The Cradle in the Grave (27 page)

Only three stars, was it?
I don't say it. It's too easy to be cruel to her, and I know I'd enjoy it too much.
It's not her fault I started blubbing and made an exhibition of myself
.

‘I didn't like the room they put me in, but I told myself it didn't matter – I'd only be there a few nights while I sorted out somewhere more permanent to live. I had this nauseous feeling that wouldn't go away, a bit like car sickness, but I tried to ignore it.'

‘What was wrong with the room?' I asked. ‘Was it dirty?'

‘Probably. I don't know.' I hear impatience in her voice, as if she's been asked the same question countless times and still can't come up with an answer. ‘It was mainly the curtains that bothered me.'

‘Dirty?' I try again.

‘I didn't get close enough to find out. They were too thin and too short. They stopped at the bottom of the window instead of going down to the floor. It was as if someone had pinned two handkerchiefs to the wall. And they were attached to one of those horrible plastic tracks with no pelmet or anything to cover it. You could see bits of string poking out behind the material at the top.' She shudders. ‘They were disgusting. I wanted to run from the room screaming. I know it sounds crazy.'

Just a bit
.

‘There was a picture on the wall of a stone urn, with flowers strewn around its base. I didn't like that either. It was sort of washed-out looking. No proper colours.' She rubs her neck, plucks at the skin with her fingers. ‘I wondered at first if it was because it was an urn—you know, the death connection—but I decided it couldn't be. Marcella and Nathaniel weren't cremated, they were buried.' Her matter-of-fact tone makes my skin prickle.
You know, the death connection
. How can someone whose two babies have died say that so casually?

‘Anyway, there was nothing I could do,' she goes on, unaware of my reaction. ‘I couldn't ask to change rooms without a good reason, and I didn't have one, not until I turned on the taps in the bathroom and nothing came out. No water. I was so pleased, I burst into tears, ran to the phone – I had my legitimate reason, and I knew they'd have to move me. Silly thing was, I didn't really care about having no water – I could have got a bottle from the mini-bar and used it to brush my teeth and wash my face. I just wanted to get away from those damn curtains.' She looks at me with a weak grin. ‘The ones in my new room were better. They were still too short, but at least there was a pelmet, and the material was thicker. But . . .' She closes her eyes. I wait for her to tell me that there was something even more appalling in the new room: the previous occupant's toenail clippings in a pile on the bedside table. The thought makes me feel sick; I try to erase it from my mind.
The jury will disregard the image of hard, yellow slivers of toenail
.

‘The picture of the urn was there, up on the wall – the same wall as in the previous room, directly opposite the bed.' From her haunted expression and her shaky voice, anyone would think she was recalling a scene of carnage. Perhaps she's about to. I realise I'm holding my breath.

It's a while before she speaks again. When she does, she says, ‘Not the exact same picture, obviously. An identical copy. They must have put one in each room – clones masquerading as art. Hideous, mass-produced . . . crap!'

‘I
was
sick then – properly, physically sick. I packed my things and got the hell out of there, didn't have a clue where I was going. I flagged down a taxi in the street and heard myself reciting my old Notting Hill address to the driver.'

‘You went to your ex-husband?'
Why not here, to Marchington House?

‘Angus. Yes.' There's a faraway look in her eyes. ‘I told him I couldn't stay in the hotel, but I didn't tell him why. He wouldn't have understood if I'd said there was no difference between a hotel room and a cell at Geddham Hall.'

‘But . . . you'd split up. He thought you'd . . .'

‘Killed our children. Yes, he did.'

‘Then why go to him? And why did he let you in?
Did
he let you in?'

She nods. When I see her coming towards me, I stiffen, but all she does is sit down at the far end of the sofa, leaving a comfortable distance between us. ‘I could tell you why,' she says. ‘Why I behaved as I did, why Angus behaved as he did. But it wouldn't make sense out of context. I'd like to tell you the whole story, from the start – the story I've never told anybody. The truth.'

‘You can make your documentary,' she says, with a new energy in her voice. I'm not sure if she's begging or issuing an order. ‘Not about Helen Yardley, or Sarah Jaggard – about me. Me, Angus, Marcella and Nathaniel. The story of what happened to our family. That's my one condition, Fliss. I don't want to share the hour or two hours or however long it is with anyone else, however worthy their cause. I'm sorry if that sounds selfish . . .'

‘Why me?' I ask.

‘Because you don't know what to think about me. I could hear it in your voice, the first time I spoke to you: the uncertainty, the doubt. I
need
your doubt – it'll make you listen to me, properly, because you want to find out, don't you? Hardly anyone really listens. Laurie Nattrass certainly doesn't. You'll be objective. The film you'll make won't portray me as a helpless victim or as a killer, because I'm neither one of those things. You'll show people who I really am, who Angus is, how much we both loved Marcella and Nathaniel.'

I stand up, repelled by the determination in her blazing eyes. I have to get out of here before she makes the choice for me. ‘Sorry,' I say firmly. ‘I'm not the right person.'

‘Yes, you are.'

‘I'm not. You wouldn't say that if you knew who my father was.' There, I've said it. I can't unsay it. ‘Forget it,' I mutter, feeling dangerously close to tears again.
That's why I got upset: Dad, not Laurie
. Nothing to do with Laurie, and so slightly less pathetic. A tragically dead father is a better reason to cry than unrequited love for a complete arsehole. ‘I'll go,' I say. ‘I should never have come.' I grab my bag, like someone who really intends to leave. I stay where I am.

‘It makes no difference to me who your father was,' says Rachel. ‘If he was the first on my jury to vote guilty, if he was the judge who gave me two life sentences . . . Though I think it's unlikely Justice Elizabeth Geilow's your dad.' She smiles. ‘What's his name?'

‘He's dead.' I sit down again. I can't stand up and talk about Dad at the same time. Not that I've ever tried. I've never even talked about it to Mum. How stupid is that? ‘He committed suicide three years ago. His name was Melvyn Benson. You probably won't have heard of him.'
Though he'd heard of you
. ‘He was Head of Children's Services for—'

‘Jaycee Herridge.'

I flinch at the name, though I know it's ridiculous. Jaycee Herridge didn't kill my dad. She was only twenty months old. I feel trapped, as if something that's been gaping open has slammed shut. I shouldn't have said anything. After years of bottling it up, why tell Rachel Hines, of all people?

‘Your dad was the disgraced social worker who killed himself?'

I nod.

‘I remember hearing people talking about it in prison. I avoided the news and the papers as much as possible, but a lot of the girls couldn't get enough of other people's misery – it was a distraction from their own.'

I swallow hard. The idea of Dad's suffering providing entertainment for the feral incarcerated masses is hard to take. I don't care if I'm prejudiced; if they can enjoy my father's downfall, I can think of them as scum who deserve to be behind bars. That way we're even.

‘Fliss? Tell me.'

I have the oddest feeling: that I always knew, deep down, that this would happen.
That Rachel Hines is exactly the person I want to tell
.

Woodenly, I layout the facts. Jaycee Herridge was taken to hospital twenty-one times in the first year of her life, with injuries her parents claimed were accidental – bruises, cuts, swellings, burns. When she was fourteen months old, her mother took her to the doctor's surgery with what turned out to be two broken arms, saying she had climbed out of her pram and fallen on a concrete playground. The GP knew the medical history and didn't believe the story for a second. He alerted Social Services, wishing he'd done so several months earlier instead of allowing himself to be given cups of tea and lied to by Jaycee's parents, who always took great pains to reassure him when he visited them at home, cuddling Jaycee and making a fuss of her in his presence.

The social worker assigned to the case spent the next four months doing everything she could to remove Jaycee from the family home. She had the support of the police and of every health professional who had ever had contact with the family, but the council's legal services department decreed that there wasn't sufficient proof of abuse for Jaycee to be taken into care. This was a catastrophic error on the part of a junior legal executive who should have known that in the family courts, guilt did not have to be proven beyond reasonable doubt. All that was required was for a family court judge to decide that on the balance of probabilities, Jaycee would be safer in local authority care than with her parents, and, given the number and seriousness of her injuries, this would almost certainly have happened if the case had ever made it to court.

As Head of Children's Services, my father should have spotted this mistake, but he didn't. He was overworked and stressed, ground down by the tottering towers of files on his desk, and as soon as he saw the words ‘unsafe to initiate care proceedings' and the signature of a legal executive beneath it, he probed no further. He would never have dreamed of trying to take a child from its parents against legal advice, and it wouldn't have occurred to him that a legal executive working in child protection could be so incompetent as to confuse criminal and civil standards of proof.

As a result of his misplaced trust and the legal executive's idiocy, Jaycee was left in the care of her parents, who finally murdered her in August 2005, when she was twenty months old. Her father pleaded guilty to kicking her to death and was sentenced to life in prison. Her mother was never charged with anything because it was impossible to prove she was involved in the violence against her daughter.

My father resigned. Jaycee's GP resigned. The legal executive refused to resign and was eventually fired. No one remembers their names now, and although everyone knows the name Jaycee Herridge, very few people would be able to tell you that her parents' names were Danielle Herridge and Oscar Kelly.

My father never forgave himself. In August 2006, a week before the anniversary of Jaycee's death, he washed down thirty sleeping tablets with a bottle of whisky and never woke up. He must have planned it well in advance. He'd encouraged Mum to spend the weekend at her sister's house, to make sure she didn't find him in time to save him.

I could tell Rachel Hines a lot more. I could tell her I spent the last year of Dad's life lying to him, pretending I didn't blame him for screwing up so horrendously when all the time a voice in my head was screaming
Why didn't you check? Why did you take someone else's word for it when a human life was at stake? What kind of useless cretin are you?
I've always wondered if Mum pretended too, or if she believed what she told him over and over: that it wasn't his fault, and no one could ever claim that it was. How could she believe that?

I drag myself back to the present. I need to finish explaining myself and get the hell out of here. ‘What you don't know – because you can't—is that he talked to me about you not long before he killed himself.'

‘Your father talked about
me
?'

‘Not just you – all three of you. Helen Yardley, Sarah Jaggard . . .'

‘All three of us.' Rachel smiles, as if I've said something funny. Then her smile disappears and she looks deadly serious. ‘I don't care about Helen Yardley and Sarah Jaggard,' she says. ‘What did your dad say about me?'

I feel like a sadist, but I can hardly refuse to answer her question, having got this far. ‘We'd gone out for the day – me, him and Mum. One of the many trips Mum arranged to cheer him up after Jaycee died. The fact that they never worked and it was obvious he'd never be cheerful again didn't stop us trying. We were having lunch, me and Mum chatting brightly as if everything was fine. Dad was reading the paper. There was an article about you, your case. I think it must have said something about an appeal – that you were planning to appeal or that you might, I don't know.'

Laurie probably wrote it
.

‘Dad threw down the paper and said, “If Rachel Hines appeals and wins, there's no hope.”'

Her lips twitch slightly. Apart from that, no reaction.

‘He was shaking. He'd never mentioned your name before. Mum and I didn't know what to say. There was this horrible, tense atmosphere. We both knew . . .' I stop. I don't know how to say it without sounding awful.

‘You knew that if he was thinking about me then he was thinking about dead babies.'

‘Yes.'

‘And that was a dangerous subject for him to be thinking about.'

‘He said, “If they let Rachel Hines out of prison, no parent who murders a child will ever be convicted in this country again. Everyone working in child protection might as well pack up and go home. More children like Jaycee Herridge will die and there'll be nothing anyone can do to stop it.” He had this . . . ferocious look in his eyes, as if he'd seen some sort of vision of the future and . . .'
And it made him want out
. I can't bring myself to articulate this. I'm convinced – I've always been convinced – that Dad killed himself because he didn't want to be around if and when Rachel Hines was released.