No wonder she’d hit the bottle.
By comparison, Ryan and Declan had seemingly led exemplary lives. Both had left school at sixteen to ride as professional jockeys, and each had been married just the once, to Susan and Arabella respectively. The only visible stain on either of their characters was that Ryan had been officially cautioned by the police for causing a disturbance in a Doncaster hotel, where it was claimed he’d punched a man during an argument, breaking the man’s nose. Ryan had been arrested but there had been no ensuing court case, however, as the unnamed victim of the assault had apparently declined to press charges.
There was also a little about Tony but the bulk of the research team’s report concentrated, as I’d requested, on Oliver Chadwick’s only daughter — Zoe. And there was plenty to know about her.
She’d been born at the Rosie Maternity Hospital in Cambridge in early December 1988. At age four, she had been enrolled at St Louis Roman Catholic Primary, and then, at eleven, she went to Newmarket College, the local secondary school. She dropped out before taking her A levels and never returned to formal education.
The first time she was reported missing was two days after her eighteenth birthday when her mother had called the police to inform them that her daughter had failed to return home from an evening out with friends.
At the time of her disappearance, the killing of two young girls in nearby Soham was still fresh in local people’s minds, and there were some unsolved murders of young women in Ipswich, just forty miles away along the A14. Hence, it was widely believed that Zoe had been another victim of the man being labelled as the ‘Suffolk Strangler’. A huge police search had been initiated, with hundreds of volunteers scouring every corner of Newmarket and the surrounding heath looking for Zoe’s body.
Nothing had been found, of course, and she had finally been identified by the Metropolitan Police three weeks later on Christmas Eve, living under a railway arch in Croydon, south London, with a number of other homeless young people. Apparently, both her family and the police had been absolutely furious with her but she had claimed she was unaware of the massive publicity generated by her disappearance. She also announced that, as she was now legally an adult, she could do as she pleased, and had refused to go home.
Over the following years, she had not only come to the attention of the police on several occasions, but also to many other agencies, not least the local social services in Ealing who had twice briefly taken her children into care.
Arabella had disclosed to me that Zoe had had mental health problems, and she hadn’t been kidding.
The research team had somehow discovered that Zoe had been forcefully admitted to psychiatric hospitals on at least three separate occasions, the most recent being for a two-month stretch earlier in the current year.
Arabella had claimed that post-natal depression was the basis of Zoe’s problems but it appeared from the chronology in the report that her first hospital admission had been well before the birth of her eldest child, indeed it had been not long after she’d been found in Croydon.
There was also something about the arson conviction, including two local newspaper reports from the time. Two years previously, Zoe and two other women had set fire to the garden shed of a man who had admitted beating up his wife. The shed in question had been large and had housed the man’s treasured model-train layout. The whole lot had been completely consumed in the fire.
The three women had been neighbours of the victim and had seemingly extracted their own revenge after the man had been handed a community service order rather than the jail sentence they all felt he deserved.
The three had pleaded guilty to criminal damage at Ealing Magistrates’ Court and had been bound over for a year to keep the peace, with each ordered to pay a hundred pounds in compensation for the loss of the shed. The man, meanwhile, had claimed in vain that thousands of pounds’ worth of model railway had also been destroyed, but the lady chairman of the bench had referred to it as simply ‘a few toys’.
There was clearly little doubt about whose side she’d been on.
But it was hardly the crime of the year, and surely not worthy of being the reason why the TV news was blaming Zoe for the fire at Castleton House Stables. If the Simpson White research wizards could get the information, then unquestionably the BBC should have been able to do so as well.
However, there was one interesting additional detail at the bottom of the report that had not been available to the Ealing magistrates at the time the case had come before them: one of the other two women later revealed that it had been Zoe alone who had proposed setting fire to the shed, and that she had also snapped the door padlock shut first, wrongly believing the man to be still inside.
Maybe it could have been the crime of the year after all.
The last part of the Simpson White research report concerned Zoe’s husband, Peter Robertson.
As Georgina’s original brief had indicated, Peter was an estate agent, but that told only a fraction of his story.
Janie had said she thought Peter was older than Zoe, and he was — almost nine years older. He’d also been married twice before Zoe, and neither of those marriages had ended well. Now his third had gone the same way.
The wizards had attached scanned copies of all three of his marriage certificates, together with the death certificate of his first wife and the High Court judge’s divorce certificate that had unshackled him from his second. There were also copies of the official registration of births for his and Zoe’s two children.
They all made for interesting reading.
Peter Robertson had married his first wife, Kirsty Wright, at Croydon Register Office when they had each been twenty-one. Both bride and groom had had ‘no fixed abode’ recorded for their addresses, and ‘unemployed’ was written in the spaces for their professions.
Kirsty had survived a mere two months after her wedding day and it had clearly not been a happy marriage. The South London Coroner had recorded a verdict of suicide, deciding that Kirsty had killed herself by deliberately stepping off the platform at East Croydon Station, right into the path of the non-stopping Gatwick Express.
Peter had wed for a second time at the same venue two years later, this time to a Lorna Harris. This marriage had lasted longer, three years to be precise, but it too had ended badly with Lorna divorcing him for what was stated in the petition as his ‘unreasonable behaviour’.
Neither of these marriages appeared to have produced any children.
He married Zoe Chadwick two years after his divorce, once again at Croydon Register Office, and this time, not only did Peter have a fixed abode but also ‘estate agent’ was recorded as his profession on the certificate.
The birth of their first child, a daughter called Poppy, was registered at Croydon University Hospital just six weeks after the wedding, with a second daughter, Joanne, following twenty months later, by which time the Robertsons had apparently moved, Ealing Hospital now being recorded as the place of delivery.
Finally, there was a note from the wizards saying that their contact at the Disclosure and Barring Service had confirmed to them that Peter had twice been convicted of the possession of Class A drugs, and they were still searching for further details.
As a solicitor, I wondered just how legal that last enquiry had been. The registers of births, deaths and marriages were all in the public domain, as were the judgements of both the coroner and family courts, but an individual’s criminal record was subject to data-protection regulations, or at least it should have been.