For Death Comes Softly (27 page)

‘I don't know ‘ow he did it,' she told me wonderingly. ‘All I could do was watch.'

She had sustained a broken leg and a couple of cracked ribs, but she was sitting up in her hospital bed when I took a break from my vigil at Robin's bedside and visited her on the morning after the disaster. I knew how fond Robin was of Mrs Cotley, and reported back to him that she appeared to be recovering surprisingly well. Robin showed little interest. He seemed to be in a kind of trance. The papers may have dubbed him Abri's Hero. But it meant nothing to him. He was discharged from hospital later that day, although I did not really think he was fit to leave. It seemed to me that he was still in deep shock.

Somehow, I don't really know why or even recall exactly how, we all ended up going to Northgate Farm. I knew by then that my mother and my brother-in-law Brian were both safe, but my nephew Luke was still missing, and so was Robin's brother, James.

Robin and I travelled in complete silence in a hospital car. He would by then answer questions in a monosyllabic way, but there was still no possibility of conversation. I wanted desperately to talk about all that had happened. Robin would have none of it.

Maude and Roger were already at Northgate when we arrived. She was deathly white behind her perpetual tan, but maintained her dignity as ever.

The news we had all been dreading came within minutes of Robin and I arriving at the farm. Roger answered the phone. Maude and I were sitting at the kitchen table drinking tea. Robin had gone upstairs alone. He returned as soon as he heard the phone ring. All three of us stared silently at Roger as he held the receiver in his hand and listened. He said little, just an occasional desultory yes or no, but his manner told the story.

‘They've found James,' he said simply, when he turned to face us.

We did not need to ask if he was dead. We knew, and indeed had known all along, I suppose. Nonetheless this was the final blow.

Robin seemed to sway on his feet. I thought for a moment that he was going to pass out, but before I could get to him Maude was by his side, her hand under his elbow steadying him. She had been a tower of strength all her life, I had no doubt, and it seemed to come automatically to her to support others. Even at this terrible time, learning that she had lost her much-loved younger son, her first thought was to prop up Robin – in every sense.

Again he did not speak, just looked at her with panic in his eyes.

She led him to a chair which he half-fell into. Maude stepped back from him and stood, ramrod straight, looking down at him.

‘Just remember you are a Davey,' she told him. A truly weird thing to say at such a time, anyone who did not know the family might think, but from her it seemed perfectly natural, and her voice was gentler than her words.

Robin reached up and grasped her hand tightly. In common with Julia in the hospital the day it happened, he didn't sound a bit like himself when he eventually began to talk.

‘If only James had lived instead of me,' he whispered, forcing the words out.

His mother stroked his hair as if he were a child. ‘You mustn't say that, darling boy,' she said. ‘You really mustn't.'

‘It's true, it's my fault, all those deaths, mother, they're all my fault,' he said. ‘I'm to blame.'

‘No, no, Robin,' she admonished him, everything about her still wonderfully calm and controlled, her voice almost hypnotic. ‘No-one's to blame. There hadn't been that number of people on the island since your first wedding, and that was over twenty years ago. Perhaps it was just too many. We just don't know, do we? But nobody could ever have predicted such a thing, Robin, luv. It's nobody's fault.'

I didn't know how she could be so logical and so articulate right then. Robin remained crumpled. Certainly he didn't look convinced. I could understand that well enough. If you throw a wedding party for 300-odd people and around half of them end up dead or injured you are bound to feel responsible, aren't you? I jolly well knew that, I did.

My nephew Luke, my godson, was also not found alive. It took almost a week to recover all the bodies, and poor little Luke was one of the last to be discovered. I had loved him dearly and I was devastated. Although once again we had all known, I suppose, that he really must be dead, that there could be no hope, the dreadful limbo period had added to the nightmare. And when we finally got the bad news, I found myself wishing that my mother – who had been one of the few to survive from inside the church, escaping only with a broken wrist – had died instead of Luke. Then, of course, I was overwhelmed with guilt for allowing myself to think such a thing.

In all forty-four people died that terrible day and ninety-four were injured. Also among the dead were two of the band, The Dave Morgan Five, and thirteen residents of Abri. None of my police colleagues were killed although two were among the injured.

Luke's death was the worst of all for me – the horror of it heightened by the long wait before his body was recovered. Naturally Clem took it very badly. Nothing else could have been expected. I wanted to visit her, in fact I had wanted to be with her all week, but my brother-in-law had counselled against it. Clem would not even come to the phone to speak to me.

‘Look Rose, I know it doesn't make any sense, but she seems to blame you for what has happened to Luke,' Brian told me haltingly over the telephone.

‘It makes sense to me . . .' I said. ‘You see, I blame myself too.'

My mother had gone to stay with Clem and Brian, which I thought was all they probably needed, but even she wouldn't speak to me. Normally I couldn't have cared less about my mother's whims and moods, but I needed all the comfort I could get right then. And there wasn't a lot of it about.

I called Peter Mellor to ask him if he thought it had been Luke whom he had tried to save. He had never even met my nephew, and didn't have a clue one way or the other. I don't know why I even bothered to ask, but I think maybe it was a question of trying to keep Luke alive inside my head. And somehow I would always believe that it was Luke whom Peter Mellor reached out for.

I only went to two of the funerals. Luke's and James' – that was all I could cope with – and even that in spite of receiving a curt note from my sister telling me she did not want me there when she buried Luke. But I could not stay away. I arrived as late as I could and sat at the back of the church. Julia – who had gone straight back to work after the disaster, maybe trying to deny that it had all really happened – drove down from London to be with me, but Robin was not there. He only went to one funeral, his brother's.

Little Luke was laid to rest on a wet and windy April day amid scenes which will haunt me for the rest of my life. It seemed like thousands of people lined the streets of Weston-super-Mare as the funeral cortege drove by. My brother-in-law carried Luke's tiny white coffin in his arms and that image will remain with me always.

Julia kept her left hand permanently under my right elbow and somehow we got through it. When we came out of the church I wanted to go to the graveside, but saw Clem looking at me with undisguised hatred through tears which seemed to be born as much of rage as of grief.

I didn't know what to do but Julia steered me firmly away. We walked slowly through the churchyard, I think I was still reluctant to leave, and suddenly I was surprised to find my brother-in-law Brian by our side, having broken away briefly from the main funeral party.

‘If it's any consolation, Rose, she blames me too,' he said.

I could only stare at him. I didn't understand.

‘I was there, you see. I was with our son. I survived, and he didn't. I doubt she will ever forgive me.'

His pain was written in the lines of anguish on his face that had not been there three weeks earlier. I touched his hand. He half-smiled. My legs felt shaky. I do not think I would have been able to carry on walking without Julia's firm grip under my elbow. So often I was staggered by her strength, and couldn't quite comprehend where she got it from. She too had been through a terrible ordeal, and the way she coped not only with her own nightmares but also with mine, was little short of magnificent.

She also managed to keep the bulk of press attention away from me yet I knew she must be walking a tightrope in her own office – showbusiness editor or not. After all, she had been at the wedding, she was the bride's best mate, she would be expected to get the big story. Whatever the big story was. I felt for her. I knew exactly what it was like to be in that kind of situation. She must have been under terrific strain but she did not show it. She was such a good friend and support.

Robin was far too shocked to be supportive of me. I had to support him. That I could understand, but I was a little surprised – maybe because I had grown to regard him as some kind of superman.

Maude continued to be the most magnificent of all. She never spoke of her own grief, never seemed to consider her own pain. Her concern was entirely for Robin and for me and the families of all the other victims. She seemed to regard everyone else as being worse off than her.

I was coming to love Maude more with every passing day, and it was no surprise that she struck up an instant bond with Julia, who stayed with us all at Northgate for several days while the funerals were going on. Often it seemed that only Maude and Julia were holding the rest of us together.

Even before the Abri Island dead were buried, speculation about what had caused the disaster was rife. It seemed quite extraordinary that the entire structure of the island had caved in the way it did. It had been, as Eddie Brown had at once described it, like an earthquake. But earthquakes of that magnitude were not known in the British Isles, not in modern times, anyway – although I couldn't help remembering those giant chasms which the locals all believed to have been caused by a quake some time around the seventeenth century.

Abri was unique, people said. And early speculation was that there must have been some extraordinary geological fault running through the island. Certainly, whatever the true cause might turn out to be, it seemed likely that Robin's mother's instinctive presumption that the disaster had been triggered by the volume of people on the island could be proven absolutely right.

Seventeen

The only excuse I had for my behaviour over the next few months was that I was also in deep shock. I went into a kind of denial, I suppose. Once the funerals were all over the one obsession which preoccupied me was when Robin and I could decently rearrange our wedding. In spite of, or maybe it was because of all that had happened, I could think of little except marrying him.

I lay awake in bed at night reliving my wretched wrecked wedding day and imagining what may have been, what should have been. It was indecent really to allow the true horror of the Abri Island disaster to be over-shadowed, or even in any way challenged, by personal disappointment.

At the end of April Robin went ahead and moved into the Clifton house as planned. I stayed on at the flat for a couple of weeks, wondering if perhaps we would heal better apart, but, predictably, I needed to be with him. He said that he wanted me at the house with him, that it was our house, but there was of course no longer any joy about setting up our first proper home together, and he showed little interest in my presence when I finally completed the sale of my flat and moved in with him. He reacted in the way which I by now knew was typical of him when he was distressed. He withdrew into himself. He was quite capable of going for days without hardly speaking to me at all, and spent many of his evenings sitting in front of the TV mindlessly channel surfing or endlessly playing backgammon on his laptop computer.

I understood his anguish, of course, because I shared it. I too had lost friends and family on Abri. I too had witnessed horror beyond my wildest imaginings. But Robin seemed to have no conception of that. He was obsessed with his own misery.

He was a man of paradox though. It was only at night when he was alone with me that he allowed himself to sink to the depths of despair. He went back to work three weeks after the disaster, immersing himself in his new property business, and seemed quite able to deal with the day-to-day routine. I tried to do the same, returning to The Job about a week later. There was little point in moping around at home, I thought. However, I did not succeed in the way Robin appeared to. I told myself that it was different for me, that Robin's new business was an impersonal affair involving balance sheets and men in suits, whereas mine was centred around people's sadnesses and tragedies. All of which I had experienced quite enough of myself lately.

Whatever the reasons, and for the first time in my life, I really was not able to cope. Perhaps surprisingly under the circumstances, I had immediately been put back in charge of the Stephen Jeffries case which remained unresolved. Maybe if I had been working on something with which I was not so emotionally involved it would have been all right, maybe my state of mind might even have been improved by having to concentrate on matters apart from Robin and what had happened on Abri. As it was, within a couple of weeks of being back at Kingswood, everything just became too much for me. Looking through a file of photographs of Stephen Jeffries for the umpteenth time one evening, I started to see accusation in his trusting eyes and suddenly realised that tears were running down my face. This case had got to me long before the Abri disaster and now my emotions were completely out of control. The tears turned into great heaving sobs. I was sitting at my desk with my office door propped open as usual. No doubt the officers in the open-plan area outside were riveted by my display – I didn't even notice. Eventually I became aware that Peter Mellor, only just back at work himself following the disaster and with his arm still in a sling, was at my side and that my office door was closed.