Cath Staincliffe - Crying Out Loud

‘Maybe we would have gone our separate ways,’ Heather said, ‘but Alex would still have his father.’

And so would Libby’s daughter. Had Heather known that Libby was pregnant? It hadn’t been in the papers. The women had no contact so I could only assume that Heather had no inkling of Rowena’s existence. I imagined it would be even harder if she had done. To discover that Charlie had been on the brink of starting a new family when he died, replicating what Heather and Alex had shared with him, would have been an extra grief.

She fell quiet.

After a moment or two, she asked: ‘He couldn’t get a retrial, could he?’

‘He’d have to present new evidence.’

She nodded, reassured.

We made small talk as she showed me out. The house was warm but she shivered and rubbed at her arms, the chill of murder in the air.

I had parked on the roadside. Above the high wall, tall shrubs and specimen trees seethed in the wind. I could see some sort of palm and a lovely graceful fir, the spiral of its branches reminiscent of Japanese watercolour paintings. My phone rang before I could start the car. It was Chloe Beswick. ‘Did you see him?’

‘Yes.’

‘And?’

‘Chloe, I’m not sure what you expect me to say.’ I sighed.

‘You believe him – that’d be a good start,’ she said baldly.

‘I’m not sure I do. He wasn’t very coherent; he kept going off at a tangent. He didn’t say anything that would count as new evidence. Frankly he seemed to be evading my questions.’

She swore. ‘Wanker! I told him. So, you just giving up, are you? ’Cos I’m not.’ I couldn’t help but admire her determination. She’d a losing hand with Damien to defend but she was with him all the way.

‘I’m working for Libby Hill,’ I reminded her, ‘not you.’

‘You’re not totally sure about it, though, are you? If you could just talk to him some more-’

‘I don’t know yet. Let me think about it, see some more people.’

‘OK.’ She sounded disappointed.

‘Oh, he wants you to take him some tobacco,’ I said.

‘I always do, cheeky git.’

Had Damien Beswick killed Charlie Carter or had he made a false confession? I spent the next hour in my office, researching the phenomena. Most articles stressed that the area was complex and several factors were involved when someone made a false confession. There were three broad categories: voluntary confessions, compliant false confessions and internalized false confessions. I reckoned I could rule out the first – Damien had not walked into a police station claiming responsibility for the murder. He hadn’t been seeking fame and notoriety or meaning for his life as most of these people did. His confession was only made once he’d been arrested and in the middle of interviews. There were elements in both the other categories that I thought might fit with Damien Beswick. Compliant false confessions are made by those who see no other way out. The suspect thinks if he confesses he will get away, get help, be allowed to leave. Damien had been panicking about his drug supply being cut off. He hoped to see the doctor; he hoped the doctor would give him something to manage the withdrawal symptoms he was experiencing. On the other hand, he also fit the picture of an internalized false confession: people who are highly suggestible and over the course of questioning come to believe they may be guilty.

Damien Beswick was suggestible. He had been at the scene, his memory of events was fragmented, he was eager to finish the questions and end the interview to get drugs. The fact that his memory of events was so poor was a major obstacle to establishing if he was lying now – or had been lying when he owned up.

The friend that Heather had enlisted to trail her cheating husband, the one Libby had told me about, was Valerie Mayhew, a retired teacher and a justice of the peace. Mayhew is not a common name in Manchester and it was easy enough to find her in the phone book. She answered my call on her way out to a meeting at the Civil Justice Centre. She would have put me off but I asked whether she could spare me ten minutes over a coffee if I came into town, telling her it related to the Charlie Carter case. She relented; I think her interest was piqued.

The Civil Justice Centre is a brave new building in the Spinningfields area of the city centre. It’s an audacious design: a tall, thin central skyscraper with glassy boxes jutting out irregularly at either end; coloured battleship grey and primrose yellow, it looks a bit like a Jenga toy tower made of snazzy shipping containers, defying gravity with their overhangs. The feel as you enter is of a sweeping space, a hotel or conference centre, perhaps. The atrium soars twenty stories high and each floor has vistas to the Pennine hills that fringe the city to the north and the east. A bank of lifts whisk people heavenward to their fates: for adoption, bankruptcy, custody hearings. There’s a café on the ground floor where Valerie had arranged to see me. I had described myself (grey wool pea-coat, turquoise scarf) and she waved me over. A woman in a navy trouser suit with silver-grey shoulder-length hair, expertly cut. Valerie had fantastic bone structure so, although her face was heavily lined with age, she was still very attractive. She’d paid attention to her teeth, too: they gleamed white and regular.

Valerie had finished a snack and I refused her offer of a drink and sat across the table from her.

‘You went to see Heather?’ she asked. ‘How was she?’

‘Upset.’

‘It’s still very raw,’ she said. ‘You don’t put any store by Damien Beswick’s retraction?’ There was a no-nonsense, teacherish tone in her voice which got my back up.

‘I’m keeping an open mind,’ I said, ‘still building up a picture of events. That’s why I wanted to talk to you.’

She weighed me up for a moment. ‘OK,’ inviting me to proceed.

‘Just describe that day,’ I said.

‘Heather rang me in a complete state, mid-afternoon. Charlie had told her he was off to some sales convention in Birmingham but she didn’t believe him. He’d more than enough work on and he’d never touted for jobs outside the north-west before. She thought he was using it as an excuse to go see this other woman.’

‘Libby Hill?’

Valerie nodded.

‘Heather had already told you about her?’ I asked.

‘Yes. He’d agreed to stop seeing this woman for a few months. They didn’t want to mess up Alex’s exams and I think Heather hoped he would come to his senses. But then she suspected he’d broken his promise and asked me to help her find out one way or the other. She thought if we used my car Charlie wouldn’t notice.’ Valerie shrugged and rearranged her plate on the tray in front of her. ‘It all seemed a bit… seedy.’ She looked up. ‘I suppose it’s the sort of thing you do all the time, in your line,’ she said dryly.

‘Oh, yes,’ I agreed.

‘So, I tried to dissuade her but she was set on catching him out and I owed Heather a lot. She’d been brilliant when my own marriage was breaking up.’ She shrugged. ‘I couldn’t say no.’

‘How did you know each other?’

‘Through church.’ Valerie caught sight of someone across the foyer and waved hello. She turned back to me. ‘I went round there, called for Heather and we parked a few hundred yards down the main road. When Charlie came out and turned right at the junction, we would go after him. We didn’t have long to wait. He set off about four.’ She frowned. ‘It really was the most horrible, awful irony.’ She gave her head a little shake. ‘As you probably heard from Heather, we followed him until the turning for Thornsby and off he sailed. The opposite route from Birmingham. Heather knew he must be going up to the cottage. She was furious – hurt, too. We went back to hers and I didn’t feel I could leave her like that so I stayed with her. Alex was there but he didn’t know about any of it.’