Authors: Cath Staincliffe
‘Sophie, you are not a saddo. You’re a wonderful—’
‘Mum, don’t.’
Tears burned in my eyes. ‘Hug?’ I offered, my voice too squeaky by half.
She gave a little shrug, noncommittal. I moved in and wrapped my arms around her. Kept quiet. In a few moments she spoke: ‘When’s Dad back?’
‘Soon.’ Could he make it better? ‘I’ll tell him to come up and see you?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Okay. It won’t always be like this, you know. It’ll change. Everything changes.’
She nodded. ‘Yeah.’ A small voice.
‘You want anything? Hot chocolate?’
‘No, just tell Dad.’
‘I will.’
She always wanted her father. He was her rock. And now he’s gone. I have taken him from her.
Neil persuaded me not to hang around while he was in having the tests done. He wouldn’t get the results then, and most of the day he’d be sitting about waiting. He
promised to call when he was done.
It was late afternoon when I picked him up. He didn’t say much about the day, just some quip about hospitals being no place for sick people. He had a little plaster on his arm where
they’d taken the biopsy. They wanted him back in a week’s time for the results. ‘I’ll come with you,’ I said.
Did the days go fast or slow? They rippled, concertina-like, altering speed. The sooner the days passed, the sooner we would know.
That winter I was working on a refurbishment project for a health spa. They were building an extension and it was a good time to revamp their interior, which was looking jaded:
Roman mosaics and friezes, pillars and arched doorways. I’d been playing around with something minimalist, using Japanese influences. Any materials would have to be high spec, to cope with
the heavy traffic and, of course, the effects of steam and chlorine in the pools area, without looking industrial. Calm, comfortable and clean: these were the words I used with the client during my
first presentation.
The day of Neil’s follow-up appointment I drove out to the spa, near Knutsford, for a meeting and spent the morning with the manager and the architect. It was frustrating: the manager was
eager to shave off costs but not happy to compromise on quality, and the architect was dying to get away.
I tried not to get too sharp even though I felt the manager was wasting our time. At one point I suggested he redraw his budgets and give me a new figure to work to, if he was having second
thoughts, which prompted the architect to complain about delays. The manager backtracked and blethered on. My husband might be dying, matey, I thought. I don’t give a flying fuck for your
yardage problems. But I smiled thinly and did my job. After all, if Neil was dying, I’d need all the work I could get.
Of course, the proper jargon, as I learned on the Internet, is living with MND, not dying from it. Like AIDS. Adam had a T-shirt around that time, black and voluminous with a slogan in scratchy
white lettering: ‘
Life – a death sentence
’. That soon got lost in the wash.
At the hospital, I saw Neil before he saw me in the waiting room (ghastly orange chairs designed to deaden the bum and weaken the spirit). He was reading, his head tilted to the side, legs
stretched out, ankles crossed. Beautiful. If I hadn’t known him, I’d have thought the same: the shape of his face, his frame, dark hair, inherently attractive. I didn’t need to
get close enough to smell his pheromones.
He sensed me watching, looked up and smiled, closed his book. Unhooked his ankles and sat up straighter. I reached him, sat beside him, unbuttoning my coat, unwrapping my scarf: I was hot after
the frosty air outside.
‘They’re running late,’ he said.
‘Great – gives you a bit more time, then.’ I thought I’d gone too far but his eyes crinkled at the joke.
‘Good meeting?’ he asked.
‘Crap. He wants to cut corners without it showing. I told him we need to move forward by next week or he’ll lose the slot, another client waiting, bigger.’
‘Have you?’
‘Nope.’
‘Neil Draper,’ the nurse called.
The consultant, Mr Saddah, was a really nice man. He took his time, answered all our questions, even if most of the answers started off with
it’s hard to say
or
it varies a great
deal.
He said eminently sensible things about support and resources and dealing with it as a family and how MND progressed.
His words streamed past me, lapping around me like channels of water carving the sand. I gripped Neil’s hand and tried to stop time.
The judge comes in and everybody stands. A wave of panic washes through me, blurring my vision. I blink hard. Jane is saying something to Adam. It’s lonely here, lonely
and exposed. Did Martin think of coming and decide against it? If my dad had lived would he have come to show support? I’m glad my mum’s not still around, not here today, anyway.
Because her reaction to all this, her eloquent unhappiness would give me more of a burden to carry. Happy birthday, Deborah. Happy bloody birthday.
‘C
all Deborah Shelley.’
I stand in the dock, beside me a guard from the court. The clerk asks, ‘Are you Deborah Shelley?’
‘Yes.’
Do they ever get it wrong? No, not me, mate. Whoops, sorry, you should be next door with the traffic offences . . .
‘Deborah Shelley,’ she reads from a notepad, ‘you are charged that on the fifteenth of June 2009 you murdered Neil Draper at 14, Elmfield Drive, contrary to common law. Are you
guilty or not guilty?’
‘Not guilty.’ My voice sounds thin, swallowed by the space.
The judge is exactly how you would imagine a judge to be: old, white, male. The only deviation from the stereotype, a northern accent. He has wild white eyebrows and a pleated face. He leans
forward slightly and asks the clerk to fetch the jury. They file into the court and make their way to the jury box. Here they are sworn in, each person putting their hands on the Bible (no one
chooses the Qur’an even though two are Asian and one is black) and promising to try the case faithfully and reach a true verdict on the evidence presented. Three of them choose to affirm
rather than use a holy book. I find it depressing that nine are believers. But perhaps their faith is the church-once-a-year variety, the sort of people who tick ‘Christian’ on the
hospital admission form because they can’t bear to tick none. If any of them are fundamentalists, rabid right-to-lifers, it bodes ill for me.
The clerk repeats the charge against me to the jury.
The judge explains to the jury and the court that we will hear first from the prosecution who will make an opening statement. He consults with the barristers about a probable time to break for
lunch. The exchanges are eminently civil and the reality that I am in the dock for murder seems preposterous set against this mannered chat. I detect warmth in the judge’s voice, perhaps down
to those Lancashire vowels, and a benign paternalism in his manner. It shouldn’t make a difference: he is meant to be impartial, his role simply to apply the processes of the law, but had he
seemed waspish or frosty I would have been more fearful. After all, the jurors will look to him for guidance, they will drink in all his non-verbal communication. And if I am not acquitted he will
set my sentence.
The prosecuting barrister stands up and introduces herself. ‘Your Honour, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, my learned friends, I, Briony Webber, appear for the prosecution, and my learned
friend, Mr John Latimer, appears for the defence.’
I guess she is in her early forties. She’s extremely tall, like a seedling gone rampant, but she carries it well. No stoop. Her wig looks fresh and tidy, whereas Mr Latimer’s has the
appearance of a scrap of sheep’s wool caught on barbed wire.
Miss Webber has a clear voice, a fluency with words as she lays out my crime for the court.
‘In the dock today stands Deborah Shelley. She is here accused of the gravest crime, that of murder. The murder of her husband Neil, a loving son, a caring father, a valued colleague. The
case for the prosecution is that Deborah Shelley set out to kill Neil Draper, in the full and clear knowledge that what she was doing was wrong. We shall show how she attempted to cover up her
crime, lying to her family and lying to the police. We shall show how, faced with incontrovertible evidence that she had poisoned and then suffocated her husband, she continued to lie. Neil Draper
was unwell. He suffered from motor neurone disease. He had a limited life expectancy. It is our contention that Neil Draper asked his wife to help him end his life prematurely and that she
complied. We shall call witnesses who will testify that Deborah Shelley was functioning well in the days before this tragic death, witnesses who will report her being in good spirits, able to
socialize, to work. We will call a psychiatric expert who has examined Ms Shelley and who will tell you that the defence of diminished responsibility is a sham. Ms Shelley knew exactly what she was
doing that day last June.’
She gives the word ‘Ms’ a little buzz, a hornet’s touch.
‘She set out to end Neil Draper’s life and she succeeded. She then covered her tracks, employed deceit and a web of lies to try to convince the world that this was a natural death.
There was nothing natural about this death, there was nothing natural in her behaviour. This woman lied to her own children, to the parents of the man she killed, to the authorities, and she
persists in her lies even as she stands before you today.’
Holding my head high, fighting the urge to bow, aware of the tension in my throat and my jaw, I watch the jury, their eyes flicking from the prosecutor to me. Examining my hair, my clothes,
making assessments already. Forming first impressions. Snotty cow, not even a Mrs, unnatural, how could she do that?
The day the magistrates refused me bail and remanded me to Styal, I rang home again. The desire to hear their voices, to make sure they were coping, was all-consuming. Sophie
answered the phone.
‘Sophie, it’s Mum. Are you all right, darling?’
There was a pause and then she said in a low, trembly voice, ‘You shouldn’t have done it, Mum.’
My heart racketed in my chest. I felt the blood drain from my cheeks and the cold steal into my bowels. ‘Sophie, I never meant to hurt—’
There was a clatter as she let go of the phone. She believed what they were saying. She trusted them, not me. I longed to call her back to the phone, to try and explain. Her censure was
understandable: she’d adored her father and now she thought I had taken him away from her. I felt unsteady, the love and concern I’d anticipated from Sophie snatched away. The chance we
might console each other shattered.
A few seconds later, Adam came on. ‘Mum?’ He was subdued.
‘Adam, I’m sorry for all this. I need you to be strong now, look after yourself.’
‘Yeah.’
‘You can go to Grandma and Grandpa’s.’
‘I’ll stay. Sophie’s going.’
I’d a mad image of Adam opening up the place for a house party. It’d be great weather for it, tents in the garden and a barbecue, giant spliffs and too much booze.
‘Talk to Jane, if you need anything.’
‘Cool. Can I come and see you?’
I couldn’t speak for a moment. Tears burned the back of my eyes. I didn’t want to break down on the phone, didn’t want him to have to cope with that on top of everything else.
‘Yes, please. I’ll find out what we have to do. You’ll need to go shopping – make sure you eat something.’
‘Course.’ There was a pause. Then he went on, ‘ Jonty’s going to this festival in Spain – there’s a load of them going. I . . .’ He offered it as
something to talk about, then realized it might seem tactless.
‘That sounds great. You thinking of going?’
‘Maybe.’
‘When is it?’
‘Middle of August.’
‘Good.’ I’ll still be in here, I thought. Ms Gleason had told me it would be between six months and a year till my trial started. ‘You could take the little
tent.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Well, I’d better go. I love you. I’ll ring you about the visit.’
‘Cool.’
‘Bye-bye.’ My hand ached from gripping the phone.
That night as I lay in my bed, Sophie’s words tore through me, again and again.
You shouldn’t have done it, Mum.
The prison isn’t one big building, as I’d imagined. Instead two rows of large red-brick villas slope down avenues lined with oak and lime and beech trees towards the wing at the
bottom. Most women live in the houses, which were built as Victorian orphanages. Nowadays the villas all take their names from venerable women, good role models for us: Brontë, Gaskell,
Pankhurst. Though when I think about it Pankhurst spent quite a bit of time behind bars, being force-fed for her trouble.
The more dangerous prisoners, those with chronic addiction problems and those in for the most serious offences, live on the wing. Although my charge was up there with the worst, once I had been
assessed and deemed to pose no threat to the other women, I was allocated a room in one of the houses near the bottom of the hill close to the wing.
The majority of the women ‘pad up’, two or four to a cell, in the houses. When they sent me to Shapley House – this villa is named after a pioneering radio broadcaster who
lived in Manchester – I was put in one of the small single rooms, a privilege, and I was hugely relieved that I didn’t have to put up with someone else’s taste in television night
after night, that I didn’t have to lie awake listening to another woman breathe and dream.
We share a bathroom, one to each floor, and I can’t get used to sharing with strangers, never time to indulge in a long shower or a hot soak, someone always knocking on the door. I dart in
and out when I have to and never linger. The single cell gives me the option to retreat. That’s all I want to do. To withdraw into my shell like a hermit crab. To creep back along the
crevices of memory.
My ‘pad’, as I learned to call it, measures ten foot by eight. Beneath the protector, the mattress is plastered with graffiti, crude and poignant:
Cilla4Shawn
,
I suck
cock
,
help me
,
Kimberley Smith died age 3 my angel in heaven.
There is a moulded block covered with a speckled rubber coating for the mattress to rest on. I once used some of the
same material for a maternity unit. It copes well with heavy human traffic, is fireproof, will easily repel blood or urine or vomit and withstands accidental or malicious damage. An important
aspect in prison. My pad also has a set of built-in shelves and a cupboard made of the same tough material, a chair, a telly and a sink. Its redeeming feature is the big lime tree outside the
window. Its limbs sashay in the wind. I lie on my bed and gaze at it. Listen to the rooks cawing, the ‘teacher teacher’ song of great tits and the roar of jets. We are close to the
airport, below the flight path, and the planes overhead are a reminder of freedom, of escape, of holidays. And beyond all those sounds are the haunting calls of women yelling from the wing. Like a
chorus of sergeant majors, their plaintive conversations bellow across the spaces between the cells, between the wing and the houses. That sound more than anything is Styal. I can never make out
the words. No one ever calls for me. But through the mangled yells and shouts, news travels: of private affairs and public tragedies. Of the woman who set her hair on fire and the one who’s
got a release date and the one whose child has been taken away in the mother and baby unit.