Хилари Боннер - The Cruellest Game

‘I do, My Lord,’ he said, without any real certainty, I felt.

He turned to Robert.

‘Mr Anderton, how could your wife possibly have known that she would be able to persuade your son to kill himself?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Robert muttered.

‘In confronting Robbie and exposing her real identity to him she surely risked ending her entire charade without necessarily wreaking any significant revenge against you at all. So what would she have done if your son had not proved so susceptible? What would she have done if he had simply picked up the phone to call his mother?’

Robert looked down at his hands and said nothing.

‘You must answer the question, Mr Anderton,’ instructed the judge.

Robert looked up.

‘Brenda told me she had been prepared to kill him if necessary.’ His voice was barely more than a whisper but the court was so quiet there was no need for the judge to ask him to speak up.

Joshua Small QC seemed to turn rather pale. Rather desperately, I felt, he sought some sort of recovery.

‘Mrs Anderton planned to kill a fit and athletic teenage boy. How exactly?’

Robert looked appealingly towards the judge. Sir Charles Montague merely stared at him.

‘She told me she had taken a carving knife with her,’ Robert said, again in almost a whisper. ‘From the kitchen... it was in her handbag. She always carried quite a big bag...’

His voice, already so tiny, faded away.

A kind of embarrassed titter reverberated around the court. In spite of the awfulness of Robert’s latest revelation, I understood. There was something almost surreally comical about the concept of this middle-aged woman seeking out Robbie at Highrise with a carving knife concealed in her handbag.

Joshua Small was no longer at all the super-confident QC of earlier in the day. You could just see how much he regretted having asked that question. He really was a man in a hole unable to stop digging.

‘But did you really think your wife would have been capable of using a knife on Robbie?’ he blustered on.

‘No, of course not,’ said Robert, his voice louder and stronger. ‘I’m sure she couldn’t have.’

Small ended his re-examination, and did his best to continue with the case for the defence, which, it seemed to me, had been more or less totally scuppered by Robert’s performance. The defence barrister had been left with damned near nowhere to go.

He called, as had doubtless been his intention before Robert’s outburst, one of the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary forensic team who had initially examined Brenda Anderton’s car.

From the beginning John Parsons, a big man in his early forties, looked as if he’d rather be almost anywhere other than Exeter Crown Court that morning. He stumbled over his words and was clearly ill at ease. After all, he must already have been well aware that he and his colleagues had missed something rather important when they’d first examined the Toyota. The little matter of deliberate sabotage had totally escaped them.

However, Mr Small pushed his point gamely.

‘Is it significant that any question of these strands being deliberately cut only arose after the police learned that there may actually be people — indeed, they came to believe, one person in particular — with reason to want Mrs Anderton dead?’

‘I suppose so, yes.’

‘And does the history of the accelerator system of Toyota Corollas continue to cast an element of doubt on this?’

‘I’m not sure I understand, sir,’ said John Parsons.

‘I am asking you if the possibility that the death of Mrs Anderton was due to a tragic accident caused by mechanical failure might indeed remain,’ continued Small.

John Parsons finally grasped that he was being thrown a professional lifeline.

‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘Of course. Absolutely.’

But it was clear that his evidence was having little effect on the jury or anyone else in the courtroom. This was technical stuff. And it paled into insignificance compared with the excitement provoked by Robert’s appearance in the witness box, which the press were later to widely describe as having offered ‘scenes of the highest possible drama’ and a ‘spectacular courtroom revelation’.

In any case Pam Cotton put paid to it in one brief onslaught.

‘Obviously the original forensic team can be totally forgiven for allowing their initial opinion to be coloured by the unfortunate recent history of certain Toyota motor cars,’ she said. ‘And furthermore there was initially no reason at all to even consider, really, the possibility of suspicious circumstances surrounding the death of Mrs Anderton. But, Mr Parsons, when you were asked to re-examine the vehicle, along with a more experienced man, the UK’s acknowledged leader in the field, and in a more thorough and detailed way, was it not then abundantly clear to you and your team that strands of the accelerator cable of Mrs Anderton’s vehicle had been deliberately cut?’

Parsons coloured slightly. ‘Well, not entirely,’ he said.

‘C’mon now, Mr Parsons,’ Pam Cotton persisted. Another of her favourite phrases. ‘Come on, now. Surely you were then able to tell whether or not the threads had been deliberately cut? So, were they?’

‘Yes. They must have been, I suppose.’

‘You suppose, Mr Parsons? Surely you must now accept beyond any reasonable doubt that the damage to the vehicle’s accelerator cable was not caused by mechanical failure?’

‘Well, yes,’ Parsons agreed with obvious reluctance, looking more uncomfortable than ever.

‘And so you must therefore accept that the cable threads were cut by someone wishing to harm Mrs Brenda Anderton, do you not?’

John Parsons glanced pleadingly at the judge, who in turn fixed a disapproving look on Pam Cotton.

‘The witness cannot possibly be in a position to answer that question, Mrs Cotton,’ he said.

‘Of course not, My Lord, I do apologize,’ the barrister responded, again looking almost anything but apologetic.

‘No further questions,’ she added, once more taking her seat.

Ultimately the cases for both prosecution and defence, including the opening and closing statements of both barristers, took eleven days to complete. On the twelfth day Sir Charles Montague sent the jury to deliberate their verdict.

They took less than four hours. And their decision was unanimous, the foreman told the court. Guilty. Robert had been found unanimously guilty of murdering his first and only legal wife.

Still protesting his innocence, the man I had once so loved, the husband who had never really been mine, was sentenced to life imprisonment, with a recommendation from the judge that he serve a minimum of fifteen years.

As I left the court, hurrying past the press gathered on the forecourt, I did experience a certain sense of satisfaction. The woman directly responsible for my son’s death was herself dead, and the man I now held indirectly responsible for the entire tragedy had been jailed for life for her murder.

They had both got no less than they deserved and I felt no compassion for either of them. Not any more. It wasn’t enough, of course, because nothing could bring my beloved Robbie back.

But at least a kind of justice had been achieved.

I retreated into Highrise again, into what had once been the comforting womb provided by my beautiful home. Although this time only for a few days. I had already planned what I would do if Robert was convicted, in theory anyway, but I did not yet know if it would be possible.

I remained devastated by all that had happened and would for the rest of my life. However, in a way, I had done my grieving. For my son, for the life I had once lived, and indeed for the man I had once loved. In order to survive I had to move on, at least to the best of my ability. And if I were to have any chance of doing so, I could not stay at Highrise long term. Not only did I no longer have the money or the will to maintain the place, but the home I’d once thought so perfect was now just a constant reminder of the sham of my marriage and the tragic loss of my son. Although, of course, I really needed no reminder.