Felix Francis - Guilty Not Guilty

‘I need to talk,’ she said, and tears welled up in her deep-set eyes.

‘It’s okay, Mary,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry.’

‘It’s not okay,’ she said, the tears now openly flowing. ‘And I do worry. I accused you of killing her. I now know that wasn’t true. And I am so very, very sorry.’

‘Mary, my dear, forget it. Everyone else was accusing me as well. I promise, you have nothing to be sorry about.’

‘Yes, I do,’ she said. ‘And it wasn’t just that.’

She paused as if plucking up the courage to go on.

‘I had no idea that Joseph was being so horrid to you and to my dear Amelia. That nice policeman showed me his dreadful emails.’ She cried some more. ‘Why didn’t Amelia tell me?’

She had tried, often, but Mary hadn’t wanted to know — and she certainly hadn’t wanted to believe. Not least because, all the time, Joe had been whispering in her ear that Amelia was mad and untrustworthy.

But I didn’t say that.

‘Maybe she hadn’t wanted to distress you.’

But she was distressed now, and seemingly the more so because it was now too late to tell Amelia how sorry she was.

‘I so wish she was still here so I could speak to her,’ Mary said, the tears still flowing.

So did I. It would have done so much good for her mental health.

‘That is all Joe’s doing,’ I said, twisting the knife in Mary’s heart. ‘He is the reason Amelia isn’t here.’

She nodded, as if aware of the fact.

‘Will the police be able to prove that?’

‘I hope so,’ I said.

She nodded again. ‘I won’t see it, though,’ she said miserably. ‘I’ve not got long now.’ She suddenly smiled. ‘But I’ll be able to put things right with Amelia on the other side.’

‘Maybe,’ I agreed, even though I didn’t really believe in all that. But if the thought gave Mary some comfort, then I would not be the one to mock it.

As DS Dowdeswell had told me, the old dear seemed more alert and more mentally perceptive than in the past, and I so wished that Amelia had known that too.

‘I must go now,’ she said. ‘Fred and Jill, my neighbours, they brought me here. They’re waiting outside.’

‘Thank you so much for coming.’ It had obviously been quite an effort.

She managed another smile. ‘You take care, my dear.’

I watched her go in the sure knowledge that it would be the last time I would see her, and my eyes filled with tears too.

But I was wrong.

No sooner had she disappeared from my sight through the door, than she was suddenly back again.

‘One more thing,’ she said. ‘I’ve changed my will. You will now receive Amelia’s half of my estate, and Joseph’s half goes directly to his children.’

Did I detect a slight degree of amusement in her voice?

‘It’ll serve him right.’

Three weeks after my arrival at the National Spinal Injuries Centre, I took my first steps, albeit between parallel bars for support and with lots of help from the team of physiotherapists.

My housemaster at school had been very fond of using the expression There’s no such word as can’t , whenever one of his charges had moaned, ‘I can’t do it, sir.’

Here in the rehabilitation gym at Stoke Mandeville, that expression should have been inscribed on the walls in huge flashing letters.

And what the patients could do was remarkable.

Wheelchairs, rather than being simply the inanimate objects that most of us see, take on a personality of their own in the hands of men and women so badly damaged that half their bodies have no use whatsoever, other than to be an encumbrance.

But that didn’t mean that these remarkable people would not participate to the full in love, in life and, especially, in sport.

The precursor to the Paralympic Games was first held at Stoke Mandeville way back in 1948, on the very day that the Olympic Games were declared open in London by King George VI.

In those first Stoke Mandeville Games, there was just one event in one sport, archery, and a mere sixteen competitors took part, all of them from the United Kingdom.

By 2016 the games had grown somewhat such that, in Rio de Janeiro, nearly four and a half thousand athletes from a hundred and sixty countries competed in twenty-two Paralympic sports, still including archery, winning 528 gold medals and setting 220 world records.

And most of the patients at Stoke Mandeville had seemingly set their sights on being on the next Paralympic flight to Tokyo, or the one after that to Paris, or after that to Los Angeles.

The level of determination to make the best of life’s bad deal was inspirational, to put it mildly, and it was as much the encouragement from the other patients as that from the staff that made things happen.

‘Come on, Bill,’ shouted Robin, a fellow patient who couldn’t even sit upright without being strapped to a high-backed wheelchair, and who was unable to breathe without the aid of a ventilator that rhythmically pushed and pulled his chest in and out. ‘You can do it.’

It had taken all his strength to shout like that, and all his breath, and I wasn’t about to let him down, now was I?

Walking was simple, right?

Even tiny kids could do it, right?

Just put one foot in front of the other, and then repeat.

I took five of the smallest steps ever, and I was totally exhausted.

I sat back down heavily into the wheelchair that one of the staff had been pushing behind me.

‘Good job,’ shouted Robin, and then, when the contraption he was wearing gave him another breath, ‘Way to go, Bill.’

And so my life progressed, one tiny step at a time, each one feeling like a gold-medal winning achievement.

By the end of the fourth week, I could walk along the total length of the bars, albeit in a manner that made Hopalong Cassidy look more like a marching guardsman.

And it was after another particularly lengthy stint in the gym that DS Dowdeswell came to see me again.

‘We got him,’ he said, echoing the words that Barack Obama had used when he was informed that a US Special Forces soldier had shot and killed Osama bin Laden.

‘Who?’ I asked, my mind clearly not working properly after such a strenuous session.

‘Who do you think? Joe Bradbury.’

‘How?’ I asked.

‘Cell-site evidence.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Evidence from his mobile phone,’ the detective said with a laugh. ‘It’s always their mobile phones that give them away. They can’t resist taking the damn things with them wherever they go as if they’re a part of their own bodies. Criminals are so stupid. It’s almost as if they want to get caught.’

And the clever ones never are , I thought.

‘Anyway, like you said to, we examined Bradbury’s black Nissan, but there was no damage on it, not even a scratch.’

‘It could have been fixed. It’s been long enough.’

He shook his head. ‘We can always tell. There are minor changes to the paintwork of the repaired bit compared to the rest. He would have had to have the whole vehicle resprayed and, even then, there would still be telltale signs in the door recesses and also in the boot and the engine compartments. No, we were certain the Nissan was not the car that hit yours.’

I sat silently in the wheelchair and waited for him to go on.

‘But,’ he said, ‘we did a check on his phone and, sure enough, it showed that he’d been in Banbury around four o’clock on the day of your accident.’

‘It was not an accident.’

‘Yeah, that’s right — your non-accident. We get so used to describing every road-traffic collision as an accident. Difficult to forget sometimes.’ He paused. ‘Anyway, the cell-site records show that his phone was switched off for most of the afternoon but he did turn it on for a while when he was in Banbury to make a call to his office. Maybe he forgot, but the phone wasn’t switched off again until later, and it was still on when automatically passed from a mast in Banbury to one close to Hanwell village at twenty-six minutes past five.’