Unsafe Convictions Read online

  Trisha’s divorce petition referred to an horrendous attack after she had been in hospital. ‘It wasn’t like she said,’ he insists. ‘I never kicked her. She started bleeding because she’d come out of hospital too soon, and wouldn’t take it easy. I was thunderstruck when I saw what she’d written.’

  During the marriage, he became a Roman Catholic convert, and that led to further problems. ‘Religious convictions are the most deeply personal things, but Trisha was forever sneering. When Father Brett tried to talk to her about what me becoming a Catholic meant for us, she wouldn’t even let him in the house. She accused me of putting up another false front, like when I changed my name. Thank God Father Brett stopped her from poisoning my faith the way she’d poisoned everything else that mattered.’

  When he was sixteen, he discarded the name ‘Peter Smith’. His new name was an extension of the childhood fantasy life which allowed him to survive the brutal reality. His marriage to Trisha at the young age of twenty-one was another part of the fantasy. She was several years his senior, like Beryl. ‘I hoped for a new history by giving myself a new identity,’ he tells me. ‘But the real challenge is to make something of little Peter Smith from the council flats.’

  At the trial, it was claimed that little Peter Smith watched his teacher Joyce Colclough burn to death in her crashed car. When I broach the matter, his body jerks into the foetal position, arms locked around his head. ‘Only you know what happened that day,’ I add.

  Slowly, he exposes his face. ‘Mrs Colclough was kind to me. Before we moved to the council flat, she used to take me home from school. We lived well out of Sheffield, in a dreadful hovel near a stream. The floors were just tiles on top of mud, and every time it rained, the mud soaked through the mats. I had to wear wellingtons indoors.’ There is a long, sad silence. ‘I don’t remember what happened. Maybe a rabbit ran into the road, or a cat. She cried out and swerved, and we hit the tree. There was an awful noise, then nothing. When I tried to move, I couldn’t feel my legs, and I think I passed out. I remember being outside the car, trying to open her door. Then I smelled petrol, and at the same moment there was a sort of whooshing noise, and my legs started to burn. I ran up to the road, praying for somebody to come, but nobody did.’

  His physical scars amounted to slight burns, a few scratches and a bruised head. But the mental trauma of the accident was pernicious. It was almost too shocking to talk about, like his squalid childhood. After he left home at sixteen, he never saw his mother again, and burned the few photographs he had. But memories of her are ingrained in his mind like the dirt and nicotine stains ingrained in her skin.

  ‘Her real name was Hilda,’ he says. ‘But she liked being called Bunty. That’s probably how I got the idea of changing my name.’ He takes another cigarette from a slim gold case chased on both sides, then puts it back. ‘All 1 know about my father is that he took up with her, stayed around long enough to father me, joined the army, went AWOL, got run over by a train, and had both his legs cut off.’

  I ask myself how one innocent person can be pursued by so much tragedy. He continues talking, his moods shifting unexpectedly in a way I begin to find quite disturbing. Some of the things he says are striking. Bunty was ‘his only point of reference’, because there was no extended family. He recalls grinding poverty, filth, rats, head-lice and bedbugs. His childhood memories are like the ‘mess dogs make of a bin bag’. As he succumbs to the temptation inside the golden cigarette case, he tells me about the ‘uncles’ Bunty entertained. The shame she never felt is another tin can tied to his tail. Trisha knew all about that childhood. It was something else she used as a weapon after twisting it into a horrible new shape.

  Suddenly he says: ‘In a way, it’s Bunty’s fault Mrs Colclough died.’ His glance flicks over me, like fingers. ‘I used to walk the three miles back from school to keep out of her way as long as possible. Mrs Colclough found out what I was doing, and made me have lifts in her car.’

  I remember what was said at the trial about that accident.

  ‘Forensic examination of the car yielded no clues,’ Counsel for the Prosecution commented. ‘And at the scene, there were only the marks some forty feet away where she skidded off the road before plunging down an embankment and into the tree.’

  ‘Joyce was the most careful driver,’ Henry Colclough insisted ‘I think he pulled the steering wheel. I know he did something!’ Wringing his hands, he added: ‘I saw him when the police drove me there, and there was a light in his eyes as if the flames were still blazing in front of him. And I know he hated Joyce. She told me about the trouble she was having with him at school, and all because she was trying to help!’

  ‘None the less, Mr Colclough, that’s a far cry from suggesting he precipitated your wife’s accident.’

  ‘He’d threatened her. And she took it seriously. He said if she didn’t leave him alone, he’d make sure she had to.’

  But as good teachers have always done, Joyce Colclough was simply trying to help a poor, inadequate mother.

  Bunty claimed benefits, never declaring her casual jobs. Swindling the system landed her in prison. ‘First the social security people came knocking on the door,’ he says. ‘Then the police turned up.’ He was sent to a children’s home run by nuns. ‘It was like going to heaven. I prayed they’d keep her locked up for ever.’

  He paints vivid pictures of his dead mother. One of Bunty’s jobs in the black economy was sweeping up in a knife and fork factory. ‘She’d come back with her shoes and trouser hems silvery with swarf.’ She also worked nights in a chip shop. ‘Then the whole house stank of stale fat.’ Her unwashed hair hung like weeds round her face, and smeared grease on the chair backs.

  After the trial, I visited the corporation block where he lived as a child. It is still notoriously deprived. I saw another generation of under-class children playing in squalor. They had runny eyes and noses, and sneezed a lot. Somebody told me it is an allergy to cockroaches.

  Bunty occasionally hit her son. Most of the time, she paid him little attention. ‘After I spent those few blessed months with the nuns,’ he explains, ‘I saw my foul little world with different eyes. It wasn’t from spite that people called Bunty a “dirty slut”. Even in that dump, she marked us out, and I got bullied for it. The other kids chucked stones at me, like I was a mangy dog, so I started going on the attack first. That’s why I could be violent to Trisha. I was sensitised by experience.’

  He talks at some length of the insights counselling has provided. Uppermost in his mind was the deep need to escape his circumstances before they destroyed him. Books were his first escape. He quotes a telling remark by Rousseau. ‘When society treats someone as ugly, they become ugly.’ Shockingly, he saw himself as others must. It was the spur to leave Bunty. He rented a bedsit and worked as an office boy for a while. After he got a job with an advertising agency, he was sent to Haughton to help with Kay’s spring campaign. Trisha was one of their salesgirls.

  ‘Would to God I could put back the clock!’ He looks inward, eyes darkened. ‘I came out of the marriage with the clothes on my back and a few books. I didn’t want any reminders. But I can’t forget!’ Anguished, he talks of the vain hope he had cherished of a reconciliation. And of the way Trisha’s own hidden instability resurrected his childhood terrors. While he feared his own violence towards her, he was growing increasingly afraid of hers. More and more often, she threatened him with kitchen knives and fire-irons.

  Such violence is often a projection of unresolved feelings towards others who have caused harm. When I ask him about the sexual problems in their marriage, he is clearly very uncomfortable. Trying to avoid a direct answer, he blames his own low self-esteem for affecting intimate relationships. But he admits that he began to see a pattern in Trisha’s behaviour. She would deliberately provoke a row as a ploy to avoid sex. Taking a deep breath, he says: ‘I realised she hated anything to do with sex, so I challenged her. ‘Trisha eventually admitted that she had suffered years
of sexual abuse at the hands of a male relative. ‘She wouldn’t say who, but there weren’t many to choose from. Linda could’ve been another victim. Even if she wasn’t, she must have known. She and Trisha were closer than twins.’

  He explains why he did not unburden himself of this terrible knowledge at his trial. ‘I couldn’t bring myself to cause her family more pain.’ Trisha’s abuser must be a potential suspect for her murder. But he fears the police will not see it that way. ‘They still think Beryl might have done it. Because she’d have been paying Trisha’s alimony until I got a job.’

  That seems a very unlikely motive for murder. Money is the least of his new wife’s problems. There is pride, of course, and resentment. But is she that kind of person? We shall find out tomorrow. The self-effacing Beryl Stanton Smith has agreed to set the record straight exclusively for our readers.

  Chapter Two

  A thick tweed coat over her clean overall, short brown suede boots with tassels and cleated soles on her feet, and the furry brown hat from Debenham’s keeping her head and ears warm, Rene slithered more than once on icy patches as she made her way gingerly along Church Street at half past seven in the morning, every so often grabbing with woolly-gloved fingers at a doorknob for support. The wind was cutting, still threatening rather than strong enough for snow, but bitter all the same. Looking at the sky, where dawn was breaking over Bleak Moor to the east, she saw no prospect of sunshine to lift the chill from the day.

  She yawned, but from cold rather than tiredness. Early rising was the habit of her lifetime, part and parcel of the well-ordered existence she had fashioned too long ago to recollect. Keeping busy was another part of that life, and she had been quite overjoyed by the prospect of taking care of the policemen from North Wales, for she controlled her world, and the people in it, with domestic order, food, and ritualised routines designed to keep anarchy at arm’s length. She regarded domestic skills as instantly redeployable in innumerable settings, and since the dye and print mill on the corner by Trisha’s place closed ten years ago, where she had been in charge of quality control, Rene had successfully and profitably charred and cooked for most of the strangers who holidayed in the many village cottages now given over to tourism. In the process, she also made a whole new batch of friends, some of whom lived abroad, and she often thought the postman must be quite envious when he pushed postcards from Paris and crinkly airmail letters from Australia and America and even Hawaii through her letter-box.

  As she progressed along the street, the railings intruding on her peripheral vision like shafts of black light, she noted absent-mindedly which housewives were not scrubbing their doorsteps and polishing their letter-boxes properly, and shook her head. Pausing for breath, she watched the rooks clattering in the trees, making that dreadful noise of theirs even before first light was properly over the horizon. Whatever time of the year, that sound obliterated all other birdsong, and she could not imagine how the people who lived with it day in and day out could bear it. When she was a child, the local guns came every so often to cull the rooks before the nesting season, and would line up, spaniels and retrievers to heel, alongside the railings, which were blacker then, with gold paint on the finials. She remembered as if it were yesterday the sharp crack as the guns went off, the noise ricocheting off the church walls, then the sound of the rooks crashing like stones through the trees, snapping twigs as they went, and the thud as they landed on the graves below. Sometimes their wings were torn off during that plummeting to earth, and hung off branches like broken black fans, and always there was a shower of spiky black feathers settling to earth for a long time afterwards, and the smells of blood and gunsmoke draped in the air. Unconsciously chewing the inside of her cheek, because her new teeth had not yet made themselves at home in her mouth, her thoughts returned involuntarily to the newspaper she had read over breakfast and, for all the iciness of the day, her blood threatened to come to the boil once more.

  On her way home last night, she had called in at the newsagent’s and arranged to have that particular paper delivered for the rest of the week. While McKenna and the others were out seeing Barry Dugdale yesterday afternoon, she had read the newspapers left in an untidy pile on the dining-room table, wondering who this Gaynor Holbrook thought she was. This morning, reading the latest batch of lies, Rene could hardly believe her eyes, and she almost choked on her scrambled egg and toast. She had washed the dishes, put the parlour gas fire on low to keep the room warm, and checked the central heating thermostat, still mulling over the article. More than once, she had to make sure her eyes had not deceived her, but there it was, in black and white for all the world to see. She considered contacting Linda, but decided to bide her time, even though her mind seethed with the pictures Gaynor Holbrook evoked. Thinking sourly that if God had chiselled Smith’s features, he must have used a very blunt tool, she set off again, her mind’s eye filled with the photograph which accompanied the article. Smith’s face was brutally coarse, hard as a granite outcrop on Bleak Moor, his eyes stone cold, his lips thin, and she decided then that, like the rooks, he should be shot for the vermin he was.

  The backs of the Church Street houses had little sun even at the height of summer, and always smelled of damp earth. Had she not showered the alleyway cobbles and the garden path with salt last night, they would be like an ice rink. Compelled to glance at the camera above her head, she latched the back gate and walked crabwise to the back door, wondering if her bug-eyed image was being watched inside the house. Still wary of falling and perhaps being cut off from the excitement of life with a broken leg or hip, she grabbed the door handle. The kitchen should have been dark and empty, awaiting her attentions, but it was warm and brightly lit, smelling of breakfast. McKenna had eaten, and was washing his dishes, while Jack, the newspaper she had already read propped against the milk jug, was spooning cornflakes into his mouth, a little drop of milk trickling down his chin.

  Wiping away the milk with a napkin, he smiled at her. ‘I was expecting to see snow by now.’

  ‘It’ll come,’ she muttered.

  ‘How are you today?’ McKenna too had a smile for her. ‘Your shepherd’s pie was lovely, by the way.’

  ‘Glad you liked it,’ Rene said. She took off her coat, and went to the hall, where she put the coat on a hook, then removed the hat, and fluffed out her hair. She would change her boots for house shoes later, when her feet and the house were warmer.

  Tea towel in hand, McKenna came to the kitchen door. ‘Is something wrong?’ Advancing into the hall, he added: ‘Please don’t think we’re trying to make you redundant. I’m programmed to clear up after myself, and Mr Tuttle’s just programmed to find food. We had breakfast early because I have to be in Manchester for nine.’

  ‘Oh.’ She stared at the floor.

  ‘So, if you were thinking…’ McKenna began, then saw tears shimmering in her eyes. ‘What is it, Rene? What’s wrong?’

  ‘Have you seen the paper?’ she demanded, fists clenched. ‘Have you?’

  He leaned against the wall, running the tea towel through his hands. ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s not true! That woman’s writing horrible lies!’

  ‘If she is, it’s only because Smith’s telling them.’

  ‘What d’you mean? If? Nobody touched Trisha. I’d know. And Linda, well, she’d’ve killed anybody if they so much as tried to lay a finger on her.’ Rene paused, breathing noisily. ‘And she’d’ve done the same if anyone laid a hand on Trisha, too. She’s got a real fighting spirit, that one.’

  ‘Unfortunately, we can never he sure whether or not a girl’s been interfered with,’ he said. ‘Even if they’re asked, they often hide the truth, out of shame, or guilt, or fear.’

  ‘Trisha was pure as the driven snow when she married that monster,’ Rene insisted.

  ‘How d’you know?’

  ‘How d’you think?’ Rene said impatiently. ‘Off the doctors and nurses, of course. When she had the operation.’

  McKenna
coaxed her back to the kitchen, and made her sit at the table. ‘Which operation d’you mean? We only know about one, and that was after she married.’

  Sitting opposite Jack, who was forking egg and bacon into his mouth while he listened, Rene turned her teacup round and round in the saucer. ‘I don’t like saying this in front of men. It doesn’t seem right.’

  Not to be coarse,’ Jack said gently, ‘but it won’t be anything we haven’t heard before. We develop hides like rhinos in this job.’

  She nodded. ‘My hubby used to say much the same.’ Picking up the cup, she held it to her lips, then put it back in the saucer after taking only a sip. ‘Trisha’s periods started when she was fifteen, and she had trouble right from the start. Dorothy worried herself sick about it. The poor kid got the most awful cramps and she’d bleed like a stuck pig for days on end. They lost count of the time she missed off school. On top of that, it was ever so embarrassing, because after the first few times they all knew why she was away.’

  ‘And?’ McKenna asked.

  ‘Well, she went back and forth to the doctors, but they weren’t much use. She was tired and run down all the time, and looked as pale as a little ghost.’ She picked up the cup again, and took another sip. ‘The doctors were all for putting her on the pill, but Dorothy wouldn’t hear of it, so they gave her vitamin pills and iron.’

  ‘Did that help?’ Jack asked.

  ‘She got a bit of colour back in her cheeks, but she was still laid up every month. Dorothy told me she was going to make the doctors do something, then things settled down of their own accord.’ Rene began to twist her wedding band round and round her finger. ‘But her troubles came back, about a year before she got married, and she had to have an operation. She had what they call a D&C. A scrape. She had fibroids in the womb. There was no end of improvement afterwards, although they did say she’d probably have to have it done again. And she did.’ She stopped turning her ring, and put her hands flat on the table. ‘The sister at the hospital told her she’d be a lot better if she was leading a normal life, and it wasn’t good for a young woman of twenty-five to be a virgin. Apparently, the nuns have a lot of problems because of that.’