A Room Swept White Read online

  Journalist and writer Gaynor Mundy, 43, who collaborated with Mrs Yardley on her 2007 memoir Nothing But Love, said: ‘Everyone who knew Helen knew she was innocent. She was a kind, gentle, sweet person who could never harm anyone.’

  TV producer and journalist Laurie Nattrass played a major role in the campaign to free Mrs Yardley. Last night he said: ‘I can’t put into words the sadness and anger I feel. Helen might have died yesterday, but her life was taken from her 13 years ago, when she was found guilty of crimes she didn’t commit, the murders of her two beloved sons. Dissatisfied with the torture it had already inflicted, the state then robbed Helen of her future by kidnapping – and there’s no other word for it – her only surviving child.’

  Nattrass, 45, Creative Director of Binary Star, a Soho-based media company, has won many awards for his documentaries about miscarriages of justice. He said, ‘For the past seven years, 90 per cent of my time has been spent campaigning for women like Helen, trying to find out what went so dreadfully wrong in so many cases.’

  Mr Nattrass first met Mrs Yardley when he visited her in Geddham Hall women’s prison in Cambridgeshire in 2002. Together they set up the pressure group JIPAC (Justice for Innocent Parents and Carers), formerly JIM. Mr Nattrass said: ‘Originally we called it “Justice for Innocent Mothers”, but it soon became clear that fathers and babysitters were being wrongly charged and convicted too. Helen and I wanted to help anyone whose life had been ruined in this way. Something needed to be done. It was unacceptable that innocent people were being blamed whenever there was an unexplained child death. Helen was as passionate about this as I am. She worked relentlessly to help other victims of injustice, both from prison and once she got out. Sarah Jaggard and Ray Hines, among others, have Helen to thank for their freedom. Her good work will live on.’

  In July 2005, Wolverhampton hairdresser Sarah Jaggard, 30, was found not guilty of the manslaughter of Beatrice Furniss, the daughter of a friend, who died aged six months while in Mrs Jaggard’s care. Mr Nattrass said: ‘Sarah’s acquittal was the indicator I’d been waiting for that the public were starting to see reason. No longer were they willing to let vindictive police and lawyers and corrupt doctors lead them on a witch-hunt.’

  Yesterday, Mrs Jaggard said: ‘I can’t believe Helen’s dead. I will never forget what she did for me, how she fought for me and stuck by me. Even in prison, not knowing if and when she’d get out, she took the time to write letters supporting me to anyone who would listen. My heart aches for Paul and the family.’

  Rachel Hines, a 42-year-old physiotherapist from Notting Hill, London, had her convictions overturned in the court of appeal after serving four years for the murders of her baby son and daughter. Julian Lance, Mrs Hines’ solicitor, said: ‘If it wasn’t for Helen Yardley and JIPAC, we wouldn’t have been granted leave to appeal. We were lacking key information. JIPAC found it for us. Helen’s death is a devastating blow to everyone who knew her, and a huge loss.’ Mrs Hines was unavailable for comment.

  Dr Judith Duffy, 54, a paediatric forensic pathologist from Ealing, London, gave evidence for the prosecution at the trials of Mrs Yardley, Mrs Jaggard and Mrs Hines. She is currently under investigation by the GMC, pending a hearing next month for misconduct. Laurie Nattrass said: ‘Judith Duffy has caused unimaginable suffering to dozens if not hundreds of families, and she must be stopped. I hope she’ll be removed from the list of home office pathologists and struck off the medical register.’ Mr Nattrass is currently making a documentary about the miscarriages of justice for which he believes Dr Duffy to be responsible.

  Part I

  1

  Wednesday 7 October 2009

  I am looking at numbers when Laurie phones, numbers that mean nothing to me. My first thought, when I pulled the card out of the envelope and saw four rows of single figures, was of Sudoku, a game I’ve never played and am not likely to, since I hate all things mathematical. Why would someone send me a Sudoku puzzle? Easy: they wouldn’t. Then what is this?

  ‘Fliss?’ Laurie says, his mouth too close to the phone. When I don’t answer immediately, he hisses my name again. He sounds like a deranged heavy-breather – that’s how I know it’s urgent. When it isn’t, he holds the phone too far away and sounds like a robot at the far end of a tunnel.

  ‘Hi, Laurie.’ Using the strange card to push my hair back from my face, I turn and look out of the window to my left. Through the condensation that no amount of towel-wiping seems to cure, across the tiny courtyard and through the window on the other side, I can see him clearly, hunched over his desk, eyes hidden behind a curtain of messy blond hair.

  His glasses have slipped down his nose, and his tie, which he’s taken off, is laid out in front of him like a newspaper. I stick out my tongue at him and make an even ruder gesture with my fingers, knowing I’m completely safe. In the two years I’ve worked with Laurie, I’ve never seen him glance out of his window, not even when I stood in his office, pointed across the courtyard and said, ‘That’s my desk there, with the hand cream on it, and the photo frames, and the plant.’ Human beings like to have such accessories, I restrained myself from adding.

  Laurie never has anything on his desk apart from his computer, his BlackBerry and his work – scattered papers and files, tiny Dictaphone tapes – and the discarded ties that drape themselves over every surface in his room like flat, multi-coloured snakes. He has a thick neck that’s seriously tie-intolerant. I don’t know why he bothers putting them on at all; they’re always off within seconds of his arriving at the office. By the side of his desk there’s a large globe with a metal dome base. He spins it when he’s thinking hard about something, or when he’s angry, or excited. On his office walls, up among the evidence of how successful and clever and humane he is – certificates, photographs of him receiving awards, looking as if he’s just graduated from a finishing school for heavy-featured hulks, his grade-A gracious smile fixed to his face – there are posters of planets, individual and group portraits: Jupiter on its own, Jupiter from a different angle with Saturn next to it. There’s also a three-dimensional model of the solar system on one of his shelves, and four or five large books with tatty covers about outer space. I asked Tamsin once if she had any idea why he was so interested in astronomy. She chuckled and said, ‘Maybe he feels lonely in our galaxy.’

  I know every detail of Laurie’s office by heart; he is for ever summoning me, asking me questions to which I couldn’t possibly know the answers. Sometimes, by the time I arrive, he’s forgotten what he wanted me for. He has been into my office twice, once by accident when he was looking for Tamsin.

  ‘I need you in here now,’ he says. ‘What are you doing? Are you busy?’

  Move your head ninety degrees to the right and you’ll see what I’m doing, you weirdo. I’m sitting here staring at you, in all your weirdness.

  I have an inspired idea. The numbers on the card I’m holding make no sense to me. Laurie makes no sense to me. ‘Did you send me these numbers?’ I ask him.

  ‘What numbers?’

  ‘Sixteen numbers on a card. Four rows of four.’

  ‘What numbers?’ he asks more abruptly than last time.

  Does he want me to recite them? ‘Two, one, four, nine . . .’

  ‘I didn’t send you any numbers.’

  As so often when I’m talking to Laurie, I’m stumped. He has a habit of saying one thing while leaving you with exactly the opposite impression. This is why, even though he’s said he didn’t send me any numbers, I have the sense that if I’d said, ‘Three, six, eight, seven’ instead of ‘Two, one, four, nine’, he might have said, ‘Oh, yeah, that was me.’

  ‘Bin it, whatever it is, and get in here, soon as you can.’ He cuts me off before I have a chance to reply.

  I swing my chair from side to side and watch him. At this point, surely, anyone halfway normal would glance across the courtyard to see if I was obeying orders, which I’m not: I’m not binning the card, I’m not leaping to my feet. All o
f which Laurie would see if he turned his head in my direction, but he doesn’t. Instead, he pulls at the open collar of his shirt as if he can’t breathe, and stares at his closed office door, waiting for me to walk through it. That’s what he wants to happen, and so he expects it to happen.

  I can’t take my eyes off him, though on the physical evidence alone, I really should be able to. As Tamsin once said, it’s all too easy to imagine him with a bolt through his neck. Laurie’s attractiveness has little to do with his looks and everything to do with his being a legend in human form. Imagine touching a legend. Imagine . . .

  I sigh, stand up, and bump into Tamsin on my way out of my office. She’s wearing a black polo-neck, a tiny white corduroy skirt, black tights and knee-high white boots. If something isn’t either white or black, Tamsin won’t wear it. She once wore a blue patterned dress to work, and felt insecure all day. The experiment was never repeated. ‘Laurie wants you,’ she tells me, looking nervous. ‘Now, he says. And Raffi wants me. I don’t like the atmosphere today. There’s something not right.’

  I hadn’t noticed. There are a lot of things I don’t notice when I’m in the office these days, and only one thing that I do.

  ‘I reckon it’s something to do with Helen Yardley’s death,’ says Tamsin. ‘I think she was murdered. No one’s told me anything, but two detectives came to see Laurie this morning. CID, not your regular bobbies.’

  ‘Murdered?’ Automatically, I feel guilty, then angry with myself. I didn’t kill her. She’s nothing to do with me; her death’s nothing to do with me.

  I met her once, a few months ago. I spoke to her briefly, made her a coffee. She’d come in to see Laurie and he’d done his usual trick of vanishing without trace, having confused Monday with Wednesday, or May with June – I can’t remember why he wasn’t there when he ought to have been. It’s an uncomfortable thought, that a woman I met and spoke to might have been murdered. At the time I thought it was strange to meet somebody who’d been in prison for murder, especially someone who looked and seemed so friendly and normal. ‘She’s just a woman called Helen,’ I thought, and for some reason it made me feel so awful that I had to leave the office immediately. I cried all the way home.

  Please let her death have nothing to do with why Laurie’s summoned me.

  ‘Do you know anything about Sudoku?’ I call after Tamsin.

  She turns. ‘As much as I want to. Why?’

  ‘Does it involve numbers laid out in a square?’

  ‘Yeah, it’s like a crossword puzzle grid, except with numbers instead of letters. I think, anyway. Or maybe it’s an empty grid and you fill in the numbers. Ask someone who’s got swirly patterned carpets and a house that smells of air-freshener.’ She waves and heads for Raffi’s office, shouting over her shoulder, ‘And a doll with a skirt to cover up the spare loo roll.’

  Maya leans out of her office, holding the door frame with both hands as if hoping to block the strong smell of smoke with her body. ‘You know those knitted-doll bog-roll holders are highly collectable?’ she says. For the first time since I’ve known her, she doesn’t smile, try to hug or pat me or call me ‘honey’. I wonder if I’ve done something to offend her. Maya is Binary Star’s MD, though she prefers ‘head honcho’ – that’s her nickname for herself, always delivered with a giggle. In fact, she’s only third in the pecking order. Laurie, as Creative Director, is the supreme power in the organisation, closely followed by Raffi, the Financial Director. The two of them control Maya by stealth, allowing her to believe she’s in charge.

  ‘What’s that?’ She nods at the card in my hand.

  I look at it again, read it digit by digit for about the twentieth time.

  A grid, Tamsin said. There’s no grid here, so it can’t be a Sudoku puzzle, though the layout is grid-like. It’s as if the lines have been removed once the numbers were filled in.

  ‘Your guess is as good as mine,’ I tell Maya. I don’t bother to show her the card. She’s always gushingly friendly, particularly to lower-ranking Binary Star employees like me, but she has no interest in anyone but herself. She asks all the right questions – loudly, so that everyone hears how much she cares – but if you take the trouble to reply, she blinks at you blank-eyed, as if you’ve bored her into an upright coma. And I can tell from her frequent glances over her shoulder that she’s eager to get back to her burning cigarette, probably the tenth of the thirty she’ll get through today.

  Sometimes when Laurie walks past her office, he shouts, ‘Lung cancer!’ The rest of us pretend to believe Maya’s story about having given up years ago. Legend has it that she once burst into tears and tried to pretend it wasn’t smoke billowing from her office but steam from a particularly hot cup of tea. None of us has ever actually seen her with a cigarette in her hand.

  ‘I’ve worked out how she does it,’ Tamsin said the other day. ‘She keeps the cig and the ashtray in the bottom drawer of her desk. When she wants a drag, she sticks her whole head in the drawer . . .’ Seeing that I wasn’t taking her theory seriously, she said, ‘What? The lowest drawer’s twice the size of the other two – you could easily fit a human head in there. I dare you to sneak into her office and—’

  ‘Yeah, right,’ I cut her off. ‘I’m really going to commit career suicide by ransacking the MD’s desk.’

  ‘You’d totally get away with it,’ said Tamsin. ‘You’re her baby, remember? Maya’s got an underling fetish. She’s going to love you whatever you do.’

  Once, without irony and in my presence, Maya referred to me as ‘the baby of the Binary Star family’. That was when I started to worry that she didn’t take me seriously as a producer. Now I know she doesn’t. ‘Who cares?’ Tamsin groans whenever I mention it. ‘Being taken seriously is seriously overrated.’

  Maya quickly loses interest in me and withdraws into her smoky lair without so much as a ‘Bye, sugar!’ Suits me fine; I never asked to be the object of her frustrated maternal urges. I hurry down the corridor to Laurie’s office. I knock and walk in simultaneously, and catch him whizzing his model globe round on its axis with his right foot. He stops and blinks at me, as if he’s struggling to remember who I am. In his head, he’s probably already had whatever conversation he wanted to have with me, I’ve agreed to whatever he wanted me to agree to, and done it, and maybe I’ve even retired or died – maybe Laurie’s mind has transported him so far into the future that he no longer knows me. His brain works faster than most people’s.

  ‘Tamsin says Helen Yardley was murdered.’ Nice one, Fliss. Bring up the thing you least want to talk about, why don’t you?

  ‘Someone shot her,’ Laurie says expressionlessly. He starts to manipulate the globe with his foot again, kicking it so that it goes faster.

  ‘I’m really sorry,’ I say. ‘It must make it even harder . . . Than if she’d died naturally, I mean. To cope with.’ As I’m speaking, I realise I have no idea how to pitch my condolences, towards what sort of loss. Laurie spoke to Helen Yardley every day, often more than once a day. I know how much JIPAC means to him but I’ve no idea whether he cared about Helen personally, whether he’s mourning her as a fellow campaigner or as something more than that.

  ‘She didn’t die naturally. She was thirty-eight.’ The anger in his eyes still hasn’t reached his voice. He sounds as if he’s reciting lines he’s memorised. ‘Whoever murdered her – he’s only partly responsible. A whole string of people killed her, Judith Duffy for one.’

  I don’t know what to say, so I put the card down on his desk. ‘Someone sent me this. It came this morning in a matching envelope. No explanatory letter or note, no indication of who it’s from.’

  ‘The envelope also had numbers on it?’ Miraculously, Laurie seems interested.

  ‘No . . .’

  ‘You said “matching”.’

  ‘It looked expensive – cream-coloured and sort of ribbed, like the card. It was addressed to “Fliss Benson”, so it must be from someone who knows me.’

  ‘Why m
ust it?’ Laurie demands.

  ‘They’d have written “Felicity” otherwise.’

  He squints at me. ‘Is your name Felicity?’

  It’s the name that goes on the credit sequence of every programme I produce, the name Laurie will have seen on my CV and covering letter when I applied to Binary Star for a job. Seen and then forgotten. On a good day, Laurie makes me feel invisible; on a bad day, nonexistent.

  I do what I always do when I’m in his office and there’s a possibility that I might get upset: I stare at the miniature solar system on his shelf and list the planets. Mercury, Earth, Venus, Mars . . .

  Laurie picks up the card and mutters something inaudible as he aims it across his office at the bin in the far corner. It whizzes past my ear, narrowly missing me. ‘It’s junk,’ he says. ‘Some kind of marketing teaser, waste of a tree.’

  ‘But it’s handwritten,’ I say.

  ‘Forget it,’ Laurie barks. ‘I need to talk to you about something important.’ Then, as if noticing me for the first time, he grins and says, ‘You’re going to love me in a minute.’

  I nearly drop to my knees in shock. Never before has he used the word ‘love’ in my presence. I can say that with absolute certainty. Tamsin and I have speculated about whether he’s heard of it, felt it – whether he recognises its existence.

  You’re going to love me in a minute. I assume he’s not using the word ‘love’ in the physical sense. I imagine us having sex on his desk, Laurie utterly oblivious to the large window through which everyone whose office is on the other side of the courtyard can see us, me anxious about the lack of privacy but too scared of upsetting him to protest . . . No. Stop this nonsense. I shut down the thought before it takes hold, afraid I might laugh or scream, and be called upon to explain myself.