The Bad Samaritan (23 page)

“Would you mind if I just told you—told you about me and Stephen and . . . everybody, right from the beginning? Of course you realise that much of what I told you before wasn't true. It will come out much more easily if I tell it my way than questions and answers.”

“There may have to be questions if you forget to tell us something we need to know,” said Oddie.

“Yes, of course. But otherwise will you let me tell it in my own way?”

“Yes. Certainly we can try it like that.” He spoke into the microphone. “Interview with Dorothy Mills, seventeenth of May 1994. Detective Superintendent Oddie and DC Peace present.”

She was sitting opposite him, still and collected, apparently perfectly calm. When he had recorded the necessary documentation he gestured to her to go ahead. She thought for a little, swallowed, and then began.

“I lied about how I met Stephen. It was something I liked to put out of my mind—it was so like his usual pickups. I met him in 1978 on a train from London. I was finishing my second term at teachers college, and already I'd decided I wasn't cut out to be a teacher. I was one of those many who aren't, but go on with it because they can't think of anything else to do. I had already more or less decided to get out. Stephen sat opposite me, across the table, and the moment I saw him I thought he was the handsomest man, the most exciting man, I'd seen in my life. A lot of people have thought that, before and since. When he started to talk to me my heart started to thump like a hammer on an anvil, and I know I blushed scarlet. Stephen was used to having that
effect, but he didn't let that show, then. Later he became sort of complacent, and put a lot of women off. He kept the conversation low-key, and before long I calmed down. He got me a cup of tea and a sandwich, and quite soon we weren't talking about the weather or the places we were passing in the train, but about me. Stephen was always very good at getting women to talk about themselves—at least, the sort of women who were attracted to the sort of man he was.”

“Tell us something about yourself,” said Oddie quietly. She looked surprised.

“Me? Somehow I don't seem to matter in all this . . . . All right, I'll try. I was brought up in what I suppose was a dull, middle-class household. My mother died when I was ten, so I was very close to my father, or perhaps I should say that I thought I was. What Dad had always wanted was a son. He owned a good furniture shop in Abbingley, and was—is—a very committed Christian. Our lives then revolved around the church, which was an evangelical Baptist one. It's gone now. The congregation got older and older, and then died . . . . I was a timid, repressed, not at all charming young woman.”

With unfathomably deep eyes, thought Charlie.

“All this I told Stephen, that first meeting, and much more. When he wanted to—when he wanted to learn something—he could just sit quietly, listen intelligently, and hear everything he wanted to hear. By the end of the journey he knew me through and through. I would have felt naked before him, if I had thought like that. As it was, I remembered my manners enough to ask him about himself, though that was not before we drew out of Wakefield. He told me he was from London and was coming to Leeds to start a new job. That was fairly typical of Stephen: he was economical with the facts about himself. There are still large areas of his life about which I know nothing, though that's partly
because for a long time I haven't wanted to know, preferred not to. That time he diverted me from the subject by asking for my address. I couldn't believe my ears. It was the first time I'd been asked for my address—and by
such
a man! As I was writing it down, eyes glued to the table to hide disappointment if he refused, I asked him if he'd like to come to supper the next night. He said at once, ‘That would be wonderful. You'll be the first people I know in Leeds.' I just felt . . . elated, on a cloud, on a drug trip, if I'd thought like that. Like Cinderella suddenly confronted for the first time with Prince Charming.”

She sat there for a moment, lost in memory.

“How did your father take to him?” Charlie asked.

“When I told him, he was suspicious. It was the first time I'd ever asked anyone home, anyone male, anyone young at all, and he said he didn't like his daughter asking to the house a young man she'd just met—he didn't say ‘picked up,' but he probably thought it—on a train. But when Stephen came round everything changed . . . . Stephen was very good with men too, you know. Maybe better. He was good at drawing out women, but basically he despised them and thought they were good for only one thing. With men he was in his element: he could talk business, the economic situation, export possibilities, the trade unions—it was all grist to him, and he was very good, very convincing. I should have been bored, I had been a hundred times with that sort of conversation, but I sat there gazing at him fascinated, thinking I understood.”

“I suppose they talked about religion too,” said Oddie.

“Oh yes. With my father you always got on to religion. Stephen said he was an Anglican. I'm sure he'd thought about it, after our conversation on the train, and he was prepared to be a Christian but he was damned if he was going to be an evangelical nonconformist. After we were married he would go along now and then
to the Baptist Church, and he'd ask father along to St Saviour's. Eventually Dad made the changeover completely.”

“Why do you think your husband continued going to church?” asked Charlie.

“It was part of his respectable image. He half-realised there was something of the adventurer and gigolo about him, but the Anglican Church built up another side to him in people's minds. He did meet the odd influential person there, but after Dad nominated him for Rotary Club he used that mostly to get contacts. But Rotary Club is not respectable as the Church of England is respectable. People laugh at it a bit, as they do the Masons, and they think it's full of back scratchers.”

She paused, having allowed herself to be sidetracked. She tried to get back to those early days.

“It was the happiest time of my life. Stephen was working with a building society, but he was anxious to start his own business. Dad was captivated by him and willing to do everything in the way of helping him and introducing him to people. In the little spare time he had we went places together—plays, concerts, church do's of one sort or another. After a respectable amount of time—after the middle-class, English amount of time—we got engaged. Dad was over the moon. So was I. We didn't sleep together. It seems funny to think of now. Stephen was acting his part well, but perhaps overacting a little. Did you realize he was only uncertainly English? He lived in Yugoslavia till he was seventeen. Of course now I know he must have been getting what he wanted from someone, perhaps many, but at the time I knew or suspected nothing. Dad gave me away at St Saviour's, and I think it was the happiest moment of his life as well as mine.” She paused, then suddenly spat out: “I burnt the wedding pictures later. I couldn't bear to look at them. I couldn't even say I'd been sold. I'd sold myself.”

There was silence in the room for a moment.

“How soon did things start going wrong?” Oddie asked gently. She answered him only indirectly.

“I once read about Lord Byron, and how he told his wife on their wedding night that he'd only married her for revenge. In my case it wasn't revenge, it was because of all Dad could offer, but he did make things pretty clear right from the start . . . . I wasn't very good in bed. Not at all what he had been used to. He wasn't gentle or understanding—he was contemptuous. He just gave up on me as soon as he'd had me. By the end of the honeymoon he wasn't bothering to hide his impatience to get home and get down to what really interested him in life: making money. He felt sure that, now we were married, Dad would be willing to make a big investment in him, and he was right. By the end of the honeymoon I knew I was an irrelevance in his life, a means, a steppingstone. It hurt.”

“Did you both put up a front for your father's benefit?” Charlie asked.

“Oh yes—at first. Later on Stephen stopped bothering, because Dad didn't notice. I'd been around all his life, and though he'd been forced to make do with what he'd got he'd never thought much to daughters. It was Stephen who fascinated him, and before long I stopped interesting him at all. He set Stephen up in business and was taken with the whole idea of European Opportunities Ltd. He'd come round to our house, Stephen would be round at his. Meanwhile the marriage became nothing more than a facade, a shell, a charade—call it what you will.”

“But you didn't think of leaving him?”

“I
thought
. . . . But what would I do? Go back to live with Dad? I'd have seen more of Stephen there than if I'd stayed married to him. Get a job? But what could I do? I had no training, no experience,
no confidence. And after a time Dad began to fail with very bad arthritis. I could see it happening, and in the end we moved into his house, our old home, and built a little flat on the back for him, and that seemed about as satisfactory a solution as I could hope for. I wasn't
happy
, but it worked.”

She stopped. The men thought they'd asked too many questions, and they let her continue in her own fashion.

“I said the marriage was a shell. That was true for a long time. We would have the odd meal together, almost by accident, and that was it. Otherwise a meal was always there when he came in, and some days we hardly saw each other, hardly exchanged a word. That was perfectly satisfactory as far as I was concerned. Of course we didn't sleep together—the mere thought of it nauseated me—and I knew he had plenty of substitutes: paid, casual, sometimes a bit more than that, but never anything involving real feeling. Stephen was incapable of real feeling. Mostly what was involved was humiliation. I know because . . . There was a change, you see. For a time he was so busy running two businesses, Dad's and his own, that our marriage more or less ceased to exist. Eventually even Dad would have noticed that, but he was becoming more inward-looking, not noticing anything except his immediate comforts. Then Stephen got rid of the furniture business, and I think around that time he started getting into all sorts of dodgy businesses—organised crime in the East European countries, and so on. That was much more exciting than any boring old furniture firm, and more profitable too. It gave spice to his life, he began to relish living on the edge of danger. It brought out the buccaneer in him.”

She looked up and straight at them.

“It spilled over into the marriage. Indifference, living our own lives separately, wasn't enough any more. It was as if he resented the fact that he'd trapped himself in a loveless, unexciting marriage
when all the time there were these more thrilling ways of making money and getting on that he hadn't thought about when he used me to do that.” She paused, and her mouth involuntarily went into a little moue. “He began to be around more, to torment me. He would sit at the breakfast table and read aloud from love letters begging him to leave his boring wife and go off with whoever it was. ‘Why don't you?' I'd say. He began bringing girls home—all sorts of girls—and flaunting them in front of me before taking them upstairs to make love . . . . What a phrase: ‘make love'! . . . I hated that, I have to admit. I couldn't cope with that, and I couldn't tell you why to this day. Some of them were tarts, but some of them were really nice girls like Janet Sheffield, and that was worse. I was sorry for them . . . . One day he raped me. I don't want to go into that. I told him that if it ever happened again I'd murder him.”

“Did it?”

“No. He knew I meant it.”

“Why didn't you turn him out of the house?”

“His own house? Dad had made it over to him the same time as he'd handed over the business to him . . . . Oh, I know there are ways, but I've never been a strong person. Not determined or single-minded. I felt trapped. If Dad had died I'd have done something, but he's still well apart from the arthritis, though his mind has been going for some time. Stephen found that mightily amusing, of course. Now and again he'd tell people at church about silly things Dad had said or done, exaggerating, to show what he'd sunk to . . . . I'd almost stopped going to church myself soon after we were married.”

“Why?”

“I don't know. I don't think I'd lost my faith, at least not then, but I didn't want to be part of Stephen's
using
religion. It demeaned it. Stephen didn't have a faith! He didn't even have a
moral code, not even the faintest ethical barrier beyond which he wouldn't go . . . . Stephen would do
any
thing . . . . Shall I tell you about Saturday evening?”

“Please.”

She paused, collecting her thoughts.

“I had no intention of going to the church party. I never went to any function with Stephen unless he forced me, which he did now and then when the whim took him, mainly to establish respectable-married-man credentials. But it was true that the cat was missing. I'm very fond of Moggs. Sometimes he just sits there
looking
at Stephen, as if judging him, deciding he's lower than an insect he wouldn't waste his time catching. I like that . . . . Stephen came in to change about seven. There'd been a phone call earlier—a foreign man, sounding very upset. He didn't leave a message, but I told Stephen about it. He just shrugged. He went out shouting goodbye to Dad: ‘'Bye, Dad—have a good time.' His idea of humour.” She frowned in thought. “That was the last time I'll ever hear his voice.”

She paused, as if trying to order events in her own mind.

“During the evening I watched a bit of television, listened to Radio Three. I kept going out into the garden and calling for Moggs, then along the road too. He's a neutered tom, but he's a real prowler when the mood takes him. I always worry when he goes missing because we're so close to the Ilkley Road. I lied about his never crossing that. Once we found him in Herrick Park. Anyway I got Dad his nightcap. He always has Ovaltine around half past nine. Then I went out again, back home, out again. Eventually, after the ITV news, I decided to go across to Herrick Park. It was silly, I know: the only sensible thing when a cat is lost is to wait for him to come home. But when it's the only thing you've got, almost . . .”