The Evidence: A completely unputdownable psychological thriller with a shocking twist Read online

  The Evidence

  A completely unputdownable psychological thriller with a shocking twist

  K.L. Slater

  Books by K.L. Slater

  The Evidence

  The Marriage

  The Girl She Wanted

  Little Whispers

  Single

  The Silent Ones

  Finding Grace

  Closer

  The Secret

  The Visitor

  The Mistake

  Liar

  Blink

  Safe With Me

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Blink

  Hear More from K.L. Slater

  Books by K.L. Slater

  A Letter from K.L. Slater

  The Girl She Wanted

  Little Whispers

  Single

  The Silent Ones

  Finding Grace

  Closer

  The Secret

  The Visitor

  The Mistake

  Liar

  Safe With Me

  Acknowledgements

  *

  One

  THE FISCHER FILES

  EPISODE ONE: MEETING SIMONE

  I’m speaking to you from outside HMP Bronzefield women’s prison on the outskirts of Ashford in Middlesex. Now, this place is a bit of a groundbreaker as far as prisons go. It was built in 2004 as a women-only facility but you won’t find any Victorian gloom here or Gothic towers. The building is clean-looking, modern.

  But make no mistake, this is a Category A facility for adult female offenders.

  I’m about to go inside and speak to Simone Fischer, one of the inmates here. You might well have heard Simone’s name before. She’s a fifty-two-year-old British woman who, ten years ago, was convicted at the Old Bailey of the brutal murder of her husband of twenty years, Grant Austin Fischer.

  Fischer has always maintained a strict silence, refusing even to give evidence at her own trial and has completely blocked any media visits. Until now.

  For the first time ever, Simone has agreed to break her silence and tell The Speaking Fox the true story… in her own words.

  This week marks Simone’s tenth year of an eighteen-year sentence behind bars. Today, we’ll finally begin to discover the full, true story of what happened that fateful night in 2009.

  We’ll find out the truth behind a sham marriage built on coercive control and why she, and her supporters, believe her conviction was truly a miscarriage of justice.

  This is a Speaking Fox podcast and I… am Esme Fox.

  I’m standing about two hundred yards away from the actual prison now.

  There are nearly six hundred women accommodated here, plus there’s a mother-and-baby unit, too. It’s a big place. I’m approaching the building and I can see there’s a constant stream of people entering and leaving. Visitors, officials wearing lanyards and delivery couriers.

  Just going in…

  So, I’m inside the foyer and it’s bright in here… smells a bit like my old school hall an hour after lunch.

  OK, I’ve just been through the security and admin process, quite thorough as you’d expect and now I’m heading into the prison proper. I’ve got my own prison officer here to take me to the room where I’ll have my scheduled thirty-minute meeting with Simone. I’ll talk as we walk. It’s a noisy place as you can hear, metal doors slamming, lots of footsteps around us.

  I think it’s about a five-minute walk… is it? Yes, the prison officer is nodding.

  When I heard Simone had agreed to see me, I thought about the best way to prepare to get a complete overview of the case. To start, I read and watched everything I could get hold of online. There’s an incredible volume of stuff that’s been written and recorded about Simone and her conviction.

  Next step was the endless hours I spent cataloguing online images, YouTube videos and audio news reports about the Fischer family. There’s a plethora of stuff out there with little to separate genuine reports and fake news. Seems everyone and his dog has an opinion and feels the need to air it.

  I have a theory about that – about the strength of feeling that comes across in all this. I think the detail people struggle with, is the fact the Fischers’ twelve-year-old son, Andrew, was actually playing on his computer game in the next room when his father was killed.

  I’ve read the original court transcripts and researched a variety of opinions on how Grant Fischer’s blood ended up spattered all over the kitchen units. It’s blunt, yes, but it’s the truth. And the truth is what we’re seeking in this podcast. The truth is what we have pledged not to shy away from, no matter how unpalatable.

  Here we are now, outside the interview room. I can see Simone Fischer through the glass door. She’s smaller in real life than I expected. She looks the exact opposite of the type of woman that might beat her husband to death.

  Sorry? Right, no problem.

  So, the officer’s just asked me to wait here while she checks everything is in order in the room. Simone is sitting at a table, dressed casually in jeans and a lemon tunic top. The women at Bronzefield are permitted to wear their own clothes. Her brown hair is tied back in a loose ponytail and I’m struck by her ordinariness. She looks like your mum, your aunt… a random woman you might see shopping in the supermarket.

  Yet the majority of the British public detests her. This woman who faced her abusive husband and said, ‘No more’.

  The officer is on her way back to me again. Looks like I’m going in.

  Esme: Hi, Simone!

  Simone: Hello, Esme.

  Esme: This is your chance to reach our listeners with your truth, speaking from your heart. Do you feel ready to make a start?
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br />   Simone: I’ve been waiting for the right time for a very long time. I’m ready.

  Esme: Forgive me, but I’m going in strong with my questions. I want to tackle a comment I’ve seen repeatedly during my online research of your case.

  Simone: Go for it.

  Esme: Did you ever fantasize about murdering your husband, Simone? Go through the ways you could kill him… plan exactly how you might do it?

  Simone: If only it had been that simple but no. I’d… I’d forgotten what life should be like. Does that make sense? To me, it was just the way things were now and I never questioned why I was settling for it. I only tried to get through it.

  Esme: You were just trying to get through life.

  Simone: That’s it, yes. You asked about death? Well, not once did I consider he might go before me, I thought… I honestly thought he would eventually kill me. Or that I would kill myself because of him. I was so far gone it never occurred to me I had a choice in the matter.

  Esme: Can you remember a time you didn’t feel that way? Maybe when you first met or in your early marriage. I’m assuming things were fine to begin with… But when you first noticed the signs, when he first started treating you badly… can you remember thinking ‘I’m not standing for this’ or ‘I need to get out’?

  Simone: You’ve got to understand that this wasn’t a case of one day things are fine, the next day he starts controlling me. People like to think in black and white, but it was far more subtle than that. Grant had a very special talent. When I met him, he appeared to be caring and reasonable for the first year, when in fact, underneath, he was a master at guiding my thoughts and decision-making processes. Even more impressively, he could do this while making me believe I was the one who was in control. He was like a magician in that respect.

  Esme: Can you give me an example?

  Simone: Let me think… OK, so, when we began dating, I was very young and close to my mum. She died a couple of years after we got married but when I met Grant, I lived just a few streets away from her and I’d pop round every day without fail. Do a bit of shopping for her sometimes, when she’d had a bad day – she had respiratory problems – or maybe do her laundry, ironing, that sort of thing.

  Grant said from the start he thought it was wonderful, the way I took care of my mum. He used to say it showed what kind of a person I was: giving and caring. Then over time he started saying Mum was leaning on me far too often. He’d say things like, ‘How come she can go to Bingo but she can’t hang her own washing out?’

  The clever bit was that he always seemed to come from a position of worrying about and caring for me or for Mum. For instance, at the end of a long day, he’d say, ‘I’m worried you’re doing too much running after your mum like this, darling. It’s not good for her to become too reliant. You need to help her become a bit more independent for her own self-worth.’

  It all sounded perfectly reasonable. He was the voice of common sense in my mixed-up head.

  Esme: That’s what you told yourself?

  Simone: That’s what I believed.

  Esme: You said that’s how it started. How did things progress?

  Simone: Well, in terms of Mum, he’d organise things at times he knew I’d usually go around there. Like he’d get surprise cinema tickets for an early film showing after work when I’d normally call at Mum’s. He wrapped his need to get me away from Mum in a nice thoughtful act, so that if I complained or accused him of anything, it just made me look ungrateful.

  Then, just like that, Mum stopped ringing and texting. If I made plans to go around she’d say there was no need as her neighbour was helping her out, which I always found strange because they’d never got on that well over the years.

  Esme: You accepted she was OK without you?

  Simone: Not at first. I went round a couple of times to make sure she was OK and she was nervy and distant like she really didn’t want me there. And she wouldn’t hear of me doing any tasks to help her out. I still made an effort to see her, but I always felt like she was kind of trying to get rid of me. Then she asked me not to keep coming around.

  Esme: That must’ve been upsetting for you.

  Simone: I was heartbroken. I felt so… rejected. Still, I just thought she’d got more independent, like Grant said.

  Esme: But you found out differently?

  Simone: Mum died about six months later and when I had to clear her flat, I found a letter addressed to me. In it she said that Grant had been round there and told her to leave me alone. He’d said that I’d had enough of running around after her but didn’t know how to tell her. He told Mum I’d been to the doctor’s with depression caused by worrying about her… Sorry, I can’t…

  Esme: It’s OK. Take your time. Here, I’ve got some tissues in my bag… there we go.

  Simone: Thanks. It’s just hard, you know? I went around to her neighbour to ask if she had helped Mum out, and she had the grace to look guilty and said she hadn’t seen her for months before she died. She said she didn’t even know Mum was struggling with her health.

  Esme: I can see that was tough for you. Did you confront Grant about what he’d done?

  Simone: I did. I was hysterical and he was absolutely horrified. He cried. Can you believe it? He actually cried and said Mum must have been mentally ill and hallucinating, that he’d never do anything so callous. Then he got angry and said Mum was cruel to do that to me… to leave a letter full of lies, as he called it. But he was particularly hurt that I chose to believe a sick old woman above him.

  Esme: And what was your reaction to what he said?

  Simone: I’m ashamed to say I believed him. It’s hard to explain, but he was so genuine. I know this doesn’t make any sense, but it came down to the fact that I wanted to believe him and chose to do so. It was all subconscious but I was in the grip of his control, you see. It was like I couldn’t think for myself anymore, like I’d got so used to him telling me what to think and what to feel, I just blindly accepted what he said.

  Years later I met one of Mum’s oldest friends and she confided that Mum had told her the exact same story. That she’d been so upset. She told this friend she was afraid of Grant and afraid of what he might do to us both if I kept going round there. I can remember thinking ‘let sleeping dogs lie’. Mum was gone by then and so I said nothing to him. I knew he would just make me feel like it was all in my head. He did that all the time.

  Esme: Gaslighting.

  Simone: I hadn’t heard of that term back then.

  Esme: It’s shocking to think that, over a relatively short time, he was able to destroy your strong key relationship, with your mum… almost without you noticing it was happening.

  Simone: That’s the thing I find hardest to bear now, thinking about how Mum must have struggled alone… after us being so close for so long. I’ve had plenty of time to think and I’ve spent the last ten years blaming myself. How could I have just taken Mum’s word for it when she said she was OK? Why didn’t I just keep going around there to check on her, to do the things I’d always done, despite Mum insisting she was fine?

  Esme: It’s a kind of brainwashing, I suppose.

  Simone: There have been so many examples like that, over the years. Friendships, my job as a cook in a local school, the book club I’d been attending for three years before I met him. They all bit the dust after Grant came up with solid reasons why I shouldn’t be doing that sort of stuff any longer. All for my own good, apparently.

  Esme: Sounds like the classic tactic of isolating you from friends and family.

  Simone: Absolutely. I’ve had a steep learning curve since undergoing the voluntary therapy sessions here at Bronzefield. For the first two years it felt like waking up from a drugged sleep. I still can’t believe how I blindly accepted everything he told me, how he played my insecurities in his own favour. In the end I had nobody but him, you know. Nobody to turn to, nobody to stop me from drowning in anxiety and depression… nobody but him.

  Esme: And t
his treatment… it just went on and on in your marriage?

  Simone: Yes, it was one of many things I now understand he was systematically subjecting me to over time. There was the stinging criticism about almost everything: how I dressed, what I cooked for dinner, the television programmes I chose to watch. He’d keep a mental tally of every single thing I’d done wrong in his eyes, however small. Everything would be brought up as ‘evidence’ against me at key times, especially if he was deciding something like whether I deserved a new outfit or a haircut.