Felix Francis - Guilty Not Guilty

It wasn’t quite the whole truth but... it seemed to do the trick. The Wilsons gradually relaxed and Gladys even took another bite of her bagel.

‘I loved Amelia,’ I went on. ‘I loved her with all my heart. And I want to see the person responsible brought to justice more than anyone.’

Jim Wilson sat down again.

‘So why are you here?’ he asked.

‘I know this sounds strange,’ I said, ‘but I believe that, during your recent visit to Mary, you said something about the price that her house next door was sold for, and I think that could be relevant in determining who killed Amelia.’

It was a tenuous connection but, if I could prove that Joe Bradbury was a liar and a fraudster, and one who would even steal from his own mother, then I might be some way to proving that he was a murderer too. If nothing else it would stop the police believing he was as honest as Mother Teresa.

‘I don’t know what that could be,’ Jim said. ‘We talked mostly about other long-standing friends of both ours and hers. I can’t see how that could help find Amelia’s killer.’

‘How about the couple that bought Mary’s house? Did you speak about them at all?’

‘Alan and Margaret Newbould,’ Gladys said. ‘Nice couple.’

‘Do you know them well?’ I asked.

‘Quite well,’ she replied. ‘They are friendly enough if we see them out somewhere or over the garden fence. But they’re not like Mary and Reg.’ She laughed. ‘With them, we almost lived in each other’s houses at times. Such a shock for us all when Reg died.’

She sighed.

Death was always a shock, all the more so when it was unexpected, sudden and violent. Worse still when it was at the hand of another.

‘Have you seen the Newboulds recently?’ I asked. ‘Perhaps that was what you told Mary about?’

They both thought in silence for a moment.

‘I saw Margaret quite recently,’ Gladys said. ‘I was going for a walk and she was standing outside while some men were unloading a van. She waved at me and I stopped for a chat.’

‘What was being unloaded?’

‘Electrical goods, I think. A new washing machine and a dryer.’

‘That’s it,’ Jim said excitedly. ‘You were telling Mary that Alan wasn’t very pleased that the ones she’d left in the house had broken down so soon, particularly after he’d spent so much to buy them from her in the first place. And they weren’t still under an extended guarantee either, like he’d been promised.’

I inwardly groaned. If all that Joe had done was misrepresent the age of his mother’s old washing machine, then it was hardly going to rate as grand theft auto.

But Amelia would surely have realised that too. So why had she said what she had to Nancy?

‘A second-hand washing machine and tumble dryer can’t have been that expensive,’ I said.

‘It wasn’t just them,’ Jim said. ‘Alan Newbould told me he’d bought all sorts of other things too — carpets, curtains, light fittings, and so on. Even some nice pieces of furniture that Mary didn’t have room for in her new place. He told me he’d done a deal with young Joseph to buy it all at a grossly inflated price so that he could effectively reduce the stamp duty a bit on the true cost of the house. Seems everyone does it.’

Indeed, they do. Amelia and I had done exactly the same when we’d bought the Old Forge. Stamp duty land tax was not levied on removable items such as white goods or wall and floor coverings, things that the taxman described as chattels, so why give the government more money than we had to?

But there had been no mention of any chattels payment in the letter sent by the lawyers to Mary.

‘Do you know how he paid?’ I asked.

‘He wrote out a personal cheque to Joseph,’ Jim said. ‘Seems Joseph told him that it would be best if the lawyers on each side didn’t know anything about it.’

‘Do you happen to know how much the cheque was for?’

‘A hundred thousand pounds.’

No crime would have been committed if Joe had given the cheque to his mother to deposit into her bank account. No crime, that was, other than defrauding the taxman of a few thousand pounds in stamp duty. And that would be nothing for me to get excited about, especially when paying the duty was the purchaser’s responsibility, not the seller’s.

But Nancy had told me that Amelia had been convinced that Joe had stolen the money from their mother.

Ever since we’d been helping Mary with her day-to-day expenses, Amelia had had access to her mother’s online banking and she would have surely looked for the hundred thousand to have been paid in.

By mid-afternoon, I was back at Hanwell and on my knees in front of the Queen Anne desk.

When we were first married, Amelia had spent several weeks unsuccessfully trying to cancel an online film-streaming service for which she had forgotten the password and so, ever since then, she had kept a little blue-covered notebook, containing all her user names and passwords. With luck it would also contain her mother’s bank login details.

All I had to do was find it.

I rifled through the drawers of the desk but it was nowhere to be seen.

In the end, I removed all the papers one by one, stacking them in piles on the sitting-room floor, but still there was no sign of the notebook.

But I did find one thing that made me gasp in shock, or in horror.

In the top right-hand drawer, hidden inside a cookery magazine, was a thin booklet entitled Living or Dying with My Friend Suicide .

The booklet was not only extremely well thumbed but Amelia had written copious notes in the margins alongside the text.

I couldn’t tell whether they were recent or not. Probably not. There had been a time when almost all Amelia would talk about was taking her own life, but I thought that time had passed. But, nevertheless, finding the booklet brought it all back to me.

One of her notes caught my eye.

‘THIS IS ME’, she had written in large capital letters.

According to the title page, the booklet had been written by someone called Richard Schneider, MD, professor of psychiatry at New York University.

I sat on the floor with my back against the sofa and read it.

The professor started by stating that, in his considerable clinical experience, there were only six basic reasons why people kill themselves:

1. Psychosis — when schizophrenia or some other neurotic disorder generates ‘voices’ in the head telling sufferers to take their own lives, an instruction that is difficult or impossible for them to ignore.

2. Impulse — when someone takes their life on little more than a careless whim, mostly due to excessive use of alcohol or drugs. The ‘watch me, I can fly’ leap from a hotel balcony, or the ‘I don’t want to live any more’ mournful cry of the maudlin drunk who then steps in front of a car or throws himself into a canal. These people wouldn’t have dreamed of killing themselves if they’d been clean or sober.

3. Depression — when sufferers feel that they cannot bear for any longer the agony that it causes. Bizarrely, they often don’t really want to die, they just want to stop living in pain, as if there was some halfway house from which they could return at some later stage when things were better. Depression can also blur a person’s thinking, giving them the misplaced opinion that people would be better off without them and that they would be doing everyone a favour by ending it all.

4. A cry for help that goes wrong. Taking an overdose and then telling someone so that medical attention can be sought is a prime example. Such people don’t really want to die, or expect to. They even frequently choose a method that they don’t think will actually kill, only intending to alert or cause suffering to someone who has previously hurt them . But, if the overdose is sufficient or the medical help is too slow in coming, then death can occur, rendering the cry for help as misplaced as it is heart-wrenching.