Unfaithfully Yours (30 page)

Although most people seem to agree that she was a talented hairdresser, she clearly thought that she was somehow ‘above such a humble job’. She was the mother of three children: Barnaby Larner, who was last heard of in a high-security jail in eastern Burma; Leo Larner, who is an off-licence manager in Budleigh Salterton; and Milly (also known as Molly) Larner, who, after a brief career in local radio, has joined a lesbian commune for unemployed gay women over thirty in Haworth, Yorkshire.

Her marriage to Michael Larner was not a happy one. In the mid-1990s, when she was out of touch with all of the ‘Puerto Banús Eight’, including, by his account, her husband, she seems to have become seriously delusional and lost the loyalty of her children, if she had ever really had it. She became convinced that she had four, not three, children and one respondent, not part of the ‘Puerto Banús Eight’ – who has asked not to be named – has reported her talking, at length, about her ‘wonderful daughter Lucy’, who had been to Oxford, got a first-class degree, married a man called Hugh and now ‘has bought a beautiful farm in Gloucestershire where I go for weekends to ride her horses Dapple and Misty’.

She also persistently maintained that she had a first-class degree from Brasenose College, Oxford. She was not consistent about which subject she had taken but the most common skill to which she laid claim was medieval Spanish, a subject of which, as far as I can gather, she was entirely ignorant. In fact, she attended the ‘Ox and Cow’ secretarial college in Oxford where she acquired typing and secretarial skills.
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She began taking various drugs during this period, including a variety of sleeping pills, some of which were prescribed for her ‘under the counter’ by Dr John Goldsmith. He told me in a lengthy interview that he had been very careful about the amount he prescribed and, after a while, had said that she should consult her own GP about her problem.
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During this period Larner met Gerald Price by the cheese section in Waitrose, a place he often uses to make ‘sexual conquests’,
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and their passion, which seems to have developed while they were staying in the Villa Maurice Barres in Calvi, Corsica, was reignited. Mr Price maintained, in his interview with me, that she was ‘just a shag’ and certainly, from his point of view, that would seem to be the case.

Not so, however, from Mrs Larner’s perspective. Her demands on Mr Price grew more intense. She several times suggested they should ‘go away together to somewhere hot and live on the beach’, and when Mr Price responded negatively, Mrs Larner threatened to tell her husband, her mother and, on one occasion, Putney Police – apparently on the grounds that ‘what he did to her in his kitchen when Mrs Price was on the school trip was against the law’. Pamela Larner’s mother, who refused to be interviewed by me, works as a receptionist in a nightclub in Marbella, although she is in her early eighties.

On the night of 3 November 2000 Mr Price visited her at the Larner family home at 24 Lawson Crescent, Putney, a four-bedroomed family home arranged on four floors, having the advantage of a secluded garden to rear, which, although largely still in its natural state, has the benefit of several mature fruit trees. It is situated in the popular ‘Putney Wedge’ between the Upper and the Lower Richmond Roads.

It was a warm night for the time of year.

When he arrived Mr Price found that Mrs Larner was upstairs in the room she often referred to, during this period, as ‘Lucy’s bedroom’. He could see this as Mrs Larner’s shape was clearly visible behind the blinds. It was 20.30 and this time, suggested originally by Mr Price, has been confirmed by Mrs Katharine Bildeeze, who was living, as she is now, in the opposite house and, on the night in question, was, as usual, at what she calls ‘her station’ in the upstairs front bedroom.
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Mr Price called up to her and asked her why she had telephoned him, twice, on his home number, something he had specifically asked her not to do. Mrs Larner replied – this account from Mr Price is confirmed by Mrs Bildeeze, ‘Because I love you!’ To which Mr Price replied, ‘Fuck off why don’t you?’

After quite a lengthy conversation Mrs Larner let Mr Price into the house.
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We only have Mr Price’s account of what happened next. According to him, they had a long argument about their relationship in which Mrs Larner, several times, threatened suicide. At one point she held up a bottle of what she claimed were phenobarbitolozone
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and ‘waved them around her head shouting’ for several minutes. She said, several times, that she ‘wanted to die’ and that her ‘husband is a fish’. Eventually she swallowed two or three and Mr Price hit her in the face ‘to try to get some sense into her’. She then opened the french windows and said she was going out into the garden to kill herself ‘so that the neighbours would see’. Then, according to Mr Price, he produced an item of ‘male jewellery’ that Mrs Larner had given him during a villa holiday in Chania, Crete, in 1982, and told Mrs Larner that it was about the only thing he had had from her and that it summed her up as it was ‘gaudy, tasteless and worth absolutely nothing to anyone’ because, like her, it was completely fake. She seized it from him and threw it into the garden, then retreated to the sofa, waving the bottle of pills and shouting, ‘I will take these and die and then you’ll be sorry!’
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Mr Price said she was welcome to top herself any time she liked and that as far as he was concerned he would be glad if he never saw her again. He then left the premises at – according his estimate – ‘roughly 22.15’.
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Mrs Bildeeze (see Notes 7 and 11 and attached Appendix ‘BILDEEZE’) has told me that at approximately 23.25 ‘an unknown woman’ approached 24 Lawson Crescent and rang the bell several times. There was no response. The woman then went to the side door and started to climb over it. When I asked Mrs Bildeeze why she did not contact the police, then or subsequently, about this apparent intruder on Mr and Mrs Larner’s property, she said it was ‘Just sex, sex, sex all over again and I didn’t want to get involved.’
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I have reason to believe that this woman was also the person who approached me on 12 June of this year, pretending to be Mrs Elizabeth Price. I received a letter from a Post Office Box address in Putney in which I was asked to keep Mr Price under surveillance as she suspected he was having sex with someone who was not her. This person proposed that she deal with me purely by letter and told me that, in order to preserve ‘confidentiality’, she was against our meeting or communicating in any other way than by letter.

I followed her instructions faithfully.

On 14 July ‘Mrs Price’, who, I am now convinced, was not Mrs Price at all, told me she was ‘going away for a few weeks’. This fact is important. Store it in your minds. We will return to it. I continued to investigate the issue of Mr Price’s adultery for her and, in good faith, supplied her with pictorial, photographic and aural recordings of his activities.
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The last occasion on which I received a letter from her was on 10 September. I wrote to her again on 5 November, which was when I began to suspect that ‘Mrs Price’ was not actually Mrs Price.

Something must have happened after 10 September to make her (or at that stage I thought, possibly, him) lose interest in the ‘game of deception’ to which I had been subjected. Another significant factor, the importance of which I did not appreciate at the time, was that a person she suspected was female had subjected the person on whom I was spying for ‘Mrs Price’ to several violent attacks. On one occasion this unidentified assailant ran up behind her on the towpath and assaulted her after a rehearsal of
Hamlet
in which she played Ophelia.
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Could it be, I reasoned, that the person attacking Mrs Dimmock was Mrs Price?

Let us return to the evening of 3 November 2000. The night on which, as you will remember, Mrs Pamela Larner breathed her last. ‘Died’, in other words or, if we are going to be brutally honest, and that is what I intend to be in this letter, was murdered by the placing of a pillow over her face in order to stop her breathing. There is a word for it. Asphyxiation. It is not a pretty word, but it is the only word that will do in these circumstances because it is what happened. Asphyxiation. Suffocation. Murder. That is what we are talking about.

When Michael Larner returned to the marital home, where he lived with his wife, on that fateful evening of 3 November, which is when she died beyond all question of a doubt and is confirmed by the police report, he found her, of course, ‘dead’ in such a final and absolute way that he knew immediately, or at least fairly quickly, that she could not be resuscitated.

The empty bottle of pills. The half-bottle of red wine. The single glass. It all screamed one word at him: suicide. Death. Two words – but with one meaning. And yet, as he looked around the room, decorated in Mrs Larner’s favourite colours, turquoise and pea green, he saw something that made him think that perhaps another word or phrase might be more applicable here: ‘murder’; ‘homicide’; ‘deliberate killing’; ‘assassination’. And so on. There are many words for murder. And I have given you a few here – which, although I did not originally intend this, may serve to remind you of the gravity and seriousness of the offence we are talking about.

There was, ladies and gentlemen, a cushion on the floor. Not only that. Someone – Michael Larner was emphatic on this point – had rearranged the wine glasses in a way that suggested, along with the fact that Mrs Larner would never have drunk red wine on her own, that another person had been with her after Mr Price had left the premises. In other words, after Mr Price had left, someone, the woman who had been following him, climbed over the fence and entered the premises from the rear: the doors had been opened by Mrs Larner when she threw the ‘man bracelet’ into the flowerbed.
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Who was this woman?

Someone who was obsessed with Gerald Price. Someone who had been nurturing passionate feelings about him for years. Someone who wanted to know what he was up to
without anyone knowing that that was what she was doing
.
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Someone who hated the idea of anyone else having him so much that she was prepared to spy on his possible lovers while, at the same time, ingeniously attempting to incriminate the woman with whom he was living, who was, of course, his wife of many years, which is to say Mrs Elizabeth Price – without ‘inverted commas’. The letters to me were written on a computer and signed with what I have since ascertained is a fairly credible imitation of Mrs Price’s handwriting.
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It is, in one sense, a ‘practical joke’ but a pretty sick one in my view. It is the action of a woman who is deranged, although she appears, as many such people do, to be perfectly normal; but murder, as I do not need to remind you, is not a practical joke. It is a very serious business; and I am convinced that the woman who initiated the ‘fake letters’ was also the woman who held a cushion over the face of Mrs Pamela Larner.
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Who is this woman?

As soon as I became aware – in the early part of December – that Mr Price had left his wife for Barbara Goldsmith,
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I realized that there was only one possible candidate. There is only one person who has nurtured a disturbingly violent passion for ‘the Beastly Barrister’. Yes, Mr Price, that is the name by which you are generally known in Putney. There is only one person who knows Mrs Price well enough to include in her letters to me certain telling details, which led me to think, even when I was fairly sure she wasn’t, that ‘Mrs Price’ was, or could be, Mrs Price.
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There is only one person who is adept enough at ‘literary style’ to provide me with letters that ‘caught’ Mrs Price’s well-known, sardonic tones – even down to an obviously genuine quotation from Mr Price on the subject of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

That person is Mrs Barbara Goldsmith – or ‘Sharpe’, as she prefers to be known on the dust jackets of her well-regarded ‘literary’ novels.
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Even if they are full of misprints and contain what can only be deliberate misinformation about the bus depot opposite the Green Man.

I have shown a selection of photographs of women to Mrs Katharine Bildeeze of Lawson Crescent. She immediately identified Ms Sharpe as the person who climbed over the fence at 23.25.

The police report puts the time of death somewhere between eleven and twelve on the night of 3 November 2000. Mrs Bildeeze also identified Ms Sharpe as the person who left the house by the front door at approximately 23.43.39. Time, I think you will agree, to have drunk some of a glass of wine with Mrs Larner, watched her fall into a coma and then ‘helped her along’ by holding a pillow over her face. It is possible that Mrs Goldsmith – or ‘Ms Sharpe’ or whatever she wants to call herself – even posed as a friend to the distressed woman.
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I have learned, subsequently, that Mrs Goldsmith has given an account of her relationship with Mr Price that is, frankly, incredible. She has, it appears, claimed that she and Mr Price have always been in love with each other and that they, although aware of their feelings for each other, had never, in all the time they had known each other,
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begun a physical relationship. It is obviously difficult to speculate as to what exactly happens between two people when no one else (
not even a private detective
!)
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is present – but a more likely alternative seems to me to be this.

Mrs Goldsmith had long harboured a violent passion for Mr Price, which developed into an all-consuming hatred for anyone with whom he was, or ever had been, involved. Although professing to share his feelings that their relationship should be unconsummated in any permanent way, she dreamed of nothing but total possession of him, in a way that destroyed her own relationship with her husband and children. She watched, from a distance, as Mr Price ‘cut a swathe’ through the women of Putney and the intensity of her hatred for these women
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grew ever stronger with the years.