For Death Comes Softly (35 page)

‘Not a thing,' I replied.

Did I imagine the quick intake of breath. ‘How absolutely terrible,' he said.

I replaced the receiver and tried to tell myself, with mixed success, that I was being stupid. Robin was in Ireland. He could not possibly have had anything to do with the fire in Julia's flat. And in any case, how could I really think that the man I loved could be capable of that, or of the death of Natasha Felks, come to that. How could I even consider that Robin was that wicked?

Sometimes, as I veered from believing or fearing one thing to accepting the complete opposite and back again, I came to the conclusion that the only really wicked person around was me.

Good as his promise, Robin arrived home the next morning. He flew this time, from Cork into Bristol. And when he walked into the house the first thing he did was to take me into his arms. But I was determined at least to confront him with every detail of my terrible anxieties. I was quite possibly even more confused than poor Julia, I reckoned.

Resolutely I shook myself free of him, struggled to collate my muddled thinking and endeavoured to speak calmly and clearly.

‘I was on my way to visit Julia when I heard on the car radio the news of the fire,' I began.

‘Poor darling,' he said, his voice full of concern.

‘You haven't asked why I suddenly decided to go to see her?' I said bluntly.

‘Rose, she's your best friend, I was going to be away for several days, why should you have to have a reason?' he asked reasonably.

I persevered. ‘Julia had a letter to show me, a letter from Natasha to Sir Jeremy Cole,' I said.

He looked almost as blank as Julia had in her hospital bed.

‘Rose, why do you want to tell me about a letter my late fiancée wrote to her former lover?' he asked. ‘I'm not interested.'

I made myself not be put off. As succinctly as I could I told him about Julia's pretend interview and about the letter and how Julia had taken it away with her.

When I had finished Robin's face seemed to have paled considerably.

‘You can't ever forget you are a police officer, Rose, can you? Not for an instant?'

I could see that he was hurt. More than that I could not fathom.

‘Not the investigating officer,' I said. ‘There is one again though.'

His eyes opened wide in wonderment. ‘You've reported it all, haven't you?' he said, and there was absolutely no expression in his voice. ‘All this nonsense. And you've pointed the finger at me. How could you, Rose?'

‘I'm sorry,' I responded, and I was too. Although I would have done the same thing all over again, it is impossible to describe the torment I had caused myself by doing so.

‘Surprising then that I haven't been arrested yet, or at least given the third degree by the new national crime squad,' he said, his voice heavy with sarcasm.

‘Todd Mallett has already checked up on your whereabouts,' I replied quite formally, almost as if I really were on duty and dealing with a suspect. ‘And I am sure he or one of his team will question you sooner or later.'

‘Really,' Robin said, still sarcastic. ‘Good job I have such a perfect alibi, then. Or do you think I beamed myself off the train or over from Waterford to London in order to despatch your barking mad bloody friend? Is that it? Have you gone quite barking too?'

He had raised his voice almost to screaming pitch, something I had so rarely known him to do. I said nothing. His eyes narrowed.

‘Has this letter been found?' he asked.

I shook my head. ‘Julia's flat was almost totally destroyed along with everything in it,' I told him.

I was aware of Robin watching me closely, as if my behaviour were somehow curious.

‘What does this Jeremy Cole chappy have to say about it all now, then?' he continued. ‘I presume he has been questioned.'

I nodded. ‘He says there was no letter and his interview with Julia was entirely about his new TV show,' I said flatly.

Robin smiled, and for once I did not find his smile attractive at all.

‘So the allegedly incriminating letter no longer exists if it ever did, poor Julia cannot remember anything about it nor even interviewing Cole, and he denies everything,' he finally remarked coldly. ‘Bit of a cock-and-bull story, wouldn't you say?'

For a fleeting moment I almost hated him. It was the first time I had ever felt like that. Great passion and great loathing are often not far apart, I suppose. But I couldn't really hate Robin. Not even now.

He stood up, strode across the room and caught hold of me by the shoulders. Not roughly, not even then, but firmly, as if by physical contact he might emphasise his point. And he spoke to me in the way that an exasperated parent might address a silly child. Not the first time he'd done that I remember thinking, and I wasn't sure which of us that said most about.

‘Rose, I didn't even know Julia had gone to see Cole. How could I have known? I went to Ireland. I was on the overnight train on the way there when her flat caught fire. You know that.'

He wasn't being so patient now. After all this was the second time that I had confronted him with the unspeakable.

He was angry. He still had hold of me by the shoulders and just very slightly shook me. I could feel the frustration in him. For a moment I thought he was going to lose control. But he didn't. Instead he let go of me and stepped back. When he started talking again his voice was by then quite quiet and somehow very chilling.

‘I can't believe I am being interrogated by my own wife,' he said. ‘And I can't believe what you seem to be trying to accuse me of.'

I bowed my head. I'd had to have this out with him, I remained consumed with doubts and fears, but he had already succeeded in making me feel a bit ashamed of myself.

‘Are you determined to destroy our marriage?' he asked even more coldly.

‘No, no, oh, I don't know,' I stumbled. ‘I don't know what I think, or what I'm doing any more. I am so confused.'

I saw his face soften.

‘You don't really believe such awful things about me, do you, Rose?'

He just sounded sad then. I looked into his eyes. All I could see was pain, the so familiar pain.

‘No, I suppose I don't, I can't really, can I?' I heard myself say. And yet such a short time previously I had half-convinced myself that he really might be guilty of almost unimaginable crimes. What I told him next was the absolute truth. ‘If I believed it, I couldn't stay with you.'

He reached out for me again, but this time quite tenderly.

‘You have to stay with me, Rose,' he whispered. ‘We are so good together.'

It still felt right, absolutely right, there was no doubt about that. My body softened to his touch.

‘But you must stop doubting me, Rose, you really must, I just can't take any more of it. You keep opening up old wounds, don't you, digging in places where there is nothing to dig for. It's like some kind of obsession. It has to stop.'

Then he softened his words by smiling the old to-die-for smile.

I was no longer entirely blinded by the white mist of my love for him, and maybe I never would be again. But still I could not see clearly. And it was in that moment that I realised with devastating clarity that while I couldn't quite quell the terrible suspicions which haunted me, I would continue to belong to Robin Davey until there was absolutely no doubt left at all about his guilt. Perhaps even then I would not be able to break the hold he had over me.

I attempted to make one last enquiry into my husband's doubtful past. A couple of days later, on a damp, grey, rather more typically English December morning, I drove to Northgate Farm, without Robin, to visit Maude. I had begun to wonder more and more about the time, just after having suffered her dreadful stroke, when she had seemed to almost bring her son back to life with those words she had whispered into his ear.

I could still remember clearly the snatches of her conversation that I had succeeded in catching, and I had begun to wonder if the meaning was rather different to what I had first assumed. That maybe Maude had not been telling Robin to share the burden with me, but that she shared the burden with him.

Roger left me alone with Maude, who lay very still in her bed. She had recently suffered a second stroke and her condition had deteriorated.

She still managed half a distorted smile when I arrived. I held her poor semi-paralysed hands, and helped her drink some of the champagne that I had brought, from which she still seemed to derive a little pleasure.

‘It's Bollinger,' I told her affectionately. ‘I could never give you supermarket issue.'

I thought that her one good eye twinkled, but I couldn't be certain. Eventually I asked her the question I had come to Northgate to put to her.

‘Maude, were there newer mining maps of Abri which Robin withheld?' I queried bluntly.

She peered at me through that single good eye. It was hard to work out just how well her brain was still functioning. Was it my imagination that she seemed to blink more rapidly.

‘Maude, I love your son, I have to know,' I continued. ‘If there were new maps you would have seen them, wouldn't you? You would have known about them.'

I hated the idea of Maude having connived in the dreadful secret almost as much as I could not bear to think of Robin having had any part of it. But she was a Davey. By marriage, and now remarried. But still a Davey, without doubt still a Davey, and Abri was everything to that family, I was well enough aware of that.

I studied her carefully, this once so proud, broken woman I had come to love. ‘Did you tell Robin he had done the right thing?' I asked. ‘Was that it? Right to keep the maps back?'

I knew how much it would have meant to Robin to know at least that his mother thought he had done the right thing. Nothing would have been more likely to swing his mood around than that.

Suddenly Maude's good eye fell shut like the other one. I was not sure if she was actually asleep. I suspected she may just have drifted off into her own world, perhaps deliberately shutting out one she no longer wanted any part of.

I stayed for a few more minutes. I supposed I knew that I had been wasting my time. Roger Croft-Maple had already told me that Maude had not spoken a word since her second stroke.

After that there seemed nothing left but to try to get on with my life again.

Christmas came and went. Robin and I spent Christmas Day alone at our Clifton home, and of course the day lacked all of the optimistic joy of the previous year on Abri when we had so delighted just in being with each other, and in making plans for a wonderful future, blissfully unaware of the horror that was to overwhelm us. Yet, curiously, it was not as bad as it should have been. I thought a lot about my sister spending her first Christmas without her beloved son, Luke, and Robin, I knew, mourned his brother dreadfully. On Boxing Day we visited poor Maude, whose condition continued to worsen. But Robin and I were together, and in spite of everything, there was no doubt that was the way I wanted it.

Also Julia, thank God, proceeded to get better and better and the doctors were now confident of a complete recovery.

I was still on sick leave from the force. I had to see a police doctor every so often, but nobody was pressurising me to go back to work. The thought occurred to me that it was no wonder that the scale and cost of police sick leave had become a national scandal. But it was almost certainly true that I was not yet fit to return.

I was a long way from forgetting all that I had left behind, though, particularly the Stephen Jeffries case, that other nightmare. I had been doing my trick of trying not to think about that either, but eventually in mid-January I got Peter Mellor to take me out for a drink and tell me all the gruesome details. I was no longer a part of any of it, and I realised that all I was doing was torturing myself. I knew that Jeffries had been charged and committed and would probably stand trial at Bristol Crown Court in the late summer, and I also knew that I would have to be there. I would have to look him in the eye at least once more, to see for myself what I should probably have seen from the start.

Mellor was at first a reluctant confidante. I suppose technically he should not have been talking to me at all about the case, but the sheer habit of a professional relationship such as we had shared is inclined to linger. The more he told me the guiltier I felt about my own ineptitude.

‘You shouldn't feel like that, Rose,' he said. He always called me Rose nowadays. I wondered if I did go back to the force if I would be able to work with him again. Maybe he would not feel able to work with me again. It certainly wouldn't be the same as it had been before.

‘Richard Jeffries is the most plausible bastard I've ever come across, and cool with it,' he went on. ‘We'd never have got him for anything if we hadn't found the body, and not then without forensic having been able, thank God, to give us just enough to come up with something of a case and to be able to push Jeffries over the brink.

‘There was no history, no track record. However hard we looked – and by God we did look, Rose, don't let yourself think otherwise – we never found anybody with the slightest suspicion of his behaviour. Not even after he finally confessed. He was a paediatrician, for goodness' sake. Yet there wasn't a single parent who had a bad word to say about him, not a single child patient whose experiences indicated he was anything other than a first-class man as well as a first-class doctor.

‘We are almost certain now that the only child he ever touched was poor Stephen. Not the sister, not any of his young patients.'