Hope to Die

‘We were hounded out of our own home. And it wasn’t just the abuse – we got letters, phone calls, week after week for months on end. People saying Nigel had been seen burying the baby and we had to pay up or they’d go to the police. The same thing happened to Dick and Peggy after the trial – people claiming to know where the baby was and asking for money – trying to cash in on other people’s misery. It was all too much for Peggy in the end. No wonder she ended up in hospital. And all of it – all of it – was down to that little bitch Camilla and her vicious lies. She doesn’t care how much damage she does – how many lives she wrecks –’

‘Mrs Ward –’

She’s spitting now, a line of drool hanging from one side of her mouth. ‘She didn’t even have the courage to say those vile things herself – she got that nasty little cow with the tattoos to do it for her –’

‘Like I said –’

But she won’t stop – can’t stop – all these years of simmering in silence suddenly unleashed. She leans forward, pointing, drilling her anger home. ‘And that night – the night of the party – do you know where Nigel was? I’ll tell you where he was – he was visiting his mother – just like he did every Tuesday. She had a funny turn and that’s why he was late back – he was looking after his eighty-four-year-old mother, not murdering a baby –’

I know that. And not only because it’s clear now that no one was murdering that baby. Not Camilla Rowan, not Nigel Ward, not anyone. His mother was long dead by the time Infamous came out, but when all that shit hit the fan and South Mercia were forced to try to eliminate Ward as a suspect, they went looking for the old lady’s carer. And she backed Ward up: she said he did indeed go and see his mother in Banbury every Tuesday and would administer her evening medication before he left. He never missed a week – the carer would have remembered, and all the more in the week before Christmas. So there was no way he could have met up with Camilla that night, either on the A417 or anywhere else – the distances involved were simply too great.

‘I’m not trying to open it all up again, Mrs Ward,’ I say gently. ‘The opposite, in fact. That’s why we’d like to do the DNA test. So you can draw a line under all this.’

Her face is flushed, her breath coming in ragged gasps.

‘I was hoping you still had something of your husband’s that might give us a usable sample. A hairbrush perhaps.’

She gapes at me. ‘He died two years ago –’

She sits back in the chair. All the irritation, all the affront, suddenly drained away; she just looks exhausted. Exhausted and lost and old. And I feel like a shit. For the second time today.

‘I’m sorry,’ she says eventually, reaching into her sleeve for a tissue and dabbing at her mouth. ‘I can’t help you.’

‘What about his family – I believe he had a brother?’

When she speaks again her voice is paper-dry. ‘Jeremy. We’re not in touch. We fell out after that wretched programme. The press were harassing him – not as bad as they did to us, but bad enough. He blamed Nigel.’ She swallows. ‘He didn’t even come to Nigel’s funeral. His own brother. No one did. His friends, the golfers, his old colleagues – nobody. He’d turned into a leper.’

I have a brief mental picture of a bleak winter churchyard with only her and the vicar by an open grave. The Wards never had any children. I wonder now if that was choice, or chance.

‘Do you know how we could contact Jeremy?’

She sighs. ‘I have his address somewhere. Assuming he hasn’t moved. I doubt he’d have bothered telling me if he had.’

She gets up, slowly and heavily, and goes over to a bureau on the far wall.

‘Here,’ she says a few moments later, handing me a slip of paper. ‘This is all I have.’

An address in Burford. The sort that doesn’t need a number. I look up at her. ‘Thank you.’

She folds her arms. ‘And now, I’d like you to leave.’

* * *

‘I’m not leaving and that’s flat.’

Margaret Swann is perched on the edge of the sofa, her hands gripped in her lap.

Ev looks at her and then at her husband, who’s skulking behind the furniture where Margaret can’t see him.

‘I appreciate this is inconvenient – annoying, even – but it really would make sense. As Mr Swann himself pointed out, you’re a long way from the nearest police station, and if a lot of press suddenly turn up and start causing you difficulties it’s going to be a little while before we can get to you –’

Margaret gives her a dark look. ‘We’ve been through all this once before, young lady, in case it’s slipped your mind. There is nothing, believe me, that the likes of you can tell us about the depths to which the media will sink – doorstepping, telephoto lenses, lights trained on the house all night – we were prisoners in our own home –’

‘All the more reason, surely, to go somewhere else for a few days? Just until things die down?’

Ev turns to the old man, hoping he’ll be more amenable to reason, but he’s refusing to meet her gaze.