A Room Swept White (2 page)

www.telegraph.co.uk
, Wednesday 7 October 2009, 0922 GMT report by Rahila Yunis

Wrongly Convicted Mother Found Dead at Home

Helen Yardley, the Culver Valley childminder wrongly convicted of murdering her two baby sons, was found dead on Monday at her home in Spilling. Mrs Yardley, 38, was found by her husband Paul, a roofer aged 40, when he returned from work early in the evening. The death is being treated as ‘suspicious’. Superintendent Roger Barrow of Culver Valley Police said: ‘Our inquiries are ongoing, and the investigation is still at an early stage, but Mrs Yardley’s family and the public can be assured that we are putting every possible resource into this. Helen and Paul Yardley have already endured intolerable anguish. It is vital that we handle this tragedy discreetly and efficiently.’

Mrs Yardley was convicted in November 1996 of the murders of her sons Morgan, in 1992, and Rowan, in 1995. The boys died aged 14 weeks and 16 weeks. Mrs Yardley was found guilty by a majority verdict of 11 to one and given two life sentences. In June 1996, while at home on bail awaiting trial, Mrs Yardley gave birth to a daughter, Paige, who was placed with a foster family and subsequently adopted. Interviewed in October 1997 on the day that he heard the family court’s decision, Paul Yardley said: ‘To say that Helen and I are devastated is an understatement. Having lost two babies to cot death, we have now lost our precious daughter to a system that persecutes grieving families by stealing their
children. Who are these monsters that decide to tear up the lives of innocent, law-abiding people? They don’t care about us, or about the truth.’

In 2004, the Criminal Cases Review Commission, which reviews possible miscarriages of justice, referred Mrs Yardley’s case to the appeal court after campaigners raised doubts about the integrity of Dr Judith Duffy, one of the expert witnesses at the trial. In February 2005, Mrs Yardley was released after three judges in the court of appeal quashed her convictions. She had always maintained her innocence. Her husband had stood by her throughout her ordeal, working ‘20 hours a day, every day’, according to a source close to the family, to clear his wife’s name. He was helped by relatives, friends, and many parents whose children Mrs Yardley had looked after.

Journalist and writer Gaynor Mundy, 43, who collaborated with Mrs Yardley on her 2007 memoir
Nothing But Love
, said: ‘Everyone who knew Helen knew she was innocent. She was a kind, gentle, sweet person who could never harm anyone.’

TV producer and journalist Laurie Nattrass played a major role in the campaign to free Mrs Yardley. Last night he said: ‘I can’t put into words the sadness and anger I feel. Helen might have died yesterday, but her life was taken from her 13 years ago, when she was found guilty of crimes she didn’t commit, the murders of her two beloved sons. Dissatisfied with the torture it had already inflicted, the state then robbed Helen of her future by kidnapping – and there’s no other word for it – her only surviving child.’

Nattrass, 45, Creative Director of Binary Star, a Soho-based media company, has won many awards for his documentaries about miscarriages of justice. He said, ‘For the past seven
years, 90 per cent of my time has been spent campaigning for women like Helen, trying to find out what went so dreadfully wrong in so many cases.’

Mr Nattrass first met Mrs Yardley when he visited her in Geddham Hall women’s prison in Cambridgeshire in 2002. Together they set up the pressure group JIPAC (Justice for Innocent Parents and Carers), formerly JIM. Mr Nattrass said: ‘Originally we called it “Justice for Innocent Mothers”, but it soon became clear that fathers and babysitters were being wrongly charged and convicted too. Helen and I wanted to help anyone whose life had been ruined in this way. Something needed to be done. It was unacceptable that innocent people were being blamed whenever there was an unexplained child death. Helen was as passionate about this as I am. She worked relentlessly to help other victims of injustice, both from prison and once she got out. Sarah Jaggard and Ray Hines, among others, have Helen to thank for their freedom. Her good work will live on.’

In July 2005, Wolverhampton hairdresser Sarah Jaggard, 30, was found not guilty of the manslaughter of Beatrice Furniss, the daughter of a friend, who died aged six months while in Mrs Jaggard’s care. Mr Nattrass said: ‘Sarah’s acquittal was the indicator I’d been waiting for that the public were starting to see reason. No longer were they willing to let vindictive police and lawyers and corrupt doctors lead them on a witch-hunt.’

Yesterday, Mrs Jaggard said: ‘I can’t believe Helen’s dead. I will never forget what she did for me, how she fought for me and stuck by me. Even in prison, not knowing if and when she’d get out, she took the time to write letters supporting me to anyone who would listen. My heart aches for Paul and the family.’

Rachel Hines, a 42-year-old physiotherapist from Notting Hill, London, had her convictions overturned in the court of appeal after serving four years for the murders of her baby son and daughter. Julian Lance, Mrs Hines’ solicitor, said: ‘If it wasn’t for Helen Yardley and JIPAC, we wouldn’t have been granted leave to appeal. We were lacking key information. JIPAC found it for us. Helen’s death is a devastating blow to everyone who knew her, and a huge loss.’ Mrs Hines was unavailable for comment.

Dr Judith Duffy, 54, a paediatric forensic pathologist from Ealing, London, gave evidence for the prosecution at the trials of Mrs Yardley, Mrs Jaggard and Mrs Hines. She is currently under investigation by the GMC, pending a hearing next month for misconduct. Laurie Nattrass said: ‘Judith Duffy has caused unimaginable suffering to dozens if not hundreds of families, and she must be stopped. I hope she’ll be removed from the list of home office pathologists and struck off the medical register.’ Mr Nattrass is currently making a documentary about the miscarriages of justice for which he believes Dr Duffy to be responsible.

Part I

1

Wednesday 7 October 2009

I am looking at numbers when Laurie phones, numbers that mean nothing to me. My first thought, when I pulled the card out of the envelope and saw four rows of single figures, was of Sudoku, a game I’ve never played and am not likely to, since I hate all things mathematical. Why would someone send me a Sudoku puzzle? Easy: they wouldn’t. Then what is this?

‘Fliss?’ Laurie says, his mouth too close to the phone. When I don’t answer immediately, he hisses my name again. He sounds like a deranged heavy-breather – that’s how I know it’s urgent. When it isn’t, he holds the phone too far away and sounds like a robot at the far end of a tunnel.

‘Hi, Laurie.’ Using the strange card to push my hair back from my face, I turn and look out of the window to my left. Through the condensation that no amount of towel-wiping seems to cure, across the tiny courtyard and through the window on the other side, I can see him clearly, hunched over his desk, eyes hidden behind a curtain of messy blond hair.

His glasses have slipped down his nose, and his tie, which he’s taken off, is laid out in front of him like a newspaper. I stick out my tongue at him and make an even ruder gesture with my fingers, knowing I’m completely safe. In the two years I’ve worked with Laurie, I’ve never seen him glance out of his window, not even when I stood in his office, pointed
across the courtyard and said, ‘That’s my desk there, with the hand cream on it, and the photo frames, and the plant.’ Human beings like to have such accessories, I restrained myself from adding.

Laurie never has anything on his desk apart from his computer, his BlackBerry and his work – scattered papers and files, tiny Dictaphone tapes – and the discarded ties that drape themselves over every surface in his room like flat, multi-coloured snakes. He has a thick neck that’s seriously tie-intolerant. I don’t know why he bothers putting them on at all; they’re always off within seconds of his arriving at the office. By the side of his desk there’s a large globe with a metal dome base. He spins it when he’s thinking hard about something, or when he’s angry, or excited. On his office walls, up among the evidence of how successful and clever and humane he is – certificates, photographs of him receiving awards, looking as if he’s just graduated from a finishing school for heavy-featured hulks, his grade-A gracious smile fixed to his face – there are posters of planets, individual and group portraits: Jupiter on its own, Jupiter from a different angle with Saturn next to it. There’s also a three-dimensional model of the solar system on one of his shelves, and four or five large books with tatty covers about outer space. I asked Tamsin once if she had any idea why he was so interested in astronomy. She chuckled and said, ‘Maybe he feels lonely in our galaxy.’

I know every detail of Laurie’s office by heart; he is for ever summoning me, asking me questions to which I couldn’t possibly know the answers. Sometimes, by the time I arrive, he’s forgotten what he wanted me for. He has been into my office twice, once by accident when he was looking for Tamsin.

‘I need you in here now,’ he says. ‘What are you doing? Are you busy?’

Move your head ninety degrees to the right and you’ll see what I’m doing, you weirdo. I’m sitting here staring at you, in all your weirdness
.

I have an inspired idea. The numbers on the card I’m holding make no sense to me. Laurie makes no sense to me. ‘Did you send me these numbers?’ I ask him.

‘What numbers?’

‘Sixteen numbers on a card. Four rows of four.’

‘What numbers?’ he asks more abruptly than last time.

Does he want me to recite them? ‘Two, one, four, nine . . .’

‘I didn’t send you any numbers.’

As so often when I’m talking to Laurie, I’m stumped. He has a habit of saying one thing while leaving you with exactly the opposite impression. This is why, even though he’s said he didn’t send me any numbers, I have the sense that if I’d said, ‘Three, six, eight, seven’ instead of ‘Two, one, four, nine’, he might have said, ‘Oh, yeah, that was me.’

‘Bin it, whatever it is, and get in here, soon as you can.’ He cuts me off before I have a chance to reply.

I swing my chair from side to side and watch him. At this point, surely, anyone halfway normal would glance across the courtyard to see if I was obeying orders, which I’m not: I’m not binning the card, I’m not leaping to my feet. All of which Laurie would see if he turned his head in my direction, but he doesn’t. Instead, he pulls at the open collar of his shirt as if he can’t breathe, and stares at his closed office door, waiting for me to walk through it. That’s what he wants to happen, and so he expects it to happen.

I can’t take my eyes off him, though on the physical evidence alone, I really should be able to. As Tamsin once said, it’s all too easy to imagine him with a bolt through his neck. Laurie’s attractiveness has little to do with his looks and everything to do with his being a legend in human form. Imagine touching a legend. Imagine . . .

I sigh, stand up, and bump into Tamsin on my way out of my office. She’s wearing a black polo-neck, a tiny white corduroy skirt, black tights and knee-high white boots. If something isn’t either white or black, Tamsin won’t wear it. She once wore a blue patterned dress to work, and felt insecure all day. The experiment was never repeated. ‘Laurie wants you,’ she tells me, looking nervous. ‘Now, he says. And Raffi wants me. I don’t like the atmosphere today. There’s something not right.’

I hadn’t noticed. There are a lot of things I don’t notice when I’m in the office these days, and only one thing that I do.

‘I reckon it’s something to do with Helen Yardley’s death,’ says Tamsin. ‘I think she was murdered. No one’s told me anything, but two detectives came to see Laurie this morning. CID, not your regular bobbies.’

‘Murdered?’ Automatically, I feel guilty, then angry with myself. I didn’t kill her. She’s nothing to do with me; her death’s nothing to do with me.

I met her once, a few months ago. I spoke to her briefly, made her a coffee. She’d come in to see Laurie and he’d done his usual trick of vanishing without trace, having confused Monday with Wednesday, or May with June – I can’t remember why he wasn’t there when he ought to have been. It’s an uncomfortable thought, that a woman I met and spoke
to might have been murdered. At the time I thought it was strange to meet somebody who’d been in prison for murder, especially someone who looked and seemed so friendly and normal. ‘She’s just a woman called Helen,’ I thought, and for some reason it made me feel so awful that I had to leave the office immediately. I cried all the way home.

Please let her death have nothing to do with why Laurie’s summoned me
.

‘Do you know anything about Sudoku?’ I call after Tamsin.

She turns. ‘As much as I want to. Why?’

‘Does it involve numbers laid out in a square?’

‘Yeah, it’s like a crossword puzzle grid, except with numbers instead of letters. I think, anyway. Or maybe it’s an empty grid and you fill in the numbers. Ask someone who’s got swirly patterned carpets and a house that smells of air-freshener.’ She waves and heads for Raffi’s office, shouting over her shoulder, ‘And a doll with a skirt to cover up the spare loo roll.’

Maya leans out of her office, holding the door frame with both hands as if hoping to block the strong smell of smoke with her body. ‘You know those knitted-doll bog-roll holders are highly collectable?’ she says. For the first time since I’ve known her, she doesn’t smile, try to hug or pat me or call me ‘honey’. I wonder if I’ve done something to offend her. Maya is Binary Star’s MD, though she prefers ‘head honcho’ – that’s her nickname for herself, always delivered with a giggle. In fact, she’s only third in the pecking order. Laurie, as Creative Director, is the supreme power in the organisation, closely followed by Raffi, the Financial Director. The two of them control Maya by stealth, allowing her to believe she’s in charge.

‘What’s that?’ She nods at the card in my hand.

I look at it again, read it digit by digit for about the twentieth time.