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Killer Couples. Tammy Cohen
Читать онлайн.Название Killer Couples
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781857827378
Автор произведения Tammy Cohen
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
‘What’s wrong?’ she asked, miserably, as her passenger sat staring at the road ahead, his hands in his lap.
Stephen shrugged unresponsively, refusing to meet her gaze.
‘Talk to me,’ she begged.
But he wasn’t in the mood for talking. Nor did he return the pressure when she tried to hold his hand, or lean over to kiss her deeply as he’d always done before. When he finally did turn to face her, it was as if someone had switched off the love in his eyes, leaving them shuttered and illegible.
‘I’ll see you later then,’ he said. And then he was gone.
Once again, Rebecca Harris was left alone with her thoughts and her memories, and the glassy-eyed ghost she was trying so hard to keep at bay. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be.
That whole day, she tried to concentrate on her work, but she was like an automaton as she answered calls. She was OK as long as she concentrated on the caller and the question, but every now and then a wave of shock would come over her as she remembered what she’d done. Looking round her, she wondered how it could possibly be real. Everything else was so normal – the staff, the phones, even the potted plants. How could the world just potter on as if it were just an ordinary day when something so earth shattering had happened? Wouldn’t it all be different? Wouldn’t you be able to tell?
‘How are you feeling?’ she asked Stephen, when he got in the car at the end of the day, ready for a lift home. Again, he wouldn’t meet her eyes; again, he just brushed off the question, unwilling to enter into conversation.
He was just in shock, like she was, she told herself. And he was probably steeling himself for what would happen when he went home.
Driving towards Gorseinon, Rebecca’s hands clutched the steering wheel tightly. These were the same roads she’d driven down just the night before, and yet it seemed like a lifetime ago. Now the woman who’d sat behind the wheel while her lover bombarded her with texts, who’d had the option to pull out any time she liked and hadn’t appreciated what a luxury that was, seemed like a different person.
Rebecca was fast realising just how much she’d lost. Dropping Stephen off near his home, she felt an overwhelming urge to grab onto him and not let go. She would force him to tell her he still loved her, to reassure her that everything was going to be just as he’d promised. She couldn’t bear the blankness in his expression. He was looking at her as though she was nothing to him, as if she was worse than nothing. Didn’t he realise how much she’d done for him, for them?
As she watched him walk away from the car in the direction of his home, once again Rebecca felt that crushing weight in her stomach as an agonising thought occurred to her. Might this be the last time she’d ever see him? Had it all been for nothing?
Back home with Ron and her little boy, Rebecca was taciturn and even more irritable than normal. She didn’t want to talk to her husband; she didn’t want to play at being a fun, happy mummy. All she wanted to do was sit with her mobile phone in her hand, waiting for news from Stephen.
Would the police have fallen for his story about a burglary gone wrong? Had she been seen leaving the house? She wanted to call him so badly, but she didn’t dare in case the police were there with him.
By now it was starting to sink in just how huge a thing she’d just done. Sure, she’d made mistakes in her life before – marrying Ron had been one of them – but never any that she couldn’t put right again. Slowly she was beginning to realise that this weight she’d been carrying around inside her for the last few weeks, and the panic washing over her in waves since the previous night were now with her for life.
What the hell had she done?
By the next morning, she was a nervous wreck. When the police rang the door bell, wanting to talk to her about the mysterious death of her lover’s wife she hardly had the energy to act surprised.
‘I went straight home after the work party,’ she told them, weakly. ‘I’ve no idea what happened to her.’
But the police, unsurprisingly, simply weren’t buying it, particularly when they scrutinised CCTV footage from Friday night in Swansea City Centre and saw Rebecca’s car heading in the opposite direction to the one she’d described.
When they came back to Rebecca’s house on the Monday after the murder, it was with a warrant for her arrest.
On 2 April 2007, after just two and a half hours, the jury of eight women and four men announced to a packed Swansea Crown Court that they had reached a unanimous verdict in the case of Stephen Marsh.
Over the past seventeen days, the twelve jurors had heard evidence from Rebecca Harris describing how she’d murdered Jaspal Marsh while acting on direct instructions from the victim’s husband. They’d heard from police who had a record of the large volume of texts between Rebecca and Stephen on the night of the murder. They’d heard from Stephen’s girlfriends, one of whom claimed to have talked to him about murdering his wife. And they’d viewed shocking footage from Stephen’s mobile phone of Rebecca Harris writhing on a bed while being sliced with a knife.
On the other hand, they’d also heard Stephen express his deep, abiding love for murdered Jaspal. ‘She was going to be my wife forever,’ he’d told the court, assembling his handsome features into an appropriate expression for a grieving widower. He’d always managed to get women to agree to anything he asked. Now, with a jury where women outnumbered men two to one, he was putting his charm to the ultimate test.
Rebecca Harris and the other women had been silly mistakes, he confessed, holding his hands up like a naughty boy caught smoking behind the bike shed. They hadn’t meant anything. In fact, he had ‘no opinion’ of Rebecca now and was trying to block her out of his mind.
The jury also heard Stephen blame alcohol for the ‘catastrophic memory loss’ that caused him to blank out the texts he’d received from Rebecca Harris on the night of the murder. As for those he’d sent her, well, she’d just misinterpreted them.
Stephen Marsh held up his hands to being an alcoholic, he admitted being a womaniser with a penchant for very rough sex, but he flat-out denied being a murderer.
Whatever way the verdict went, it was all over for Rebecca Harris. Already she had confessed to murdering Jaspal and she knew she was going to prison for a very long time. She’d done it all for love, only to have the man of her dreams throw her to the lions in the most public and humiliating way.
She wanted revenge. And when the jury returned its verdict on Stephen Marsh, she got it.
‘Guilty!’
In May 2007, Rebecca Harris and Stephen Marsh were back in court to be sentenced for the murder of Jaspal Marsh. Stephen Marsh, who’d tried so hard to wriggle out of any blame, was sentenced to eighteen years in prison for masterminding the murder, while Rebecca Harris received twelve years for carrying it out.
Anyone in court during that trial would be left with one abiding, haunting image - of a woman, tied to a bed while a knife sliced through her flesh.
A relationship rooted in power and in pain carries within it from the start the seed of its own self-destruction. Unfortunately, in the case of Stephen Marsh and Rebecca Harris, it was someone else who would eventually pay the ultimate price for a twisted desire, gone out of control.
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