The Cradle in the Grave (52 page)

 

Thank you to Laurie for giving me the chance.

 

Thank you to Tamsin and the gang at Better Brother Productions.

 

Last but not least, thank you, Hugo, for your unwavering support, and for your foresight in predicting that I would one day love you more than I love your house. I do, but only just.

 

 

 

On Monday 5 October 2009, Angus Hines got up at 6 a.m. and drove a hired car from his home in London's Notting Hill to Spilling in the Culver Valley. His destination was number 9 Bengeo Street, the home of Helen Yardley. As he drove, he listened to the
Today
programme on BBC Radio 4. Helen's husband Paul had already left for work, so Helen was alone in the house when Angus arrived at 8.20 a.m. It was a bright, sunny winter day, clear skies, not a cloud in sight.

He must have rung the doorbell. Helen must have let him in, though they were not on friendly terms and the last time they had met they had argued. Angus spent the whole day alone with Helen in her house. At some point during the hours they spent together, Angus produced a gun that he'd obtained from an acquaintance, an M9 Beretta 9 millimetre. At five o'clock in the afternoon, he used that gun to shoot Helen dead because, according to him, she had failed a test he'd devised for her – or, rather, not specifically for her, but for all women accused of murdering babies who claim to be innocent of the crime – women like Sarah Jaggard, Dorne Llewellyn, and of course Angus's wife, Ray. It was Angus's own personal connection to a case of this sort that led him to formulate the test that he calls, without any irony, ‘Hines' Test of Guilt', though he has twice asked me if I think he ought to change its name to ‘Hines' Test of Truth'. Here's how he explained its rules to me:

The first two times I asked Angus what happened when he subjected Helen Yardley to his Test of Guilt, he wouldn't tell me. He taunted me by saying, ‘You'd like to know, wouldn't you?' and seemed to relish his superior knowledge and my frustrated ignorance. Then, suddenly and for no apparent reason, he changed his mind and announced that he was willing to tell me the story of what happened at Helen's house on Monday 5 October. The telling process took nearly three hours from start to finish. I will summarise what Angus told me very briefly, and spare you the more chilling aspects of his account; I wish I could have been spared them myself.

Angus told me that Helen spent very little time – less than half an hour – changing her story from innocence to guilt and back again before finally admitting to having smothered both her sons. That's why he shot her, he said: to punish her, because she was a murderer. But, he told me, before he shot her, he spent several hours listening to her long and comprehensive confession: what she'd done, why she'd done it, and how she felt about it.

 

This book is the story of the Hines family – Ray, Angus, Marcella and Nathaniel – and of the police investigation into the murders of Helen Yardley and Judith Duffy. Angus Hines' murder of Helen Yardley isn't how the story begins. Insofar as you can pinpoint the origin of any story, I think this one started in 1998, when Angus and Ray Hines had their first baby, Marcella. I've started with this much later incident, Angus's shooting of Helen Yardley in October 2009, not because it's violent and shocking and attention-grabbing – though it is, all those things – but because I want to set it apart from the rest of the book, because I believe Angus's account of it, and therefore my account of it, to be a lie. That's another reason why I have condensed and summarised what Angus told me about what happened between him and Helen that day: I don't want to devote any more space than I must to a story I'm sure isn't true.

By the end of this book, you'll have formed an opinion of Angus, and you'll be able to decide for yourself if he's the sort of man who would ignore the terms and conditions of his own Test of Guilt/Truth, according to which only lying is punishable by death, and shoot Helen Yardley even after she had told him the truth about her guilt. Maybe you'll decide he couldn't risk leaving her alive because she'd seen him and would have gone to the police. My impression, for what it's worth, is that Angus was never afraid of being found out – he freely distributed what he regarded as clear clues to his guilt, as you will see later in the book.

Angus's respect for the law is limited to a handful of detectives: DC Simon Waterhouse and Sergeant Charlotte Zailer chief among them, for reasons that will become clear. In general, however, he has little respect for the police or the legal system, and my theory – though I must stress it is only a theory – is that he doesn't think anybody but him deserves to know the truth about what happened on Monday 5 October 2009 between him and Helen Yardley. I think he feels that, as the sole inventor of the Test of Guilt/Truth, only he is entitled to know its results.

Is that why he shot Helen, so that she wouldn't be able to tell anybody her version of what happened that day? To ensure that he would always be the sole owner of that information? Given his delight in his knowledge, and the power it gives him in the face of others' ignorance, does that mean the story he told me is the opposite of what really happened? Might he get a kick out of misleading me as much as possible, and if so, does that mean his Test in fact proved Helen to be innocent? I believe that's unlikely too, because the fact remains that he shot her dead; Angus's rules clearly state that if you tell the truth, you're allowed to live.

Perhaps Helen didn't waver once but consistently protested her innocence, and perhaps in spite of this Angus didn't believe her – in which case his Test would have been revealed to him as a comprehensive failure. Would that have been enough to make him shoot her? I believe it might. I also believe, given the history between Helen and Angus – a history you will read about – that she might well have refused to say anything at all. Was she determined to resist him, even though he had a gun? Silence from her would have constituted a defeat for him, and she would have known that. Or did she keep ‘chopping and changing' her story, to use Angus's terminology? Did she keep saying different things, hoping to stumble on the one that would make him put away the gun and leave? Did he kill her because he simply couldn't ascertain what the truth was?

If Angus didn't discover on that day that his Test was flawed, did he perhaps discover a flaw within himself, an inability to stick to the terms and conditions he'd laid down for himself? Before he was a killer, Angus was a devoted father who lost two children and then his wife when she was wrongly accused of their murders. Did Helen confess to smothering her two babies, and was Angus so overcome by anger and disgust that he couldn't resist pulling the trigger? If that is what happened, he might never tell anybody – he prides himself on being a planner, always in control and thinking ahead. He would never admit to being so swayed by emotion that he went against his own plan.

I am hoping, and Paul Yardley and Hannah Brownlee are hoping, that one day Angus will tell us what really happened at 9 Bengeo Street on Monday 5 October. It's a slow process, but I'm doing my best to chip away at his image of himself as super-rational and in control. I have tried to explain to him that his Test is useless: people do not behave predictably when threatened with imminent execution. Ordered to tell the truth about the most traumatic event in their lives, some might choose the story they wish to believe about themselves – let's say, for the sake of argument, a lie – and stick to it, on the grounds that their lives wouldn't be worth living anyway if they acknowledged the painful truth. Some might tell the truth and stick to it; some might waver, changing back and forth from one version to another. Angus has no way of proving how either a guilty or an innocent person would respond to being tortured. To me this is an undeniable fact, but he insists I'm wrong.

He clams up completely when I point out to him the main flaw of his Test: that it involves judging, condemning and executing other human beings – three things no one should ever do. If what you're about to read proves anything conclusively, it's the necessity for compassion and humility, as well as the undeniable fact that if people could learn to be more forgiving, of themselves and others, there would be less to forgive all round. If attempts to understand and help could replace judgement and condemnation, even when heinous crimes have been committed –
especially
when heinous crimes have been committed – then there would be fewer heinous crimes committed in the future. A popular misconception is the idea that to understand and help a criminal means to let him or her ‘get away with it'; this is not the case, as I hope this story will prove. Personally I believe that, irrespective of whatever legal action might or might not be taken, nobody ever ‘gets away with' anything: what we do has an effect on us from which we can't escape.

Before handing in the final version of this book to my editor, I went to visit Angus in prison and took the manuscript with me. I made him read this introduction. When I asked him if there was any aspect of it he objected to, he shook his head and handed it back to me. ‘Publish it,' he said.

I am very grateful to the following people, all of whom helped substantially with the writing of this book: Mark Fletcher, Sarah Shaper, Jackie Fletcher, Mark and Cal Pannone, Guy Martland, Dan, Phoebe and Guy Jones, Jenny, Adele and Norman Geras, Ken and Sue Hind, Anne Grey, Hannah Pescod, Ian Daley, Paula Cuddy, Clova McCallum, Peter Bean, David Allen, Dan Oxtoby (who, without meaning to, inspired a plot twist) and Judith Gribble.

 

Several medical experts helped me to make sense of many of the controversial issues surrounding crib death: chiefly Dr Mike Green and two other people who would prefer not to be named. All three, and several others, were enormously generous with their time and knowledge, for which I am hugely grateful.

 

Thank you to Fiona Sampson, author of the brilliant poem ‘Anchorage' – which is reprinted in the novel and from which the novel's British title is a quote – and to Carcanet Press for allowing me to use the poem. Thanks also to The Estate of Hilaire Belloc and PFD for allowing me to use ‘The Microbe' in this book.

Thank you to Val McDermid, who invented Reverse L'Oréal Syndrome.

 

Massive thanks to my inspirational agent Peter Straus, to the wonderful Jenny Hewson, and to my superb publishers Hodder & Stoughton, especially Carolyn Mays, Karen Geary and Francesca Best.

 

I wouldn't have been able to write this novel if I hadn't read three books:
Unexpected Death in Childhood
edited by Peter Sidebotham and Peter Fleming,
Cherished
by Angela Cannings and Megan Lloyd Davies, and
Stolen Innocence: the Sally Clark Story
by John Batt. The experiences of women such as Sally Clark, Angela Cannings and Trupti Patel were part of the inspiration for
A Room Swept White
, though none of the characters or cases in my novel are based on real people or cases.

Read on for a chilling taste of Sophie Hannah's next psychological thriller

It's 1.15 a.m. Connie Bowskill should be asleep. Instead, she's logging on to a property website in search of a particular house: 11 Bentley Grove, Cambridge. She knows it's for sale; she's seen the estate agent's board in the front garden. When she clicks on the ‘Virtual Tour' button, keen to see the inside of the house and put her mind at rest once and for all, Connie finds herself looking at a scene from a nightmare: on the living room carpet, there's a woman lying face down in a pool of blood. In shock, Connie wakes her husband Kit. But when Kit sits down at the computer to look, he sees no dead body, only a clean beige carpet in a perfectly ordinary room . . .