Close to Death

‘Not me. Phyllis. She spoke to him over the garden hedge.’

‘He wasn’t himself,’ Phyllis said. She seemed to be too nervous of May to utter more than three words.

‘What did he say to you?’ Dudley asked. He had his notebook poised. ‘And how do you spell your name, by the way?’

‘Moore. Phyllis Moore.’

‘Is that with two o’s? Or like St Thomas?’

‘Two o’s.’

Dudley wrote this down.

Phyllis glanced at May for permission, then continued. ‘It was late in the afternoon. He’d just come back in a police car! We didn’t speak very much. He said that he’d been asked a lot of questions and that he was relieved he had taken his wife to her sister’s.’

‘Did he think he was about to be arrested?’ Hawthorne asked.

‘He didn’t say. But the police wouldn’t have arrested him for something he hadn’t done.’

‘I’m sure that’s never happened,’ Dudley agreed.

‘He told me he was going to call Adam Strauss and ask him for advice.’

Hawthorne frowned. ‘Why not Andrew Pennington? He was a barrister. He’d know a lot more.’

‘That’s a very good point. I would have thought Mr Pennington would be exactly the right person to go to. I can’t imagine why he didn’t.’

Dudley wrote something down in his notebook. He added a question mark and circled it.

‘How did the two of you come to be living in Richmond?’ Khan asked.

‘You were nuns.’ Hawthorne made it sound improbable, like the first line of a joke.

‘We met at the Franciscan Convent of St Clare in Osmondthorpe, near Leeds,’ May said.

‘We were cellies,’ Phyllis added.

‘That’s what we called the sisters who shared rooms. There was very little space. I arrived two years before Phyllis – and we left at the same time.’

‘How long were you there for?’

‘Almost three decades. I went in when I was in my forties.’

‘Why?’ Hawthorne sounded almost hostile.

‘It’s rather personal, Mr Hawthorne. And I don’t see that it has anything to do with what’s happened here, but I suppose this is a murder investigation so I’ll tell you what you want to know.

‘I had a very unhappy marriage. I was living in Chester at the time and I was in an abusive relationship. My husband was an alcoholic and hurt me quite badly on many occasions. Once, he even put me in hospital. And yet I found myself unable to leave him. I’m told this is not uncommon in cases like mine. It was a bit like Stockholm syndrome. Is that the one I mean? We had a son and I did my best to protect him until he turned eighteen and left home. I thank the Lord that he had no idea what his father was like. David had a hold over me that I cannot explain to this day. He destroyed my self-confidence, my inner resolve. He controlled my every waking moment until the day he died of a heart attack . . . and I’m ashamed to say I didn’t mourn him for a single minute. The bigger question was – what was I going to do? I was forty. I had a house, a little money and no income.

‘It’s funny, really. I had always been a regular churchgoer, although I didn’t think of myself as a religious person. It was more of a respite from David. He would drink on Saturday night and sleep it off on Sunday, so church was somewhere for me to go. The vicar was a friend of mine and after David died, she talked to me about St Clare’s. At first, the idea was that I might go there for a month or two while I thought about what I might do next, but from the moment I arrived, I felt happy and didn’t want to leave. It was a safe space. I liked the simplicity . . . Not so much the prayers and the meditation but the friendship and the sense that I was doing something useful. We ran soup kitchens and food pantries in Bradford and Leeds. We visited families in their homes. It was the first time in my life that I actually felt wanted.’

Dudley turned to Phyllis. ‘Were you ever married?’ he asked.

Phyllis seemed reluctant to answer. She lowered her head. ‘My husband passed away.’ That was all she would say.

‘So why did you leave the convent?’ Hawthorne continued.

May answered. ‘It was time. Almost thirty years. Phyllis and I often spoke at night about what we might do after St Clare’s. As she just told you, we shared a room.’

‘We weren’t meant to speak to each other after vespers,’ Phyllis added. ‘But we’d whisper to each other in the darkness.’

‘It’s true. There was no talking after night prayer. Maybe that little disobedience should have told me something.’ May paused. ‘And then an aunt of mine died and left me money. It was like something out of a fairy story! I’d already given everything I had to the convent and the mother superior expected me to do the same with my inheritance. But I didn’t agree, I’m afraid. I saw it as a sign that it was time to move on – a sign from God, if you like. So I talked to Phyllis and we left together the same day.’

‘Why Richmond?’

‘This is where I grew up. I saw the house on the internet and I thought it looked perfect.’

‘It is perfect,’ Phyllis agreed. ‘We’ve been very happy here.’

‘Until all this business started, anyway.’