Till We Meet Again (34 page)

‘But Beth needs to be with Longhurst now,’ Susan insisted. ‘She’ll creep back into her shell if this goes on and on. I couldn’t bear to think I robbed her of the happiness she deserves.’

Steven didn’t know what to say to that. He knew Susan was right in believing Beth wouldn’t see Roy until all this was squared away, she would see it as a point of honour. Maybe that time apart, and the things that the case might throw up, would be damaging to any future relationship with Roy, but he didn’t think Susan should take that burden on her shoulders, she had a big enough one there already.

‘Beth is a grown woman,’ he said gently. ‘You don’t have to worry about her.’

‘But I have to do the right thing by her,’ Susan said, looking at him with bleak eyes. ‘So I’m going to tell him the whole story this afternoon.’

Steven thought she meant about the rape and how she knew about it. ‘That isn’t necessary, the less said about that the better,’ he said in alarm. ‘You just answer the questions Longhurst asks you, nothing more.’

‘I didn’t mean about Beth,’ she said, frowning at him. ‘I meant the full story about the murders. A confession.’

Steven was so taken aback that he could only gape at her.

‘Confession? Are you trying to tell me you did kill Reuben and Zoë after all?’ he gasped out.

‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘I know they haven’t got enough to charge me, yet. But Longhurst is a clever man and he knows I did it. He’ll only keep on till he’s got the proof. I can’t take any more, I might as well own up now and be done with it.’

‘I don’t believe you killed them,’ Steven heard himself say. His head seemed to be foggy, all that was coming through was that Susan was insane and she wanted to confess so that the questions would stop.

‘I did, Mr Smythe,’ she said and put one hand on his arm. ‘It’s nice that you don’t believe it of me, but it’s true. I don’t suppose Beth will believe it either, but you must explain to her. She should forget me, and take her chance of happiness with Longhurst. I want that for her. I can help her.’

Steven didn’t think he’d ever heard anything so implausible. Yet Susan had sincerity written all over her face. But that was what Susan was, a paradox. Admirable in so many ways, for her kindness, stoicism and timidity. He liked her. Really liked her, far more than he did most of his clients. Yet she had flown in the face of all those admirable qualities by killing: kindness becoming cruelty, stoicism lost in the need for revenge, and timidity in courage.

But even knowing she had killed two more people hadn’t diminished his view of her. He still liked her.

‘Beth wouldn’t want you confessing to try and make things right for her,’ he said hastily. ‘I have to advise you against this, Susan. If it’s because you feel pressured by all the questions, I can insist you’ve had enough for one day.’

‘Beth always believed I told the truth.’ Susan’s head came up defiantly. ‘She said once that was one of the nicest things about me. I haven’t got much left that’s nice about me any more. I’ve even learned to lie since I’ve been in here. I need to tell the whole truth now, if only to feel better in myself. You see, Mr Smythe, I am an evil killer. I need to be put away where I can’t do any harm to anyone ever again.’

Chapter seventeen

Steven had to go out of the interview room for a few minutes to compose himself, leaving Susan with a prison officer. He would have liked to go outside in the fresh air, but that was asking the impossible due to prison rules and staff shortages. So he had to stand in the corridor, breathing in the fusty, hot air, and for the first time in many years he wished he had a cigarette, and a stiff drink to go with it.

He was completely stunned by Susan saying she wanted to confess to murdering Reuben and Zoë. He wondered now why he hadn’t thought to ask her how she’d killed them, and what she’d done with the bodies. That at least might have indicated whether she was making it up, and if it was some sort of bid for attention or perhaps even a kind of glory.

Yet Steven knew in his heart it wasn’t that. Susan might be many conflicting things, but she wasn’t an attention-seeker.

Should he try and talk her out of it? Make her wait twenty-four hours until she’d had time to consider the full implications? He was certain that’s what most defence lawyers would do, given that there was no real evidence against her, not even the most vital, kind – the bodies.

Over the years Steven had had many clients who had been arrested for one crime, then for some reason or other, while in custody, they’d decided to own up to other things. Sometimes it was because they guessed the other crimes might be uncovered anyway, or that they thought the judge would look more kindly upon them. Now and again it was a need to unburden their guilt.

The judge certainly wouldn’t look on Susan more kindly. She would spend the rest of her natural life in prison. And she knew that. Steven preferred to think it was her guilt that made her want to confess, and that way he would feel justified in letting her go ahead.

But this crazy stuff about helping Beth! If Steven had been told such a thing by another solicitor he would have laughed and said the person was certifiable. Yet Susan didn’t appear to be mad, not at their first meeting, or any other one. Often she was about the most rational person he knew.

‘I’m an evil killer.’ He muttered her words to himself and then took deep breaths to try to quell the butterflies in his stomach. He saw ‘evil killers’ as men like Fred West, Peter Sutcliffe or Dennis Nielson. Cold, twisted men who got some sort of perverted thrill out of murder. Rose West and Myra Hindley had probably been equally evil, but right now as he stood here in a stuffy prison corridor, their part in the murders only seemed to him to be as assistants. He knew women’s prisons held many murderers, but for the life of him he couldn’t name one who had killed more than once.

He wished now he’d had some previous experience in a murder case. Perhaps then he could be more objective. He had always imagined that if he had to defend a murderer, he would do it to the very best of his ability but be very glad when he lost the case. He’d never heard of any lawyer believing their client innocent when they themselves admitted their guilt.

But that was how he felt. While knowing perfectly well that Susan did do the shooting at the surgery, he couldn’t help but feel she was justified in doing it. When he looked back on her life and saw all the shit which had been dumped on her, he didn’t think he would blame her if she’d opened fire on a hundred people.

But that was his real quandary, of course. He had so much wanted to steam into court and fight the prosecution by bringing up all the sad, miserable and tragic things which had happened to Susan. He wanted others to feel as he did, that she was pushed over the edge, couldn’t help herself, so they’d be glad when she only got a short sentence.

Yet with another two murders thrown in, the picture was entirely different. There wouldn’t be many tears for Reuben. But Zoë was young and beautiful, no one would think she deserved to die. Susan would become a hate figure. That bothered him more than anything, for like Beth he’d seen the goodness and honesty in her. To him she was a victim, too, of cruel circumstances that compelled her to step outside the law.

He looked at his watch and saw it was almost two. He had to go back in.

Steven had only a couple of minutes in the interview room alone with Susan before Longhurst and Bloom came back in. She seemed composed, even anxious to get started.

‘Are you absolutely sure you want to do this?’ he asked.

‘Absolutely sure,’ she said, looking right into his eyes.

‘You do understand what this will lead to?’

‘Yes, there will be no diminished responsibility. I’ll get life,’ she said, with great determination in both her voice and her eyes. ‘And no, I don’t want time to think about it. I have thought. My mind is made up.’

Steven thought Roy looked drawn and tired as he came back into the room. ‘My client has instructed me that she wishes to make a full confession,’ he said.

Roy’s expression was almost laughable. His dark brown eyes widened, he looked in disbelief first at Susan and then at Steven and his mouth gaped.

But he recovered very quickly. He took off his jacket and hung it on the back of the chair, sat down and put a new tape into the recorder, tested it, then did the usual date, time and those present.

‘Where would you like to begin, Susan?’ he asked.

‘On August 9th, 1986,’ she said, looking toward the tape-recorder self-consciously. ‘That was the day I killed Liam Johnstone.’

Steven looked at her in complete astonishment. A cold shudder ran down his spine. He opened his mouth to speak but nothing came out. Surely she hadn’t really killed Liam too?

‘I didn’t mean to kill him,’ she said, looking straight at Steven as if willing him not to interrupt. ‘I was angry because he wouldn’t come to Bristol with me. We argued, he began to walk out of the kitchen to leave the house, and I picked up a knife and stabbed him in the back.’

‘What kind of knife was it?’ Roy asked.

Steven noticed his voice shook just a little, even though he had managed to suppress his surprise.

‘A French cook’s knife,’ she said, quite calmly. ‘It was about ten or twelve inches long, a triangular blade. I’d left it out on the side after cutting up some meat earlier.’

Only that morning Susan had lied to Detective Inspector Longhurst when she said she couldn’t remember anything much about that day. She could recall it all in fine detail, every word that was spoken, however much she wished she could forget.

It was hot and sultry, and the river at the bottom of the garden reflected the blue of the sky. She had got off the bus just before two, changed into a pink sundress, put her hair up in bunches, and after hastily preparing a chicken casserole for the evening meal, went outside to sit on the sun lounger under one of the apple trees. She was so full of excitement about the house she’d found in Bristol that she could barely wait for Liam to get home so she could tell him about it. Unable even to read because of her excitement, she closed her eyes and planned the colour scheme for the living room in her new home.

She must have dropped off to sleep for she woke suddenly at the sound of running water. Looking round, she saw Liam standing in the doorway. He was drinking a glass of water, wearing only a pair of jeans which had been cut off into shorts, his chest bare. His dark curls stuck to his head with sweat, or maybe he’d just put his head under the tap.

Calling out to him, she asked him to bring her some water and to come and hear her exciting news. When he didn’t come out, she got up and went to the kitchen, and found him sitting at the table studying a map.

‘Didn’t you hear me?’ she asked.

‘Yes, but I was just checking something,’ he said, still looking at the map.

‘I’ve found us a wonderful little house,’ she said, and gabbled on for a while about the size of the rooms, the garden and how lovely Clifton in Bristol was. In her excitement she didn’t notice he wasn’t responding, not until he got up from the table and caught hold of her arm.

‘Suzie, I’m really glad you’ve found somewhere nice to live,’ he said, his face stern and cold. ‘But it’s no good you talking about it as if I’m going to be there too. I told you I wasn’t going to Bristol with you. I’m not going to change my mind.’

‘But you must come with me,’ she said. ‘It’s just perfect for us. You’ll get lots of work around there too.’

‘I have my work here,’ he insisted. ‘I told you I couldn’t live in a city.’

‘But it isn’t like a city, it’s really pretty,’ she said.

He
had
said she was to find a place for herself, and that he was going to carry on the way he’d always done, living in his van, moving from job to job. He had even been quite fierce about it. But she hadn’t really believed he meant it. After all, he’d told her he didn’t like living in this house either, and he’d been here since last December.

He made her sit down, and repeated everything he’d said before. How he wasn’t the settling-down kind, and he’d only stayed here because of the circumstances of her parents dying and her brother being so vicious. ‘I really like you, Suzie,’ he said, reaching out and stroking her cheek. ‘We had some good times together. But you need a straight guy, someone steady who will look after you. I’m sorry if you began to think of it as a permanent thing, but every time I’ve tried to go before you got upset. I’ll help you with the packing, do anything I can to make it easier for you. But that’s all, Suzie. I need my freedom back.’

She argued with him, insisting he did really love her and that she couldn’t live without him.

‘That’s not true,’ he said. ‘You’ve found your wings now, Suzie, it’s time you made a life of your own, for yourself.’

‘I don’t want to,’ she burst out, frightened by his harsh tone. ‘I want to be with you, to care for you.’

‘I don’t want to be cared for the way you cared for your father,’ he snapped back at her. ‘It’s not my scene to have dinner on the table when I get in, my clothes washed and ironed. Someone waiting on me. It shouldn’t be your scene either. You’ve had a lifetime of looking after your mother and father, cooking, cleaning and chasing after them. It’s time to stop that.’

‘I won’t do that if you don’t like it,’ she said wildly. ‘I’ll be whatever you want me to be.’

‘I don’t need a woman who just wants to mould herself around me,’ he said impatiently.

She didn’t understand what he meant by that. Surely that’s what all men wanted, women who made everything nice and comfortable for them? She began arguing wildly with him, contradicting everything he’d said, and things she’d said herself, and she could feel herself growing angrier and angrier because she couldn’t find the right words to convince him she was what he needed. She kept repeating that she loved him, and she needed him with her, but that seemed to make him even more determined.

Then quite suddenly his calm left him. ‘You’re suffocating me, for fuck’s sake!’ he shouted at her. ‘Christ almighty, Suzie! How many times do I have to tell you I don’t like living in houses, with meals on the table and a bath run for me? I hate it. I’m beginning to hate you too, Suzie because you are squeezing the lifeblood out of me.’

He turned away towards the door, and she knew he was going for good. She had to stop him, she couldn’t live without him.

A French cook’s knife was still lying on the kitchen unit where she’d cut up chicken for a casserole earlier, and in the heat of the moment she picked it up and she ran at his back with it.

In the split second before she thrust it into him, a voice inside her head was telling her this wasn’t the way. But she was too angry, too desperate to stop, and with all her force she plunged the blade right into him, right up to the hilt.

‘What have you done?’ he said in a strange, strained voice, half turning towards her. He tottered and fell sideways to the floor.

For a moment she couldn’t believe what she saw – the knife embedded in his bare back, blood, thick and dark red, oozing out around it, dripping on to the tiles. She stood there looking down at him, her hands over her mouth in shock.

She came to sufficiently to pull the knife out a few seconds later. She pressed a clean towel over the wound. But he only made a little gurgling sound, then nothing more.

Nothing was ever so bad as that moment. She couldn’t believe that in just a couple of seconds someone could go from arguing to death. Or that she could get angry enough to attack anyone. Part of her wanted to run to the phone and tell someone, anyone, what she’d done. But the longer she knelt beside Liam, knowing by then he was truly dead, the more afraid she got.

It was murder! The sort of thing she’d seen on the television and wondered at. The police would come, she’d be taken off to prison and her face would be in all the papers.

As she knelt there beside him, it was as though she was being sucked into a vortex. Time, place, even what they’d argued about had no meaning. She was sobbing, leaning over him, kissing his face, smoothing back his hair and telling him she didn’t mean to do it.

It was at least an hour until the thought came to her that she could bury him in the garden. It was big, surrounded by trees and thick bushes, not overlooked from any other house. Even if someone was walking down by the river, there were too many bushes to see anything clearly. No one would know what she’d done, she would leave just as planned, and everyone around here would think Liam had just moved on. Maybe they’d even think he’d gone to Bristol with her.

The more she thought about it, the better the idea seemed. The people who were buying the house had fallen in love with the garden, they weren’t likely to start digging it up. She even knew a place where the ground was soft.

The previous autumn, Liam had cut down some trees. One stump had been left, intended to be turned into a bird table, but it had sprouted from the base again during the spring. Only a few weeks earlier, Liam had insisted on digging it out, he said it was diseased and an eyesore. She didn’t see why that mattered, seeing as she would be leaving, but he insisted.

He made a real mess of the lawn by digging such a deep and wide hole to get the roots out, and she got cross with him because she thought the new owners would be upset. Liam had promised to get some new turf for it, and a new shrub to plant. He had done it too, just yesterday while she was still in Bristol – she’d noticed it the moment she got home.