A Fatal Verdict

A Fatal Verdict

Tim Vicary

The second book in the trials of Sarah Newby

Other Kindle e-books by Tim Vicary

 Crime and Legal Thrillers

 
A Game of Proof
 

(The Trials of Sarah Newby, book 1)

Bold Counsel
 

(The Trials of Sarah Newby, book 3)

Historical novels

The Blood Upon the Rose

(Love and terror in Ireland, 1920)

Cat and Mouse

(Suffragettes and Ulster Rebellion in 1914)

Website: TimVicary.com

Part One

Bloodbath

1. Minster Bells

The man had been outside the door for over a minute now, just standing and listening. He could hear no sound from within; only the hum of the traffic in the street outside, and canned laughter from a TV on the floor below. But here, on the landing halfway up the steep, narrow staircase, it was quiet. His own door was directly in front of him, to his left the stairs continued to the flat above.

He bent his ear closer to the door, making a funnel for it with his hand. Still nothing. No voice, no sound of movement. He was about to straighten up when the door of the flat above opened. The man jerked upright abruptly as a young priest came down the stairs. He nodded at the flowers in the man’s hand.

‘Special occasion, is it?’ he asked.

‘What? Oh, yeah.’ The man fumbled in his pocket, and held up his keys as if relieved. ‘Thought I’d lost them.’

‘That’s good, then.’ The young priest examined his neighbour coolly for a second, then let his eyes flick back to the flowers. ‘Always best to make up.’

He smiled briefly and was gone, clattering away down the uncarpeted stairs two at a time. The man waited until he heard the street door open and close far below. Then he opened his own door with the key and stepped inside.

As he entered the flat the bells began. Not just any bells, but a tumultuous carillon of cathedral church bells in full voice. The tower of York Minster, the largest Gothic cathedral in England, was just across the city wall behind the flat, and the bells were a regular trial to the residents. As he entered the hall of the flat the sound came at him in waves, making thought difficult and speech at anything less than a shout impossible.

‘Shelley?’ he called out. ‘I’m back!’ But his voice was swept away like a squeak in a thunderstorm and as he expected he heard no response. He turned right into the kitchen and put the plastic bag with the flowers, the garlic and olive oil on the worktop. The vegetables - carrots, potatoes, onions - were already neatly peeled and chopped in small piles beside the cooker where had left them. The two steaks, he remembered, were still in the fridge. Soft red meat on a bloody saucer.

He filled a saucepan with water and put the vegetables in. His fingers stayed in the water, holding one of the potatoes as though it might move. He stared at it for a moment, wondering what to do next. Then he withdrew his hand quickly. For Christ’s sake get a grip, man, he told himself. Just do what you set out to do and it will be all right. But what
was
that, exactly? The vast sound of the bells made it hard to think. He looked around, confused.

The flowers! Of course - they were his masterstroke. A talisman to make everything fine. If it could ever be fine again, between the two of them.

But he had to try. Or appear to try, rather. That’s what it’s always been about with women, hasn’t it, he told himself cynically. Appearances. Making things look right even when they aren’t. Making them see things the way you want them to.

You can’t change the past. But you can change what it looks like.

He found a vase, filled it with water, even remembered to tear open the little sachet of plant food and sprinkle it in before shoving the flowers in after. It didn’t really matter, they were only for show, not to last. Nonetheless, do it right. Symbols make all the difference.

He carried the vase out of the kitchen, stepping casually through the disordered pile of Shelley’s jeans, teeshirt, bra and panties on the living room floor, and arranged  it reverentially in the centre of the small dining table by the back window.

The noise in here was tremendous. The window looked out over a first floor roof garden to the city wall with the Minster towering beyond, and the sound of bells crashed into the room like waves from a storm. His heart raced faster, his breathing came shorter.

About fifty yards away, a group of tourists were clustered on the city wall, some photographing the Minster, others covering their ears with their hands. If they looked this way they could see straight into the flat. If they had been there earlier it would have been embarrassing, he thought, but it didn’t matter now; all they would see was a man arranging flowers on a table. There was frosted glass in the window of the bathroom next door, where Shelley was.

One of the tourists, a middle-aged Japanese woman, was in fact looking his way. He  smiled mirthlessly, stood up, and, as though in some No theatre, called out again. ‘Shelley? I’m back. Are you OK?’ To the Japanese woman it would look like mime; he had to shout to make the weak chords of his voice carry even a few yards through the volume of sound produced by eight ten-ton bells. But there was no answer.

Steeling himself, he walked the two strides to the bathroom, watched all the way by the idle, innocently curious eyes of the little Japanese woman on the wall. He opened the door.

Shelley lay facing him, in a bath full of bright red water that covered most of her breasts, and dribbled into her mouth as her head lolled sideways like a broken doll. Her left wrist was out of sight, under the crimson water; the right hung limply over the side of the bath, pulsing blood onto the floor, where a kitchen knife lay in a red pool under the washbasin.

Shelley’s eyes were closed, her face as white as the side of the bath. But as he stepped into the room something - perhaps the tumultuous, earsplitting racket of the bells approaching their crescendo - penetrated her brain. Her head rolled to the left, out of the water; her right wrist twitched up from the floor, smeared a red curve along the edge of the bath, and flopped down again.

It was then - even though no one, not even the Japanese woman on the walls, was watching - that he opened his mouth to scream.

As he drew breath the bells stopped, all together, so that his scream sliced into a sudden, humming silence. Then he turned to the living room, to grab the phone.

And Shelley opened her eyes, and saw him.

The ambulance was less than half a mile away. Having just delivered a pensioner with a suspected broken hip to Casualty, the crew were looking forward to a cup of tea in the canteen when the call came through. They were back in their vehicle and out of the hospital grounds in under a minute, and at this time on a Sunday evening the roads between York District Hospital and Gillygate were blessedly clear. Just two sets of red traffic lights to negotiate, the siren turning heads outside the Salvation Army Hall, and then they were there, paramedic Sally Barnes calling out the numbers on the shop doorways to her partner, Jim Swales, as he drove along Gillygate. Jim parked on the double yellow lines and Sally jumped out. Finding the street door locked, she leaned her thumb against the bell of the first floor flat labelled David Kidd, the name of the man who had phoned 999.

There was no response. Jim joined her and pressed his hand flat against all three bell buttons at once. After another wait an elderly man opened the door and peered around it cautiously. ‘Yes?’

‘Ambulance, emergency,’ said Sally briskly. ‘There’s been a 999 call.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said the old man hesitantly. ‘I’ve heard nowt about that.’ He tried to close the door but Sally got her foot in just in time and the old man moved back.

‘It’s in the first floor flat, upstairs, sir. Please, let us through. It’s an emergency.’

They hurried up the stairs and Sally would testify later in court that it was only when they had almost reached the landing that the flat door opened in front of them and a young man emerged. He looked shocked, Sally would tell the lawyers, his face pale, his eyes wide and staring. But what chiefly marked him out was the blood on his hands and his white teeshirt. There was blood on the side of his face, too, the left side, and his jeans and teeshirt were wet.

‘Mr Kidd? David Kidd?’

‘Yeah ... you’re here already?’

‘Where’s the casualty?’

‘In ... in the bathroom. I don’t ...’ He waved a bloody hand towards the flat but when Sally strode past him through the door he followed her quickly, blocking Jim’s way and talking urgently.

‘I just found her like this, I think she’s dead, I tried to do what they said on the phone but it’s no good, she’s killed herself. God knows why, I did everything for her but ...’

By this time Sally had found the bathroom and was not listening, so she would agree later with the defence lawyer that she couldn’t be sure exactly what David had said, only that he had found the girl in the bath and believed she had killed herself. Her attention after all was not focussed on his explanations but on the horrific scene in front of her. A girl collapsed in a bath full of bloody water. She lay slumped strangely sideways; her right arm hung over the side of the bath and was bleeding profusely onto the bloodstained, slippery floor, and her right leg hung over the side of the bath too. This had the effect of bringing her left knee, which was bent, right down to the bottom of the bath where the taps were, while her left arm was under water by her side next to the wall. Her head was turned to the left too, and her fair hair was wet and streaked with blood in a way that would later haunt Sally unpleasantly when she visited the hairdresser’s and saw someone having highlights put in. But what immediately grabbed her attention was that the girl’s face was underwater.

The young man was still talking. ‘I tried. I mean I tried to give her the kiss of life but I’ve never done it before and she’s so slippery and then you rang, I mean I did try but I’m no good at this and she’s dead anyway, look I had this plaster ...’

He was in her way, Sally remembered that, fussing and talking while she went straight to the body and pulled the girl’s face out of the water. Bloody froth dribbled from her mouth and nose and then there was a weak, spasmodic choking movement. Somehow Jim bundled the man out of the way and knelt to join her. He saw it too.

‘She’s not gone yet. Come on, let’s get her out of this.’

There was no sign of spinal injuries, nothing to indicate other than that they should get her out of that water instantly, clear her airways to apply resuss and staunch that bleeding. The two of them knelt beside the bath and slid their hands in under the water to lift her out. It wasn’t easy; she was slippery, as this man, her boyfriend or whatever the hell he was, had said, and floppy too, completely relaxed like a rag doll, or rather a doll with the weight of a tree and the consistency of a jellyfish. Sally had hurt her back the week before and this wasn’t going to do it any good,  she knew that as she lifted but there was no choice, it was a girl’s life that was at stake here and that wretched man was no use, there was no point asking him ...

When they had the body on the floor they could see that the cut on the right wrist was much, much worse than the one on the left. The left wrist oozed blood, but this one was pumping - feebly, Sally thought, for an arterial cut but that was probably because most of the blood was gone already, out into the bath and now down the plughole, for in their struggle to lift the girl out of the bath they had dislodged the plug and that was where her life’s blood was going, out into the city drains and down the river Ouse to the sea.

Most of it anyway. The rest was pumping out onto the bathroom floor, so Sally immediately jammed her thumb into the artery at the elbow while Jim fumbled in his bag for a tourniquet which he tightened just above the elbow, watching and turning until the flow was cut off. But all the while they did this it was not possible to attend to her breathing, other than to push the girl’s head to one side and hope that the airway would clear. It must have been nearly a minute, maybe two, before Sally could leave Jim to attend to the bleeding while she turned her attention to the possibility that their patient was drowning as well as bleeding to death.

They didn’t have to check for a pulse - the feeble pulsing of the arterial blood had shown that the heart had not yet given up. But the pink frothy blood dribbling from the mouth was a terrible sign - it was different from the bloody bathwater which came up too when Sally pressed her chest - more like froth on beer, the colour of strawberry mousse. Still, when Sally checked the airway there was no obvious blockage. Breathing was hard to detect. It was faint but still there,  surely it must be? Then the girl choked and coughed up more froth and she was sure of it.

‘She’s killed herself, hasn’t she? I don’t know why. She’s cut her wrists and killed herself, that’s what she’s done.’

‘Not yet.’ Sally glanced contemptuously at the man hovering uselessly in the doorway. ‘You’re in luck. She’s still alive, so far, anyway.’ Later that evening she would remember how she’d said ‘
You’re
in luck’ rather than ‘
She’s
in luck’ or ‘
We’re
in luck’ and wonder whether she had meant anything by it or if it was just a slip of the tongue. And she would decide no, it wasn’t a slip of the tongue, it was exactly what she meant. Whatever had happened to the young woman this man must have caused it or been responsible in some way, and so
he
was lucky and should be grateful that she wasn’t dead. Or not dead yet, anyway.

But if he was grateful he didn’t seem so. He simply looked more shocked than ever and stood there in the bathroom doorway repeating himself: ‘She must be dead, she’s killed herself. Look at all that blood, I don’t know why she did it, I wasn’t here. God, she must be dead by now, surely ...’

Jim and Sally had no time to listen to this, they had urgent decisions to make. Jim stood up, put an arm on the man’s shoulder to push him aside. ‘I’ll get the stretcher.’