Child's Play (43 page)

Grace,
her godchild, was looking at her, yet again; doe-eyed, sorrowful, cloyingly sympathetic. Daisy’s mother wanted to kill her, too, just for being alive.

Shielding
her candle from the draught, waiting patiently for the rest of the choir to line up behind her, Grace swivelled her gaze from her godmother to peek past her father’s skirts to the coffin, where her secret was totally safe, screwed down tight with Daisy and destined for the incinerator.

She
could still barely believe how miraculously chance had played into her hands. Matron’s dismissal was especially fortuitous, because in her absence, it fell to one of the assistant matrons to watch over the girls in the infirmary. The assistant, who worked nights as an office cleaner to augment her lousy wages, was, as always, tired: too tired to argue with Grace when she said she did not feel well enough to go to chapel on that fateful Sunday morning. She took the other girls and left Grace alone and unsupervised.

Grace
had slipped out of school through the French doors in the visitors’ room, crept along the front of the building and into the woods. Learning from the near fiasco that Torrance’s hurriedly improvised accident turned out to be, she had made extensive contingency plans for Daisy, but none of them was necessary. Within minutes, she had seen Daisy and the policewoman meandering through the grounds.

As
the pall bearers began to lift the coffin, Grace nodded gravely in response to her father’s brief, proud smile, thinking yet again how Daisy had all but co-operated in her own death. She must have known
why
she had to die, Grace decided, for when she took flight off the pavilion steps, her face was a picture.

In
most respects Daisy and Sukie could not have been more different, but they shared the fatal flaw of not knowing when to keep quiet. Despite Daisy’s own multitudinous imperfections, she had been very quick to insist that Grace owned up to being out of the dorm on Tuesday night — ‘you could’ve theen thomething the polithe’ll want to know,’ she had said, in that excruciating voice. Her snide remarks about Grace’s ‘prethiouth jewelth’, made in front of the policewoman, put Grace through sheer hell. Sukie had done nothing more than urge her to confess, but on pain of exposure, and to return what she had stolen from Imogen. Under the surplice, against her flesh, Grace could feel the cold weight of the beautiful diamond pendant that soon, she would be free to flaunt to her heart’s content.

The
congregation rose as one when the Reverend Blackwell started down the altar steps. Alice saw the people in front swivel round to watch the coffin pass, and steeled herself for her turn, conscious that this was the beginning of another ending.

She
recognised that her time at the Hermitage was done when Martha drove her down the crazy drive and out of the gates at the end of term. Those last few weeks had been terrible. There was no Open Day, no Sports Day, nothing but the school’s lifeblood leaking away. She thought Vivienne Wade had somehow made the first, fatal cut when she played her ‘get out of gaol’ card the day after Daisy died. Other girls followed her, in dribs and drabs and then in a flood. When the police caravan disappeared, the horrible but so believable rumours about Daisy began, plunging Alice into a new despair. The night Sukie died, she had fallen asleep as soon as Torrance switched off the lights and would go to her grave wondering if it were true that Daisy left the dorm to murder Sukie.

When
the coffin glided past, she shivered, but could still not imagine Daisy inside. Her abiding memories were of Daisy alive, yet the lisping voice and dark presence already haunted her dreams. One day, perhaps, she would be able to mourn, for all that was lost and all that must remain unknown.

Janet
hoped fervently that once Daisy’s funeral was over, she might start learning to live with her guilt, for it would certainly never leave her. Even more passionately, she hoped that Freya Scott was equally burdened. It was rumoured the woman had already wormed her way back into the army, and God help them, Janet thought, if she served the fighting forces as well as she had the school. When the tall iron gates closed on the last pupil, everyone knew they would never open again. Except for Matron, who was left to her own grim fate, the Hermitage was abandoned, but not because the reality of Freya Scott’s little empire had been exposed. Once she had gone, the school lost all its lustre for the many parents who unswervingly believed in her and the dreams she purveyed. She had, many said, been ruined by the wayward girls she tried to guide through the stormy waters of adolescence. Sukie was already being touted as the architect of both her own and of Freya Scott’s destruction; before long, Janet thought, she would also be blamed for Daisy’s death.

Music
soared heavenwards from the organ as the procession advanced. With the rustle of robes and the whisper of feet on stone, the Reverend Blackwell halted briefly before turning for the door. For a moment, Grace was in full view. Her chorister’s garb lent charm, and with candlelight mellow on her face, she resembled a story-book child, dressed in a nightgown and bearing a candle to light the way to bed. As the procession moved off once more, she offered Janet a brief, knowing smile.

Past
and present collided. With brutal clarity, Janet recalled those first few hours at the school, and retrieved the memory that had wilfully eluded her since the evening she collected Imogen’s new stick and crutches from the hospital. She had been in the refectory, reviewing her notes before talking to the next batch of girls, when she chanced upon a snatch of conversation.

‘
You
mutht
have theen
thomething
on Tuethday night,’ Daisy had lisped.

‘
I didn’t!’

‘
Bollockth!’ Daisy snapped, glaring at the girl Janet would come to know as Grace Blackwell. ‘I timed you,’ she added. ‘You were out of the dorm for more than an hour.’

‘
I’ve
told
you!’ Grace insisted. ‘I was waiting for Matron outside her office.’ Face puckering, she had begun to snivel. ‘I wanted something for my headache. So,
there
!’

If you enjoyed reading
Child’s Play
you might be interested in
Unsafe Convictions
by Alison Taylor, also published by Endeavour Press.

Extract from
Unsafe Convictions
by Alison Taylor

Chapter One

ASPECTS OF GUILT

Two years after Piers Stanton Smith received a life sentence for murdering his ex-wife, the Court of Appeal judged his conviction ‘unsafe’. Accused of corruption, the police officers who sent him to prison are now themselves under investigation. In the first of three major articles, our chief reporter Gaynor Holbrook looks into the tragic background of this miscarriage of justice.

On a chilly April after-noon, someone in Haughton battered thirty-six-year-old Trisha Stanton Smith into oblivion, drenched her home in petrol, and dropped a match. The autopsy on her charred remains proved that the cause of death was smoke inhalation. Ten days later,  her thirty-one-year-old ex-husband was arrested for murder.

Haughton, where Trisha spent all her life, is a bleak, wind-swept town in the Pennine hills. Manchester and Sheffield are twenty-odd miles away, over snaking moorland roads that are often blocked by winter blizzards. At one time, the town’s monumental mills reverberated to the thump and roar of King Cotton’s massive machinery. Now, the vast empty walls echo to the drip of water through ruined roofs, the whine of bitter winds off the moors, and the scuttle of vermin.

Shortly before she died, Trisha lodged an alimony claim against Smith. By then, he was married to Beryl Kay. She inherited one fortune from her grandfather, the owner of the town’s largest clothes shop. She later made another one by selling the shop site to a supermarket chain.

Smith’s trial began at Manchester Crown Court on a raw November day, and the public gallery was packed. Trisha’s widowed father, Fred Jarvis, never saw his former son-in-law in the dock — he was still too distraught over the murder. But her sister, Linda Newton, was a key prosecution witness. Oddly, Beryl was never called, but she sat through every harrowing second of testimony.

The prosecution argued that Trisha had to die to stop the squalid secrets of her marriage reaching Beryl’s ears. In her divorce petition, Trisha described eight years
of terror as Smith’s wife. She was beaten, humiliated, sexually debased, and dragged into debt. Ravaged by stress, she became too ill to work. As their income went from bad to worse, so did Smith’s behaviour. Then, she had to go into hospital for a gynaecological operation.

‘I was still in dreadful pain when they sent me home,’ she had written. ‘I was crawling on the floor I hurt so much. He screamed at me to get up, but I couldn’t, so he kicked me between my legs as hard as he could.’

One by one, the prosecution witnesses slashed Smith’s reputation to shreds. He was not ‘Piers Stanton Smith’ from a small village in South Yorkshire, but plain Peter Smith from a corporation housing block in Sheffield. Then frail, elderly Henry Colclough spoke of the ‘wickedly cruel’ death his wife Joyce suffered in her blazing car, while ten-year-old Smith calmly watched.

‘Joyce was his teacher. She was giving him a lift home from school, but something happened. She drove straight into a tree, and her legs were trapped under the dashboard. He got out, but when he saw the flames licking around the car, he stood and watched instead of running for help. He kept on watching, until she was dead.’ Looking steadily at the blue-eyed man in the dock,
Colclough added: ‘I’ll never forget that look in his eyes. Never! And it’s still there. It makes my blood run cold.’

Linda Newton claimed her former brother-in-law was a closet homosexual as well as a violent monster. Relentlessly cross-examined by Smith’s barrister, she had to admit that Trisha had her own flaws. But she was outraged by the suggestion that Trisha connived masochistically in her own pain. When it came to the advertisements Trisha placed in several lonely hearts columns while she was still married, Linda hung her head and refused to reply.

‘According to your testimony, Mrs Newton,’ the barrister said, ‘your sister was completely demoralised by the violence and sexual humiliation she allegedly suffered at my client’s hands. That picture of her sits very uneasily with that of a woman confident enough to solicit approaches from total strangers, and a woman who, for all we know, engaged sexually with one or more of them.’ He then denounced the police investigation
for not finding these men. ‘Not one iota of forensic evidence links my client to the murder, whereas any one of these mystery lovers could have killed Trisha Stanton Smith.’

The climax of the trial was Smith’s testimony on his own behalf. He talked about his deprived childhood, and his mother, who died many years ago. Then he described life
with the unstable, neurotic Trisha, who devised her own ways of violence. He was asked why he did not defend her divorce petition. ‘I had to get free of her. She was destroying my personality, like water dripping on stone. She often threatened to ruin me, and now she is doing, even from beyond the grave. How can I defend myself against that?’

Of course, he could not. Despite his lawyers’ best efforts and even the claim of an alibi for the murder, the jury took less than an hour to find him guilty. As he was led down to begin a life sentence, Beryl collapsed. Linda, gloatingly, hissed: ‘Rot in hell, you bastard!’

Smith’s appeal was refused. He was forgotten by everyone except Beryl and Trisha’s family. Then a young Roman Catholic priest called Father John Barclay returned to England.

Father Barclay had been assistant priest at St Michael’s church in Haughton. Two days after Trisha died, he left to do missionary work in South America. He learned about Smith’s arrest when an old newspaper came his way months later. But he knew that Smith was in church throughout the fatal afternoon, and therefore over five miles away from the blazing house. He immediately wrote a letter to the police. Not knowing who was in charge of the investigation, he sent the letter to Father Brett
Fauvel, St Michael’s parish priest, asking him to pass it on unopened.

He heard nothing more. The police did not contact him, and Father
Fauvel did not reply. So Father Barclay assumed someone else had been arrested for Trisha’s murder. Then he caught meningitis and hovered between life and death for many weeks. He was sent back to England to recuperate. When he found out Smith had been convicted,he  approached the authorities. His evidence confirmed Smith’s own alibi defence and secured his release. But for the police it opened up a can of worms. At the appeal hearing, Father Fauvel stated under oath that he personally handed Father Barclay’s letter to Detective Inspector Barry Dugdale the day it arrived.

Dugdale
, thirty-five, was in charge of probing Trisha’s horrible death. He stolidly maintains that he did not receive Father Barclay’s letter. He has been suspended from duty. His two assistants, Detective Sergeants Wendy Lewis, forty-two, and Colin Bowden, twenty-seven, are also under suspension.

Superintendent Neville Ryman, fifty-one, supervised the murder investigation from police headquarters in the county town of
Ravensdale, an elegant spa on the edge of the Peak District. He is a prominent Mason, and his wife Estelle works tirelessly for charity. Their daughter Shelley is a student. Ryman was an inspector in Haughton until his promotion.

The Home Office has now called in officers from North Wales to investigate what looks like blatant corruption among Haughton police. The North Wales team is headed by recently divorced Super-
intendent Michael McKenna, who is forty-five. Also on board are Detective Inspector Jack Tuttle, forty, Detective Constable Janet Evans, and Ellen Turner, their top administrator. They have a nasty job to do and, as things look at the moment, will probably recommend criminal prosecution of Dugdale and the others.

The authorities appeared to respond quickly to Smith’s wrongful conviction. But the Haughton community has new worries. Trisha’s murder file remains closed, despite clear evidence that her killer is still at large. And people are suspicious about Haughton police being investigated by brother officers.

Wanting to appear independent, McKenna refused to base his inquiry at the town’s police station. He has been allocated a former police house in the village of Old Haughton. But his strings are already being jerked by the Police Federation, police lawyers and insurers, the Crown Prosecution Service, the Police Complaints Authority, and the Home Office. And he is an odd choice to head this kind of investigation. His own background is very murky. He was brought up in Holyhead, and went to Aberystwyth  University, but he comes from an Irish Republican family. A relative was hanged by the British after the 1916 rebellion.

McKenna is now head of a divisional criminal investigation unit in North Wales. But his last promotion was mysteriously delayed. He has also been absent from his usual duties at times. I queried these absences with the Home Office. Very brusquely, I was told they concerned ‘appropriate and legitimate police business’. But, as everyone knows, police business often gets very dirty.