Faith Martin - A Fatal Obsession

‘I shall need to see that idiot over at Binsey Lumber again,’ her husband was saying now. ‘What on earth made him think he could just order twenty lorries at five minutes notice and ex…’

Beatrice had no problem in tuning the droning words out, while giving every appearance of hanging on to his every word – and even offering a sympathetic murmur at just the right moment. She’d had years of patient practice with that particular skill, after all.

And if she thought she caught Rex eyeing her closely, she ignored that too. She was used to his silent antagonism. And understood it. Not that there was anything she could do about it.

Ostensibly Rex was a student, but he seemed to spend little time at college, and even less time studying.

But while she hadn’t entirely given up on mending her broken relationship with her son, now wasn’t the time to worry about that. She had a more immediate problem at hand.

Instead, her thoughts went back to the first time she’d seen Jonathan McGillicuddy, almost seven years ago now. A handsome, golden Adonis of a youth, she could remember that long-ago summer as if it were yesterday.

It had been the summer that her life, and that of her family, had turned to ashes.

And now he was dead too. And not only dead, but murdered .

She took a deep, shaky breath.

Surely this could have nothing to do with her, though? It couldn’t affect her, or her family, could it? It had to be a coincidence. People died all the time. And she hadn’t seen or spoken to him since…

Time passed in something of a fog. Her husband kissed her on the cheek, as he always did, before leaving for the office. Rex made some laconic comment about what he was going to do with the rest of his day, and sauntered off.

Beatrice was only vaguely aware of it all. Her tea went cold, her toast was left uneaten.

Jonathan McGillicuddy was dead. And somehow, Beatrice Fleet-Wright just knew this was going to spell disaster all over again. Disaster for herself and her family, just when she’d thought they’d finally managed to emerge from all the anguish and despair of the past, and those awful events.

She’d thought, then, that nothing could be worse than that.

And on the face of it, the death of someone from her past could hardly compare with the loss of a child and the scandal of the coroner’s inquest. And all the long years of loneliness, guilt and fear she had endured since.

When you thought about it logically, what could possibly be worse than that?

And yet, as she forced herself to read the scant details about the death of a landscape gardener she had once, briefly and tragically, known, Beatrice could just feel in her bones that the worst was yet to come.

The coroner’s inquest into the death of Jonathan Paul McGillicuddy was opened six days later, on a cold and grey windswept day in late January. All of those with business at either the court or the mortuary, which both shared a courtyard at the end of Floyds Row in the city of Oxford, were huddled up in their warmest clothes, and were glad to get in out of the elements.

Dr Clement Ryder watched his court filling up from a half-open doorway in the corridor connecting to his private rooms, and waited for the moment he would be called in by the usher.

He felt well today, his body free of aches and any damned tremors, and he was mentally reviewing the morning ahead and what needed to be done – which, at this early stage, would be very little. Experience had quickly taught him just how brief the inquest itself would be, unlike the general public, who’d come out in droves expecting to see some kind of spectacle. This rather ghoulish phenomenon was something the coroner was used to now, and he had little sympathy for the morbidly curious masses who would go away sadly disappointed.

He’d already spoken to the investigating officer on the McGillicuddy case, DI Harry Jennings, a sound enough police officer in his opinion, if rather lacking in imagination. They wanted an adjournment, of course, to give them time to gather more evidence, and naturally he’d ensure they got it.

It wasn’t an unusual request in the early stages of a murder inquiry.

He heard his cue to enter and walked confidently into the court, feeling, as he always did, a certain sense of satisfaction in the sudden silence that fell over the room as he appeared. Taking his seat, he looked around the packed room. He noted, with a wry smile of distaste, the presence of the press. Then he glanced at the front seats, where members of the families concerned were usually to be found, and quickly picked out the victim’s mother.

A small, shrunken lady, she looked pale and bewildered and lost.

He caught her eye, and nodded gently at her. He didn’t smile. He never did smile while in court. He hadn’t gone around grinning like a loon when he’d been in the operating theatre, and he didn’t see why he should set about doing so now he was the public face of the judiciary system.

Mavis McGillicuddy, looking up at the silver-haired, smartly dressed and rather distinguished-looking man who seemed to rule over this baffling world of law and medicine like a demi-god, swallowed hard and managed to nod back.

She understood nothing about what was about to happen, and a lot of the traditional pomp and circumstance surrounding the proceedings swept right over her head. But she instinctively felt that the man who was clearly in charge of everything would do right by her son.

But, in truth, she was finding it hard to care about the pursuit of truth and justice. The police had talked to her endlessly the past few days, asking questions about Jonathan and his life. At one point, they even seemed to suspect that she and her boy weren’t close, and that all wasn’t well at home, but she didn’t care about that either. She’d been too tired to even get angry. Her neighbour had now all but taken over looking after Marie, but, so help her, she couldn’t even seem to care about that either.

The only thing she knew or cared about was that her son was gone and she’d never see him again.

Clement firmly moved his gaze on from Mavis McGillicuddy’s blank-eyed face as he called the court to order and proceeded along the well-worn and now-familiar path of opening a coroner’s court proceeding. Once the initial preliminaries were over, the members of the jury had been instructed as to what was expected of them, and the clerks were happy with the state of their paperwork, DI Jennings was called to the stand.

As expected, the policeman made short work of stating the facts surrounding the case, giving away as little as possible about what the police were thinking, and asked for an adjournment in order for the police to gather more evidence.

Clement succinctly gave it.

He nodded to the clerk to make a proper record of this concession and, as he did so, eyed the journalists and reporters scribbling in their notebooks with a jaundiced eye. Early on, when he’d first been appointed, one or two of them had thought they might be able to take advantage of his inexperience and get a few morsels of information out of him regarding one of his more lurid cases. His response had since become legendary, and now no reporter, even the most ferociously ambitious or impertinent, would ever dream of approaching him.

It was while DI Jennings was leaving the witness stand, and his eyes were roving generally around the room, that Clement first noticed the woman sitting in the public gallery. At first he couldn’t have said why she should have caught his attention. She was perhaps a shade better dressed than most of those in the packed room, but while she was handsome enough, she was hardly eye-catching. Perhaps it was the air of stillness that seemed to surround her, or the look of calm but razor-sharp focus in her gaze as she watched DI Jennings, that tweaked his inner radar.