For Death Comes Softly (36 page)

‘So why?' I asked. ‘Why a lad who had a big enough cross to bear, why his own son?'

‘That was it, apparently, or so he told the psychiatrist we had on the case,' said Mellor. ‘Claims it was all to do with Stephen not being perfect. Richard Jeffries gave every impression of loving his Down's Syndrome son quite as much as his perfect sister, in fact he didn't know whether he loved the boy or hated him. He saw the fact that Stephen was handicapped as some kind of reflection on himself. He couldn't bear the lack of perfection, saw him as something sick. He did lavish affection on the boy, no doubt of that, but there was a very sick side to it.'

The very thought of having missed it, or more accurately, having refused to act on my own gut instinct, made me feel ill. My head ached and my hand was shaking when I lifted my glass.

‘How long had it been going on?' I asked.

Mellor was watching me closely. ‘Look, boss,' he said, returning to the old formal form of address which somehow seemed even more affectionate under these circumstances, ‘are you sure you want to hear all this? Is there any point? I can tell it's getting to you.'

‘I need to know,' I said simply.

Mellor didn't argue, but merely answered my initial question.

‘In some form or another virtually since the boy was born,' he said.

My stomach turned over. I put down my glass of beer. I suddenly felt that I would be physically sick if I ate or drank anything.

‘How the hell did he get away with it?' I asked. ‘Do you think his wife knew all along? She must have done, mustn't she?'

Mellor shrugged. ‘If she did she's an even better actor than her husband,' he said. ‘Claims Jeffries must only have touched the boy when she was doing her nursing shifts and he was at home alone preparing the children for bed. You know how feisty she was? She's a changed woman – you wouldn't recognise her now even compared to the way she was when we were questioning her after she left Jeffries. She still had some spirit. She didn't give in to us, did she? Now it's only thanks to the grandmother that the other kid hasn't already been taken into care, the old man's in the bin, and Elizabeth Jeffries is one broken woman.'

I nodded. I couldn't care much about a mother blind enough not to notice systematic child abuse being carried out by her own husband in her own home – neither did I find it easy to accept, in spite of what Peter Mellor said, that she really had not at least suspected something was going on. I reckoned she had deliberately not seen, believed what she wanted to believe. And that last bit hit home at me too, hard! Wasn't that what I was doing nowadays. Looking away from the truth, believing what I wanted to.

Mellor was still talking. I gave him my full attention again.

‘. . . only the one teacher ever suspected anything,' he said. ‘We think that was partly because Stephen was Down's Syndrome. A kid like him is naturally physically affectionate, over the top sometimes, in a way that would seem wrong in other kids. It was only when he was reaching the age of sexual awareness that anything amiss was ever going to show itself. And it is much easier with a handicapped child for an abuser to convince it that what is happening is normal everyday behaviour. Stephen wasn't scared of his father, we all saw that, he loved him and trusted him. The final irony.'

I sighed. ‘So what went wrong, Peter?' I asked. ‘Why did the bastard kill the poor little kid?'

‘Stephen was beginning to question his father,' said Mellor. He looked unhappy. ‘Our enquiries may have been partly responsible for that.'

‘Terrific,' I said.

‘I know, the final rub,' said Mellor. ‘However you go about it you're going to make even a kid like Stephen aware that something is wrong, something is going on. Down's Syndrome children are not stupid – just different. And that may have been a mistake Richard Jeffries made.'

Peter Mellor paused and took a long slow pull of his pint. I suspected he really wanted to go no further.

‘Tell me what happened, Peter, please,' I urged.

Mellor took another drink before he spoke. ‘In his confession Dr Jeffries says that the last few bathtimes his son was uneasy about what he was doing. That had never happened before. The night he killed him, Stephen had started to cry and said he didn't want to do it any more, that he wanted to talk to his mother. The boy was quite adamant about that. Dr Jeffries managed to quieten him down and put him to bed as usual but he was afraid the boy was going to wake up in the morning and start blabbing. He went into Stephen's room in the middle of the night to soothe him, he said, tell him he had nothing to worry about, to make sure he didn't tell his mother, or, perhaps worse still, anyone else. But Stephen started to cry again, and said again he didn't want to do it any more. His father tried to calm him down but the boy's sobs got louder and louder, and Jeffries says he put his hands over the boy's mouth and around his throat just to quieten him. Stephen struggled and Jeffries squeezed harder than he meant too, he maintains. He insists he didn't mean to harm him, that the death was an accident, but none of that makes a lot of difference to young Stephen.'

I left the pub feeling very heavy of heart. Mellor was right that every word he told me hurt. But I had wanted to know just how much guilt I carried personally. For weeks I had put it to the back of my mind along with all my other worries. Most of us cannot do that for ever.

In March, Julia came to stay. She had spent four weeks at the Charing Cross Hospital followed by seven in a convalescence home and then a couple of weeks with her mother in Weston-super-Mare. I had invited her in just the way I would have done without all that had happened concerning Abri and Robin, because it was the automatic thing for me to do. I suppose I had not really expected her to accept, but she did so with gratitude saying that much as she loved her mum she knew that two weeks of mothering was the most she could possibly take. She seemed to have lost all recollection of her distrust of Robin, and such was my confusion that I barely considered how ironic having Julia as a house guest might still possibly be.

Certainly I was wary of confessing to Robin that I had invited her, but although he did not exactly jump about with enthusiasm he accepted my right to do so and generally took it pretty well. He did issue one warning which I suppose was fair enough considering the history.

‘I know how you love her, Rose, and anyone you care for that much must always be welcome in our home,' he said, in that rather old-fashioned way which I still found so endearing. ‘But I do feel that Julia has tried to damage us in the past. And if she ever attempts to turn you against me again, if she ever again makes any accusation against me – then she goes and I shall never have anything to do with her again, and I would hope you wouldn't either.'

I assured him that Julia had forgotten all about her mistrust of Robin. That chapter really was closed, I told him, and he seemed satisfied. Whether or not I could ever totally satisfy myself of that I still did not know. I simply did my best to convince myself that the whole Jeremy Cole business was just some terrible mistake, and that Julia's awful accident really must have been just that.

Julia arrived, driven by her mother who was indeed fussing over her unbearably, on a dull wet Sunday afternoon, which, for me at any rate, was immediately brightened by her presence. She looked better than I had expected. Her red hair, shaven off for surgery, had already regrown thickly over her poor scarred head into a rather fashionable spiky crew cut, and she was functioning remarkably well in the circumstances. Her doctors had warned that she might still develop epilepsy brought about by her dreadful head injury, and she was not allowed to drive or to drink alcohol, but as yet she had mercifully shown no sign of this. In fact she seemed in remarkably good order. However, I considered that her personality had changed a bit, as well as her ability to remember.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, she seemed quieter and more subdued, at first at least – and one thing which had altered dramatically was her attitude to Robin. I knew I had promised him this, but I had not really expected her to have totally wiped out her suspicions about him. She treated him as a friend now and he responded with his usual charm and gallantry, and treated her with immense kindness. He even played backgammon with her, although, like me, she was nowhere near his standard, and he had always preferred the challenge of his computer to inferior opponents.

I had heard no further news from Todd Mallett, and Julia had been with us about ten days before I eventually contacted him. In spite of my pledge to Robin about the chapter being closed, I was unable ultimately to stop myself doing so. And having Julia to stay probably helped bring all the old anxieties to the surface again.

One morning after Robin had left for the office and while Julia was still in bed, she seemed to need an awful lot of sleep which I suppose was inevitable, I phoned Todd at Barnstaple nick.

None of his investigations had taken him any further, it appeared.

‘I barely have even circumstantial evidence,' he said flatly. ‘Your man's in the clear as far as I'm concerned.'

‘Have you interviewed him?' I asked.

‘Yes.' Todd sounded puzzled. ‘Weeks ago. We contacted him at his office. Didn't he tell you?'

I admitted that he hadn't. He wouldn't have done, of course. The subject was not discussed any more, that was how Robin and I dealt with the huge rift which I suppose I had to take the blame for creating between us by my persistent doubting of him. We just pretended it wasn't there. And, whatever the truth about the Abri disaster and the whole damned horror story, whatever the outcome of his police interview, Robin was highly unlikely to be the one to bring any of it up.

‘What do you really think Todd?' I asked, still desperately seeking reassurance, I suppose.

He sighed. ‘I've given up doing that kind of thinking, Rose,' he said. ‘It's only evidence that counts, and we don't have any.'

My time in limbo eventually began to run out. The doctor I was seeing finally pronounced me medically fit for work when I visited him at the end of March. My bosses were still patient, however, and I was told that I had until May to decide whether to go back to work or leave the police force permanently. I still guessed I would go back, although I wasn't looking forward to it. The official explanation for my prolonged absence was that I was having a breakdown following the tragic events I had experienced in my life. Sometimes I thought that was more or less the truth.

I took the opportunity to talk it all over with Julia. I told myself I was executing a kind of therapy for her, trying to help her remember all that she had forgotten. The truth was the therapy was for me. I wanted to get rid of all my worries, to banish the last of my suspicions for ever. In any case, to begin with certainly, the reliving of past worries was to no avail with Julia. She accepted what I said, of course, but remained without any memory of her part in it all, and her attitude seemed at first to be that of someone hearing a story which in no way involved her.

Nonetheless, as her mental and physical condition improved I was conscious of her attitude to Robin subtly changing yet again. Superficially she continued to treat him in the same way, but I spotted her studying him warily on more than one occasion. I suspected that at least areas of her memory were returning, but I was unsure of what or how much exactly, and she did not seem to want to go into that. I thought actually that maybe she preferred to remember as little as possible. After all, she still had a long way to go before she would be anything like completely well.

After a while I did make one or two desultory attempts to talk to Robin about it all, my spurious excuse being a desire to clear the air. But all that happened was that the rift between us which we so effectively ignored manifested itself in tangible form.

‘I can forgive you for having doubted me, Rose,' he told me harshly. ‘But I shall never be able quite to forget.'

More than that he would not say. He refused any further discussion. At one point he told me that if ever I mentioned the subject again he would leave me, and still that was a threat guaranteed to at least make me try to do as he willed. I remained unable to countenance life without him. And, in spite of everything, some kind of normality had returned to us. Strange how it always does. It has to really, I suppose, in order for any of us to survive.

Robin continued to work towards rebuilding and repopulating Abri. I liked the idea no more than I had when he had first told me about it in such excitement, but I knew that there would be no swaying him from his course. A new survey had been completed. AKEKO were now as convinced as Robin was that a tourist project was still feasible, and all that remained was to satisfy the demands of the various safety and planning authorities.

I reckoned there would be a public outcry if the plans Robin and AKEKO were making were allowed to go ahead, but I told myself that wasn't my problem. I also told myself it was time, once and for all, to stop dwelling on the Abri disaster and its legacy. I had, after all, done everything in my power to seek out the hidden truth, and indeed I was beginning to convince myself yet again that Robin had been honest all along and that the only real problem was within my head. There was no hidden truth. I told myself it was over now, and I was probably lucky the man was still prepared to put up with me.

I didn't think our relationship would ever be quite the same again. Much of the magic had gone. Nothing destroys magic like lack of trust. But I did still love Robin, and I was sure he still loved me.

The sex remained sensational. Sometimes I wasn't sure whether that was a good or bad thing. If ever I came close to experiencing any clarity in my thoughts concerning Robin it would be destroyed by the rush of blood to the head which took over my senses every time he even started to make love to me. The pleasure was so intense, so extreme, it was almost like a sickness.