Authors: Cath Staincliffe
‘When you and your husband planned his death, you hoped to evade detection?’
‘Yes.’
The Prof settles back. I sense disapproval. Dolly glances his way and behind them the Artist scratches at his neck, a leisurely move that seems foreign in the circumstances.
‘And did you discuss what you should do if any suspicions were aroused?’
‘Yes, if it came to it, I was to say that Neil had taken an overdose, that unknown to me he had hoarded his medication and that I had no idea what he was planning. And that I had then
hidden the evidence to spare the children.’
‘But you didn’t do that, did you?’ Latimer asks.
‘No.’ Because once I knew Sophie was caught in the undertow with me, only the truth would do. ‘When I heard that Sophie had gone to the police, I just wanted to stop all the
lies. To tell her the truth. Her and Adam. To help them understand. And also because I’d had to use the plastic bag, and they’d found evidence of that in the post-mortem, well, it made
it less likely that Neil could have done it all himself.’
The bag was strong, clear plastic. It had once held some fabric samples in it – for some curtains in the Arts and Crafts style I was working on. I had gripped it tight under his chin. His
breathing was shallow and the bag compressed in tiny, incremental stages until it lay plastered and creased against his forehead and cheeks, sucking against his nostrils. His face darkening and
then those dreadful pitiful movements he made. The brief clamour for life that had me leaping out of my skin. The appalling stillness that followed.
‘Why didn’t you tell Sophie the truth?’
‘I wanted to protect her, and Adam. I didn’t want them to know what we had done. Neil wanted them to believe he had died naturally from his illness.’
‘And why didn’t you tell the police what you had done when you were questioned?’
‘The same reason. Because of the children. Because I had broken the law and Neil was dead and I had to be there for our children.’
‘What do you think now about your actions?’
‘I never should have done it. It was awful, the whole thing. If I’d only been stronger and kept refusing him.’
‘Why didn’t you?’ Mr Latimer sounds almost harsh now.
‘I couldn’t think straight. I couldn’t work out what was best. And Neil was so clear, so sure. I was absolutely exhausted and losing my mind and he kept on at me until I
couldn’t say no any longer.’
‘How do you feel now about agreeing to his request?’
‘Terrible.’
I look across to Sophie, willing her to face me but her head is bowed, her hair a veil.
I wrote to Sophie from Styal. Ms Gleason cautioned me that I ran the risk of being accused of exercising undue influence on a prosecution witness but I promised that there
would be nothing inflammatory in my letter. The prison monitored communication anyway. I wrote to say how sorry I was. To tell her how much I loved her and how I never meant to hurt anyone with my
actions. And that, whatever happened, I would never stop loving her. I told her that Neil loved her too. Also I promised that if she ever wanted to ask me about Neil, about his life or his death,
whatever she needed to know I would tell her. There was one thing I didn’t write that needled at me like a toothache. I left it out because it might have seemed too harsh and because this
wasn’t the place to pose that question, because she was my daughter and only fifteen. What would you have done? That was what I really wanted to know. If it had been you, and you loved him as
I did, then what would you have done?
When Briony Webber stands up and launches into me she is crisp and professional, just the right side of hostile. ‘Ms Shelley, you say you feel terrible about your
involvement in your husband’s death. Is that because you were caught?’ There’s an intake of breath from someone in the gallery.
‘No.’ My cheeks glow with heat.
‘If you’d got away with it, would you still feel so terrible?’
‘No. Yes. It’s not like that.’
‘I think we’ll let the jury judge for itself what it’s like, whether the picture you paint of someone driven to lose reason is only that, a picture, a fiction.’
Mr Latimer bolts to his feet: this sort of language should be saved for the closing speeches but Miss Webber’s ahead of the game and moves on. ‘Tell me, Ms Shelley, you were still
working in the weeks leading up to Mr Draper’s death?
‘Yes.’
‘Did any of your clients complain about your work?’
‘No.’
‘Anyone cancel a project, dispense with your services?’
‘No.’
‘Did any of your clients give you bad feedback about your attitude or behaviour?’
‘No.’
‘So, as far as your clients were concerned you were performing your work perfectly well.’
‘Yes.’
‘And home. You were still looking after your house and family?’
Someone had to. ‘Yes.’
‘And apart from a spat with your neighbour we have nothing to indicate you were not in sound mind and coping admirably with a difficult situation? Is that true?’
‘I don’t know.’ It’s a weak answer and my mind darts about, desperate for a better one.
‘Oh, I think you do, Ms Shelley. Let me take you back to the events of that fateful morning. According to your own testimony, your husband did not specifically ask you to do anything that
morning, did he, apart from fetch some wine?’
‘Not as such.’
‘But you inferred that he was desperate to commit suicide?’
Her tone riles me and I feel a tide of anger mounting beneath my fear. ‘He had said, ‘‘Tomorrow.’’ I knew what he meant.’
‘Did you check? Did you ask him outright?’
‘No.’ My blood boils.
‘You just chose to interpret it that way.’
‘Why?’ I yell, knowing as I do that this is folly. ‘Why the hell would I want to do that? I wanted him to live.’
In the aftershock there is a deep silence. Briony Webber doesn’t reply but pauses, gives a tight smile of forgiveness before she sallies forth. ‘I put it to you that you knew full
well what you were doing. That you believed your husband had a right to die and that you supported him to the hilt.’
‘No!’ My face is hot, my composure lost.
‘And that when the medicine failed to work as quickly as you expected, you had the plastic bag at hand to complete what you had started. Is that not the case?’
‘I didn’t know what I was doing.’ I force down my fickle temper, mute my tone.
‘I say you did. And having carried out your promise to the bitter end, you then made every attempt to cover your tracks, did you not?’
‘Yes.’ I can hardly say otherwise.
‘You hid the evidence. You lied to your family, then to the police. I put it to you that had you been incapable of responsible thought, as my learned friend suggests, you would not have
then had the wherewithal to maintain this fabric of lies. You knew exactly what you were doing when you fed those drugs to your husband, when you selected that plastic bag and held it over his face
until he suffocated. When you hid the evidence.’
‘No. I was wrong. I was so mixed up.’
‘Ms Shelley, you were able to withstand hours of questioning with little evident distress. How do you account for that?’
I wear it well, I want to say, but simply shake my head. The more I say the more she will devour me.
‘Only when the evidence against you became overwhelming, when you were told that your own daughter was a witness for the prosecution, did you even admit to any complicity in Mr
Draper’s death. I suggest your change of tack was simply a tactic to try to save your own skin.’
Of course it bloody was, you daft bitch. What else could I do? There is no other defence they will let me make. ‘I’m telling the truth,’ my voice rings out, a tremor of rage in
it.
‘Now, when it suits. But we have heard different versions of events. You lied in order to acquire the drugs in the first place, you lied to your own children, to Neil’s parents, you
lied time and again. If you lied then, how do we know you are not lying now? Lying to the court, lying to this jury. There is precious little in what we have heard to suggest you are a credible
witness.’
I look directly across at the jury, feeling miserable, bullied. ‘I’m telling the truth,’ I say to them.
Mousy drops her gaze, most of the others look away but some people meet my eye in that moment: the Cook and Dolly. And that humanity helps ground me.
Miss Webber finally drops me, a dog tired of its chewing slipper. She leaves them with the accusation ‘liar’ pervading the air. This is the word stamped on each of her bullets,
carved on the shafts of her arrows, engraved on her knuckle dusters. Say it enough times and it will gather weight, gain credence.
A shaft of light, pale golden sunshine, gains admittance through the large window high in the walls and floods the ceiling. My neck is fused with tension. I can smell my own terror, a sharp
musk.
There is a brief pause while Mr Latimer confers with Ms Gleason. From the gallery Jane smiles at me, an open, warm smile. The worst is over. Is it? I bite my tongue and suck in my cheeks.
Mr Latimer calls my neighbour Pauline Corby. There was never any love lost between us, though relations were more or less civil until the hammer incident. My defence team think this distance
will give her testimony clout, as it were. This is no fawning friend or loyal relative but a mere acquaintance who can tell it like it is, no punches barred. And Pauline Corby does her stuff.
Particularly when Mr Latimer asks her about my aggression.
‘She was like a mad woman. Completely off her rocker. I thought we should get the police, have her sectioned.’
‘And when later you heard that there were suspicious circumstances surrounding Neil Draper’s death, what did you think?’
‘I wasn’t surprised. I’d already said as much to Barry’ – Barry is a short, fair Londoner with all the social graces of a wasp – ‘ ‘‘The
woman’s not safe. She’ll swing for somebody.’’’
Hah! A hundred years ago I would have swung for this. Women standing here, men too, would have been taken from here to the gallows at Strangeways prison. That please you, Neil? A little
historical perspective? My skin feels clammy as though the ghosts are with me now pat-a-caking my arms and cheeks, grinning slyly with black, bloated tongues and blood-red eyes.
If they find me guilty how will I bear it?
‘Was her behaviour out of the ordinary, different from normal?’
‘Oh, yes. She was like a different person. She was just crazy.’
‘And apart from this incident did the situation return to normal?’
‘Hardly. She was always wandering about the garden at night, going out to her conservatory.’
Workshop, Pauline. Workshop.
‘The security light would come on and wake us up. I don’t think she ever slept after that. We didn’t know what to do.’
Miss Webber thanks Mr Latimer and approaches the witness box.
‘Mrs Corby. It’s true, is it not, that you have had previous problems with your neighbours and their children?’
‘Some.’
‘Could you give us an example?’
‘Well, the son Adam, he damaged the car. We had to ask for money to get it fixed.’
Adam, stoned, had found it amusing to walk over the Corbys’ Golf. The dents in the roof cost a small fortune to repair. ‘It’s only a car,’ Adam had protested, when Neil
and I had hauled him into the kitchen to sort it out. ‘It’s not like I barbecued the cat or something.’
‘Anything else?’ Miss Webber asks.
‘We had to complain about the noise sometimes. Loud music going on half the night.’
‘And wasn’t this incident simply one more confrontation in the series?’
‘No,’ Pauline says stoutly. ‘This was different. She threatened me with a hammer. She was abusive.’
‘Did she raise the hammer?’
‘A little.’ She sounds defensive, unsure. ‘She was off her head.’
‘You’re a housewife, Mrs Corby?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Do you think that qualifies you to assess someone’s mental health?’
‘Maybe not,’ she says bluntly. ‘But I was a psychiatric nurse before I got married and I reckon that does.’
Oh, bless you, Mrs Corby.
There’s a moment’s silence, then the court erupts with laughter. Dolly cackles and Hilda and Flo giggle and Alice whoops. Even Miss Webber has the grace to smile and gives up on
Pauline before she digs a deeper hole.
The judge decides we will break for lunch. I realize, with a swirl of vertigo, that by the end of the day my trial will be over. There is only Don Petty, my shrink, to give evidence and then
there will be the closing speeches. As the jury file out, I watch them go, the Callow Youth hunched but any attempt at looking cool compromised by his gait – he bounces on his toes like a kid
as he walks. Flo has to help Hilda up. I see them as lifelong friends, like Jane and me. But they met for the first time last week, selected at random. The Sailor wears the same clothes again. It
strikes me that I have never heard any of these people speak. They are silent in the court, eyes and ears. Once out of the room their chatter will flow, conversation and anecdotes with which they
oil the lunches and coffee breaks, the times they wait for the call of the ushers, the partings at the end of the day.
I have absolutely no idea how we are faring. When the court is almost empty Mr Latimer comes over. ‘That was a gem,’ he tells me. ‘She doubled the weight of that
witness’s evidence.’
‘Can you tell,’ I ask him, ‘what the jury are thinking?’
He shook his head. ‘Never can. Not worth a moment’s speculation. Only time I ever did, I was wrong.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘for shouting.’
He dipped his head. ‘Hard to resist. Could have been worse.’
‘I could have gone for her with a hammer,’ I murmur.
His eyes glint. He purses his lips. The smile is in his voice. ‘That would never do. I will see you after lunch.’
D
on Petty, the shrink for my defence, is a tall gangly fellow, close to my age, I guess, with a bald head, beaky nose and an insignificant chin,
giving him the cast of a tortoise. He speaks in a precise Edinburgh accent and never smiles (now, I have to appear suitably glum and contrite but surely he could afford to crack a grin now and
then).