. People had the option of believing me. If I’d said I’d done it, I would have been betraying their memories by pretending there had been a moment when I’d wanted each of them to die. I didn’t mind lying about other things, but I couldn’t have stood in court and said under oath that I’d wanted my beloved children dead. Besides, a guilty plea would have been counterproductive. It would have netted me a lighter sentence, maybe even a lesser charge – manslaughter instead of murder. I might have been out in five years – less, for all I know – and then I’d have had to face Angus.’

  ‘But when you did get out, after you’d left the urn picture hotel, you went back to him, to Notting Hill. Weren’t you still scared of him?’

  She nods. ‘But I was more frightened of living the rest of my life in terror. Whatever Angus had in store for me, I wanted it over with. When he opened the door to let me in, I honestly thought I might never leave that house alive again.’

  ‘You thought he’d kill you, and you still went to him?’

  ‘I loved him.’ She shrugs. ‘Or rather, I had loved him, and I still loved the person he used to be. And he needed me. He’d gone mad, so mad that he didn’t realise how much he needed me, but I knew. I’m the only person in the world who loved Marcella and Nathaniel as much as Angus did – how could he not need me? But, yes, I thought he might kill me. What he’d said to me kept going round in my head: that one day he would find out whether I was guilty or not. How could he find out, if he wouldn’t believe me or a jury? The only thing I could think of was that he would let me know I was about to die, that there was no way out. Maybe then I’d finally confess, if there was anything to confess to. Maybe he planned to torture me, or . . .’ She shakes her head. ‘You think all sorts of terrible things, but I had to find out. I had to know what he was planning to do.’

  ‘And? Did he try to kill you?’

  The door opens. ‘No, I didn’t,’ says Angus.

  ‘He didn’t,’ Ray echoes. ‘Which was lucky for me, because if he’d tried, he’d have succeeded.’

  No. That’s the wrong answer. He did try to kill her. He must have, because . . . Something clicks in my mind: the cards. The sixteen numbers. And the photographs, Helen Yardley’s hand . . .

  I turn to Angus. ‘Sit next to Ray and look at the camera when you’re talking, not at me,’ I tell him. ‘Why did you email me those lists – all the people Judith Duffy testified against in the criminal and family courts?’

  He frowns, unhappy with the leap from one subject to another. ‘I thought we were talking about what happened when Ray came home?’

  ‘We will, but first I want you to explain why you sent me those lists. To the camera, please.’

  He looks at Ray, who nods. I see that she’s right: he does need her. ‘I thought you’d find it useful to see how many people Judith Duffy had accused of deliberately harming or killing children,’ he says.

  ‘Why? Why would that be useful to me?’

  Angus stares at the camera.

  ‘You don’t want to tell me. You think I ought to be capable of working it out. Well, I’m sorry, but I’m not capable.’

  ‘Isn’t it obvious?’ he asks.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Tell her, Angus.’

  ‘I assume you know the catchphrase Judith Duffy was famous for: “so unlikely, it borders on impossible”?’

  I tell him I do.

  ‘Do you know what she was talking about when she said it?’

  ‘The odds of there being two crib deaths in one family.’

  ‘No, that’s a popular misconception.’ He looks pleased to be able to contradict me. My heart’s thudding so hard, I’m surprised the camera’s not shaking. ‘That’s what people think she meant, but she told Ray otherwise. She wasn’t talking about general principles, but about two specific cases – Morgan and Rowan Yardley – and the likelihood that they died naturally, given the physical evidence in both cases.’

  ‘Are you going to tell me why you sent me those lists?’ I ask.

  ‘I’ve got my own likelihood principle, which I’ll happily explain to you,’ says Angus. ‘If Judith Duffy testifies that Ray’s a murderer, and Ray denies it, what are the odds of Duffy being right?’

  I think about this. ‘I’ve no idea,’ I say honestly. ‘Assuming Duffy’s an unbiased expert, and that Ray might have a strong motivation to say she was innocent even if she wasn’t . . .’

  ‘No, leave that out of it,’ says Angus impatiently. ‘Don’t think about motivation, impartiality, expertise – none of those things can be scientifically measured. I’m talking about pure probability. In fact, let’s not use Ray and Duffy – let’s make it more abstract. A doctor accuses a woman of smothering her baby. The woman says she didn’t do it. There are no witnesses. What are the odds of the doctor being right?’

  ‘Fifty-fifty?’ I guess.

  ‘Right. So the doctor, in that scenario, might be totally and completely correct in her judgement, or she might be totally, utterly wrong. She can’t be a bit right and a bit wrong, can she?’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘The woman either did or didn’t murder her child.’

  ‘Good.’ Angus nods. ‘Now, let’s up the numbers a bit. A doctor – the same doctor – accuses three women of murdering babies. All three women say they’re innocent.’


  Ray, Helen Yardley and Sarah Jaggard.

  ‘What are the odds of all three of them being guilty? Still fifty-fifty?’

  God, I hated Maths at school. I remember rolling my eyes when we did quadratic equations: Yeah, like we’re really going to need this skill in later life. My teacher, Mrs Gilpin, said, ‘Numerical agility will help you in ways you can’t possibly imagine, Felicity.’ Looks like she was right. ‘If, in each case, the probability of the doctor being right is fifty-fifty, then the chance of her being right in all three cases would . . . still be fifty-fifty, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘No,’ says Angus, as if he can’t believe my stupidity. ‘There’s only a one in eight chance of the doctor being right, or wrong, in all three cases.’ Ray and I watch as he pulls a crumpled receipt and a pen out of his jacket pocket and starts to write, leaning on his knee. ‘G stands for guilty, I for innocent,’ he says, handing me the receipt once he’s finished.

  I look at what he’s written.

  ‘You see?’ he says. ‘There’s a one in eight chance of the doctor being right in all three cases, and a one in eight chance of her being wrong in all three cases. Now, imagine there are a thousand such cases . . .’

  ‘I see what you’re getting at,’ I say. ‘The more cases there are of Judith Duffy saying women are guilty and them protesting their innocence, the more likely she is to be right sometimes and wrong sometimes.’ That’s why, in your email, you also made sure to tell me that on twenty-three occasions, Judith Duffy testified in favour of a parent. Sometimes she’s for, sometimes she’s against – that was your point. Sometimes she’s right, sometimes she’s wrong. In other words, Laurie’s portrayal of her as a persecutor of innocent mothers is a flat-out lie.

  ‘Precisely.’ Angus rewards me with a smile. ‘The more wrongly accused innocent women Laurie Nattrass pulls out of his hat, so-called victims of Duffy’s alleged desire to ruin lives, the more likely at least some of them are to be guilty. I have no trouble believing in a miscarriage of justice, or that a doctor can get it wrong. But to expect people to believe in an endless string of miscarriage-of-justice victims, in a doctor who gets it wrong every single time . . .’