I attempted to make one last enquiry into my husband’s doubtful past. A couple of days later, on a damp, grey, rather more typically English December morning, I drove to Northgate Farm, without Robin, to visit Maude. I had begun to wonder more and more about the time, just after having suffered her dreadful stroke, when she had seemed to almost bring her son back to life with those words she had whispered into his ear.
I could still remember clearly the snatches of her conversation that I had succeeded in catching, and I had begun to wonder if the meaning was rather different to what I had first assumed. That maybe Maude had not been telling Robin to share the burden with me, but that she shared the burden with him.
Roger left me alone with Maude, who lay very still in her bed. She had recently suffered a second stroke and her condition had deteriorated.
She still managed half a distorted smile when I arrived. I held her poor semi-paralysed hands, and helped her drink some of the champagne that I had brought, from which she still seemed to derive a little pleasure.
‘It’s Bollinger,’ I told her affectionately. ‘I could never give you supermarket issue.’
I thought that her one good eye twinkled, but I couldn’t be certain. Eventually I asked her the question I had come to Northgate to put to her.
‘Maude, were there newer mining maps of Abri which Robin withheld?’ I queried bluntly.
She peered at me through that single good eye. It was hard to work out just how well her brain was still functioning. Was it my imagination that she seemed to blink more rapidly.
‘Maude, I love your son, I have to know,’ I continued. ‘If there were new maps you would have seen them, wouldn’t you? You would have known about them.’
I hated the idea of Maude having connived in the dreadful secret almost as much as I could not bear to think of Robin having had any part of it. But she was a Davey. By marriage, and now remarried. But still a Davey, without doubt still a Davey, and Abri was everything to that family, I was well enough aware of that.
I studied her carefully, this once so proud, broken woman I had come to love. ‘Did you tell Robin he had done the right thing?’ I asked. ‘Was that it? Right to keep the maps back?’
I knew how much it would have meant to Robin to know at least that his mother thought he had done the right thing. Nothing would have been more likely to swing his mood around than that.
Suddenly Maude’s good eye fell shut like the other one. I was not sure if she was actually asleep. I suspected she may just have drifted off into her own world, perhaps deliberately shutting out one she no longer wanted any part of.
I stayed for a few more minutes. I supposed I knew that I had been wasting my time. Roger Croft-Maple had already told me that Maude had not spoken a word since her second stroke.
After that there seemed nothing left but to try to get on with my life again.
Christmas came and went. Robin and I spent Christmas Day alone at our Clifton home, and of course the day lacked all of the optimistic joy of the previous year on Abri when we had so delighted just in being with each other, and in making plans for a wonderful future, blissfully unaware of the horror that was to overwhelm us. Yet, curiously, it was not as bad as it should have been. I thought a lot about my sister spending her first Christmas without her beloved son, Luke, and Robin, I knew, mourned his brother dreadfully. On Boxing Day we visited poor Maude, whose condition continued to worsen. But Robin and I were together, and in spite of everything, there was no doubt that was the way I wanted it.
Also Julia, thank God, proceeded to get better and better and the doctors were now confident of a complete recovery.
I was still on sick leave from the force. I had to see a police doctor every so often, but nobody was pressurising me to go back to work. The thought occurred to me that it was no wonder that the scale and cost of police sick leave had become a national scandal. But it was almost certainly true that I was not yet fit to return.
I was a long way from forgetting all that I had left behind, though, particularly the Stephen Jeffries case, that other nightmare. I had been doing my trick of trying not to think about that either, but eventually in mid-January I got Peter Mellor to take me out for a drink and tell me all the gruesome details. I was no longer a part of any of it, and I realised that all I was doing was torturing myself. I knew that Jeffries had been charged and committed and would probably stand trial at Bristol Crown Court in the late summer, and I also knew that I would have to be there. I would have to look him in the eye at least once more, to see for myself what I should probably have seen from the start.
Mellor was at first a reluctant confidante. I suppose technically he should not have been talking to me at all about the case, but the sheer habit of a professional relationship such as we had shared is inclined to linger. The more he told me the guiltier I felt about my own ineptitude.
‘You shouldn’t feel like that, Rose,’ he said. He always called me Rose nowadays. I wondered if I did go back to the force if I would be able to work with him again. Maybe he would not feel able to work with me again. It certainly wouldn’t be the same as it had been before.
‘Richard Jeffries is the most plausible bastard I’ve ever come across, and cool with it,’ he went on. ‘We’d never have got him for anything if we hadn’t found the body, and not then without forensic having been able, thank God, to give us just enough to come up with something of a case and to be able to push Jeffries over the brink.
‘There was no history, no track record. However hard we looked — and by God we did look, Rose, don’t let yourself think otherwise — we never found anybody with the slightest suspicion of his behaviour. Not even after he finally confessed. He was a paediatrician, for goodness’ sake. Yet there wasn’t a single parent who had a bad word to say about him, not a single child patient whose experiences indicated he was anything other than a first-class man as well as a first-class doctor.
‘We are almost certain now that the only child he ever touched was poor Stephen. Not the sister, not any of his young patients.’
‘So why?’ I asked. ‘Why a lad who had a big enough cross to bear, why his own son?’
‘That was it, apparently, or so he told the psychiatrist we had on the case,’ said Mellor. ‘Claims it was all to do with Stephen not being perfect. Richard Jeffries gave every impression of loving his Down’s Syndrome son quite as much as his perfect sister, in fact he didn’t know whether he loved the boy or hated him. He saw the fact that Stephen was handicapped as some kind of reflection on himself. He couldn’t bear the lack of perfection, saw him as something sick. He did lavish affection on the boy, no doubt of that, but there was a very sick side to it.’
The very thought of having missed it, or more accurately, having refused to act on my own gut instinct, made me feel ill. My head ached and my hand was shaking when I lifted my glass.
‘How long had it been going on?’ I asked.
Mellor was watching me closely. ‘Look, boss,’ he said, returning to the old formal form of address which somehow seemed even more affectionate under these circumstances, ‘are you sure you want to hear all this? Is there any point? I can tell it’s getting to you.’
‘I need to know,’ I said simply.
Mellor didn’t argue, but merely answered my initial question.
‘In some form or another virtually since the boy was born,’ he said.
My stomach turned over. I put down my glass of beer. I suddenly felt that I would be physically sick if I ate or drank anything.