A Room Swept White (48 page)

‘Uncle Paul.’

‘And this one?’ Laurie Nattrass.

‘I’ve seen him,’ said Dillon, suddenly animated. ‘He went to Auntie Helen’s house lots of times. Once I was playing outside and he told me to look where I was going and he said a very rude word to me.’

‘And this one?’

Dillon’s eyes lit up. ‘That’s him,’ he said, smiling up at Simon. ‘That’s the man with the magic umbrella.’

The photograph was of Angus Hines.

23

Monday 12 October 2009

‘When Ray turned up on my doorstep after she’d been released—’

‘It was my doorstep too,’ she cuts in.

‘Our doorstep,’ Angus corrects himself. ‘When she turned up, I was happy to let her in. While she was in prison, I’d devised the perfect test. Hines’ Test of Guilt, I call it.’ Ray’s eyes are pleading with me:
listen to him, give him a chance. However awful this sounds, don’t walk away
.

I remind myself that Hugo is in the next room. That’s not as close as it would be in most houses, but it’s close enough. If I screamed, he’d hear me. Any time I can’t stand this any more, he’ll drive me away from here and from Angus, who I’m now certain is a murderer.

Angus Hines: maker of probability tables, arranger of numbers in squares. He sent me the cards. I was supposed to guess what they meant, just as I was supposed to guess his meaning when he sent me the list of people Judith Duffy had testified against in the criminal and family courts. He sent me the two photographs of Helen Yardley’s hands. Did he take them just before he shot her?

I had a bad feeling about him from the moment I met him: so bad I locked him up. My instincts must have been screaming at me that he was dangerous. Ray was scared of him too, at one time. Why isn’t she still?

‘I took Ray up to what had once been our bedroom,’ he says. ‘The room where years before she’d climbed out of the window and smoked a cigarette sitting on the ledge. I opened the window, grabbed her and dragged her over to it. I pushed her head out, and the top half of her body, and I held her there: half out, half in. She knew I could easily have pushed her out if I’d wanted to. There’s no way she’d have survived the fall.’

‘You told me you didn’t try to kill her,’ I say, keeping my voice steady.

‘I didn’t. As Ray said, if I’d tried I’d have succeeded. What I tried to do was make her believe I’d kill her if she didn’t tell me the truth. And I would have done.’

‘And then you asked her if she’d killed Marcella and Nathaniel.’

‘Hines’ Test of Guilt: put a woman who might or might not be guilty of murdering her children in a life-threatening situation. Convince her you’ll kill her if she doesn’t tell the truth, but that you’ll let her live if she does. Whatever the truth is, you’ll let her live – tell her that. Then ask her if she committed the murders. Whatever her first answer is, don’t accept it. Keep ordering her to tell you the truth, as if you don’t believe what she’s said. If she changes her answer, do it again. Keep doing it – keep ordering her to tell you the truth, and eventually she’ll be so scared and so unable to work out what the right answer is, you’ll get the truth out of her. At that point, she’ll stop chopping and changing: she’ll stick to her story, and that story will be the true version of events. If she continues to chop and change in a way that makes it impossible for you to identify the truth, kill her as you threatened to.’

Don’t interrupt him. Don’t argue with him
.

‘Ray passed with flying colours.’ Angus smiles at her, as if this is all perfectly normal. Ray keeps her eyes fixed on the camera. ‘She didn’t chop and change, not at all. She really believed I was going to kill her, yet not once did she say she was guilty. That’s what proved to me that I’d been wrong about her.’

‘I couldn’t have said I’d killed my babies when I hadn’t,’ says Ray quietly. ‘Not for anyone or anything. Not even if Angus was going to kill me if I didn’t.’

‘Did you tell the police what Angus did to you?’

‘No. It’ll be difficult for you to understand, but . . . I knew it wasn’t Angus who opened the window and . . . It wasn’t him. It was his pain and his grief that did it, not the real Angus, the one that existed before the grief. I also . . . You won’t understand this either, but I respected him for doubting my innocence. His duty as a father was to do his absolute best for Marcella and Nathaniel, even after they were gone.
Especially
once they were gone. If so many intelligent people thought I’d killed them, how could he not take that seriously? He’d have been letting them down. And . . .’

‘What?’

‘I understood exactly how he felt about me, because it was how I felt about all the other women: Helen Yardley, Sarah Jaggard . . .’

‘I asked you before if you thought Helen was guilty. You said no.’

‘I never thought she
was
guilty.’ Ray leans forward. ‘I thought she
might be
guilty. Same with Sarah Jaggard. There’s a big difference. I agree with Angus: the more of these supposed miscarriage-of-justice victims there are, the more
guilty ones there must be among them, using innocent women like me as their camouflage.’

Hines’ Theorem of Probability
. I think of Joanne Bew. Lorna Keast.

‘I didn’t want anything to do with Helen or Sarah, inside or outside of a TV documentary, because I didn’t know if they were murderers,’ says Ray.

Yet you know Angus is a murderer, and you’re planning to marry him
.

‘You wanted to find out, didn’t you?’ I ask him. ‘Your Test of Guilt had worked on Ray, so you decided to try it on Helen.’

‘Ray had nothing to do with it,’ says Angus. ‘I discussed my Theorem of Probability with her, but I didn’t tell her what I intended to do.’

‘You wanted to make someone pay for your pain and suffering, but Ray was innocent, so she couldn’t pay. And even if by then you were convinced your children had died from a vaccine, who could you punish for that? Wendy Whitehead? No, she was on Ray’s side,
against
the vaccine. It would have been hard to settle on an individual or individuals to blame. Much easier to use your test of guilt to find a baby-killer: Helen Yardley, or Sarah Jaggard. They might be guilty even if Ray wasn’t – you could make
them
pay.’

‘I delegated Sarah Jaggard to somebody else,’ says Angus. ‘He made a hash of it – did it in broad daylight in a public place and was interrupted. That’s why I did the Test on Helen myself, though I probably would have anyway. Sarah Jaggard killed – or didn’t kill – a child that wasn’t her own. I was less interested in her.’

‘You murdered Helen Yardley,’ I say, feeling sick. ‘You shot her in the head.’

‘I did, yes.’
He said it. He confessed to the camera
.

‘And you killed Judith Duffy.’

‘Yes. The police seemed determined to mistake me for a pro-Duffy vigilante. I had to set them straight. They needed a lesson in truth and fairness. Impartiality. Unless you’re impartial, how can you judge? Duffy made some bad mistakes – she was the first to admit it.’

Next to him, Ray is crying.

‘Why didn’t you go to the police?’ I ask her. ‘You must have known as soon as Helen died . . .’

‘I had no proof.’

‘You knew what he’d done to you.’

‘His word against mine.’ She wipes her eyes. ‘He could have accused me of lying, and . . . I didn’t want to hurt him or damage him any more than he’s already been damaged.
This
is what I wanted: for him to tell his own story. I knew he couldn’t be allowed to carry on, but . . . I wanted it to end in the right way, and I thought I could persuade him.’

‘Marriage and a new baby in exchange for a confession and no more killing?’ I say.
Laurie Nattrass’s baby
.

Ray winces, hearing me put it so starkly.

‘Ray’s right,’ says Angus, taking her hand. She leans into him.
She still loves him
. ‘This way’s better. I needed to be ready to tell the story.’

Is that what he was doing upstairs, all the time Ray and I were talking? Readying himself?

‘Judith Duffy died while you waited for him to be ready,’ I tell her.

‘I know that, Fliss. How do you think that makes me feel?’

‘Judith wouldn’t have minded,’ Angus says.

I stare at him in utter disbelief. ‘Wouldn’t have minded being murdered?’

‘No. Her children had disowned her, she’d lost her professional credibility – she was about to be struck off, in all probability. She had nothing to live for apart from what she’d always lived for: protecting children, bringing their killers to justice. I think she’d have approved of Hines’ Test of Guilt.’

‘Fliss, listen,’ says Ray. I hear desperation in her voice. ‘I know what you’re thinking, but everything’s going to be okay now. It’s finished. Angus’s . . . test, it’s over. He knows that; he accepts it. I know you think I ought to abandon him and hate him, but I can’t, because
this isn’t him
.’

‘Do you agree with that?’ I ask him.

‘Yes,’ he says without hesitation. ‘I didn’t used to be like this. I used to be Angus Hines. Now I’m . . . something else, I don’t know what.’

A chill runs all the way through me. How terrifying to turn into something you recognise as not yourself – something uncontrollable and horrifying – and yet not be able to define that thing or feel the horror.

‘Angus will go to prison, but he won’t be alone in the world,’ says Ray. ‘He’ll be punished as he should be for what he’s done, but he’ll have hope too, and a reason to carry on – a new child to love, me. Even though we won’t be together maybe for years, I can write to him, visit him, take our baby . . .’

‘What do the sixteen numbers mean?’ I ask.

‘They mean that Helen Yardley was a liar,’ says Angus. ‘If she could be a liar, so could Sarah Jaggard. So could any of them. Once Laurie Nattrass worked that out, I hoped he’d be
a bit more selective in choosing who to champion. I hoped the same about you, once I heard you were taking over the film. As for the police, they can’t say I didn’t play fair. Every time I killed, I left a card. All they had to do was use their brains and they’d have worked out that the person most likely to draw those sixteen numbers to their attention was me. I gave them all the information they needed to find me.’ He smiles.

He’s mad
.

But this isn’t him. This is his pain and grief, not the real Angus Hines, the one Ray loves and wants to help
.

‘What’s the connection between the numbers and you?’ I ask him.

‘If you’re clever, you’ll work it out,’ he says.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Ray whispers. ‘All that matters is that it’s over, Fliss, and you’re going to make a programme that tells the whole truth of what happened. You will do that for us, won’t you? For us, and our child, for . . . for the record?’

‘Yes. Yes, I will.’

There’s one more question I have to ask Angus Hines. I’ve put it off for as long as I can, because I don’t want to hear the answer. ‘When you did the Test of Guilt on Helen, what did she say?’

He smiles at me.

‘There’s no point,’ says Ray. ‘He won’t tell you.’

‘Did she confess to murdering her children? Did she insist throughout the ordeal
you
inflicted on her that she was innocent, like Ray?’

‘You’d like to know, wouldn’t you?’

‘Do
you
know?’ I ask Ray.

She shakes her head.

‘Tell me about Monday 5 October,’ I say to Angus, as if it’s
a different question from the one I’ve already asked twice. ‘Tell me about doing your Test on Helen. Don’t pretend you don’t want to talk about it. You want me to understand how clever you are.’

‘All right, then,’ he says easily. ‘I’ll tell you.’

Just like that
?

The doorbell rings. ‘No prizes for guessing who,’ says Angus. ‘Whoever rang the bell before, you told them to go to the police.’

‘I didn’t, actually.’ I hear footsteps, the front door being opened.
No. Not now
.

‘Is there someone else in the house?’ Ray looks worried.

‘It’s okay,’ I tell her. ‘We’re going to carry on filming.’

The door of the den inches open and a large sweaty man with messy blond hair appears, with stupid, disobedient Hugo Nattrass behind him. Since when did sitting in silence and doing nothing include letting strangers into the house?

‘Wait in the other room,’ I snap at them.

‘I’m DC Colin Sel—’

‘I don’t care who you are. Go outside, close the door and wait,’ I say quickly, before my resolve has a chance to weaken. ‘We’re busy here.’ Sellers must see something in my eyes that convinces him, because he retreats without another word.

‘Thank you,’ says Ray, once he’s gone.

I move the camera closer to Angus so that his face fills the frame. ‘Whenever you’re ready,’ I tell him.

The Times
, Tuesday 29 June 2010

Wrongly Convicted Baby-killer Acquitted

Dorne Llewellyn, 63, from Port Talbot, walked free from Cardiff Crown Court yesterday after being found not guilty at a retrial for the murder in 2000 of nine-month-old Benjamin Evans. The vote for acquittal was unanimous, as was the guilty verdict at Mrs Llewellyn’s original trial. In April 2001, in the same courtroom, the prosecution persuaded 12 jurors that Mrs Llewellyn shook Benjamin to death while babysitting for him. She spent nearly nine years in prison.

Mrs Llewellyn was one of many women convicted on expert evidence provided by Dr Judith Duffy, who was murdered in October last year. At the time of her death, Dr Duffy was being investigated for misconduct. She alleged that Benjamin must have been shaken because he had suffered bleeding in the brain, but did not mention that there was also evidence of older bleeds. The second jury to hear the case was persuaded by the five independently appointed medical experts that there was no basis on which to convict Mrs Llewellyn of murder, as she had babysat for Benjamin only once, and there was clear evidence of brain bleeds dating back to before that occasion. Mrs Llewellyn and her friends and family wept on the steps of the court after hearing the ‘not guilty’ verdict.

JIPAC chairman Laurie Nattrass said on Mrs Llewellyn’s behalf: ‘The jury demonstrated its utter scorn for this insane
and unsubstantiated murder charge by taking a superlative 40 minutes to return a unanimous ‘not guilty’ verdict. We should celebrate this triumph of justice over its enemies.’ Mr Nattrass added: ‘Currently the most dangerous of those enemies is the criminally idiotic Tom Astrow.’ Professor Astrow, chairman of the Criminal Cases Review Commission, has proposed that in certain cases where possible child abuse is an issue, the jury and all reporters ought to be made to leave the courtroom while the judge examines the complex medical evidence with two experts. Professor Astrow told
The Times
on Monday: ‘A layperson jury is simply not able to process the incredibly complex disagreements between experts on the finer points of medical opinion.’