A Room Swept White (26 page)

I stand up, repelled by the determination in her blazing eyes. I have to get out of here before she makes the choice for me. ‘Sorry,’ I say firmly. ‘I’m not the right person.’

‘Yes, you are.’

‘I’m not. You wouldn’t say that if you knew who my father was.’ There, I’ve said it. I can’t unsay it. ‘Forget it,’ I mutter, feeling dangerously close to tears again.
That’s why I got upset: Dad, not Laurie
. Nothing to do with Laurie, and so slightly less pathetic. A tragically dead father is a better reason to cry than unrequited love for a complete arsehole. ‘I’ll go,’ I say. ‘I should never have come.’ I grab my bag, like someone who really intends to leave. I stay where I am.

‘It makes no difference to me who your father was,’ says Rachel. ‘If he was the first on my jury to vote guilty, if he was
the judge who gave me two life sentences . . . Though I think it’s unlikely Justice Elizabeth Geilow’s your dad.’ She smiles. ‘What’s his name?’

‘He’s dead.’ I sit down again. I can’t stand up and talk about Dad at the same time. Not that I’ve ever tried. I’ve never even talked about it to Mum. How stupid is that? ‘He committed suicide three years ago. His name was Melvyn Benson. You probably won’t have heard of him.’
Though he’d heard of you
. ‘He was Head of Children’s Services for—’

‘Jaycee Herridge.’

I flinch at the name, though I know it’s ridiculous. Jaycee Herridge didn’t kill my dad. She was only twenty months old. I feel trapped, as if something that’s been gaping open has slammed shut. I shouldn’t have said anything. After years of bottling it up, why tell Rachel Hines, of all people?

‘Your dad was the disgraced social worker who killed himself?’

I nod.

‘I remember hearing people talking about it in prison. I avoided the news and the papers as much as possible, but a lot of the girls couldn’t get enough of other people’s misery – it was a distraction from their own.’

I swallow hard. The idea of Dad’s suffering providing entertainment for the feral incarcerated masses is hard to take. I don’t care if I’m prejudiced; if they can enjoy my father’s downfall, I can think of them as scum who deserve to be behind bars. That way we’re even.

‘Fliss? Tell me.’

I have the oddest feeling: that I always knew, deep down, that this would happen.
That Rachel Hines is exactly the person I want to tell
.

Woodenly, I layout the facts. Jaycee Herridge was taken to hospital twenty-one times in the first year of her life, with injuries her parents claimed were accidental – bruises, cuts, swellings, burns. When she was fourteen months old, her mother took her to the doctor’s surgery with what turned out to be two broken arms, saying she had climbed out of her pram and fallen on a concrete playground. The GP knew the medical history and didn’t believe the story for a second. He alerted Social Services, wishing he’d done so several months earlier instead of allowing himself to be given cups of tea and lied to by Jaycee’s parents, who always took great pains to reassure him when he visited them at home, cuddling Jaycee and making a fuss of her in his presence.

The social worker assigned to the case spent the next four months doing everything she could to remove Jaycee from the family home. She had the support of the police and of every health professional who had ever had contact with the family, but the council’s legal services department decreed that there wasn’t sufficient proof of abuse for Jaycee to be taken into care. This was a catastrophic error on the part of a junior legal executive who should have known that in the family courts, guilt did not have to be proven beyond reasonable doubt. All that was required was for a family court judge to decide that on the balance of probabilities, Jaycee would be safer in local authority care than with her parents, and, given the number and seriousness of her injuries, this would almost certainly have happened if the case had ever made it to court.

As Head of Children’s Services, my father should have spotted this mistake, but he didn’t. He was overworked and stressed, ground down by the tottering towers of files on his desk, and as soon as he saw the words ‘unsafe to initiate care
proceedings’ and the signature of a legal executive beneath it, he probed no further. He would never have dreamed of trying to take a child from its parents against legal advice, and it wouldn’t have occurred to him that a legal executive working in child protection could be so incompetent as to confuse criminal and civil standards of proof.

As a result of his misplaced trust and the legal executive’s idiocy, Jaycee was left in the care of her parents, who finally murdered her in August 2005, when she was twenty months old. Her father pleaded guilty to kicking her to death and was sentenced to life in prison. Her mother was never charged with anything because it was impossible to prove she was involved in the violence against her daughter.

My father resigned. Jaycee’s GP resigned. The legal executive refused to resign and was eventually fired. No one remembers their names now, and although everyone knows the name Jaycee Herridge, very few people would be able to tell you that her parents’ names were Danielle Herridge and Oscar Kelly.

My father never forgave himself. In August 2006, a week before the anniversary of Jaycee’s death, he washed down thirty sleeping tablets with a bottle of whisky and never woke up. He must have planned it well in advance. He’d encouraged Mum to spend the weekend at her sister’s house, to make sure she didn’t find him in time to save him.

I could tell Rachel Hines a lot more. I could tell her I spent the last year of Dad’s life lying to him, pretending I didn’t blame him for screwing up so horrendously when all the time a voice in my head was screaming
Why didn’t you check? Why did you take someone else’s word for it when a human life was at stake? What kind of useless cretin are you
? I’ve
always wondered if Mum pretended too, or if she believed what she told him over and over: that it wasn’t his fault, and no one could ever claim that it was. How could she believe that?

I drag myself back to the present. I need to finish explaining myself and get the hell out of here. ‘What you don’t know – because you can’t – is that he talked to me about you not long before he killed himself.’

‘Your father talked about
me?’

‘Not just you – all three of you. Helen Yardley, Sarah Jaggard . . .’

‘All three of us.’ Rachel smiles, as if I’ve said something funny. Then her smile disappears and she looks deadly serious. ‘I don’t care about Helen Yardley and Sarah Jaggard,’ she says. ‘What did your dad say about me?’

I feel like a sadist, but I can hardly refuse to answer her question, having got this far. ‘We’d gone out for the day – me, him and Mum. One of the many trips Mum arranged to cheer him up after Jaycee died. The fact that they never worked and it was obvious he’d never be cheerful again didn’t stop us trying. We were having lunch, me and Mum chatting brightly as if everything was fine. Dad was reading the paper. There was an article about you, your case. I think it must have said something about an appeal – that you were planning to appeal or that you might, I don’t know.’

Laurie probably wrote it
.

‘Dad threw down the paper and said, “If Rachel Hines appeals and wins, there’s no hope.” ’

Her lips twitch slightly. Apart from that, no reaction.

‘He was shaking. He’d never mentioned your name before. Mum and I didn’t know what to say. There was this horrible,
tense atmosphere. We both knew . . .’ I stop. I don’t know how to say it without sounding awful.

‘You knew that if he was thinking about me then he was thinking about dead babies.’

‘Yes.’

‘And that was a dangerous subject for him to be thinking about.’

‘He said, “If they let Rachel Hines out of prison, no parent who murders a child will ever be convicted in this country again. Everyone working in child protection might as well pack up and go home. More children like Jaycee Herridge will die and there’ll be nothing anyone can do to stop it.” He had this . . . ferocious look in his eyes, as if he’d seen some sort of vision of the future and . . .’
And it made him want out
. I can’t bring myself to articulate this. I’m convinced – I’ve always been convinced – that Dad killed himself because he didn’t want to be around if and when Rachel Hines was released.

‘He had a point,’ she says gently. ‘If all the mothers convicted of killing their babies appeal and win, the message is clear: mothers don’t and can’t murder their children. Which we all know isn’t true.’

‘He started shouting in front of everybody.’ I’m crying again, but this time I don’t care. ‘ “Suddenly, they’re all innocent – Yardley, Jaggard, Hines! All tried for murder, two of them convicted, but they’re all innocent! How can that be?” He was yelling at me and Mum, as if it was our fault. Mum couldn’t handle it, she ran out of the restaurant. I said, “Dad, no one’s saying Rachel Hines is innocent. You don’t know she’s going to appeal, and even if she does, you don’t know she’ll win.” ’

‘He was right.’ Rachel stands up, starts to walk in no particular direction. She would hate my kitchen. It’s too small for aimless walking. It would make her feel sick. ‘My case effectively changed the law. Like your dad, the three judges who heard my appeal didn’t see me as an individual. They saw me as number three, after Yardley and Jaggard. Everyone lumped us together – the three cot-death killers.’ She frowns. ‘I don’t know why we got to be the famous ones. Lots of women are in prison for killing children, their own and other people’s.’

I think of Laurie’s article.
Helen Yardley, Lorna Keast, Joanne Bew, Sarah Jaggard, Dorne Llewellyn . . . the list goes on and on
.

‘Would I have had my convictions overturned if Helen Yardley hadn’t set a precedent? She was the one who first piqued Laurie Nattrass’s interest. It was her case that made him start questioning Judith Duffy’s professionalism, which was what led to my being granted leave to appeal.’ She turns to face me, angry. ‘It was nothing to do with me. It was Helen Yardley, Laurie Nattrass and JIPAC. They turned it political. It wasn’t about our specific cases any more – Sarah Jaggard’s, mine. We weren’t individuals, we were a national scandal: the victims of an evil doctor who wanted us locked up for ever. And her motive? Rampant malevolence, because we all know some doctors
are
evil. Oh, we’re all suckers for a wicked doctor story, and Laurie Nattrass is a brilliant storyteller. That’s why the prosecution rolled over and I was spared a retrial.’

‘Because Laurie can’t see the trees for the wood.’

‘What? What did you say?’ She’s standing over me, leaning down.

‘My boss, Maya – she said you said that about him. She thought you’d got the saying wrong, but you meant it the way you said it, didn’t you? You meant to say that Laurie saw you as one of his wrongly accused victims, not as a person in your own right. That’s why you want the documentary to be about you only – not Helen Yardley or Sarah Jaggard.’

Rachel kneels down on the sofa beside me. ‘Never underestimate the differences between things, Fliss: your flat in a horrible terrace in Kilburn and this house; a beautiful painting and a soulless mass-produced image of an urn; people who are capable of seeing only their own narrow perspective, and people who see the whole picture.’ She’s pinching the skin on her neck again, turning it red. Her eyes are sharp when she turns to face me. ‘I see the whole picture. I think you do too.’

‘There’s another reason,’ I say, my rapid heartbeat alerting me to the inadvisability of bringing this up.
Tough
. Now that I’ve had the thought, I have to see her reaction. ‘There’s another reason you don’t want to be part of the same programme as Helen Yardley and Sarah Jaggard. You think they’re both guilty.’

‘You’re wrong. I don’t think that, not about either of them.’ When she speaks again, her voice is thick with emotion. ‘You’re as wrong about me as I’m right about you, but you’re thinking – that’s what matters. If I wasn’t convinced before, I am now: it has to be you, Fliss. You have to make this documentary. The story needs to be told and it needs to be told now, before . . .’ She stops, shakes her head.

‘You said your case changed the law,’ I say, trying to sound professional. ‘What did you mean?’

She snorts dismissively, rubbing the end of her nose. ‘My appeal judges concluded, and wrote into their summary remarks so that there would be no ambiguity, that when a case relies solely on disputed medical evidence, that case should not be brought before a criminal court. Which means it’s now pretty much impossible to convict a mother who waits till she’s alone with her child and then smothers him. There isn’t generally much other evidence in cases of smothering. The victim puts up no resistance, being only a baby, and there are no witnesses – you’d have to be pretty stupid to try to smother your baby in front of a witness.’

Or desperate, I think. So desperate you don’t care who sees.

‘Your father’s prediction was spot on. My appeal judgement
has
made it easier for mothers to murder their babies and avoid prosecution. Not only mothers – fathers, childminders, anyone. Your dad was smart to see it coming. I didn’t. I might not have appealed if I’d known that was the effect it would have. I’d lost everything already. What did it matter if I was in prison or out?’

‘If you’re innocent . . .’

‘I am.’

‘Then you deserve to be free.’

‘Will you make the documentary?’

‘I don’t know if I can.’ I hear the panic in my voice and despise myself. Will I be betraying Dad if I do? Betraying something more important if I don’t?

‘Your father’s dead, Fliss. I’m alive.’

I owe her nothing. I don’t say it out loud because I shouldn’t have to. It should be obvious.

‘I’m going back to Angus,’ she says quietly. ‘I can’t hide away here for ever, with no one knowing where I am. I need
to start living my life again. Angus loves me, whatever’s happened between us in the past.’

‘Does he want you back?’

‘I think so, and even if he doesn’t, he will when I . . .’ She leaves the sentence unfinished.