A Room Swept White (42 page)

‘So?’

‘Why didn’t you mention that, when I showed you the card I’d been sent and asked you what it could mean? Why didn’t you say “Someone sent me one of those too”?’

‘I don’t know,’ Laurie says impatiently.

‘I do. You knew about the card found on Helen’s body, didn’t you? You must have done – it’s the only thing that makes sense. I don’t know how you knew, but you did. My guess is that Paul Yardley told you, and you were scared. You worked out that whoever was sending the cards had moved on to killing. If they’d killed Helen, maybe you’d be next. You and Helen and JIPAC have your loyal supporters, but you’ve also got enemies. I found several anti-JIPAC websites yesterday, all of which claim you’ve created a climate of fear for doctors and paediatricians. Most of them are terrified to testify in suspected abuse cases, in case you set out to destroy them the way you did Judith Duffy.’

Laurie says nothing, just walks alongside me, head down. I’m glad I can’t see his face.

‘You panicked. There was no way you were going to continue with your quest for justice if it meant there might be some actual consequences for you personally, like someone trying to kill you. All that matters to you is you, right? You needed to distance yourself from the cot-death murders controversy quickly, so you announced that you were leaving Binary Star, going to Hammerhead. Incidentally, I’ve been chatting to people at Hammerhead about you. I know when
they first made you that offer you couldn’t refuse: more than a year ago. Funny how you suddenly decided to accept, the day after Helen Yardley was murdered.’

I stop, so that he can confirm or deny it. He says nothing.

‘You emailed everyone telling them I was taking over the film. You chose me because, if you’re right and whoever ends up making that film
is
going to be a killer’s next target, better that it should be someone disposable like me, someone who’s never going to amount to anything anyway.’

I pick up my pace, full of furious energy. Who’d have thought anger would have aerobic benefits?

‘Course, you could have gone to the police, couldn’t you? Told them about the card you’d been sent, how it was the same as the one found on Helen’s body. And when I showed you my card, you could have alerted me to the danger I was in. It’s pretty obvious why you did neither. You couldn’t risk anyone putting two and two together: your being on a killer’s mailing list, and your suddenly dropping the cot-death film like a hot brick. People might have concluded you were scared. The great Laurie Nattrass – scared! Imagine if that had leaked out to the press. That was why Tamsin had to go. She was the only person who knew you’d been sent those numbers; she’d seen the card on your desk.’

‘Tamsin’s redundancy wasn’t down to me,’ Laurie snaps, making me wonder if this is the first thing he’s heard that he disagrees with. ‘Raffi said we were overstretched, we had to make some savings . . .’

‘And you suggested Tamsin as the sacrifice,’ I finish the sentence for him. ‘My best friend.’

We’re in Regent’s Park. I’d probably think it was beautiful
if Laurie and I weren’t having the most wretched conversation in the world.

‘I had a best friend,’ he says tonelessly. ‘Her name was Helen Yardley. And I didn’t choose you to take over the film because I thought you were disposable and wouldn’t amount to anything – that’s your paranoia.’

I chose you because I love you. I chose you because the film is important to me, and so are you
.

‘I thought you’d be easy to control. The film mattered to me, and I thought I could get you to make it the way I wanted it made.’

Oh. Right.

‘You’ve got an inferiority complex.’ He makes it sound like a disgusting medical condition, something I should be ashamed of. Surely it’s a good thing that some of us are riddled with self-doubt. Don’t the people like me balance out the people like Laurie?

‘How could you not tell me?’ I say. ‘When I showed you that card, how could you not say . . .’

‘I didn’t want to worry you.’

‘You
were worried, enough to—’

‘Do we have to analyse everything to death?’ he cuts me off. ‘You’ve done what you came to do, staked out the moral high ground.’

I reach into my bag and pull out the second draft of his
British Journalism Review
article. ‘I’ve read this.’ I thrust it at him. He doesn’t take it. The pages fall to the ground. Neither of us bends to pick them up. ‘I thought it was better than the first version. Scrapping those names from the list was a good move.’

Laurie frowns. ‘What list?’

‘The one that goes on and on.’

‘Fuck are you talking about?’

‘ “Dr Duffy was responsible for ruining the lives of dozens of innocent women whose only crime was to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when a child or children died: Helen Yardley, Lorna Keast, Joanne Bew, Sarah Jaggard, Dorne Llewellyn . . . the list goes on and on.” Ring any bells?’

Laurie turns away.

‘One problem. In this latest draft’ – I bend to retrieve the pages – ‘the list doesn’t go on and on. In this draft, the list is only three names long: Helen Yardley, Sarah Jaggard, Dorne Llewellyn. I’m no editor, but I think the original version’s better. If you want to invoke the dozens of innocent women whose lives were ruined by Duffy, five names works better than three. So what happened? Was it a word-limit thing?’

Laurie is walking away, heading towards the boating lake. ‘Why ask if you already know?’ The wind brings his words back to me.

I run to catch him up. ‘You deleted Lorna Keast and Joanne Bew. Keast was a single mother from Carlisle with a borderline personality. She smothered her son Thomas in 1997, and her son George in 1999. Judith Duffy testified against her, and she was found guilty in 2001. By the time Helen Yardley’s convictions were quashed, you’d managed to kick up such a stink about Duffy that the CCRC was forced to act: it started to re-examine similar cases. In March this year – I’m guessing just after you wrote the first draft of your ‘Doctor Who Lied’ article – Lorna Keast was granted leave to appeal, which had previously been denied. Obviously the honest side of her personality was to the fore that day – she was devastated when her lawyers told her she might be in with a chance of getting out. She’d always
protested her innocence up until that point, but when she heard she might soon be freed, she confessed to having smothered both her sons. She said she wanted to stay in prison, wanted to be punished for what she’d done. She wouldn’t hear of having the charge changed to infanticide, which was a possibility once she’d confessed, and would have carried a lighter sentence – she wanted to be punished as a murderer.’

‘What your Google searches won’t have told you is that, as well as being barking mad, Lorna Keast is one of the thickest women ever to drag her knuckles along the surface of this planet,’ says Laurie. ‘Even if she was innocent, being found guilty and sent to prison might have been enough to convince her she was a murderer and deserved to be behind bars.’ He flashes a contemptuous look in my direction. ‘Or maybe she preferred the safety of prison life to having to fend for her brainless self on the out.’

‘Or maybe she was guilty,’ I say.

‘So what if she was? Does that make Judith Duffy any less dangerous? Of course I knocked Keast’s name off the list – I don’t want people reading the article and thinking that if Duffy was right about her then she might have been right about all the others. She
wasn’t
right about Helen, Sarah Jaggard, Ray Hines, Dorne Llewellyn . . .’ Laurie grabs my arm and swings me round to face him. ‘Someone had to stop her, Fliss.’

I shake off his hand. ‘What about Joanne Bew?’

‘Bew was granted leave to appeal.’

‘Whoa, let’s rewind a bit. What was she in prison for?’

Laurie’s mouth flattens into a thin line.

‘Why don’t I tell us the story? Joanne Bew murdered her son Brandon . . .’

‘Let’s fast-forward a bit,’ Laurie parodies me. ‘There was a retrial and she was acquitted.’

‘Then why delete her name from the article? Surely she’s your best illustration of the harm irresponsible experts can do: first she’s convicted, all because of a doctor’s flawed testimony against her, then she’s retried and acquitted once that same doctor’s been exposed by the wonderful Laurie Nattrass. Come on, she’s JIPAC’s perfect poster girl, isn’t she? No? Why not, Laurie?’

He’s staring at the boating lake as if it’s the most fascinating expanse of water in the world.

‘Joanne Bew, former landlady of what’s now the Retreat pub in Bethnal Green, murdered her son Brandon in January 2000,’ I say. ‘She was blind drunk and at a party when she did it. There was a witness: Carl Chappell, also very drunk. Chappell was on his way to the loo, and he passed the door of the bedroom where Joanne had put six-week-old Brandon down to sleep. He happened to look into the room, and he saw Joanne kneeling on the bed with a cigarette in one hand and her other hand pressed over Brandon’s nose and mouth. He saw her hold her hand there for a good five minutes. He saw her press down.’

‘As you say, he was smashed. Had form too: GBH, ABH . . .’

‘At Joanne’s first trial in April 2001, Judith Duffy gave evidence for the prosecution. She said there were clear signs of smothering.’

‘Which is the only reason the jury believed Chappell,’ says Laurie. ‘His eye-witness account tallied with a respected doctor’s expert opinion.’

‘Lots of other people also testified against Joanne. Friends and acquaintances said she never referred to Brandon by his
name – she called him ‘The Mistake’. Warren Gruff, Joanne’s boyfriend and Brandon’s father, said she mistreated the baby from day one – sometimes when he was screaming with hunger, she’d refuse to give him milk and try to feed him chips or chicken nuggets instead.’

‘She was a bad mother.’ Laurie shrugs and starts to walk. ‘Doesn’t make her a murderer.’

‘True.’ I catch him up, keep pace with him. I imagine myself linking my arm through his and nearly laugh. He’d regard that as such an affront; I’d love to see his reaction. I’m tempted to do it, just to prove to myself I have the nerve. ‘Bew was already a convicted killer, though, wasn’t she?’ I say instead. There’s no surprise on Laurie’s face. He knew I knew, and he thinks that’s it, that’s my trump card. That’s why he’s not worried. ‘She and Warren Gruff had both served time for the manslaughter of Bew’s sister, Zena. They punched and kicked her to death in the kitchen of Gruff’s flat after a family row, and each blamed the other. At Bew’s first trial in 2001, Zena’s death wasn’t mentioned – someone must have thought it might prejudice the jury. I can’t think why, can you? I mean, just because a woman punches and kicks her sister to death, and is a bad mother – as you say, it doesn’t mean she must have murdered her baby. Though, as it happened, and even without the inconvenient Zena anecdote, all twelve jurors
did
believe Joanne Bew was a murderer.’

‘You ever watched a criminal trial?’ says Laurie scornfully.

‘You know I haven’t.’

‘You should try it some time. Watch the jurors being sworn in. Most of them can’t read the oath without stumbling over the words. Some can’t read it at all.’

‘What about the jury that acquitted Joanne Bew second
time round, in May 2006? How stupid were they? They
were
told that Bew had served time for the manslaughter of her sister. What they didn’t know was that she’d previously been convicted of murdering Brandon. They didn’t know it was a retrial.’

‘That’s—’

‘Standard. I know.’ I walk as close to Laurie’s side as I can without touching him. He moves away, widening the gap between us. ‘Judith Duffy didn’t testify against Bew the second time,’ I continue with my story. ‘By May 2006, you’d made sure no prosecutor in need of an expert would touch her with a bargepole. I wonder if the jury would have believed Carl Chappell, though, if he’d testified again that he watched Bew smother Brandon?’

‘They didn’t get a chance to believe or disbelieve him,’ says Laurie. ‘Chappell updated his statement to the effect that he was so drunk that night, he wouldn’t have known his own name, let alone what he did or didn’t see.’

‘You can tell he’s a drinker, can’t you?’ I’m nearly there, nearly at the end of this protracted worst moment of my life. ‘The bulbous nose and the broken veins. He’s a prime candidate for one of those makeover shows, don’t you think?
10 Years Younger
.’

Laurie stops walking.

I carry on, talking to myself. I don’t care if he can hear me or not. ‘I can’t watch that programme now Nicky Hambleton-Jones doesn’t present it any more, can you? It’s not the same without her.’

‘You’ve met Chappell?’ Laurie’s by my side again. ‘When?’

‘Yesterday. I’d found an article on the internet that suggested he used to be a regular at the Retreat, or the Dog
and Partridge as was, so I paid a visit there and asked if anyone knew him. Quite a few people did, and one told me which betting shop he’d be in first thing this morning. That was where I found him. Is that how you found him too, when you needed to track him down and offer him two thousand pounds in exchange for a revised statement, a statement full of lies that would secure a not-guilty verdict for Joanne Bew and another point to you in the battle against Judith Duffy?’

‘Look, whatever—’

‘Chappell wasn’t there when you popped in, so you left a note for him with someone who said they’d pass it on. And they did.’

‘You can’t prove any of this,’ Laurie says. ‘You think Carl Chappell keeps notes from years back, just in case the British Library wants to acquire his archive one day?’ He laughs, pleased with his own joke. I remember Tamsin telling me a few months ago that the British Library had paid some obscene amount of money for Laurie’s papers. I wonder how much they’d pay for a long letter to him from me, detailing exactly what I think of him. Maybe I should get in touch with them and ask.

‘Chappell didn’t keep the note,’ I say, ‘but he remembers what happened, and he remembers where you told him to meet you. If only you’d picked Madame Tussauds, or the National Portrait Gallery, or here in Regent’s Park, by the boating lake.’