by Peter Murphy
‘Let’s contact Phillips, then,’ Ginny said. ‘Singer may have the ear of the police at Ely or St Ives, but I find it hard to believe that he’s going to have much clout in Cambridge – certainly not in a case like this.’
‘One would hope not,’ Ben replied. ‘But just in case, let’s get Scotland Yard involved too, just to make sure that we can snuff out any local interference before it even starts.’
‘How will you do that?’ Julia asked.
‘I’ll talk to Andrew Pilkington,’ Ben replied. ‘Andrew is senior Treasury counsel, one of the prosecutors at the Old Bailey. Andrew can talk to the Director of Public Prosecutions, and the Director can make sure that the Yard gets involved.’
He took a deep breath.
‘There’s a way to do this, Audrey. It’s not going to be easy, and none of us is going to pretend otherwise. But if you want justice for yourself and Emily, it’s something you’re going to have to face up to. What you and Ken have to decide is whether you can live with what you know if you don’t come forward. Remember, this is for Emily too, not just yourself.’
‘And for many, many others,’ Ginny added, ‘including those Father Gerrard is allowing to be abused even now, as we speak.’
Audrey and Ken looked at each other for some time.
‘We’ve come too far to go back now,’ Ken said.
‘Yes, I know,’ Audrey replied. ‘I just want to make sure Emily is all right.’
5
‘So: what about names?’ Ben asked.
Julia opened her briefcase and took out a number of documents. She laid them out in front of her on the table.
‘Do you want to start with the girls, or the men?’
‘Let’s start with the girls.’
‘Girls, it is. Obviously, Emily’s case is easier, because it’s so recent and she remembers everything. Emily told Audrey that it had happened to four or five girls she knew, but we haven’t spoken to anyone as yet. We didn’t want to throw the cat in among the pigeons until we had our strategy in place. Once we approach her school friends or their parents, there’s likely to be pandemonium, and we need to be prepared.’
‘We shouldn’t approach them,’ Ben said. ‘We should leave that to the police.’
Julia nodded. ‘All right. Here’s Emily’s list of names.’ She handed a sheet of paper to Ginny. ‘And this,’ handing her another sheet, ‘is Audrey’s list, going back to her time at school. And, of course, this is where we enter the world of recovered memory.’
‘Father Gerrard was always very careful,’ Audrey said. ‘He would leave it until about eight thirty to nine o’clock, when there would only be one member of staff on night duty. What I remember is: he never came for more than one girl at any given time, so I was taken on my own, or another girl was taken on her own, and we only ever knew for sure if she spoke about it later. Often, we didn’t talk about it. Most of the time, we just went straight back to bed and cried our eyes out. That’s a general impression. I can’t remember specifically everyone I talked to. I know I would have told Joan and my best friend, Mary Forbes.’
‘Where were you taken to?’ Ben asked. ‘And where from?’
‘Father Gerrard would come to our dorm. It started not long after I got to the school, so I was seven. All the sleeping accommodation was upstairs, on the fifth and sixth floors. At that age, we slept in dorms of twelve girls. When you got older, fourteen or fifteen, you shared a bedroom and study with one other girl, but until then it was always dorms of twelve. Father Gerrard would take you downstairs to a room next to his study, and that’s where the men would be waiting for you.’
‘What kind of room was it?’ Ginny asked.
‘As I understand it now, from having seen plans of the school we keep at work, it’s his private library. It’s a room you would never normally see as a pupil. You might go into his study, but there’d be no reason to go into his library. It was like something from a gentleman’s club in Pall Mall, you know, with book cases all around the walls, filled with old books and busts of God knows what Greek philosophers and what-have-you, and a long cherry-wood table in the middle of the room and heavy red leather armchairs. I remember, there was always a smell of tobacco, cigars or a pipe.’
‘So, you do remember some of the other girls who were taken?’ Ginny asked.
‘I gave Julia that list you have, with five names.’
‘These are girls who told you they’d been taken?’
‘That’s what I remember now. The girls I knew from the East End went back to London once the Blitz died down. There were two girls from that group I know it happened to, but they got out pretty quickly. I’ve included their names, but even if they remember, I’m not sure they would want to talk about it.’
Ben scanned the list. ‘So, Betty Friedman and Sylvia Marks were the two from the East End?’
‘Yes. They’re both in London still. Betty’s married to a furniture importer and she’s still living in the East End. Sylvia married a stockbroker and they live in Islington, or they did when I last heard from her.’
‘And the other three?’
‘Jenny Hamilton, I added to the list because I have a memory of her. But she died a year or two ago, from cancer of some kind. Mary Forbes was a good friend to me. Her parents were well off, from the Guildford area, but they weren’t snobbish at all. Joan and I spent several school holidays with them. Mary became a solicitor, and married an international lawyer, a Canadian. They live in Toronto. Then lastly, there’s Alice Hargreaves. I’m not sure where she is now. I heard she’d gone travelling after she left university. There was talk three or four years ago that she’d come back and settled in some remote corner of Ireland. But…’
‘We will find her if we need her,’ Julia said in a matter-of-fact tone. ‘Those are the only girls you have specific memories of?’
‘Yes. Of course, the school would have a complete record of all the girls who were there in my time, and they will have contact information for most of them. The school relies heavily on old girls and boys, and their families, to fund its endowments and scholarships, so they’re pretty keen on keeping in touch with us. They pester us to update our contact details all the time.’
‘That would be one strategy,’ Ginny said. ‘To approach all of them and ask them point blank whether they were ever taken to the private library. I bet we’d get a good response.’
‘Again,’ Ben replied, ‘I think we have to let the police do all that. This has to be an official investigation, with the police in charge, not us. I don’t want it to look as though we’re trawling for victims. With any luck these women will find us, or the police, without our having to approach them.’ He replaced the list on the table. ‘What about the men?’
Julia delved into her briefcase again. ‘You’re going to love this.’
She took out a number of newspaper clippings, and handed them to Ben, who perused them in silence, with Ginny looking on over his shoulder. It was some time before anyone spoke.
‘You took these clippings after your memory returned?’ Ginny asked.
‘Yes. As soon as I saw their pictures in The Times, I recognised them as men I’d seen in his library – men Father Gerrard invited there to molest me.’
‘Thirty or more years ago,’ Ben observed quietly.
‘I remember them as they were, Mr Schroeder,’ Audrey insisted. ‘They haven’t changed that much. I’d know them again anywhere.’
‘She reacted instantly, Mr Schroeder,’ Ken confirmed, ‘as soon as she turned to the page and saw them. She must have seen these men hundreds of times – they’re in the papers and on TV all the time, aren’t they? You see them every day. But she’d never reacted to them like that before her memory returned: never. But she did once the memories came back, believe you me. She screamed and jumped right out of her chair. She looked like she’d seen a ghost.’
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bsp; Ben nodded. ‘That’s exactly what will worry a judge or jury,’ he replied.
‘These men are public figures, Ben,’ Julia pointed out. ‘Why pick on these three? If Audrey intended to pick names out of a hat, or out of The Times, what guarantee would she have that they don’t have cast-iron alibis?’
‘I’m not suggesting that you’re making anything up, Audrey,’ Ben said. ‘Please understand that. I’m playing devil’s advocate.’
‘I know,’ Audrey replied.
‘And as devil’s advocate, I would point out that it’s difficult to produce an alibi if all you’re told is that you’re accused of having done something some time in 1940, by someone who saw your face in a newspaper more than thirty years later – an image she’d seen many times in the intervening years, and said nothing.’
‘That’s not fair…’ Ken began.
‘Yes, it is,’ Audrey replied, cutting him off. ‘That’s what they’re going to say, and we may as well face up to it now.’
There was a long silence.
‘So now you know what I was referring to when I said we would be ruffling some influential feathers,’ Julia said, at length.
‘One member of the House of Lords; one former cabinet minister, still an MP; and one…?’ Ben concluded inquiringly.
‘Retired bishop, currently serving as Master of an Oxford college,’ Julia replied.
‘I don’t suppose any of them were still getting up to their tricks with Emily?’ Ginny asked. ‘We couldn’t be that lucky, could we?’
‘Emily says the men wear masks now,’ Julia replied. ‘Apparently, they’ve got more self-conscious over the years.’
‘It wouldn’t help anyway, would it, if they were the same men?’ Audrey said. ‘That would just give me more motive for identifying them, wouldn’t it?’
Ben smiled grimly. ‘You’re developing a good instinct for how this works.’
‘I’m developing a bad case of paranoia – and a bad case of cynicism,’ she replied.
6
Audrey Marshall
Finding my sister hanging there from the staircase of the house in which I thought we were happy was a moment of utter devastation. I never saw the scene of my parents’ death, the bombed-out ruins of the other house in which I’d been happy. I found out about their death in a detached setting, when Father Gerrard called Joan and me into his study, with Matron in attendance weeping into her handkerchief, and told us that we were now orphans, in much the same tone he used to read out the daily notices in morning assembly. It was a moment of fear and bewilderment and wondering what would become of us in the world. But at least I didn’t have to see the results of the Luftwaffe’s work up close, and I still had Joan.
Now I had to see the results of her desperation for myself, and I no longer had anyone. She had asphyxiated, the procurator fiscal explained, in the course of reporting that Joan had committed suicide while the balance of her mind was disturbed. No further enquiry into her death was necessary, he concluded. It would have taken her some time to die, because she’d positioned the knot to the right of her jaw, causing it to move down to her throat and effectively strangle her; instead of to the left, from where the knot would have turned up behind the back of her neck, causing an immediately fatal fracture of the second and third vertebrae and severance of the spinal cord – a technical nicety, the procurator fiscal added thoughtfully, well known to public executioners. As it was, the effects of her death struggle were obvious. I have often wondered whether, once she knew she had passed the point of no return, she regretted what she was doing; and would have given everything she had for a second chance; and whether she would have liked to talk to me once more, to tell me why she thought she had to leave me, to give me the chance of talking her out of it. ‘I’m sorry, Audrey. I wanted to stop it, but I couldn’t.’ Stop what? Was the balance of her mind disturbed, or had she finally found the balance of her mind again? She couldn’t tell me now.
I remember that, on discovering her body and the note she had left, I sat down on the top stair, staring helplessly at her and at the note in turn, finding it all completely inexplicable. It was almost an hour before I stood up again, strangely calm by then, in the way that only people devoid of all consciousness of hope are calm, and made my way downstairs, almost as an afterthought, to tell anyone who might for any reason be interested in the information that my sister was hanging from the staircase on the attic floor upstairs.
I remember very little about the ensuing weeks. I think they kept me sedated for at least three or four days, the first two in hospital, the second two back at home with a nurse at my bedside day and night. After that, with the procurator fiscal’s investigation pending, they allowed me, still under supervision and medicated, to go through her things and decide what I wanted to keep and what could be donated to some charitable cause. Eventually the supervision stopped and I was left with a supply of a tranquilising drug, my discretion whether to take it or not. After the procurator fiscal had presented his report, I returned in my mind – a police officer had seized it as evidence and had to retain it for some period of time – to her note. ‘I’m sorry, Audrey. I wanted to stop it, but I couldn’t.’ Stop what, Joan, for God’s sake, stop what? Was there some scandal at work I didn’t know about? Had you got yourself involved with drugs? Surely I would have noticed? Your boyfriend didn’t impregnate you or pass on some terrible disease – the procurator fiscal would have explained that as helpfully as he had explained the mechanics of an efficient hanging. What in God’s name brought you to this? What in God’s name was too terrible for you to confide in me: in your sister who had shared the experience of being orphaned and exiled from the home we had loved; in your sister who, after we had survived those irreversible losses, had chosen to make a home and a new life with you in Edinburgh? In God’s name, Joan, what is it you couldn’t tell me?
Two weeks after the inquiry was complete, I returned to work. The staff at the bank were incredibly kind to me. They never once hurried me, or even hinted that my job depended on my coming back by a given date. They were genuinely sad to lose Joan, and within a month of my return I was asked to move up to her job as a senior administrator. Out of gratitude and loyalty I would have liked to accept: but everything about the place, everything about Edinburgh, reminded me of Joan; there was no respite, and I knew I couldn’t move on while I stayed there.
Matron, from school, to whom I had reported Joan’s death and who must have been reading my mind, sent me by post, special delivery, an advertisement taken from the Cambridge News. The diocese of Ely urgently needed to fill a vacancy for a deputy to work alongside the diocesan administrator: experience of administrative responsibility highly desirable, but willingness to learn and the ability to work efficiently without supervision more important; prior knowledge of church affairs not essential; salary commensurate with experience. I applied at once, enclosing an embarrassingly effusive reference from my manager at RBS. The diocese paid for my travel south for an interview with the administrator, Bill Hollis, who became my boss, and the diocesan solicitor, John Singer. They offered me the job without even asking me to leave the room, and I accepted similarly.
Two weeks after that, I said a tearful goodbye to Edinburgh and to my friends at the bank, and to my friends from university who were still in the city; and for the second time in my life, made a life-changing journey to Cambridgeshire. It was 1958. I was approaching the age of twenty-five.
7
I met Ken at a reception given by the bishop after a service in the cathedral. Like me, he was a university graduate who had fallen in love with the setting and atmosphere of his university, and so had never wanted to leave the Cambridge area. After graduating with a law degree he qualified as a solicitor, and set up on his own in practice in Ely. He was doing well by the time I met him in 1960, and was a generous benefactor of the diocese; and after our first meeting, we ran into each other on a reg
ular basis.
There had been an immediate attraction between us, but it was some time before I agreed to go out with him on our own for an evening. It was an area of my life that wasn’t working, and I was scared. There had been no opportunity for dating while I was still at Lancelot Andrewes. There were known instances of boys and girls defying the rigidly enforced apartheid between the boys’ school and girls’ school: romances happened, and one or two girls even managed to get pregnant during the years I was there. But to say that fraternisation was frowned on would be an understatement: as often as not it resulted in, at least an extended suspension, and in some cases expulsion from school; and I had nowhere else to go. In any case, I never had sufficient interest in any of the boys to consider battling against such overwhelming odds to pursue him.
That changed when I became a student at Edinburgh. I wasn’t exactly making up for lost time, but like my contemporaries I began to go out with boys I met in class or at social gatherings, and everything seemed to be going normally: until Alistair. Alistair was a year ahead of me, reading medicine. He was handsome and sporty, and I really fancied him. One evening when we knew each other pretty well, I went back to his place with him after a few drinks. We started kissing, and one thing led to another, and suddenly there I was: naked on a bed with a naked man. Oddly enough, perhaps because of the drink, I didn’t feel unduly nervous. We lay down together and kissed using tongues, and I took his cock in my hand as if I’d been doing it all my life, and stroked him until he started to get hard. Then – and it was really the most natural thing in the world – he put his hand on my knee and very gradually moved it up my leg and thigh until he was ruffling my pubic hairs. At which point my legs, in fact my entire body below my waist, seemed to freeze. I started to say something, but before I could, two of his fingers ventured very gently just inside me. I felt a moment of intense excitement, but then, without any conscious decision on my part, I remember my cunt snapping shut as if someone had slammed the door of a vault, and I remember pulling his hand away quite roughly, and saying no.