A Room Swept White (35 page)

Talking of clothes, Judith Duffy’s were a little odd. Individually, each garment was okay, but the ensemble didn’t work: a lacy white blouse, a shapeless purple cardy, a grey knee-length skirt that might have been half of a suit, black tights, and flat black shoes with large bows on them that looked as if they would suit a younger woman better. Charlie couldn’t work out if Duffy had tried to dress smartly or casually this morning; either way, she hadn’t got the look quite right.

Charlie had talked her way into Duffy’s house by appealing to what they had in common. It had taken more honesty than she’d thought it would, and she’d ended up almost convincing herself that she and this plain, prim-looking doctor were some kind of outcast soulmates, to the point that to condemn Duffy now for anything would feel like condemning herself, and Charlie was bored of doing that. She’d given it up roughly a year ago.

‘Much to my lawyer’s consternation, no – no defence at all,’ said Duffy. ‘And no appeal. I don’t want to argue with anyone about anything – not the GMC, not Russell Meredew. Certainly not Laurie Nattrass. That man’s appetite for being proved right is insatiable. Anyone who locks horns with him is likely to find themselves still there twenty years later.’ She smiled. She and Charlie were sitting on cushionless wicker chairs in her green-tiled, green-walled conservatory. From what Charlie had seen of the house, it was assorted shades of green throughout. The view at the back was of a long, neat, entirely plant-free garden – just lawn and empty beds – and, beyond a low wooden fence, a garden of the same proportions but with shrubs and flowers, leading to a conservatory that looked like an exact replica of Duffy’s.

‘When I first became unpopular, I used to plead my case to anyone who would listen. It took me more than two years to notice that standing up for myself made me feel worse rather than better.’

‘There’s something soul-destroying about trying to persuade people you aren’t as bad as they think you are,’ Charlie agreed. ‘My natural inclination has always been to say, “Fuck you all – I’m even worse.” ’ She didn’t apologise for
her language. If being a pensioner netted you a free bus pass, outcast status surely earned you the right to swear.

‘I’m as bad as I am and as good as I am.’ Duffy wrapped her cardigan around herself. ‘So is everybody else. We all feel pain, we all relieve pain, we all unwittingly cause pain to others. Most of us at some point in our lives deliberately cause pain, of varying degrees.’

‘At the risk of sounding like a smart-arse . . . You could fight for your job and your reputation at the GMC hearing and all that would still be true.’

‘A GMC verdict doesn’t change who I am, and neither does public opinion,’ said Duffy. ‘Nor does unhappiness, which is why I’ve given it up.’

‘So you no longer care what people think of you?’

Duffy looked up at the glass above her head. ‘If I say I don’t, it sounds as if I’m dismissive of my fellow human beings, which isn’t true at all. But . . . most people are incapable of forming a meaningful opinion about me. They can’t see beyond the things I’m famous for having said and done.’

‘Isn’t that who a person is?’ Charlie asked. ‘The sum total of everything he or she says and does?’

‘You don’t really believe that, do you?’ Judith Duffy sounded very much the concerned doctor. Charlie half expected her to produce a pad and pen, prescribe a powerful mind-changing drug.
For your own good, dear
.

‘To be honest, I’m way too shallow to have given it any thought, so I won’t pretend to have an answer.’

‘What’s the best thing you’ve ever done?’

‘Last year I . . . well, I suppose I sort of saved the lives of three people.’

‘I’ll ignore the “sort of”, which is you being modest,’ said Duffy briskly. ‘You saved three lives.’

‘I should probably qualify that.’ Charlie sighed. It wasn’t a memory she enjoyed revisiting. ‘A colleague and I saved
two
people’s lives, though the person who was going to kill them ended up killing—’

‘Don’t qualify it.’ Duffy smiled. ‘You saved lives.’

‘I suppose so.’

‘I have too, dozens of them. I don’t know the exact number, but there are plenty of children who wouldn’t have lived to see adulthood if I hadn’t persuaded a court to take them away from families that would have killed them. What greater gift can you give than the gift of continued life, when someone’s threatened with extinction? None. You and I have both given that gift, more than once. Does that make us two of the greatest people who ever lived?’

‘God, I hope not.’ Charlie laughed. ‘If I’m the best the world has to offer, I might have to resort to space tourism.’

‘We aren’t defined by our achievements any more than we’re defined by our mistakes,’ said Duffy. ‘We’re just who we are, and who really knows what that amounts to?’

‘You could say that about Helen Yardley. You thought she murdered her children.’

‘I still do.’

‘But that wasn’t
her,
was it, according to your theory? It was the worst thing she did, but it wasn’t who she was.’

‘No, it wasn’t.’ Duffy’s voice took on a new energy. ‘And I wish more people understood that. Mothers who murder their babies aren’t evil, they aren’t monsters. Mostly, they’re trapped in little hells of the mind – hells they can’t escape from and can’t talk about to anyone. Often they conceal those
hells so expertly, they convince the world they’re happy and normal, even those closest to them.’ She shifted in her chair. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve read Helen Yardley’s autobiography,
Nothing But Love?’

‘I’m in the middle of it.’

‘Have you noticed how many people she writes off as blind and stupid for not taking one look at her and
knowing
she didn’t kill her two boys, because she was so distraught and grief-stricken, as surely no baby-killer would be? Because it ought to have been obvious to everybody how much she loved her children?’

Charlie nodded. She hadn’t been impressed even the first time the point had been made.
You could have been pretending to be distraught, though, couldn’t you
? was the retort that sprang to mind.

‘Mothers who smother their babies usually do love them – deeply, as deeply as any mother who’d never dream of harming her child, though I know that’s a hard idea to get your head round. Typically, they
are
distraught – quite genuinely. They’re heartbroken, their lives are in pieces – exactly the same as an innocent mother who loses a baby to meningitis. Forget the controversial cases – I’m talking about the many women I’ve met in the course of my work who admit to having felt so desperate that they put a pillow over baby’s face, or threw him under a train, or off the balcony. With the very odd exception, these women are devastated by the loss of the child. They want to die afterwards, they can’t think of a reason to go on living.’

‘But . . .’ Was Charlie missing something? ‘They caused that loss themselves.’

‘Which, if anything, makes it worse.’

‘But . . . Why didn’t they just not do it, then? Do they think they want the child to die, and only realise too late that they don’t?’

Judith Duffy smiled sadly. ‘You’re attributing a level of rationality to these women that simply isn’t there. They do it because they’re suffering terribly and don’t know what else to do. That behaviour
came out
of them, out of their pain, and they didn’t have the inner resources to stop it. When you’re mentally ill, it’s not always possible to think, “If I do this, then that will happen.” Mentally ill isn’t the same as mad, incidentally.’

‘No,’ said Charlie, not wanting to seem unsophisticated. Privately, she was thinking,
Sometimes they’re the same. Both can mean going to the shops with no clothes on and shouting when you get there about aliens making off with your vital organs.

‘Mothers who kill their babies deserve our compassion in exactly the same way that mothers whose babies die of natural causes do,’ said Duffy. ‘I felt like cheering when Justice Elizabeth Geilow questioned, in her summary remarks, whether women like Ray Hines and Helen Yardley belong in the criminal system at all. In my view, they don’t. What they’re crying out for is empathy and help.’

‘Yet you testify against them. You’re a crucial part of the successful prosecutions that send them to prison,’ said Charlie.

‘I didn’t testify
against
Ray, or Helen, or any of them,’ Duffy corrected. ‘As an expert witness in a criminal trial, I’m asked for my opinion about what caused children to die. If I think parent- or carer-inflicted violence is the cause of death, I say so, but I’m not
against
anybody when I say it. By telling
the truth as I see it, I’m trying to do the best for everyone. Lies benefit nobody. I’m on every accused woman’s side just as I’m on every endangered or murdered child’s side.’

‘I’m not sure the women would see it that way,’ said Charlie tetchily.
Talk about trying to have it both ways.

‘Of course they wouldn’t.’ Duffy tucked her iron-grey hair behind her ears. ‘But I also have to think about the children – defenceless and equally deserving of compassion.’

‘You wouldn’t say
more
deserving?’

‘No. Though if you ask me what I think I’m here for, it’s to save and protect children. That’s my number one priority. However much compassion I feel for a woman like Helen Yardley, I’m going to make sure she doesn’t kill a third child if at all possible.’

‘Paige?’

Duffy stood up. ‘Why do I feel as if I’m defending myself?’

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to . . .’

‘No, it’s not you. Do you want another cup of tea?’

Charlie didn’t, but she sensed the doctor needed some space to clear her head, so she nodded. Had she sounded too harsh? Simon would have laughed and said, ‘Don’t you always?’

While Duffy was pottering about in the kitchen, Charlie looked at the books on the small shelf in the corner of the conservatory. A biography of Daphne Du Maurier, a few Iris Murdochs, nine or ten books by someone called Jill McGown that Charlie hadn’t heard of, lots of Russian classics, three vegetarian recipe books,
Forever
. . . No, surely not. Charlie crept across the room to check she wasn’t seeing things. She wasn’t. Judith Duffy had a copy of
Forever in my Heart
by Jade Goody. Talk about eclectic tastes.

‘The Yardleys’ inventiveness with names is one of the many
reasons I’m in trouble,’ said Duffy, returning with a mug of tea each for her and Charlie. ‘I referred to their younger son Rowan as “she” in a report I wrote. I’ve only known of two other Rowans and both were female, so I assumed Helen’s Rowan was too. Laurie Nattrass has made much of that, just as he’s made much of my lack of personal involvement with the Yardley family, in contrast to Russell Meredew, who practically moved in with them at one point. I never spoke to Helen or Paul, never interviewed them.’

‘Do you regret that?’ Charlie asked.

‘I regret not having time for the personal touch, but the reality is that . . .’ Duffy stopped. ‘I’m defending myself again.’

‘You can’t be. I’m not attacking you.’

The doctor’s lips flattened into a line. ‘The reality is,’ she said less stridently, ‘that I was the most sought-after expert witness in the country before Laurie Nattrass declared me the root of all evil, and I didn’t have time to get to know every family. I had to leave that to others I hoped were properly trained to give parents like the Yardleys and the Hineses the help they needed. My job as an expert witness wasn’t to meet and get to know the family – it was to look at samples under a microscope, look at the slides I was given, and make sense of what I saw. In the case of Rowan Yardley, I was looking at lung tissue and a fractured skull – that was what the paediatric pathologist who performed the post-mortem passed on to me. I wasn’t asked to inspect the child’s genitalia, hence the mistake about his sex.’

Duffy pushed her hair away from her face. ‘I should have known he was a boy. I should have checked, and I deeply regret that I didn’t, but . . .’ She shrugged. ‘Sadly, that doesn’t cancel out what I saw through the microscope: clear evidence
that in the course of his short life, Rowan Yardley had been subjected to repeated smothering attempts. No amount of sitting in the Yardleys’ kitchen and chatting to them would have made the evidence of non-natural airway obstruction disappear. Or the skull fracture.’

Charlie sipped her tea, wondering if there was an analogy to be found in policing terms. If she was walking through the Winstanley estate, and saw a teenager in a hooded top knock an old woman to the ground, verbally abuse her and run off with her bag, unambiguous eye-witness evidence that a crime had been committed . . . Was that how certain Judith Duffy was about Helen Yardley? Were the doctors who testified in Yardley’s defence saying the equivalent of, ‘He wasn’t mugging her, he was rehearsing for his part in a school play about thieves?’

‘For what it’s worth – and since I never spoke to the woman, you might say it’s not worth much – I believe Helen Yardley escaped from her little hell before she died,’ Duffy said. ‘What she went through gave her a purpose. Her campaigning work on behalf of other women – it was genuine, I think. She believed passionately in their innocence – Sarah Jaggard, Ray Hines, all of them. She suited being a celebrity, the perfect martyr-turned-heroine. It gave her something she needed: attention, recognition. I think she really wanted to do good. That’s why she was so effective as a figurehead for JIPAC.’

Charlie heard pride and admiration in the doctor’s voice; it made her feel uncomfortable.

‘It’s always difficult to untangle a person’s motivations,’ said Duffy, ‘but if I had to guess, I’d say Helen’s wish to be innocent herself would have fuelled her determination to believe other women were, others like her. The irony is that
even if every last one of them were guilty, Helen’s support would have been incredibly beneficial to them. By believing in their essential goodness, she probably helped them to forgive themselves for what they’d done.’

‘Are you saying . . .?’

‘They’re all guilty? No. What I’m saying, and what people like Laurie Nattrass seem unwilling to take on board, is that the chances of an unexplained and unexpected child death being murder are far greater now than they used to be, proportionally. Fifty years ago there were 3,000 cot deaths a year in the UK. Gradually, as housing conditions improved, that went down to 1,000 a year. Then with more houses becoming smoke-free, less co-sleeping, and the ‘Back to Sleep’ campaign – persuading parents it was dangerous to put a baby down to sleep on its front – the SIDS rate came down to 400 a year. But those little hells of the mind . . .’ Duffy glanced towards her kitchen, as if her own private hell was somewhere in that direction. ‘Presumably there are as many of those now as there ever were, if not more – which means as many adults driven to harm children.’