Читать книгу Recalled to Life - Reginald Hill - Страница 9

‘You can bear a little more light?’

‘I must bear it if you let it in.’

Lights.

Some hot, harsh and constant. Others driven at her like snow against a stove-pipe, melting soon as touching.

A shallow platform, one step up.

She takes it, pauses, sways, hears the pause and the sway in the watcher’s breath.

She thinks: So it must have felt for Mick, that first step on to the scaffold.

A hand steadies her. No executioner’s hand, but her saviour’s, Jay’s, cousin Jay Waggs, though she cannot yet think of him as saviour. She clutches her old leather-bound Bible to her skinny breast. He smiles at her, a warm smile in a young face, and a memory is touched of faraway times, faraway places. He urges her forward.

There is a chair. She sits. To her left, a pitcher of water with a glass. To her right, a small vase out of which a spray of freesia raises its hand of glory. Before her, a posy of microphones offering some protection from the flashing bulbs and probing gazes but none from the TV cameras covering her every move, like guns on a prison watchtower.

Mr Jacklin is speaking. Her solicitor. A small grey man who looks so dry that a very little pressure might crumble him to dust. But it is a dryness which kindles to fire at the spark of injustice.

He says, ‘Let me rehearse the situation in case anyone has strayed in from another planet. My client, Miss Cecily Kohler, was tried for the murder of her employer, Mrs Pamela Westropp, in nineteen sixty-three. She was found guilty and sentenced to death. The sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment. Almost from the start, doubts were expressed in some quarters about the safeness of the verdict, but circumstances conspired to make a re-examination of the case virtually impossible until, two years ago, Miss Kohler’s kinsman, Jay Waggs, began to interest himself in the fate of his distant kinswoman, Cissy Kohler. The new evidence he uncovered was first presented to the public in the Ebor television programme Doubt last spring. Now the Home Secretary has at last accepted that there are serious grounds for believing there may have been a gross miscarriage of justice and he has issued a release order pending consideration of the new evidence by the Court of Appeal.

‘Until the decision of that court is officially made public, I cannot of course comment on the legal implications of what has happened. But I can point out the obvious. My client has spent a longer period in jail than any other woman in the annals of English penology. It goes without saying that she will need a proportional period of readjustment to the rigours of freedom. But being aware of the great public interest in the case, she has accepted the recommendation of her advisers that she should attend this press conference in the hope that thereafter she will be permitted a long breathing space free from the importunities of the media.’

‘Does that include Jay Waggs and Ebor television?’ calls a sharp-faced young woman.

Jay Waggs smiles at her and says, ‘One question per paper was the agreement. Is that yours, Sally?’

‘No! Miss Kohler, I’m Sally Blindcrake, Daily Sphere. How did it feel when you heard you were getting out?’

Cissy Kohler speaks so softly not even the posy of mikes can pick it up.

‘Sorry? I couldn’t catch that.’

‘She says she felt nothing,’ says Waggs. ‘Next question.’

‘Nothing?’ insists Blindcrake incredulously. ‘After all those years you’re told you’re innocent, and you feel nothing?’

Kohler raises her head and speaks again, this time loud enough to be heard.

‘I knew it already.’

A pause, then laughter, a ripple of applause.

‘Next,’ says Waggs.

‘Martin Redditch, BBC television. Miss Kohler, you didn’t apply for parole until nineteen seventy-six, though you could have applied earlier. Why was that?’

She frowns and says, ‘I wasn’t ready.’

‘Ready for what?’ shouts someone, but Redditch is pressing on, regardless of the one question limit.

‘But you were ready in ’seventy-six, right. And it looked like you were getting out, till you attacked and killed Officer Daphne Bush in Beddington Prison. At least, you got tried and sentenced for killing her. Or are you claiming to be innocent of that killing too?’

She takes her time, not as if the effort of remembering is painful so much as if the machinery of memory is rusty.

Finally: ‘I killed her,’ she says.

Redditch tries to follow up once more but now Waggs cuts him off.

‘OK, Martin, you got two in. We’ll call it one for each channel. Next!’

‘Norman Proudfoot, Church Times. Miss Kohler, the TV programme mentioned the Bible your mother gave you as a child. I presume it’s that same Bible you’re carrying now. Can you tell us what comfort you have drawn from it during your long imprisonment?’

She looks down at the book still clutched tight against her breast.

‘It helped me look in at myself. Without it, I don’t think I’d have survived.’

This is the longest answer she gives. The questions come thick and fast, some aggressive, some insinuating, some simply inane. All receive the same treatment – a pause followed by a short reply in a soft monotonous voice. Soon Waggs ceases to intervene and relaxes, faintly smiling as the cohorts of the Press dash themselves vainly against the walls of her solitude.

At last the room is silent. Waggs asks, ‘All done?’

Sally Blindcrake says, ‘I know I’ve had my question but it was so long ago I’ve forgotten what it was. How about me closing the circle?’

‘In the interests of balance? Well, that’s certainly a novelty in the Sphere, Sally. OK. Last question.’

‘Miss Kohler. Cecily. Cissy. If you were innocent, why did you confess?’

This time the preliminary pause goes on and on.

Blindcrake says, ‘OK, let me rephrase the question. Not only did you confess, but your alleged confession implicated Ralph Mickledore to such an extent that, along with the other evidence against him, it sent him to the gallows. Was he innocent too?’

Waggs says, ‘OK, Sally, I should have known better. That does it, folks …’

‘No! Hold on. I need an answer, Jay. It was your telly programme that suggested she was so smashed up by little Emily’s drowning that she was fair game for anyone. If she’s innocent, then who’s guilty? And I don’t just mean of the murder. Who was it who twisted her arm till she stuck it up?’

Now Waggs is on his feet, drawing Kohler upright too.

Jacklin leans over to the mikes and says, ‘I cannot allow my client to answer that question outside of a courtroom. We must remember the law of defamation …’

‘Defamation nothing! You can’t defame the dead,’ yells Blindcrake. ‘And isn’t the guy most likely the late Detective-Superintendent Walter Tallantire, then Head of Mid-Yorkshire CID?’

Waggs is urging Kohler off the platform. Any discipline the press conference might have had is rapidly disappearing. Cameramen and reporters jostle each other in their efforts to get near the woman. They spill out of the body of the hall and get between her and the door. The air is filled with a blizzard of flash bulbs and a babble of voices.

‘… What about compensation? … Will you go back to the States? … Are you suing the police? … Is it true you’ve written your memoirs? … How much are they paying? … Have you heard from James Westropp? … What’s his son Philip doing now? … Did you mean to drown the kid? … Is it true you’re going into a nunnery? … Was Daphne Bush your lover? …’

Three uniformed policemen have appeared. They clear a path to the door. One of them flings it open. A camera peers through, momentarily revealing a long corridor in which several men are standing. Then Kohler and Jacklin are through. Waggs turns in the doorway, helping the police to block pursuit. Someone shouts, ‘Hey, Jay. When they make the movie, how about Schwarzenegger playing you?’

Waggs grins and says, ‘Thank you for your courtesy, gentlemen, and ladies. That’s it. End of story.’

He steps back through the door. A policeman pulls it shut behind him.

The scene fades, to be replaced by a close-up of a woman with dead eyes and a mobile lower lip who says, ‘The rest of our programme will be running approximately forty minutes late because of that news conference. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause to viewers …’