A Room Swept White by Sophie Hannah Page A

son.’
    ‘Pardon?’
    ‘I can tell you the name of the person who did, if you want: Wendy Whitehead. Though it wasn’t—’
    ‘I don’t want you to tell me anything,’ I say, my heart pounding. ‘I want you to leave me alone.’ I press the ‘endcall’ button hard. It’s several seconds before I dare to breathe again.
    Back in my flat, I lock and bolt the door, turn off my mobile phone and unplug the landline. Five minutes later I’m rigid and wide awake in bed, the name Wendy Whitehead going round and round in my brain.

 
    From
Nothing But Love

by Helen Yardley with Gaynor Mundy
    21 July 1995
    On the twenty-first of July, when the police came, I knew straight away that this time was different from all the other times. It was three weeks to the day since Rowan had died, and I’d become an expert at reading the detectives’ moods. I was usually able to tell from their faces whether the questioning on that particular day would be relentless or sympathetic. One detective who had always been kind to me was DS Giles Proust. He always looked uncomfortable when I was being interviewed and left most of the questions to his junior colleagues. On and on they would go: did I have a happy childhood? What was it like being the middle sibling? Did I ever feel jealous of my sisters? Am I close to my parents? Did I ever have babysitting jobs as a teenager? Did I love Morgan? Did I love Rowan? Did I welcome both pregnancies? I wanted to scream at them, ‘Of course I bloody well did, and if you can’t see that with your own eyes and ears then you don’t deserve the title of detective!’
    I always had the impression that Giles Proust alone among the police didn’t merely believe that I was innocent of the murder of my babies, but
knew
it, in the way that I knew it and Paul knew it. He could see I was no baby-killer, and understood how much I’d loved my two precious boys. Nowhere he was at my door again, with a woman I didn’t recognise, and I could see at once from his facial expression that this was going to be very bad. ‘Just tell me,’ I said, wanting to get it over with.
    ‘This is DC Ursula Shearer from Child Protection,’ said DS Proust. ‘I’m sorry, Helen. I’m here to arrest you for the murders of Morgan and Rowan Yardley. I don’t have any choice. I’m so sorry.’
    His regret was absolutely genuine. I could see from his face that it was breaking him up to have to do this to me. At that moment, I think I hated his superior officers more for his sake than for my own. Hadn’t they listened to him, all those times he must have told them they were hounding a grief-stricken mother who’d done nothing wrong? I was as much a victim of my boys’ deaths as they were.
    However terrible the moment of my arrest was for me, I can never think of it without also thinking of Giles Proust and how terrible it must have been for him. He must have felt as helpless as I did, powerless to make the people in charge see and hear the truth. Paul had urged me many times not to assume anybody official was on my side. He was scared I might be naïvely deluding myself, storing up more pain for the future. ‘However decent Proust seems, he’s a policeman, don’t forget,’ he would tell me. ‘The sympathy could be a tactic. We’ve got to assume they’re all against us.’
    Although I didn’t agree with Paul, I could understand his attitude. For him it was a way of staying strong. At first he didn’t even trust our close families, our parents, brothers and sisters, to be fully on our side. ‘They say they’re sure you didn’t do it,’ he would say, ‘but how do we know they’re not just saying that because it’s what’s expected of them? What ifsome of them have doubts?’ To this day I am convinced that none of my relatives or Paul’s ever thought I could be guilty. They had all seen me with Morgan and Rowan and seen my passionate love for them.
    Paul would face no criminal charges, we were told, but he was