PART 4 — THE RECORD
The obvious question is why, and the answer took the state about fourteen months to assemble and it is not what I expected.
It was not the baby.
He was not trying to end that pregnancy. That was the first thing everybody assumed, including me, and the timing and the substances do not support it and two experts said so.
He was building a record.
Since the February of that year there were entries at Marchcroft under my name that I had never seen. Not in the maternity notes — in general medicine, where he had an admitting relationship.
Episodes of dizziness. Two documented near-syncopal events. A note from the April describing me as a poor historian and referencing “possible non-adherence.”
Two sets of bloods he had told me were unremarkable, which were not in the system at all, because they were never run.
Eleven entries in seven months, building a picture of a woman who was unwell, unreliable, and not fully in charge of herself.
My father left me forty-one percent of a specialist logistics company when he died. It is not a fortune and it throws off a distribution every year and it is in a trust with an independent trustee.
That trustee had, in the March, declined a request from Roland Vessey for a schedule of assets, and had told me about it, and I had told Roland it was probably a data protection thing and he had agreed with me pleasantly.
What you need in this state to move against a trust like that is a finding about the beneficiary’s capacity.
What you need for that is a medical record.
And then, in the eleventh month of the investigation, Detective Sunniva Rask sat down across a table from me and asked whether I knew how Roland’s first wife had died.
I knew he had been married before. I knew she had died in 2019 and that it had been a heart thing and that he did not talk about it, and I had always taken the not talking about it as grief.
Corliss Vessey was thirty-four. She was nineteen weeks pregnant.
She died at home, on a Sunday, and the death was certified by a colleague of her husband’s on the basis of a cardiac event, and there was no post-mortem, because the family did not request one and because her husband was a physician and nobody in that room saw a reason to.
Rosamund Vessey brought her a drink every morning.
That is in the statement of Corliss’s sister, given in the February, seven years late, and it is one line long, and when I read it I had to put it down and go and stand in a different room.
There is no evidence. That is the ending of that part and I am not going to pretend otherwise. There is nothing to exhume and nothing to test and a death certificate signed by a man who is now retired in another state.
Roland was charged in relation to me. He pleaded in the spring and he is serving a sentence and he surrendered his licence in the November.
Rosamund was charged and her case took longer because she is seventy and because her defence was that she did not know what was in the cup, that she made it from a recipe her son gave her, and that she is his mother.
A jury did not believe her.
