‘Guy idolised her,’ said Kathleen Jeffries, ‘that was half the trouble. And for all his faults, I idolised him.’
Harry nodded. They were sitting in her lounge, a large austerely furnished room which boasted a narrow balcony and a view across the dunes to the distant sea. The dry heat of underfloor central heating made the room warm but somehow far from cosy. Her mantelpiece was bare of family photographs and bric-a-brac; her shelves were crammed with nineteenth-century classics rather than with her husband’s books. Curled up in a corner was the old Labrador that had been her sole companion during the years since Guy’s death. After half an hour of conversation, he felt he had begun to win her confidence and she had even thawed to the extent of making him a cup of tea. In response to her final angry questions, he had explained how he knew that, if Smith was innocent, then unless Carole had fallen prey to a passing maniac, the only person who could have murdered her was Guy.
‘Benny Frederick, like Ray Brill, had an alibi. Clive Doxey had broken his wrist and was scarcely in a fit state to strangle anyone. Who else could have been guilty?’
‘So you followed a simple process of elimination?’ she asked, the hint of scorn in her voice making her sound like an elderly schoolmistress despairing of a pupil’s haphazard ways.
‘No, there was much more to it than that.’
He’d explained that he had puzzled over the dedication at the front of Our Sterile Society. To Carole, whom I adore? I’ve never been a parent and I’m sure if I ever did have a child I might worship her, but I doubt I’d wear my heart on my sleeve in quite the same way. It was obvious from that, and from everything I’d been told, that it was an exceptionally close relationship. Perhaps unhealthily so.’
Yet his ideas had not crystallised until he considered the discrepancy between the newspaper’s published account of an interview Guy gave immediately after the discovery of Carole’s body and the original version preserved in the file on the black. His exact words had been I could never have let her go, but in print he had been quoted as saying I should never have let her go. Presumably a long-forgotten sub-editor had regarded the change as an improvement which seemed to make more sense: yet when one realised Guy was an obsessively devoted father whose only child was about to marry his best friend, a man almost twice her age, the words he actually used took on a sinister significance. Even in the bits and pieces of the old Cyril Tweats file, Guy came over as a man not merely shocked by his bereavement but horrified by it — and, perhaps, filled with self-loathing. It had dawned on Harry that in suspecting Doxey, he had been looking at the wrong man.
Kathleen Jeffries peered at him over the half-moon spectacles which perched on the end of her long nose. She was a tall grey-haired woman whose mouth seemed to Harry to have a natural curve of disapproval. Again he felt like a schoolboy awaiting chastisement for some juvenile idiocy. ‘But why have you sought to rake up the old business? I don’t understand why you…’
‘Should poke my nose into other people’s affairs, when there is nothing in it for me? Blame my curiosity, Mrs Jeffries, everyone else does. But I also think of Edwin Smith’s mother, who died with her pathetic son’s name still not cleared. You were a mother, too; perhaps you will agree that she would have been glad for someone, at least, to vindicate her faith in him.’
‘I was not a good mother,’ said Kathleen Jeffries and Harry realised that, for all her severity of manner, she would judge herself most harshly of all. ‘Had I been, perhaps my daughter would still be alive today.’
He guessed that she had been waiting for thirty years to unburden herself of the truth. Those three decades of accumulated guilt, horror and fear were drawn in the lines that furrowed her brow. Yet her back was straight and her voice calm. She must, he thought, have been very strong to survive so much for so long.
‘Tell me about Guy,’ he said gently, putting his teacup down. ‘You met him when you were both students, I believe?’
‘Yes, for me it was love at first sight.’ She sighed and leaned back in her leather chair. ‘I’d had little experience of men — we’re talking of the years immediately after the war, long before women could claim to be liberated. Guy and I hit it off at once and I must confess I was flattered by his attention. He was an exciting man, clever and ambitious as well as handsome. Even then it was clear that he would make his mark. He introduced me to politics and I became as enthusiastic as he was for social change. We believed that with the war over, we could help to change the world.’
She moistened her lips. Harry said nothing, content to let her take her time. ‘Things didn’t work out as we had expected, but then the lesson of life is that they never do. I became pregnant — a terrifying prospect and yet one I found strangely exhilarating. Guy panicked when I broke the news and I half expected him to press me to find some back street abortionist or simply leave me in the lurch. But to his credit, he did not. In later life, I’ve often remembered that and told myself that in our early days together, my passion for him must have been reciprocated.’
‘So you married…’
‘Hastily, yes. And I had the child. I had been well throughout the pregnancy and I expected the birth to be straightforward.’ She closed her eyes for a moment. ‘How wrong I was. My midwife was inexperienced, mistakes were made. Carole was fine, but I nearly died and I was told that a further pregnancy would be dangerous. Today, perhaps, one would have sued, but in the post-war years, medical negligence was as much a taboo as teenage sex. So I just got on with my life, and looking after my husband and child.’
‘You gave up your career?’
‘I didn’t regain my health for over a year. And afterwards, caring for Carole seemed to take up all my energy. Looking back, I realise that despite everything Guy used to say and write about women’s rights — he was ahead of his time, the feminists would have been proud of him — he was as emancipated at home as a ruddy-cheeked Tory squire. But I didn’t see it like that; I was proud of him and as desperate for him to succeed as he was himself. So I contented myself with my domestic responsibilities and baked and dusted with as much determination as any suburban housewife.’
‘While Guy’s star rose?’
‘Yes, and naturally I enjoyed my share of the reflected glory. Guy rapidly earned a reputation for radical and creative thought. During the fifties, the long years of opposition offered him the ideal opportunity to expound his views with conviction and flair.’ She gave a grim smile. ‘It is easy to put the world to rights when one does not have the responsibility for doing more than delivering a lecture with wit and verve or checking the proofs of an article which excoriates the dullards in power.’
‘But you did not see Guy in that light then?’
‘Of course not, although it is true that after Carole’s birth I had lost much of my original interest in sex. It became more of a duty, less a source of uninhibited delight.’
Harry fiddled with his tie. He felt uncomfortable, but he had to ask the question. ‘And — what about Carole?’
She looked him in the eye. ‘Do you really believe that he was her lover?’
‘It would explain…’
‘It would explain nothing, Mr Devlin. I understand what you are thinking, but I am quite sure you are mistaken.’ Sensing that he was not convinced, she continued urgently, ‘Of course Guy was besotted with Carole from the moment he first saw her in the hospital, but I never had cause to suspect anything other than the intense devotion of a father to his only child. We often quarrelled about the way he spoiled her. I said it would do her no good in the long run, but Guy always argued I was far too strict.’
‘A battle you could not win?’
‘Precisely. Carole was no fool. Soon she learned how to take advantage of him, how to play the two of us off against each other to her own advantage. There was very little I could do about it. By the time she reached her teens, she was running wild. It appalled me — but I felt powerless. Whatever she wanted, Guy allowed her to have. She was clever enough to have stayed on at school, to have done well at university, but when she decided to throw it all up, he insisted it would be wrong to impose our views on her. And so she left — to start work behind a shop counter, for Heaven’s sake!’
She glared at Harry, still furious at the memory. ‘That incident led to our bitterest row. I simply couldn’t believe he was prepared to let her throw her education away, but he brushed my protests aside. He said I was jealous of her, that she was doing all the things I would have liked to do in my own youth. And — who knows? — perhaps he was right.’
‘Did you know she was going out with Ray Brill?’
‘That loathsome pop singer? Yes, of course I did. She gloried in the fact that she’d stolen him from the girl
