The Cruellest Game (40 page)

Pam Cotton waited a few seconds, for Robert to continue perhaps. But when he did not she piled on the pressure.

‘Your son was fit and healthy, just fifteen years old with his whole life in front of him. He was clever and talented, that rare mix of an academic and a sportsman, was he not?’

‘Yes,’ muttered Robert.

‘So come on, Mr Anderton. Come on. What else did your wife say to him? What on earth did she say to him, to make him want to take his own life, to take his own life straight away, without
even confronting you, or speaking to his mother? What did Brenda say to your son, Mr Anderton?’

Robert’s eyes seemed focused on some unseen point in the middle distance. It was almost as if he were somewhere else, perhaps back with Brenda listening to the terrible revelations
she’d made concerning the death of our beloved Robbie. Never mind a pin, it was as if you could have heard a piece of thread drop in that courtroom.

‘Why don’t you tell us exactly what Brenda said to him, Mr Anderton?’ Pam Cotton repeated. ‘All of it. Because you know, don’t you? Brenda told you, didn’t
she?’

Robert nodded in a vague sort of way. His voice when he spoke again seemed to come from a long way off.

‘She said she wanted me to share Robbie’s pain, to understand why he felt his entire life had been destroyed . . .’

‘Yes, Mr Anderton. But what did she say to him?’

‘She said – she said she told him about the Huntington’s, and about his older half-sister who already had the full-blown disease and was unable to function as a human being any
more. She told him how we were just waiting for Janey, for his younger half-sister, to become ill too. We didn’t know when it would happen, but we knew it would happen sometime, because in
their cases the disease was carried one hundred per cent . . . there was no chance, not even a slight chance, that Janey might not get it . . . she told him all of that . . .’

Robert paused again. He was holding on to the front of the witness box for support. He looked absolutely defeated.

‘Go on, please go on, Mr Anderton,’ said Pam, much more gently now.

‘Everything she said was true, it was all true, except for one thing . . .’

Yet again he seemed unable to continue. Yet again Pam encouraged him, her voice quite soft, cajoling almost.

‘Please tell us what that one thing was, Mr Anderton,’ she coaxed.

Robert was still holding on to the witness box. He looked down at his hands so that I could no longer see his face. His voice was weak and strained, but the words were clear enough.
Frighteningly, shockingly clear.

‘She told him that I was the carrier. That I was the one who carried the deformed Huntington’s gene, not her. She said she’d told Robbie that he too would get
Huntington’s, that it was a hundred per cent certain. And so, and so . . . would any children he fathered.’

Even Pam Cotton seemed stunned.

‘She told him that you were the carrier of Huntington’s,’ she repeated, stressing the point as usual, but I thought she was just operating on autopilot.

I remembered once reading that barristers are reluctant to ask questions in court to which they do not know the answer. There was no way Pam Cotton had second-guessed that piece of evidence. And
neither had I. Nor anyone else it seemed. This time it was not a strangled gasp which could be heard in the courtroom, but more of a loud and sustained rumble.

I could not at first quite take in what I was hearing. However, Pam Cotton swiftly gathered herself together and began to speak again, determined, it seemed, to clarify every aspect of
Robert’s devastating evidence.

‘And did she say how your son responded to that terrible news?’

‘She told me that h-he broke down, and said at once that he couldn’t carry on. That . . . that he didn’t want to carry on.’

‘Indeed. And, of course, not only did your son believe himself to be the recipient of quite terrible news about his own health and his own future, but he’d just learned that he was
about to become a father himself, had he not?’

‘Yes,’ said Robert.

‘And he presumably would therefore have believed that he would be passing on this awful disease to his own child, is that not so?’

‘Yes,’ said Robert again.

‘Did your wife, did Brenda, know that Robbie was about to father a child?’

‘Not when she went to Highrise that day. She said, she said . . .’

Robert looked even more as if he were about to collapse. But he didn’t.

‘She said that was a bonus,’ he continued after a brief pause. ‘A bonus, for God’s sake. She said Robbie told her about the baby right away. About how he’d just
learned that he was going to have a child and, of course, yes, he then believed he was going to pass on a terrible disease to that child. She said it was easy after that, easy to convince him, or
let him convince himself, she put it to me, that he’d rather die than face what he then believed the future to hold. And easy, she said, easy to help him do it.’

‘So how exactly did your wife say she helped your son to kill himself?’

‘She told me she suggested hanging, because it was quick and rarely failed, and he just meekly accepted what she said. He was broken, just broken. My poor boy . . .’

Robert wiped tears away from his eyes with one hand.

‘Just repeat what she told you,’ encouraged Pam Cotton. ‘Just tell the court exactly how Brenda said she helped your son to take his own life.’

Robert nodded, and took a big gulp of air.

‘She . . . she said she helped him move his desk below the big beam that ran across the ceiling of his room, then sent him to find a length of rope, and helped him rig it all up. Then . .
. then she just . . . just watched him do it. That’s what she said. She stood there and watched him climb on the desk, put the rope around his neck, tighten it, and jump. She stood there and
watched him choke to death. Our wonderful boy. Then she left, went home as if nothing had happened.’

Robert’s voice was high-pitched now, almost hysterical. His shoulders were heaving. Tears were pouring down his cheeks.

I had always been so certain that Robbie had not killed himself, or not unaided anyway. And I’d been so sure, from the moment I discovered who and what she really was, that Brenda Anderton
was the one responsible for his death. But I hadn’t actually come close to imagining anything like this, to guessing the terrible lie which had made Robbie not want to live any more. I
didn’t want to think about what he must have been feeling, what he must have been going through on the day he died. I realized there were tears running down my cheeks too.

The judge coughed and again looked as if he were about to speak, perhaps to ask Robert if he were able to carry on. Even defendants in a murder trial are treated with that sort of courtesy in an
English courtroom.

Pam Cotton, however, was in full flow. She made sure she didn’t give the judge time to interject before firing off her next question.

‘And so you believed that you then knew the truth about the death of your only son, and that your legal wife was responsible for it,’ she barked. ‘You therefore decided to
wreak the ultimate revenge. You decided to kill her, did you not? You decided to kill your wife Brenda. Is that not the case, Mr Anderton?’

Robert’s jaw dropped. It was as if he had not considered at all the impact of what he had just told the court. He stopped weeping as if a switch had been thrown.

‘No, no!’ he cried. ‘I hated Brenda then, of course I did, but I’m not a murderer. I would never kill anyone, not even her, not even after what she’d told me
she’d done. In any case, I could never really believe she’d done it. Not to Robbie. He’d never hurt anyone—’

‘Oh come on, Mr Anderton. You idolized your only son, ironically your only healthy child. Your wife Brenda told you she helped him to die. Encouraged him to kill himself. You must have
felt this justified taking her life too. Didn’t you, Mr Anderton? Isn’t that what happened, Mr Anderton? You murdered your wife in revenge for the death of your son, did you
not?’

‘No, no,’ said Robert more quietly. ‘I told you, when I thought about it, I didn’t even believe her. Not really. I thought she was just trying to hurt me, to make me
suffer too. I certainly never planned to hurt her. I didn’t kill her. I didn’t.’

But Robert was no longer at all convincing. Not only had he proven himself to be a most accomplished liar over the years, which my evidence alone had made clear, but also his own evidence had
been muddled throughout to the point of being totally contradictory.

‘No further questions, My Lord,’ said Pam Cotton.

The court seemed curiously silent. Then the judge glanced towards Joshua Small.

‘Do you wish to re-examine, Mr Small?’ he asked.

The defence barrister, apparently as stunned as all the rest of us and quite clearly previously unaware of the evidence his client had just given, climbed to his feet.

‘I do, My Lord,’ he said, without any real certainty, I felt.

He turned to Robert.

‘Mr Anderton, how could your wife possibly have known that she would be able to persuade your son to kill himself?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Robert muttered.

‘In confronting Robbie and exposing her real identity to him she surely risked ending her entire charade without necessarily wreaking any significant revenge against you at all. So what
would she have done if your son had not proved so susceptible? What would she have done if he had simply picked up the phone to call his mother?’

Robert looked down at his hands and said nothing.

‘You must answer the question, Mr Anderton,’ instructed the judge.

Robert looked up.

‘Brenda told me she had been prepared to kill him if necessary.’ His voice was barely more than a whisper but the court was so quiet there was no need for the judge to ask him to
speak up.

Joshua Small QC seemed to turn rather pale. Rather desperately, I felt, he sought some sort of recovery.

‘Mrs Anderton planned to kill a fit and athletic teenage boy. How exactly?’

Robert looked appealingly towards the judge. Sir Charles Montague merely stared at him.

‘She told me she had taken a carving knife with her,’ Robert said, again in almost a whisper. ‘From the kitchen . . . it was in her handbag. She always carried quite a big bag
. . .’

His voice, already so tiny, faded away.

A kind of embarrassed titter reverberated around the court. In spite of the awfulness of Robert’s latest revelation, I understood. There was something almost surreally comical about the
concept of this middle-aged woman seeking out Robbie at Highrise with a carving knife concealed in her handbag.

Joshua Small was no longer at all the super-confident QC of earlier in the day. You could just see how much he regretted having asked that question. He really was a man in a hole unable to stop
digging.

‘But did you really think your wife would have been capable of using a knife on Robbie?’ he blustered on.

‘No, of course not,’ said Robert, his voice louder and stronger. ‘I’m sure she couldn’t have.’

Small ended his re-examination, and did his best to continue with the case for the defence, which, it seemed to me, had been more or less totally scuppered by Robert’s performance. The
defence barrister had been left with damned near nowhere to go.

He called, as had doubtless been his intention before Robert’s outburst, one of the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary forensic team who had initially examined Brenda Anderton’s
car.

From the beginning John Parsons, a big man in his early forties, looked as if he’d rather be almost anywhere other than Exeter Crown Court that morning. He stumbled over his words and was
clearly ill at ease. After all, he must already have been well aware that he and his colleagues had missed something rather important when they’d first examined the Toyota. The little matter
of deliberate sabotage had totally escaped them.

However, Mr Small pushed his point gamely.

‘Is it significant that any question of these strands being deliberately cut only arose after the police learned that there may actually be people – indeed, they came to believe, one
person in particular – with reason to want Mrs Anderton dead?’

‘I suppose so, yes.’

‘And does the history of the accelerator system of Toyota Corollas continue to cast an element of doubt on this?’

‘I’m not sure I understand, sir,’ said John Parsons.

‘I am asking you if the possibility that the death of Mrs Anderton was due to a tragic accident caused by mechanical failure might indeed remain,’ continued Small.

John Parsons finally grasped that he was being thrown a professional lifeline.

‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘Of course. Absolutely.’

But it was clear that his evidence was having little effect on the jury or anyone else in the courtroom. This was technical stuff. And it paled into insignificance compared with the excitement
provoked by Robert’s appearance in the witness box, which the press were later to widely describe as having offered ‘scenes of the highest possible drama’ and a ‘spectacular
courtroom revelation’.

In any case Pam Cotton put paid to it in one brief onslaught.

‘Obviously the original forensic team can be totally forgiven for allowing their initial opinion to be coloured by the unfortunate recent history of certain Toyota motor cars,’ she
said. ‘And furthermore there was initially no reason at all to even consider, really, the possibility of suspicious circumstances surrounding the death of Mrs Anderton. But, Mr Parsons, when
you were asked to re-examine the vehicle, along with a more experienced man, the UK’s acknowledged leader in the field, and in a more thorough and detailed way, was it not then abundantly
clear to you and your team that strands of the accelerator cable of Mrs Anderton’s vehicle had been deliberately cut?’

Parsons coloured slightly. ‘Well, not entirely,’ he said.

‘C’mon now, Mr Parsons,’ Pam Cotton persisted. Another of her favourite phrases. ‘Come on, now. Surely you were then able to tell whether or not the threads had been
deliberately cut? So, were they?’