A Room Swept White (19 page)

Laurie stands up. ‘Anything else, before you leave?’

He’s kicking me out for having the wrong opinion
. Or maybe he would have kicked me out anyway.

‘Yes,’ I say, determined to show I’m not intimidated by him. For an insane second, I consider telling him I’m speaking from personal experience, the worst experience of my life. No one can be objective about the culpability of a loved one. It’s simply not possible. I have days when I think my dad must have been corrupt through and through – evil, almost – and days when I think he deserves no blame at all, and miss him so much I feel I might as well be dead too.

‘I didn’t like the bit in the article about Benjamin Evans’ mum being a single mother and a prostitute,’ I say eventually. ‘You seemed to be suggesting that those two things made her more likely than Dorne Llewellyn to have shaken—’

‘You read an out of date version,’ Laurie cuts me off. ‘Editor of the
British Journalism Review
agreed with you, so I took that bit out. I’ll email you a copy of the sanitised version, in which I don’t mention that Rhiannon Evans is a hooker who sings Judith Duffy’s praises at every available opportunity and is keen for Dorne Llewellyn to stay in prison for the rest of her life.’

‘Don’t be angry with me, Laurie.’

He snorts dismissively. ‘Do you know how easily your job could disappear? Carry on pursuing Judith Duffy and that’s what’ll happen. If you think I’m going to stand by and let you and her use my film as a vehicle for airing her distorted—’

‘I’m not going to do anything like that,’ I yell at him. ‘I want to talk to her, that’s all. I’m not saying you’re wrong about her. She’s the bad guy – fair enough. But I need to know what sort of bad guy she is if I’m making a documentary about the damage she’s done. Is she well intentioned but prejudiced? Stupid? Is she an out-and-out liar?’

‘Yes! Yes, she’s an out-and-out fucking liar who destroys people. Will you stay away from her? This is the last time I’m going to ask you.’

Is he really so intolerant that he wants no point of view heard but his own? Is he worried about me? If so, might that mean he loves me?

Felicity Benson, how can you not despise yourself
?

I didn’t mean it. I’ve got a whole self-mockery thing going on here that’s way more sophisticated than unrequited love
.

I’d give anything to be able to tell Laurie what he wants to hear so that we could both be happy, but I can’t bring myself to be a compliant idiot simply because it would please him. If I’m making this film, and it seems I am, I want to do it in the way I think it should be done.

‘I’ve just worked it out,’ I say. ‘Why I love you. It’s because we’ve got so much in common. We both treat me as if I don’t matter, as if I’m nothing.’ Not any more, I vow. From now on, I’m not nothing.

‘
Love
?’ says Laurie, in the way a normal, civilised person might say ‘Genocide?’ or ‘Necrophilia?’: shocked and appalled.

I pick up my bag and leave without another word.

Outside, I hail a taxi and take a while to remember my own address. Once I’m moving, and breathing again, I switch on my phone and see that I have two new messages. The first is a text from Tamsin. ‘You big, big, big, BIG eejit!’ it says. The second is a voicemail message from a Detective Constable Simon Waterhouse.

8

8/10/09

Sam Kombothekra didn’t like the way Grace and Sebastian Brownlee were holding hands. It wasn’t suggestive of tenderness, but rather of taking a defiant stand against the enemy. They looked like two people about to charge into battle together.

‘Gunpowder residue,’ said Grace, her voice full of disbelief. Sam would have bet good money on this being the first time the phrase had been uttered beneath these high corniced ceilings. The Brownlees evidently believed that a period house ought to be filled with period furniture, and the sort of tastefully patterned wallpaper a bona fide Georgian might have chosen, as if the present era could be banished if one tried hard enough.

Paige Yardley’s adoptive mother was a small slender woman with mid-brown hair cut in a neat bob. Her husband was tall and balding on top, with wild gingery-blond tufts above his ears that suggested he was unwilling to lose any more hair than he absolutely had to. He and his wife worked for the same law firm in Rawndesley, which was how they’d met, they’d told Sam. Sebastian Brownlee had mentioned twice so far that he’d had to finish work three hours earlier than he normally would in order to get home for this meeting. Both he and Grace were still wearing their work suits.

‘You’re not suspected of anything,’ Sam reassured Grace. ‘It’s routine. We’re asking everyone who knew Helen Yardley.’

‘We didn’t know her,’ said Sebastian. ‘We never met the woman.’

‘I realise that, sir. Nevertheless, you and your wife are in a unique position in relation to her.’

‘We consent,’ said Grace in a clipped voice. ‘Take your swabs, do whatever you need to, and get it over with. I’d rather not see you here again.’ An odd way to put it, Sam thought. As if she might come down to breakfast one morning and find him sitting at her kitchen table. Come to think of it, the Brownlees seemed the type who might insist on taking all their meals in a formal dining room.

Sam had no reason to suspect them of anything. They had given him a full account of their movements on Monday. Together with their thirteen-year-old daughter, Hannah – the girl Sam couldn’t help thinking of as Paige Yardley – they had left the house at 7 a.m. At 7.10, they had dropped Hannah off at the home of her best friend, whose mother gave the two girls breakfast and drove them to school on weekday mornings. Sebastian and Grace had then driven straight to their firm’s office in Rawndesley, arriving there as always at about 7.50. After that, Sebastian had either been in the office or out at meetings with clients for the rest of the day. ‘You’re in luck,’ he’d told Sam. ‘Fee-earning solicitors like us have to make a note of how we spend every minute of our time, so that the right people can be billed.’ He’d promised Sam copies of his and Grace’s time-sheets for Monday, and contact numbers for all the people in whose company they had spent any of those individually itemised minutes.

Grace, who worked part time, had left the office at 2.30 p.m. and gone to pick up Hannah and her best friend from school, as she did every weekday. She and the two girls had then gone swimming at the private health club, Waterfront, to which both the Brownlees and the friend’s family belonged. Grace had been able to give Sam the names and numbers of several acquaintances of hers who had seen her either in the swimming area or having a drink and a snack in Chompers café-bar with the girls afterwards. After leaving Waterfront, Grace drove Hannah’s friend home, and she and Hannah got back to their house at 6.15 p.m. Sebastian Brownlee arrived home at 10, having eaten dinner with clients in Rawndesley.

Sam was certain everything the couple had told him would hold up. What was bothering him, then, if it wasn’t that he thought they were lying? ‘What time will Hannah be back?’ he asked. There were framed photographs of her all over the living room wall. In Sam’s experience, this many pictures of the same person in one room and no pictures of anyone or anything else could mean one of two things: a stalker with a dangerous obsession, or an adoring parent.
Or two adoring parents
.

Hannah Brownlee had glossy centre-parted brown hair, wide grey eyes and a small nose. She had Helen Yardley’s face, only a younger version.

‘You’re not swabbing my daughter for gunpowder residue,’ said Grace Brownlee angrily.

‘That wasn’t what I—’ Sam began.

‘I took her to my mother’s house because I knew you were coming. I didn’t want her involved. Tell him, Sebastian,’ she snapped. ‘Let’s not prolong the agony.’

‘Hannah knows a local woman was murdered. People have been talking about it at school and it’s been on the news, we
could hardly keep it from her, but . . .’ Sebastian glanced at his wife. She responded with a look that made it clear she wasn’t going to help him out, so he turned back to Sam. ‘Hannah has no idea Helen Yardley was her birth mother.’

‘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 postmortem 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.’