Till We Meet Again (6 page)

But at least Mrs Wetherall wasn’t making flowery statements, not yet anyway. Was that because she had recognized Susan’s name as one her husband had mentioned at home? Or was she just naturally dignified?

Beth wished she could cancel all afternoon appointments so she could go down to the library and check in their archives for newspaper reports on Annabel’s death. A death from meningitis would be reported on and Susan might have aired her views then if she felt her doctor was at fault.

But Beth had to remind herself that it wasn’t her job to be some kind of private eye. She only had to liaise with the accused, get as much information as she could from them, produce witnesses, and then pass it all on to the barrister who would put his defence together for the day of the trial. Until Susan agreed she needed help, and started talking, Beth couldn’t really do anything.

Susan was still saying nothing at all, both before her brief court appearance and after she’d heard she was to be remanded in custody and would be taken to Eastwood Park Prison outside Bristol. Beth didn’t try to make her open up by telling her she knew about Annabel, she thought she would save that for their interview at the prison on Monday. But she got the idea it wouldn’t have made any difference if she had. Susan seemed to have shut her mind down and didn’t care what happened to her.

The weekend seemed endless to Beth. It rained almost solidly and for the first time in months she felt desperately lonely. She had always hated this time of year. Damp, foggy days, the light gone by five o’clock, soggy leaves on the pavements, and the shops all trying to create a feeling of false optimism with their tacky Christmas present ideas. But this time her melancholy seemed worse than usual. She found herself dwelling on the past, unable to settle to anything which would take her mind off it.

The previous Christmas was one such memory which kept coming back to her. Every Christmas was torture to her; long before it came she dreaded all those cheery questions from her colleagues about what she would be doing. She used to lie and say she was going home to her family. Let them think she got the kind of Christmas portrayed in glossy magazines. A holly wreath on the door of the family home, an eight-foot tree, dozens of tastefully wrapped presents beneath. Carols and log fires, small children in party clothes, eyes wide with wonder. The dining table laid with candelabras, silver and crystal.

In the far-off days when Beth felt compelled to go home for her mother’s benefit, Christmas was something to be endured, not enjoyed. Her mother a nervous wreck, her father waiting for her to make one slip up so he could humiliate her. Her brother and sister strained because they knew their partners didn’t want to be there, and their children like little stuffed dummies, not daring to say a word because they were afraid of their grandfather.

Even after her mother was dead and her father in a home, Christmas had remained something to be dreaded. Of course she could have gone and stayed with either Robert or Serena and their families, they always invited her, but by then a family Christmas was synonymous with bad times. Mostly Beth booked into a country hotel, politely, but without enthusiasm, joined in the organized festivities, and escaped as often as possible for long walks on her own.

Last year had been truly awful though. Because she hadn’t been in Bristol very long, she quite relished time alone in her new flat. There was an office party in the afternoon of Christmas Eve, and as it was such a short walk to her flat, she drank far more than she would normally have done. As she went rather unsteadily up the stairs to her flat, she fell and broke her arm.

It was bad enough having to wait over six hours at the Royal Infirmary down the road to get it x-rayed and put into plaster, but then she spent the next four days in pain, totally alone and unable to do the simplest thing for herself. She didn’t know anyone in Bristol well enough to call them for help or just some comfort. That was when she discovered what it meant to feel suicidal.

As Beth drove out through Bristol, she thought how often her clients had remarked with some pique, ‘It’s all right for you, born with the silver spoon in your mouth.’ It was laughable really that people jumped to such conclusions, just because she was a solicitor, and well spoken. She knew it would never occur to a battered wife from a council estate that domestic violence could also lurk behind solid oak doors and tree-lined drives. Nor would a burglar imagine that there could be poverty in a seemingly grand house.

But Beth knew better, for she had experienced both these things at first hand. Her father was a bully, a fearful snob and a charlatan. He always implied that he came from an illustrious background, but the reality was that his great-grandfather, Ronald Powell, was just an illiterate working-class man who had made good by buying cheap land and building little terraced houses in London’s Kentish Town, then selling them on at a vast profit. He repeated this again and again, shrewdly buying land no one else wanted, then building little houses that were just what people did want.

Ronald was already quite wealthy when he married in 1870, but his wife Leah came from a more aristocratic family. Perhaps it was her influence that made Ronald build Copper Beeches, the house in Sussex where Beth grew up. It had the classic style and elegance of Georgian country houses, and Leah and Ronald planted the avenue of beech trees which now lined the drive.

They had three boys, two of whom were killed in France in the First World War, but Ernest, Beth’s grandfather, survived, and came home to take over the thriving family business and to share Copper Beeches with his now ageing parents and his wife Honor. Beth’s father, Montague, was born in 1920.

Beth had been brought up with tales of the big parties they had at Copper Beeches when her father was a boy, of the stables full of horses, the servants and the fine gardens. The stables were still there, though empty, and what had once been extensive lawns were now pasture, sold on to a neighbouring farmer. But there had been no money since long before Beth was born in 1951. The house was in dire need of repairs, it was always cold and damp, and there wasn’t even any help for her mother with the cleaning.

Beth had never been able to find out why her father hadn’t managed to continue making money after his father died. She knew that the post-war years, right up to the Sixties, were boom times in property development. She could only suppose it was incompetence or laziness, because her sister Serena, who was ten years older than her, said she couldn’t ever remember their father working. He was always at home, sitting reading the paper, pottering around in the garden, checking their mother’s household accounts and berating her for extravagance.

Beth had asked her mother, Alice, to try to explain the mystery of it to her, some fifteen years ago, but all she’d got was the same pathetic excuse she’d heard so many times before: ‘Monty was brought up to be a gentleman, he was never taught how to run a business. It isn’t his fault.’

‘Gentleman!’ Beth muttered to herself. ‘The truth of the matter is that you are a pompous, nasty bastard!’

She hated him. If it hadn’t been for her mother she would never have gone back to the house after she started university. Monty even took the credit for that, boasting about the sacrifices he’d had to make to give his three children such a good education.

The truth was, it hadn’t cost him anything, they’d all gone to grammar schools. When they went on to university they all got grants, and took part-time jobs to keep themselves. Monty had never given any of them anything – not money, not time, nor even affection. Now he liked to take the credit for their successes.

But Beth had loved her mother. She was a quiet, gently brought up woman who did her best for her children and stoically put up with her overbearing bully of a husband, believing that marriage was for better or worse. But it couldn’t get much worse than she had it. She might have lived to a ripe old age if Montague had agreed to sell the house and move somewhere dry, warm and easier to look after.

‘I wonder if you’ll tell me what your parents are like?’ Beth said to herself, thinking again of Susan.

Beth liked to know her clients’ family background. She found it often held the key to what made them turn to crime. It certainly wasn’t an infallible guide, though – there had been enough trauma and provocation in her own family for her or her two siblings to go off the rails. But none of them had.

Robert was a hard-working doctor, kind, thoughtful and with more patience than she’d ever known in a man. Serena had her mother’s sweetness, but she was no doormat. She ran her accountancy practice from home, while looking after her three children too, and she was always unfailingly glamorous.

Beth couldn’t claim to share her brother’s and sister’s gentle natures. She had always been fiery, self-sufficient, and hard-hearted too.

She had just got on to the M5 when the ringing of her car phone broke off her reverie. It was Steven Smythe. ‘I know you are on your way to visit Fellows,’ he began. ‘But we got some information about her this morning, and I thought it might be useful to you.’

‘Well, thank you, Steven,’ she said, assuming he was only going to tell her about Annabel.

‘She was born in 1951, in Stratford-upon-Avon. Born Susan Wright, she changed her name by deed poll to Susan Fellows in December of 1986 in a solicitor’s office in Bristol.’

Beth was so astounded that her hand slipped on the steering wheel and the car veered dangerously towards the middle lane of the motorway. She dropped the phone, straightened the wheel and then pulled over to the hard shoulder, badly shaken.

‘Steven?’ she said as she picked up the phone again. ‘Are you still there?’

‘Yeah, what happened, did you drop the phone?’

‘Something like that,’ she gasped out. ‘Where did this information come from?’

‘Your chum at Bridewell. He left a message for you on the answerphone before the receptionist got in.’

For the first time since Beth had met Steven she had the urge to talk to him properly, to share with him what that name meant to her. But she suppressed it. She had to think this one through carefully.

‘Thank you for letting me know,’ she said, aware her voice was shaky. ‘I’ll be back in the office by lunch-time. See you then.’

‘Are you all right?’ he asked curiously. ‘You sound odd.’

She looked at the cars streaming by her on the motorway and realized she was lucky not to have caused a serious accident. ‘I’m fine,’ she lied. ‘It’s just the reception on this phone. I’ll see you later.’

But she wasn’t fine. She felt as if she’d been hit by a thunderbolt. Now she understood why faint bells had rung in her mind when she looked at Susan and heard her voice. And why Susan had reacted as she did when Beth first met her at Bridewell.

Her childhood friend, that tubby little girl with hair the colour of ripe conkers whom she envied for the normality of her family! Beth had loved Suzie too because she had told her she looked like Snow White!

‘Oh, Suzie,’ she gasped aloud, leaning forward on to the steering wheel. ‘I thought you of all people would be happily married with a parcel of kids.’

Memories came flooding back to her, the pair of them whooping with glee as they free-wheeled down hills on their bikes. Paddling in the river with their dresses tucked into their knickers. Making a den in the woods, and practising hand-jiving as they listened to the Top Ten in Woolworth’s.

Everything that had been good in her childhood was shared with Suzie. Not just the fun they had, for it was far more than a casual friendship. Beth had lived for August so she could be with Suzie, for it was only there in Stratford that she felt free from oppression. It was Suzie who made her believe she was clever. The way she used to rush to hug her when she arrived each summer made Beth feel loved. The two of them had complemented one another in every way. Maybe if Beth hadn’t allowed their friendship, which had been for so many years the most important relationship in her life, to fizzle out and die, she wouldn’t be such a cold fish now?

Her eyes prickled with tears as she remembered that one of the excuses she’d made to herself for not writing back to Suzie the year they were both seventeen was because Suzie kept telling her about what it was like being stuck at home looking after her mother. After what had happened to Beth that year, taking care of someone you loved, and who loved you, didn’t seem so very awful. She thought Suzie should be grateful that she could sleep without nightmares. That was more than Beth could do.

The sudden realization that she was dangerously close to allowing the terrible events of 1968 to surface in her mind made her feel irrationally angry. She opened the car window and took some deep breaths to try to calm herself. She couldn’t stay on the hard shoulder, it was a dangerous place to be, but how could she face Susan Fellows now she knew who she really was? She couldn’t handle her defence objectively, nor could she deal with the memories she knew would be stirred up.

She started up the car again, signalled and pulled out. It was very tempting to call the prison and say she couldn’t make it today, then drop Susan as a client later.

As Beth drove on, she saw that was out of the question. Susan would know immediately it was because she’d found out who she was, and Beth would be left with cowardice on her conscience. The very least she could do now was go and talk to her. Whatever she’d done as a grown woman, Beth owed her for their happy times as children. Maybe Susan would rather have a different solicitor anyway. But it had to be her decision.

Beth shuddered as she turned off by the pub and on to the road that led to the prison. Eastwood Park wasn’t anywhere near as grim as some other prisons she’d visited clients in. It was small, housing only some 140 women, and it was set in beautiful Gloucestershire countryside. But once inside the wire fence, past the neat gardens and the first of the locked grilles, there was no mistaking it was a real prison, with all that entailed.

Maybe Suzie
had
changed beyond recognition in the last thirty years, lived through hardships Beth couldn’t even imagine. Yet there would still be enough of that carefully brought up little girl inside her to be horrified by the harsh regime, the bullying, the other vindictive prisoners, the dreadful food and lack of fresh air.