Хилари Боннер - A Deep Deceit

DS Perry shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Well, not in the way you mean, anyway.’

I opened my mouth to speak and all that came out was another fit of coughing. It came from deep inside me and I felt as if my body was tearing apart. I held a tissue to my mouth and tried not to let DS Perry see the black phlegm that I spat into it.

‘How did he die, then, how could he have died?’ I asked quietly when I was finally able.

‘Did you know that your husband had sclerosis of the liver?’ the policewoman asked.

I shook my head, amazed. Although I don’t know quite why I should have been surprised. I had known so little about Robert, really. For a start I had never known why he had wanted to hurt me so much.

‘He was an alcoholic, you must have known that,’ she went on.

I half nodded. I suppose I had realised that he was an alcoholic. I must have known, although I never thought of it in those terms. Just that he drank vast quantities of alcohol, and the more he drank the more violent and dangerous he became.

‘He was a minister in the Chapel of the Advent. They are opposed to alcohol. He wasn’t supposed to drink at all,’ I said. ‘But he did, constantly.’

‘That kind is often the worst, but you’d know that more than me, I expect.’

I nodded again. I didn’t want to talk about the terrible beatings I had suffered from a drunken Robert. I just hoped that one day I would be able to forget them.

‘Sclerosis of the liver is a vicious illness,’ the police sergeant went on. ‘One of the most extreme results is haematemesis – when the liver ceases to function so drastically that blood leaks into the stomach where it becomes a potentially lethal irritant. The victim vomits blood, vast quantities of it.’ She paused. ‘Your husband died of chronic blood loss... caused by his sclerosis. He was not murdered. You did not kill him and neither did anyone else.’

‘B-but when I came to in the bathroom in the morning I was covered with blood, Robert’s blood. How did it get all over me if I didn’t kill him?’

Julie Perry shrugged. ‘I’ve been thinking about that. You used the phrase “came to”. Almost certainly you’d been knocked out. I reckon Robert Foster must have started haemorrhaging blood while he was beating you. That’s how you got his blood on you. You had concussion, you didn’t know what was happening. You just crawled off to hide in the bathroom as soon as you got the chance.’

‘Carl always said I had killed him,’ I said quietly. ‘He let me believe it... he showed me the knife covered with Robert’s blood...’

Sergeant Perry nodded. ‘Yes, I realise that,’ she said.

Carl had not been half hysterical. Carl hadn’t been beaten unconscious in the night. He had seen Robert lying naked on the bed. Surely he must have realised that there were no stab wounds in his body. Was this another of his tricks, like the threatening letters?

‘So did Carl deliberately deceive me, then, for all those years?’ I asked, thinking aloud.

Julie Perry shrugged again. ‘Hard to tell. Not necessarily. He found the knife, he saw the blood, just like you did...’

I struggled to make sense of it. Carl was always so cool and calm, even under extreme stress. The kind of man who double-checked everything – even a blood-covered body for stab wounds.

I felt as if my ribcage was about to cave in. I wanted to cough, but I wasn’t capable.

‘Look, there’s more, something else...’ I heard DS Perry say somewhere in the distance.

Most clearly I could hear my own breathing. It was coming in desperate wheezing gasps. I suspected DS Perry could hear it too.

‘I tell you what, why don’t you rest,’ she said, not for the first time sounding like all the others who had tried to protect me throughout my life. ‘Let me talk to you tomorrow.’

‘No,’ I said, surprisingly firmly for me in any situation and particularly when I felt so ill that I was having difficulty even in breathing let alone speaking. ‘I want to know now,’ I croaked.

She looked at me for a moment or two as if appraising both my physical and mental state. Then she sighed. ‘We have been checking out Carl in the States. Something happened there a long time ago too...’

I wanted to know so much and yet in spite of my entreaties for her to continue I was beginning to have serious trouble concentrating on what she was saying. My chest hurt more than I could ever remember, more even than it had during the severe bronchial attacks of my childhood. My forehead was burning, and by then I was wet with sweat.

I finally managed a cough and it was as if some kind of barrier inside me burst open. I was engulfed in a coughing fit much more violent than any that had preceded it. At first black phlegm dribbled out of my mouth and then I began to cough up blood. Suddenly I was very frightened indeed. It felt as if my ribs had finally caved in on to my vital organs.

I was vaguely aware of DS Perry jumping to her feet and crying out. Then I think I must have passed out.

I didn’t know a lot about what happened next or for some time afterwards. I was vaguely aware of being moved out of my bed and on to a trolley again, and of being trundled off to the intensive care unit. At some time, somewhere, I know I heard the words ‘pneumonia, Mrs Peters.’ That was about it. Nothing meant much, really, except the overwhelming desire to stay alive. Instinctively, somewhere inside my head, I knew I truly was that ill.

The act of breathing became a terrible agonising struggle. The pain grasped me round my middle like a particularly vicious straitjacket. At some stage I remember shadowy people forcing some kind of tube down my throat, and trying to fight them off and not being able to. Most of the rest of it remains a blank – a bit like so much of the night when Robert died.

I was later to learn that I had bilateral pneumonia, which then turned to pleurisy. This meant that not only were both my lungs infected but also the lining of my chest wall. I spent several days in intensive care on a ventilator and it was getting on for two weeks before I returned properly to the world.

By then an awful lot had happened.

I was back on the ward, stupor-like most of the time, when I woke from a fitful sleep to find Mariette sitting by my bed.

‘They said you were a lot better, but I didn’t want to wake you,’ she told me with a small smile. ‘You do look better, I must say.’

I was puzzled. ‘What do you mean? Have you been to see me before?’ I asked.

She nodded. ‘A couple of times, you know, when I could,’ she said.

I was touched. I needed a friend. One thing about being as ill as I had been is that you don’t have time to think about anything except your physical misery. I was starting to think again, beginning to remember, and Carl filled my jumbled thoughts. Carl had not been to see me. Of course not. He had been arrested.

‘I suppose you know what’s happened?’ I enquired of Mariette.

‘More or less,’ she replied. ‘It’s the talk of the town, the kidnap and everything.’

I managed a small smile myself. ‘It wasn’t really a kidnap,’ I stated.

‘Sounded like one to me,’ she said. ‘Who’d have thought that of your Carl?’

‘I still don’t understand it.’

‘No. And you thought you’d murdered your first husband, as if you’d be capable of anything like that.’

‘Good God, does everyone know about that too?’

‘You know St Ives. Some of it was in the papers, don’t know where the rest of it came from. Mind you, they always say the nick leaks like a sieve...’

Mariette was kind and attentive, and completely unjudgemental. I had somehow always known so much about her life, but she had never known anything of mine. If she was shocked by anything she had learned she did not show it. But, unsurprisingly perhaps in the circumstances, she did not really know what to say to me.