Widows & Orphans (13 page)

‘They share a common enemy.’

To be fair, Barbara did not look hostile as she waved expansively to him from the front door, although Duncan was unsure how much this was a genuine greeting and how much an attempt to disconcert Ellen. He considered waving back but feared that Ellen might view it as a betrayal. So he contented himself with flashing a broad smile in her direction, even though it was too far away for her to see.

Ellen stepped into the car, filling it with a gentle fragrance.

‘You smell delicious,’ Duncan said after kissing her.

‘Thank you. It’s a new perfume my mother brought me, made by one of her friends.’

‘She should market it.’

‘Though as always with my mother there’s a catch. It’s not just a perfume; it’s a floral remedy, made from jasmine and roses and ylang ylang and heaven knows what else, designed to boost confidence, diffuse anger and promote well-being. I thought I’d put it to the test by wearing it when I met Matthew.’

‘In which case, shall we make a start?’

‘Please.’

Try as he might, Duncan could think of no less romantic date than driving a recent divorcee to visit her ex-husband in prison. Yet no sooner had Ellen mentioned her trip to Bedford than he offered to take her. If their relationship were to grow, he needed to share in all aspects of her life, both the good and the bad. Matthew’s trial had been national news and while Nugent was an unremarkable name and Martin Casey, the only person in Francombe to know of the connection, was sworn to silence, she lived in permanent fear of exposure. Duncan had at least been able to assure her that there would be no mention in the local press, even though it was a matter of legitimate interest, given that one of the hospital trusts Matthew had defrauded was East Sussex.

Duncan remembered the case well. After fifteen years as a consultant neurologist, Matthew had left the NHS to set up a
locum agency with a chain of bogus offices across the South. Capitalising on the chronic understaffing of hospital accounts departments, he submitted duplicate and inflated invoices, which over a four-year period resulted in a demonstrable loss to the NHS of £400,000, although the true figure was reckoned to be ten times higher. In court, Matthew blamed the discrepancies on errors by the locums, hospital billing clerks and his own staff, but the jury was not convinced and found him guilty on three charges of false accounting and two of fraudulent trading. He was sentenced to five years in prison, ordered to pay £200,000 in costs and disqualified from acting as a company director for ten years. Two months later at a disciplinary hearing of the GMC, he was struck off the medical register.

Although both the trial judge and the district judge who subsequently granted her divorce accepted that Ellen knew nothing of Matthew’s malpractice, public opinion was less generous. Friends who had enjoyed their hospitality were especially quick to condemn her. She saw no way to defend herself without relating a history of subservience that she feared would make them despise her all the more. Duncan was, therefore, doubly grateful for her readiness to confide in him. On a windswept cliff with the herring gulls screaming in sympathy, she described how within months of their marriage Matthew had taken control of every detail of her life. Having ordered her to give up work when she was pregnant with Sue, he refused to let her return once Neil started school, accusing her of seeking to humiliate him. Charm itself so long as his wishes were obeyed, he sank into baleful silence the moment they were defied. Her spirit was so crushed that she sometimes even longed for him to hit her. At least a bruise might embolden her to fight back.

Today’s visit, the first since her move to Francombe, was at Ellen’s request. Although his elderly parents, who continued to assert their son’s innocence, saw him regularly and wrote
her lengthy reports in the hope that, the divorce notwithstanding, she would take him back on his release, she wanted to verify that he was both well and well-treated. More importantly, she needed to be sure that he was no longer a threat. It was four years since a chance discovery by the audit manager at Basildon Hospital led the police to launch their investigation into Safe Cover: four years during which she felt that she would never be able to trust anyone again, including herself. Now she had been given another chance with Duncan. For that to succeed she had to confront her past, in the person of her former husband, one last time.

‘Would you like some music on?’ Duncan asked, when fifty minutes into the journey the companionable silence grew strained.

‘I’m sorry; I didn’t think I’d feel this nervous. I’m very glad you’re here.’

‘So am I … that is I’m glad to be with you.’

‘I couldn’t have done it on my own. Barbara offered, but her show of sympathy would have been worse than blame.’

‘What about the kids? Doesn’t Matthew want to see them?’

‘He didn’t ask. Then again, he would never set himself up for rejection. I sounded them out. Sue refused point-blank. But that has nothing to do with her anger towards her father and everything to do with her passion for Craig. The latest is that she wants his name tattooed on her thigh.’

‘Surely she’s too young?’

‘She’s too young to have one without my consent. I know I’m not best placed to talk about self-respect – and I’m terrified that she may have learnt from my example – but you don’t have to be a card-carrying feminist to object to a girl having her boyfriend’s name branded on her body.’

‘She’s clearly besotted,’ Duncan said, wondering whether they had slept together and worrying in an undefined way about Jamie.

‘She wants to make a deal. If I allow her to have the tattoo,
then she won’t have sex with him,’ Ellen said, as if reading his mind.

‘Some deal! Either you let me mutilate my body or I’ll let him break my hymen. Sorry,’ Duncan said, catching her grimace.

‘No, you’re right. She’s desperate to show her commitment. I explained that he was her first boyfriend and that she wouldn’t be with him for ever – which drew the predictable response.’

‘Is Craig equally serious about her?’

‘He’s a sixteen-year-old boy: you tell me! The one advantage of the relationship is that it’s reconciled her to moving to Francombe. I wish I could say the same for Neil. He’s not as openly antagonistic towards me as his sister; he can’t bear to see me in tears. Though I suspect that it’s less out of genuine compassion than because it makes him feel insecure.’

‘Maybe it’s both?’ Duncan said, trying to blot out the memory of Neil’s tirade against his mother on parents’ evening.

‘He’s the more disturbed by everything that’s happened. Boys need their fathers.’

‘True.’ Duncan wondered if she had forgotten his own separation from Jamie or assumed that, because he was not incarcerated, their relationship must be close.

‘He’s become so aloof. When he’s not at school, he spends most of the time holed up in his room. He’s never been what you’d call an outgoing boy, but he used to enjoy cycling and chess and gardening – he had his own flowerbeds in Radlett and heaven help the gardener if he touched them. Now he shows no interest in anything. He’s punishing me for bringing him here because it’s easier than punishing his father who’s the reason we came, although of course the person he’s really punishing is himself.’

‘Does he read?’

‘If only! He’s glued to his computer. It’s as though he can
only engage with the world when it’s at one remove and in two dimensions.’

‘How about friends?’

‘None to speak of, or at least that he speaks of. I knew that the first few weeks at a new school would be tough but things haven’t improved. Then again, he’s so prickly, such a mixture of bitterness and aggression and envy and spite, I’m not sure I’d want to be his friend. It’s hard enough being his mother.’

Duncan thought of asking Jamie to take him under his wing but feared that it would do more harm than good. ‘I know it’s not a solution, but if he’d like the odd game of chess … I play every Thursday with Henry Grainger of St Edward’s. He beats me hands down. I could use the practice.’

‘That’s really kind. Of course I’ll ask, though I don’t hold out much hope. But there is one thing. I hesitate to mention it when you already have so much on your plate. The other evening you were saying how you were hurt that Jamie was doing his local history project on the wheel park –’

‘Oh lord, I hope I wasn’t moaning.’

‘This is me you’re talking to! Anyway, I wondered if you’d consider helping Neil. He told the teacher that he knew nothing about Francombe and asked if he could do his project on Radlett, specifically the Victorian mental hospital that recently shut down at Shenley. But the man was adamant that “local” meant local to them. Somehow it’s come to stand for everything Neil hates about moving down here. If you could give him a hand with the history of the
Mercury
… It wouldn’t have to be too in-depth, just pointing him in the right direction.’

‘I’d be delighted.’

‘Really?’

‘Of course.’

‘That’s wonderful. I know that it’s not the same as doing it with Jamie.’

‘I’ll still enjoy it, and it’ll be a chance to get to know Neil.’
Even as he spoke, Duncan felt a fraud. Had he agreed to her request out of sympathy for Neil, to prove himself to Ellen, to compensate for Jamie’s collaboration with Derek, or, given that clear-cut motives rarely existed outside books, from a combination of the three?

Reaching Bedford early, they had an all-day breakfast at the Titanic Café. Visiting time was from 3.15 to 4.15, but Ellen had been told to arrive half an hour beforehand, so at 2.30 they walked to the prison where she touched up her lipstick and added a dab of powder to her cheeks. ‘War paint,’ she said ruefully, before disappearing into the gatehouse, which with its two-toned brickwork, gabled roof and white portico might have passed for a faculty building in a new university, were it not for the razor wire on the adjoining wall.

Having planned to spend the afternoon exploring the town, Duncan chose instead to stroll round the perimeter of the prison, which, like all such institutions, exerted a strong pull on both his conscience and his imagination. While he had long since abandoned the ‘Property is Theft’ sloganising of his teens, he harboured deep reservations about the efficacy, expense and, above all, the justice of locking up so many people. ‘The rich man in his castle’ and ‘the poor man at his gate’ might have been omitted from modern versions of the popular hymn (although not without a struggle, as Henry had discovered at St Edward’s), but the rich man on the bench and the poor man in the dock remained an integral part of the social order.

Never had he been more aware of this than at Cambridge, where, in his second – and, as it turned out, final – year, a group of students looking for an original party venue fixed on a country house near Newmarket, which one of their number, John Fitzsimmons, a distant cousin of the owners, knew to be empty apart from an elderly housekeeper. So, preceded by John who had slipped a Nembutal into the housekeeper’s tea, thirty or so of his friends turned up and, boosting their
supply of alcohol with several choice bottles from their hosts’ cellar, proceeded to make merry. In the early hours the police, alerted by a neighbouring farmer, arrived to investigate, but John’s patrician tones and plausible story swiftly satisfied them and, apologising for the intrusion, they drove off. The revellers then carried on until dawn when they returned to Cambridge by car, bike, motorcycle and, in the case of the ever-flamboyant Julia Flitton, on a white stallion. The housekeeper, either mollified by the large tip left on her chair or terrified of the owners’ response to her negligence, kept silent and nothing more was heard of the incident. Duncan put it from his mind until the following term when he listened to his bedder’s tearful account of her son who, in revenge for being thrown in the Cam by a gang of rowers, had set fire to the Pembroke boathouse. He was convicted of arson and jailed for eight years.

For weeks, Duncan agonised over whether to report his own crime in order to highlight the inequity, finally deciding that it would be futile, doing nothing for the wretched arsonist and incriminating his friends. But he never lost his sense of outrage and, in his first year at the
Mercury
, he commissioned a series of articles on conditions in the three prisons – Lewes, Blantyre House and East Sutton Park – that served the Francombe area. In several hard-hitting leaders he decried the inadequacy of the prisoner’s discharge grant, which, at a few pounds, was an open invitation to reoffend, and he upbraided the Council for the lack of jobs and facilities for exinmates. More controversially, he questioned the basic principles behind judicial policy, arguing that white-collar crime, which was perpetrated by well-off, well-educated people and motivated by greed, should be dealt with more severely than burglaries, assaults and even rapes, which were perpetrated by inadequate, damaged and deprived people in need of help rather than punishment.

Duncan trusted that it was revulsion at Matthew’s crime,
a cynical attack on the most revered institution in the country, which reconciled him to his sentence, and not Ellen’s anguished expression when she emerged from the gatehouse, conspicuous among a group of women whose drabness seemed designed to reassure their husbands of their fidelity.

‘Quick, let’s escape!’ she said, grabbing his arm with unexpected force. ‘How did it go?’

‘I’d rather you didn’t ask questions,’ she said, only to answer his tacit ones unbidden once they were back in the car and heading out of town. ‘I don’t know what to think. Last time he barely spoke to me; he was as distant as some of my most damaged kids. Today it was the opposite; he never stopped talking. But it wasn’t to me. Not really. I might as well have been his mother or even a prison psychiatrist monitoring how well he’s settling in.’

‘Isn’t that good? An acceptance that things have changed?’

‘I suppose so. I know I shouldn’t mind, but we’ve driven all this way and he didn’t ask me a single question about myself or the job or the house or Francombe or even – and this is what hurt the most – the children. When I mentioned them, he seemed almost indifferent.’