Хилари Боннер - Dreams of Fear

‘No,’ replied Vogel, adding disingenuously, ‘your father doesn’t actually have the footage, but we do expect to recover it in the near future from other sources.’

‘He’s seen it, though? Damn him. Must have done. And presumably told you all about it?’

‘He told us that he had seen film of you hitting your wife, and how your ring cut her face,’ said Vogel. ‘You lied to us about that, didn’t you?’

‘Yes,’ Felix admitted. ‘But wouldn’t you? It was the only time I ever hit Jane, and I was ashamed. In spite of the circumstances, I regretted it as soon as I struck her. And I knew it would look bad for me, after I realized I was your prime suspect.’

‘What about your wife’s other bruises?’

‘I told you before. She fell in the garden playing with the twins. That was absolutely true.’

Vogel thought it almost certainly was. But he intended to pile all the pressure he could on the other man.

‘Is it, Felix?’ he asked.

‘Yes, yes, I promise you, Mr Vogel,’ said Felix.

‘All right. Let’s say I accept that, for the moment, and we move on. What happened next that night?’

‘Uh, nothing much. We both went to bed and to sleep. At least I slept. I don’t know about Jane.’

‘She woke you up, didn’t she? In the middle of the night?’

Felix sighed.

‘Yes. OK. She woke me up. So you know about that?’

‘Yes. The camera was activated by movement.’

‘Then if you know what happened, why are you asking me about it now?’ asked Felix wearily.

‘I don’t know what happened,’ replied Vogel honestly. ‘Your father indicated that Jane shared with you something of considerable enormity. That she remembered something terrible about her past which she revealed to you that night. And almost certainly it was what she remembered that started the chain of events leading ultimately to her death. But your father wouldn’t tell me what it was. He said he had intruded enough on you and Jane. I need you to tell me, Felix, exactly what Jane remembered.’

‘You said you had sources who were going to give you the film from that night, so why do you need me to tell you anything?’ countered Felix stubbornly.

‘Because I don’t know how long that might take,’ replied Vogel, which in itself was true enough. ‘And I don’t want any further delay in completing this investigation. I should remind you that you are already guilty of withholding evidence. As is your father. And I should warn you, as I already have him, that I am on the verge of charging you both with perverting the course of justice.’

Felix smiled without humour.

‘Not much of a threat as I’m banged up already accused of murdering Jane,’ he said.

‘But you have not been charged,’ murmured Vogel.

Felix looked thoughtful, as if he could maybe see a glimmer of at least a certain degree of hope.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘Look, one of the reasons I didn’t tell you this before, is that I didn’t really believe what Jane said she’d remembered. I mean. I couldn’t. I couldn’t believe it. If I’d let myself accept what Jane told me as the truth, it would have been the end really, the end of our life together, it would have had to be... ’

Felix stopped, lowering his head into his hands.

‘Please go on,’ said Vogel. It was half an instruction, half encouragement.

Felix looked up. There were tears in his eyes.

‘J-Jane said that when she came round after I’d found her shaking Joanna, long-buried memories started to return,’ he began haltingly. ‘Q-quite terrifying memories, which she believed were what lay behind her nightmares, causing her to wake up screaming hysterically. She said she thought her regression therapy may have taken her back to the cause of her bad dreams. But she truly had never known exactly what they were about until that night. Then she just blurted it out.

‘“I killed my own sister, I stabbed her to death, that is what my dreams are about,” she said.’

Felix paused to wipe away the tears which were now running down his cheeks.

Vogel remained silent, with difficulty. He certainly had not expected this. He knew he was blinking at speed behind his spectacles. He was aware of Saslow sitting very still beside him. Both of them were waiting anxiously for Felix to continue, desperate that nothing should stop him from doing so.

‘Jane looked absolutely stricken, and I was just completely stunned,’ Felix began again, after just a few seconds.

‘“When you found me holding Joanna, shaking Joanna, it all came back to me,” she said.

‘She’d remembered back to when she was a little girl, to one night when her mother came into the bedroom she shared with her sister, and a kind of horror story unfolded. She suddenly became aware that her sister was dead beside her. And, that she was holding a knife. A knife dripping blood.

‘“I was screaming, and my mother was screaming — at least I think the woman was my mother, she must have been, but it wasn’t clear,” Jane told me. “Everything else was crystal clear. I had this knife with a big long blade in my hand. And there was blood everywhere.”

‘Well, I just couldn’t believe my ears. I didn’t handle it well. I didn’t handle it at all. I just jumped out of bed shouting that it couldn’t be, she must be mistaken, the damned trick cyclist had messed with her brain. It was all just another dream.

‘Jane wouldn’t have it. She said she was quite sure of what had happened. That she was suddenly very certain about her early childhood. She’d been one of twins, like our children. And the sister who died, the sister she had killed, had been her twin. That seemed to make it even worse, somehow, if anything could be worse.

‘I still insisted that I didn’t believe her. That it couldn’t be real. It was all just inside her head.

‘But the truth was I didn’t know what the hell to believe. I did know that if I admitted to myself that I had any doubts at all, I would have to leave Jane, I would have to destroy our family because I wouldn’t be able to trust Jane with our children. I just ran out of the room, leaving Jane with tears running down her face. And afterwards I went into a kind of denial. I was worried sick, of course, but I just kept on telling myself it had only been a dream, it must have been only a dream. Jane had never killed anyone, whatever she thought she remembered. The only way I could carry on was to convince myself of that. And tell no one. I wouldn’t even talk about it to Jane.

‘Then later, of course, I believed it was the reason that Jane had killed herself. Which we all thought she had. At first, anyway. I felt so guilty that I hadn’t helped her.’

Felix stopped quite abruptly. Vogel decided it was time to intervene.

‘Yet, after Jane’s death, you withheld this information from the police, even though you must have known how significant it could be,’ said Vogel sternly. ‘Why did you do that?’

‘For my children,’ replied Felix. ‘I feared it all becoming public knowledge. As it probably would have done at an inquest, let alone a trial. How could I let my children grow up thinking their mother was a killer?’

Vogel was a father. He couldn’t help feeling considerable sympathy for Felix Ferguson. He decided to put the other man out of his misery. In as much as anything could under such tragic circumstances.

‘All right, Felix,’ said the DCI. ‘You should know that Jimmy Granger has been arrested on suspicion of the murder of both Jane and Gerry Barham, and of attempting to murder your father. And in view of this development, I am going to arrange for you to be released from custody.’

Felix sat back in his chair and closed his eyes, just for a few seconds. Vogel could see the relief washing over him.