Hilary Bonner - When the Dead Cry Out

“Mummy took Lorraine and me into the garage,” the woman who claimed to be Marshall’s daughter continued. “Lorraine was crying. She was the oldest. Only a year but I think it made a difference. She always got really upset when Mum and Dad rowed. I was just bewildered mostly, that’s the limit of my memory of it, anyway. I don’t think I had a clue what was going on. Lorraine seemed to. Lorraine knew. Dad’s always said that. Lorraine knew. She knew exactly. That’s why it was more terrible for her than for me.”

Jennifer just stopped talking then, stopped dead, almost as if she had no intention of continuing.

“What did Lorraine know, Jennifer?” Karen prompted, and it seemed a very long time before she got a reply.

“She knew that Mummy was going to try to kill us. She knew.”

Karen studied Jennifer carefully. The more the young woman spoke of the tragic events of so long ago, the more she seemed to acquire a childlike voice, and childlike mannerisms. It was a bit spooky. Karen felt a shiver run down her spine.

“Mummy took us into the car and talked to us. She was trying to calm Lorraine down. Lorraine was clinging to her. She was frightened. I clung to Mummy, too. I didn’t know what was going on but I didn’t know what else to do. Mummy held us and kissed us and then she told us we were going on a journey with her, that it would not be an easy journey, not a nice journey at all, but we’d all be together always, and that would make it all right.”

“Then I started to feel sleepy, and then I don’t remember anything for a bit until I woke up in Daddy’s arms. Daddy was shaking me, asking me if I was all right. Asking me if I knew what had happened.”

“I didn’t know. I didn’t know until years later, in fact, not until I found Daddy again. I’d blocked it out, like I told you. It was so terrible I just shut it out of my head. Mummy had attached a hose pipe to the car’s exhaust and she had tried to kill all three of us. But Daddy had been so frightened by what she had said to him on the phone that he came home straight away, and he arrived just in time to save Lorraine and me. We were both unconscious, but Mummy was dead already. Daddy said it was because she was bigger than us and the gas had risen so that she had inhaled much more of it more quickly than us.”

Karen sighed. There was something about the way Jennifer Roth was talking that made her not doubt for one moment that the young woman was telling the truth. Or at the very least what she believed to be the truth.

“So why didn’t your father call the police, call an ambulance, tell the truth?” she asked.

Jennifer shrugged. “Because with his record nobody would have believed him, would they?” She sounded perfectly together and grown-up again. Her voice, with its public-school accent, had once more acquired that note of sarcasm, that hint of arrogance which almost made Karen angry with herself that she had not recognized her as her father’s daughter.

“Jennifer, Richard Marshall had a criminal record, yes. But for bigamy and fraud. It’s a huge jump from those sorts of crimes to murder. I really can’t see any reason why he should have been under any more suspicion than any other man in those circumstances.”

“No?” Jennifer Roth’s voice was heavy with sarcasm. “What about the boy he killed?”

“I’m sorry?” Karen had no idea what Jennifer Roth was talking about.

“When Daddy was still at school he hit another boy so hard that he killed him. It was a playground fight. It was an accident. At the time nobody found out exactly who had hit the dead boy and so no charges were brought against anyone. But Daddy knew that if there’d been an investigation into Mummy’s death all that would have come to light. He knew he’d be a suspect.”

“If your mother died in the way you have told us, Jennifer, I think any investigation would have been able to prove that.”

“Daddy didn’t think so. He told me that the row with Mummy had started in the morning in their bedroom and that she’d flown at him and started to hit him and he’d grabbed hold of her by the arms to keep her off. That’s all he did. Daddy was never a violent man.”

Karen studied her carefully. Jennifer was being totally ingenuous. She was apparently as completely under the spell of her father, if indeed he was her father, as had been all the other women in his life.

“But he knew there’d be bruises on Mummy. He reckoned the police would think he’d forced her into the car. And us. That he’d done it. He was sure of it.”

“You don’t think he could have been lying when he told you all this?”

“No, no, I don’t!” Jennifer Roth shouted the words.

“Look, Jennifer,” Karen persisted. “We have investigated your mother’s death. We prosecuted your father, if he is your father, and he was convicted. But I don’t know anything about him having killed anyone when he was at school. That’s never come to light at all.”

“Yes, but we’re talking nearly thirty years ago, aren’t we? If Daddy had called the police when he’d found Mummy dead back then it would all have been different. He was certain the police would find out about the boy he’d killed.”

“A missing-persons enquiry was launched a year after whatever occurred in your house on that Sunday in June, 1975. It never came to light then either.”

Jennifer Roth made a dismissive noise. “That whole investigation was a mess, wasn’t it? The police never got anything right. Everybody knows that now. But Daddy wasn’t to know then that they’d all be so incompetent, was he? Daddy thought they’d find out what he’d done at school and he’d be labelled a killer.”

Jennifer looked triumphant. Karen leaned back in her seat, perplexed. She didn’t know quite what to say.

“Looks like Daddy’s been proven right, anyway,” Jennifer continued. “You lot kept on going after him for twenty-eight years. And he didn’t do anything. He really didn’t do anything.”

“Even if he didn’t kill anyone, he certainly did something,” Karen told her bluntly. “At the very least he illegally disposed of his wife’s body, didn’t he? Your mother’s body, if you’re telling the truth. And that alone is a serious offence.”

“I don’t know anything about that,” responded Jennifer rather prissily.

“We found your mother’s body at sea, as you well know, wrapped in a tarpaulin and bound in chains. Surely you must accept that it is highly unlikely anyone but your father would have put her there.”

“I don’t know anything about that,” Jennifer repeated. “He never told me what he did with Mummy’s body and I never asked him. I wasn’t surprised, though, when that skeleton was discovered. It was important that she wasn’t found, you see. So what better place than the Atlantic Ocean. It was only through freak circumstances that she was ever found.”

Jennifer spat the words out.

“You seem very detached when you talk about your mother. Didn’t you love her?”

The question went off at a tangent, but Karen couldn’t resist asking it. She was rewarded somewhat by the fleeting expression of surprise in Jennifer’s eyes.

“I must have done, once,” she answered obliquely. “But I barely remember her. She did try to kill me, you know. Any feelings I might have had for her as a kid were part of what I tried to shut out. And if you think about it at all, well, knowing that someone tried to kill you, even if it is your mother, does rather put you off loving her.”

It seemed to Karen that Jennifer was looking down her nose at her as she spoke. Certainly her voice had acquired a definite note of superiority. She remembered that Cooper had remarked on her snootiness when he had interviewed her at the very beginning.