Cath Staincliffe: The Kindest Thing

Mr Latimer waits, hoping to settle me.

‘I couldn’t wake him up. I had the plastic bag.’ Sweat breaks out across my body. I am trembling. ‘I put the bag over his head. He jerked and made this sound, this awful sound. I held it tight. Then he stopped breathing.’

‘Would you describe what happened as a good death?’

‘No,’ I whisper.

It had been horrible. It hadn’t been dignified – not from my point of view. How could he have pressured me into it? The worst moments, the drumming of his heels on the bed, the strangled murmur that might have been ‘Stop’ or ‘Help’, the bubbling breath, the way his body bucked, the smell as he emptied his bowels. They pulse through me time and again in waves of shame and revulsion.

‘What did you do then?’

I cursed him. ‘I took the bag and the morphine bottles, along with the breathing space kit, put them in an old carrier bag in the wheelie-bin, then emptied the kitchen bin on top.’ My knees threatened to buckle as I went outside. I felt eyes on my back, expected someone to come up the drive any moment. Pauline to trot round with a complaint.

‘I went back upstairs. I needed to make sure he was still there. Still… dead.’

Flo, in the back row of the jury, blanches and looks down.

When I cupped his face in my hands I thought perhaps he was slightly cooler. I traced the lines on his brow with my thumbs, rubbed the heel of my hand against the stubble along his jaw. Speckles of silver in there with the black. He had never grown a beard, not even a moustache. He looked worried in death. His mouth turning down. His lovely eyes marbles now.

‘Wake up.’ I tested him. ‘Neil, come back.’ All I heard were the birds outside and the hammering from down the road where they were converting the loft. I wrapped one palm around his throat, over his Adam’s apple, absorbing the absence of motion, the lack of rhythm in his blood. I wanted to clean him up, bathe him with libations, oils and tears. Like the godly women who laid out the dead. We no longer had that skill: death, like birth, had been hived off to professionals, to antiseptic corporate enclaves far removed from the glory and filth of the real thing.

‘Then I rang the ambulance. And I left a message for Adam on his phone. And I rang Sophie,’ I tell the court.

‘What did you tell her?’

‘She guessed. When she got back I told her that I had gone upstairs and found he wasn’t breathing.’

‘When you and your husband planned his death, you hoped to evade detection?’

‘Yes.’

The Prof settles back. I sense disapproval. Dolly glances his way and behind them the Artist scratches at his neck, a leisurely move that seems foreign in the circumstances.

‘And did you discuss what you should do if any suspicions were aroused?’

‘Yes, if it came to it, I was to say that Neil had taken an overdose, that unknown to me he had hoarded his medication and that I had no idea what he was planning. And that I had then hidden the evidence to spare the children.’

‘But you didn’t do that, did you?’ Latimer asks.

‘No.’ Because once I knew Sophie was caught in the undertow with me, only the truth would do. ‘When I heard that Sophie had gone to the police, I just wanted to stop all the lies. To tell her the truth. Her and Adam. To help them understand. And also because I’d had to use the plastic bag, and they’d found evidence of that in the post-mortem, well, it made it less likely that Neil could have done it all himself.’

The bag was strong, clear plastic. It had once held some fabric samples in it – for some curtains in the Arts and Crafts style I was working on. I had gripped it tight under his chin. His breathing was shallow and the bag compressed in tiny, incremental stages until it lay plastered and creased against his forehead and cheeks, sucking against his nostrils. His face darkening and then those dreadful pitiful movements he made. The brief clamour for life that had me leaping out of my skin. The appalling stillness that followed.

‘Why didn’t you tell Sophie the truth?’

‘I wanted to protect her, and Adam. I didn’t want them to know what we had done. Neil wanted them to believe he had died naturally from his illness.’

‘And why didn’t you tell the police what you had done when you were questioned?’

‘The same reason. Because of the children. Because I had broken the law and Neil was dead and I had to be there for our children.’

‘What do you think now about your actions?’

‘I never should have done it. It was awful, the whole thing. If I’d only been stronger and kept refusing him.’

‘Why didn’t you?’ Mr Latimer sounds almost harsh now.

‘I couldn’t think straight. I couldn’t work out what was best. And Neil was so clear, so sure. I was absolutely exhausted and losing my mind and he kept on at me until I couldn’t say no any longer.’

‘How do you feel now about agreeing to his request?’

‘Terrible.’

I look across to Sophie, willing her to face me but her head is bowed, her hair a veil.

I wrote to Sophie from Styal. Ms Gleason cautioned me that I ran the risk of being accused of exercising undue influence on a prosecution witness but I promised that there would be nothing inflammatory in my letter. The prison monitored communication anyway. I wrote to say how sorry I was. To tell her how much I loved her and how I never meant to hurt anyone with my actions. And that, whatever happened, I would never stop loving her. I told her that Neil loved her too. Also I promised that if she ever wanted to ask me about Neil, about his life or his death, whatever she needed to know I would tell her. There was one thing I didn’t write that needled at me like a toothache. I left it out because it might have seemed too harsh and because this wasn’t the place to pose that question, because she was my daughter and only fifteen. What would you have done? That was what I really wanted to know. If it had been you, and you loved him as I did, then what would you have done?

When Briony Webber stands up and launches into me she is crisp and professional, just the right side of hostile. ‘Ms Shelley, you say you feel terrible about your involvement in your husband’s death. Is that because you were caught?’ There’s an intake of breath from someone in the gallery.

‘No.’ My cheeks glow with heat.

‘If you’d got away with it, would you still feel so terrible?’

‘No. Yes. It’s not like that.’

‘I think we’ll let the jury judge for itself what it’s like, whether the picture you paint of someone driven to lose reason is only that, a picture, a fiction.’

Mr Latimer bolts to his feet: this sort of language should be saved for the closing speeches but Miss Webber’s ahead of the game and moves on. ‘Tell me, Ms Shelley, you were still working in the weeks leading up to Mr Draper’s death?

‘Yes.’

‘Did any of your clients complain about your work?’

‘No.’

‘Anyone cancel a project, dispense with your services?’

‘No.’

‘Did any of your clients give you bad feedback about your attitude or behaviour?’

‘No.’

‘So, as far as your clients were concerned you were performing your work perfectly well.’

‘Yes.’

‘And home. You were still looking after your house and family?’

Someone had to. ‘Yes.’

‘And apart from a spat with your neighbour we have nothing to indicate you were not in sound mind and coping admirably with a difficult situation? Is that true?’

‘I don’t know.’ It’s a weak answer and my mind darts about, desperate for a better one.

‘Oh, I think you do, Ms Shelley. Let me take you back to the events of that fateful morning. According to your own testimony, your husband did not specifically ask you to do anything that morning, did he, apart from fetch some wine?’