Julia chapter 28 / 29

Perhaps I can use it to my advantage. When she's like this she drops her guard and speaks honestly, if harshly. ‘When the police came to see you about Brian, what did they say?’ She stiffens and I likewise. I make every effort to overcome the reaction, I'm not a child anymore. It's hard though. ‘Why do you want to know about that?’ ‘Because it is important. They came looking for something didn’t they?’ ‘They didn’t find it did they?’ she snipes back, and in that moment I know she knows something. ‘They were looking for something Geoffrey left here weren’t they?’ ‘I don’t know’ she replies. Now she is playing the old woman with a bad memory, I can tell.  I take the controller for the TV and turn the sound off.

‘What did you do with it?’  ‘With what?’ ‘What did you do with Geoffrey’s recording?’  I can tell she realizes I know. There is an unspoken connection at moments such as these when some energy exchange takes place and the truth is known without speaking a word. ‘It was in my bed pan’ she says proudly.   ‘You hid vital evidence from the police investigating a murder inquiry? Why would you do that? Are you crazy?’ ‘He deserves to go to prison. He deserves to be there for a long time. Why should he get any help?  He’s ruined us, every one of us.’ 

‘But he deserves a fair trial.  Everyone deserves justice!’ ‘Justice? Justice!’ Mothers voice is now shouting wildly. ‘What is justice in this world Julia!? That every man I have come across has betrayed me!? That every man my daughters have been with has betrayed them!? You shout your mouth off all the time telling everyone what is wrong with the world, you don’t like arms dealers, politicians, bankers, white slavers, well tell me what do they all have in common?  Think about it Julia, how many of them are women? How many of the ones that do all of these wicked things you fight against are women? When Brian betrayed me I swore that would be the last time any man got anything from me. Let Geoffrey rot in hell for all I care!’  I have rarely seen mother so animated, gone is the frosty snipe, the cold glare, before me is a cornered dog, a wild animal that would do anything.  So she has a breaking point and I have found it. I need to back away, regroup, think about how to deal with this in an atmosphere not charged with her venom.  I take the TV controller, turn up the volume and leave the room.        I’m still shaking when I reach the conservatory. I’ve never seen mother like that, and now I know what she’s done.  She has perverted the course of justice by deliberately concealing evidence.  What am I to do? If I could get her to give up the recording and get it to Jane Franco then perhaps it could be put right.  The police needn’t know how she came by it, they needn’t know that mother hid it from them.  I have a chance to rectify things put it all straight.  Yes, that’s what must happen, things must be put right.      An hour passes and I manage to think things through. Years of dealing with mother have taught me that she can take weeks to defrost following an argument, but this is not her usual self, this is someone else.  I begin to see that perhaps the fiery venomous mother has been held in check for all of these years covered over with a layer of protective permafrost, like a scar on an old wound. There is no time for the long thaw, I need to know urgently what she has done with the evidence. I need to find it and get it out of the house and back to Jane Franco.  Decision made I gather myself together and tread the silent stairs to her room.  ‘We need to talk’ I say as I enter the room.  She ignores me.  ‘We have got to get this sorted’ again no response.  I take the remote and switch off the TV. ‘I’m watching that!’ she shouts. ‘You can watch it later.’  I am not going to back down and I make sure she knows it. ‘You have no right!’

‘I have every right.  I look after you every day, I see to it that you are washed, you have clean linen, you are fed, without me you would be in a home, so bear that in mind when you answer my question.’ She looks at me with a hatred I can almost feel. I’ve made it plain to her, her dependence on her errant daughter and she can hardly tolerate it, but I don’t mind blackmail if that is the only way out.  ‘Where is the recording?’  ‘It’s gone.’ ‘Gone?’ ‘I got rid of it’ she replies calmly.  ‘You got rid of it!? What do you mean you got rid of it? You don’t mean you destroyed it do you?’ ‘Of course.’ ‘Jesus Christ! What have you done!?’ ‘Don’t swear at me Julia, didn’t I teach you anything?’ Now it is my turn to blaze.

‘Yes, you taught me a lot, how to fear that cold hard expression of yours, how to send a husband away by your constant demands, how to be a hypocrite and a liar, how small the world can be if you spend all of your time conforming to some out of date authoritarian belief system! Fortunately I learnt not to do any of these things. You taught me well, but I have only just come to realize it.’  She blanches, she is not used to being attacked in such a way and it is clear she recognises some truth in the words I have spoken. ‘I gave it to Lucy to get rid of, I don’t know what she did with it.’

That night in the garden, was that what she was doing? ‘Was there anything else left in the house?’  She looks at me as if she pities me and I wonder why. ‘You still don’t understand do you?’ ‘Understand what?’ ‘Think about it Julia, think about the papers.’  ‘The papers? What papers?’ And then it clicks into place. The police searched the upstairs of the house the day they came with the warrant and found nothing yet when Valerie was packing up Brian’s clothes she came across the documents relating to Geoffrey’s dealings with Brian. How could the police have missed them? And if they weren’t there when the police searched, how did they appear afterwards?   ‘You put the papers in Brian’s wardrobe.  You hid them at the same time as the recording and then you put them there for Valerie to find, that’s why you insisted she came down to clear Brian’s things.  Oh my God what have you done?’

She shows no signs of emotion, it is as if she has turned herself off. ‘I found the papers before Brian died.  I wasn’t looking for them, I went in his wardrobe because I didn’t trust him. Oh I was madly in love with the idea of us both together but I still didn’t trust him.  You know the best way of telling whether a man is cheating on you?  Go to his clothes and smell them.  You can always tell whether someone else has been around.  You look shocked Julia, as if an old woman shouldn’t know such things, let alone speak them.  Well Brian hadn’t been cheating but he had those papers and when I found out what he and Geoffrey had done it crushed me.  Then I thought, ‘why would Brian keep this information? Why would he risk having it around?’ You think I am a crazy old woman who watches TV because I have lost my marbles. Well I tell you I haven’t.  The reason I watch TV is to fill my head with anything that will stop the thoughts coming, the relentless oppressive thoughts that repeat over and over again.’  She stops, as if she is trying to summon up the things she has been trying to tamp down for an eternity. ‘It didn’t take long to realize what was going on.  When you make a pact with the devil you need a get out clause.’ ‘If you’d listened to the recording you would have known Brian was blackmailing Geoffrey.’  I interject.

‘I didn’t need to listen to it, I was there when it was made.’  Her words fly around my head. I try to make sense of them but cannot.  ‘How could you be there?’ I ask.  ‘Because I followed them. Geoffrey came down that weekend because Brian summoned him.  He wanted more money.  I was surprised when Geoffrey arrived unannounced but he made some excuse about them talking over a business transaction. I knew from the start it was rubbish, Geoffrey always was a bad liar.

They said they were going for a drink, walking to the pub.  I have never known Geoffrey walk anywhere, so I could tell it was all nonsense.  So I followed them.  They went along the cliff path and I knew the way better than they did so when they stopped I hid and listened. Geoffrey confronted Brian, got him to spill the beans for the recording and then started walking back to the house alone.  Of all the luck Brian needed to go to the toilet.  He had a weak bladder you know.  I’ve come to the conclusion that there are two ways you can kill a man easily, one is when he is urinating and the other when he is having an orgasm.  I choose the former. Not that it was premeditated of course. I was in a rage having heard some of the things that Brian had said about me, and having learned of his despicable deceit.  I picked up a rock and struck him on the head.  There was this dreadful dull thud and he moaned as he fell. Fortunately he was right near the edge of the bay so I rolled him over the cliff. It was that bay where you get all the driftwood, no one ever goes there that time of year.’  She stops speaking and the room falls silent.  

‘I went back to the house. I used a quicker route than Geoffrey so that when he arrived I was waiting.  He was fidgety, said he had to get back to Valerie. He went upstairs to pack his things and I watched through the bedroom door as he took the recorder out of his pocket and listened to make sure it had worked. It had. Then he tucked it away in one of the drawers whilst he went to the bathroom to collect his toiletries. I stole it whilst he was gone.’

I was afraid so I pretended that Brian had come back. I shouted out ‘Hello Brian you’re back early.’  His face was a picture when he came downstairs. He was white as a sheet and agitated but he couldn’t say anything could he? Was he going to accuse me of stealing his recorder? Was he going to risk Brian’s wrath if I told him what had happened? So he left without it…… but he knew.  That’s why the police came looking for it. Geoffrey thinks it is still here, but it’s not. When he left he was so distraught he ran his car into Brian’s, dented his bumper, he didn’t even stop to look at it. So…there you have it. Now you know why I watch TV. I am dumbfounded.  Lost in a place I could never imagine being. My mother has confessed to murder. As if this was not enough she continues.

‘I took the papers out of Brian’s wardrobe and kept the ones relating to the purchase of Cove House, they were going to be found by Valerie.  The others I sent to the police under plain cover some days later.  They were to be Geoffrey’s undoing. Brian got his just desserts and Geoffrey was going to get his.’  She stops for a moment and stares into mid air.  ‘I was going to confess you know, until I found out how little Geoffrey was to pay for his crimes. Three years in an open prison for ruining my life and that of my daughters. That was not enough. Then of course, being the coward he is, he ran away, it was perfect, it proved he’d committed the murder.’

‘My God, what have you have done! You can’t think you can get away with this, let an innocent man get put away for murder? You’re mad, you’re immoral, you’re not my mother.’ ‘Unfortunately for you I am Julia, and there is nothing you can do about it.  Go to the police if you like, tell them the whole story, but they won’t believe you.  They’ll treat it as fantasy.  Don’t forget you’ve been in a mental hospital.  You’re mad as far as they are concerned. And they’ll want to see evidence, and there isn’t any. I burnt my clothes, drove Brian’s car to Culver where the police think the murder took place, and of course the paint from Geoffrey’s car was still on it. Think about it before you do anything rash Julia. Consider what the police will make of your wild story about your old frail mother when they already have their man. They know that you and I have never got along, I made sure of that. Will you turn the TV on please.’    The sea is wild and crashes against the rocks and I’m standing in the rain without a coat. I want to be washed clean of my involvement in this dreadful nightmare. I ran from the house in despair and have not caught my breath yet. This wild unmanageable world of the storm tossed sea echoes that of my mind as it tries to tell me that none of this is true. Despite what I have heard I don’t want to, or perhaps more to the point, cannot, believe it.  How can it be true? How can my mother have killed a man in cold blood and set another up for the crime? I’ve watched so many killers in the dock and thought how human they look, how impossibly ordinary they were, and yet when it comes to my own kin, I cannot accept it. I am in a state of deep shock. She has wired me up to an unacceptable truth and turned on the electricity.  Nothing could ever have prepared me for the words she’s just spoken. For the first time in my life I am glad that I’ve had no children.  They would have been marked like those of Cain.  Your grandmother was a killer, she withheld evidence and tried to get a man wrongly convicted of a crime he did not commit. She was not human.

The salt spray lashes my face but it will not take anything away with it. It only serves to repeat the unwanted truth, ‘this is real.’ I am crying but my tears are lost amongst the spiky hail of the raindrops. In this moment I realize how small I am.  All of my tears could not fill a bucket let alone drown me, but something inside tells me I might drown another way, suffocated by the confession I have just heard.  Has she finally won?  Has she managed to ruin my life once and for all? Can you ever get close to a murderer? 

Chapter 29  

The bath water steams, I watch its whispy vapour climb above the edges of the white ceramic and dissolve into nothingness.  I feel as if I don’t deserve this comfort, I should be back out in the storm paying penance for a mother who kills. She’s placed this burden upon me, a burden greater than any before. I didn’t think it possible.  For a short while I was weightless, floating in a place of comfort where forty eight hours ago I could say to Valerie I was strangely happy for the first time in my life. These past few months painting, just existing, were the best, and now she has pulled the plug on me and the buoyancy has disappeared as every drop of hope drains away.  How cruel can life get? How much can it place upon one before everything crashes? I think I am about to find out. 

What mother has done is to place me in a bind that I cannot possibly untie.  She is right when she says there is no evidence, and that I have been certified mentally unstable.  If I stood up in a courtroom the first question would be ‘Could you tell the court, have you ever suffered mental issues?’ ‘Yes I have.’ Wham! The jury would immediately dismiss my evidence. Second question, ‘Could you explain the nature of your relationship with the accused.’  ‘No I could not, I have been trying to understand it myself for the past fifty years.’ Third question ‘Who told you your mother killed her husband?’ ‘She did.’ ‘But she denies doing this and says you have always led a life of fantasy. Did you run off to Morocco at sixteen? Did you have numerous sexual liaisons between the ages of sixteen and thirty five? Do you have a criminal record…..’ I am doomed from the start and she knows it. I can't go to the police unless I can find something that proves she committed the crime, and there is nothing.       Then there's Valerie and her children.  Do I condemn them to losing another member of the family to crime, the father and husband and then the grandmother both in prison?  What sort of life would they have then? The press would have a field day. I can see the headlines blazing out ‘Meet Britain’s most criminal family’ ‘Killer grandma joins thief and con man.’  They would be hounded everywhere they went, the poor children would have nowhere to go. Valerie would face the prospect of Geoffrey’s release after three years and mother would die inside.  As for me, I could just disappear, go back to that fantasy of mine in Morocco but I know it wouldn’t last. Then what? Old age as the murderer’s daughter, the corrupt solicitors in-law? By the time I have thought it all through the water has begun to grow cold. I have a plan, a thin and almost impossible plan but at least it's tangible. I'm about to do something I would not have thought myself capable of doing, I'm going to give up my endless crusade for honesty and humbly accept I am trapped in a dilemma I cannot shout my way out of. There's no other way forward.  Once dry and dressed again, I go back into the dragons lair. 'What do you want?'