Brian Freemantle - A Mind to Kill

‘ He won’t.’

‘Will you go, leave her, if he does?’

‘ That’s the deal. Easy one for me to make. ’

‘Maybe I’ll persuade you to leave first.’

‘ Then again, maybe you won’t.’

‘Jennifer, could you learn to believe in God? Love God?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Will you go through the services with me? Pray with me? Try?’

‘Yes.’

‘ Hypocrite.’

‘“Though ye believe not me, believe the works”,’ retorted the man.

‘ OK pops. Show us the works.’

‘I will,’ said Dawson, sincerely. ‘I’ll make you believe again, even if I can’t make Jennifer.’

‘ Nah! ’

‘“Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth”,’ said the priest, quoting again.

‘ Corinthians,’ identified Jane, as quickly as before.

‘I can guide you back.’

‘ Let’s make it a challenge, like it is with Jeremy Hall! ’

It was in the lawyer’s rooms, thirty minutes later, that Dawson, who could find his way around the establishment’s wine list with the sure-footedness of a tightrope walker crossing Niagara Falls, selected the Roederer Crystal (‘the Krug they’ve got is too buttery,’) and announced, ‘I’ve found the weakness.’

‘What?’ demanded Mason and Hall, almost in unison.

‘Jane believes in God. Or did, very devoutly.’

‘Her father was an Episcopalian bishop,’ remembered Hall.

‘Ah!’ exclaimed the man, a mystery solved. ‘This might not be as difficult as we thought it was going to be.’

‘You think you can do it?’ demanded the lawyer.

‘I’m more confident now than I was an hour ago.’

‘Which only leaves me to do what I have to do,’ accepted Mason.

Dawson nodded. ‘And Jennifer will be saved.’

The well established and practised discretion of the clinic extended to a pool of cars registered to Henot House, which avoided Jeremy Hall having to hire one in his own name and risk disclosing their whereabouts. He had to identify himself by telephone, though, to get the meetings he wanted and from the quickness with which people – even the police – agreed he decided the danger of being publicly recognized was outweighed by the speed with which every door opened to him. And he was in a great hurry.

Despite the psychiatrist’s warning of Jennifer’s dependence upon him, he’d been confused by the strength of her reaction to his leaving. He only bothered to tell her at all at Julian Mason’s urging and was glad the psychiatrist was with him when he did. She at once came close to tears – which he realized for the first time she’d rarely done during a lot of the horror she’d suffered – and needed the hand-holding assurance repeated several times that he was not abandoning her but would return immediately from talking to people it was imperative he see.

‘Today. Tonight,’ she’d insisted.

‘It should be tonight. Everything’s arranged.’

‘You’re not sure?’

‘If I don’t manage to see everyone I’ll come back and go again tomorrow.’

‘Don’t leave me!’

‘I told you I’m not leaving you: and where and why I’m going. Which you know I’ve got to.’

Hall had been disconcerted but Mason had called it valuable. ‘Think what she’s gone through, without breaking. That showed me just how deep the depression is.’

‘Can you lift her out of it?’

The psychiatrist pulled an uncertain face. ‘I’ve probably got a more difficult job than either you or the priest.’

The incident delayed him but he still arrived in good time for his first appointment, uncomfortable in the jacket he’d had to buy from the clinic outfitters which didn’t stock clothes in his chest size. He was unhappy, too, that Michael Bailey had decreed somewhere as public as Winchester hospital, although the nearby railway station car park was convenient to hide the hire car against its number being noted at the hospital and traced to the Hertfordshire clinic. He walked the intervening distance and grew unhappier at the obvious attention from the suddenly busy corridors, with their open-doored offices, along which he had to pass to get to the pathology department. There was a lot of activity there, too. It had been wise to abandon the car.

Bailey was a tall, gangling man with a stutter, which worsened with the intensity with which he leaned forward to get the blocked words out. Jeremy Hall went through the quadrille of thanking the pathologist for seeing him so promptly and being told in return it was in no way inconvenient: Bailey patted the dossier in front of him and said he had recovered his original statement from the archives at Humphrey Perry’s pre-trial request and of course he’d followed the sensational events.

It took longer agreeing the case of Jennifer Lomax was absolutely incredible – ‘earth shattering’ was the phrase it took the pathologist three attempts to say – threatened the very foundations of conventional imagination and even religious belief. Hall went through the routine recognizing that it was indeed every one and more of those things but that, perhaps most incredible of all, he’d become so closely involved that he’d ceased thinking so and was now accepting the totally abnormal as the totally normal. He invoked professional confidentiality to avoid talking about Jennifer personally, supposing this encounter to be a rehearsal for those to follow.

‘You want to reopen the inquest?’ anticipated Bailey.

‘I don’t know that would be possible. Or whether any useful purpose would be served.’

‘What then?’

‘It is, as you say, an astonishing case,’ said Hall, the lie carefully prepared. ‘Everything about it has to be compiled and assessed for legal and academic study. And that includes any reassessment that might be necessary of what happened in the past.’

‘I understand,’ assured Bailey, getting stuck halfway through the word.

‘All I’ve been able to do is compare newspaper reports with written statements. It’s not clear to me how much of those written statements were actually introduced as evidence or how much the coroner took as read, from access to the statements beforehand.’

‘The usual way,’ smiled the pathologist, uncertainly. ‘He just picked the relevant points to put to me, from my statement.’

Everything decided in advance, Hall thought again. ‘In your report you refer to aspects of the puncture wounds, where Mrs Lomax injected herself. Was that finding examined or taken as read?’

‘Actually I discussed it with Mr Davies before the inquest began,’ admitted the pathologist. ‘He felt it would be distressing for Mr Lomax for us to go too deeply into it at the hearing itself.’

Hall swallowed the sigh. ‘Go through it with me, if you would.’

‘The puncture mark in the left arm was larger than the others on the body and was dangerously close to the vein. The other three were much smaller and properly injected subcutaneously.’

‘What did you think about that?’

‘The largest puncture mark would have been the last injection she self-administered. By then, I believe, she would have already overdosed on insulin. And additionally have taken one lot of temazepam after another. She would have been extremely unsteady.’

‘The majority of the injections were to the right of the body: two to the right arm, one in the right thigh?’

‘That’s right.’

‘You referred to skin hardening, because of the length of time Mrs Lomax had been injecting?’

‘Yes. It happens to diabetics, particularly those who take soluble insulin, which she did.’

‘In which side of the body was that hardening most prevalent, the right or the left?’ Into his mind, abruptly, came a fact that could have greatly contributed to Jennifer’s innocence at the trial, if the other evidence hadn’t been so overwhelming.