The Word Is Murder(17)
Police have charged Mrs Cowper under Sections 1 and 170 (2) and (4) of the Road Traffic Act of 1988. She faces charges of causing death by dangerous driving and failing to stop at the scene of an accident.
Mrs Cowper gave her address as Liverpool Road, Walmer. She had recently lost her husband after a long illness. Her 23-year-old son, Damian Cowper, is an actor who has performed with the Royal Shakespeare Company and who was last seen in The Birthday Party on the West End stage.
THE TIMES – TUESDAY, 6 NOVEMBER 2001
FAMILY CALLS FOR CHANGE IN LAW AS HIT-AND-RUN DRIVER WALKS FREE
The mother of an eight-year-old boy killed as he was crossing the road in the seaside town of Deal, Kent, spoke out today as the driver walked free.
Timothy Godwin died instantly and his twin brother, Jeremy, received severe lacerations to the brain after Diana Cowper, 52, failed to see them. It turned out that Mrs Cowper had left her spectacles at the golf club where she had been playing and was unable to see beyond twenty feet.
Canterbury Crown Court had heard that she had not broken the law by not wearing her glasses. Judge Nigel Weston QC said: ‘It was not a wise idea to drive without your spectacles but they were not a legal requirement as the law stands and there can be no doubting your remorse. In the light of this, I have decided that a custodial sentence would not be appropriate.’
Mrs Cowper was disqualified from driving for a year, had nine penalty points added to her licence and was ordered to pay ￡900 costs. The judge also suggested three months of restorative justice but the family of the two boys have refused to meet her.
Speaking outside the court, Judith Godwin said: ‘Nobody should be allowed to get behind the wheel of a car if they can’t see. If that’s not against the law then the law should be changed. My son is dead. My other son has been crippled. And she just gets a slap on the wrist. That can’t be right.’
A spokesperson for Brake, the road safety charity, said: ‘Nobody should drive if they are not fully in control of their car.’
I looked at the dates above the three articles and made the connection. ‘This all happened exactly ten years ago,’ I exclaimed.
‘Nine years and eleven months,’ Hawthorne corrected me. ‘The accident was at the start of June.’
‘It’s still pretty much the anniversary.’ I handed back the third article. ‘And the boy who survived … he had brain lacerations.’ I picked up Diana Cowper’s text. ‘… the boy who was lacerated’.
‘You think there’s a connection?’
I assumed he was being sarcastic but I didn’t rise to the bait. ‘Do you know where she lives?’ I asked. ‘Judith Godwin?’
Hawthorne searched through the other pages. ‘There’s an address in Harrow-on-the-Hill.’
‘Not Kent?’
‘They might have been on holiday. The first week in June … that’s summer half-term.’
So perhaps Hawthorne had children after all. How else would he have known? But I didn’t dare raise that subject again. Instead, I asked: ‘Are we going to see her?’
‘No need to hurry. And we’ve got a meeting with Mr Cornwallis just down the road.’ My mind had gone blank for a moment. I had no idea who he was referring to. ‘The undertaker,’ he reminded me. He began to gather up the documents, drawing them towards him like a croupier with a pack of cards. It was interesting that as much as Detective Inspector Meadows had disliked him, someone higher up in the Met was taking him seriously. The crime scene had been left untouched for his examination. He was being kept fully in the loop.
Hawthorne stubbed out his cigarette. ‘Let’s go,’ he said.
Once again, I noticed, I’d paid for the coffees.
We took the number 14 back down the Fulham Road, the same bus used by Diana Cowper on the day she died. We exited, as Hawthorne would have put it, at twelve twenty-six and retraced our steps to the funeral parlour.
I hadn’t been to a funeral parlour since my father died – and that was a long time ago. I had been twenty-one years old. Although he had suffered a protracted illness, the end had come very suddenly and the whole family was poleaxed. For reasons that still aren’t clear to me, an uncle stepped in and took control of the burial arrangements … after years of agnosticism, my father had expressed a desire to have an orthodox funeral. I’m sure my uncle thought he was doing us a favour but unfortunately, he was a loud, opinionated man and I can’t say I’d ever been very fond of him. Even so, I found myself accompanying him to a funeral parlour in north London. In Jewish families, the burial happens very quickly and I hadn’t yet had time to accept what was happening; I was still in shock. I have vague memories of a large room that was more like a lost property office in a railway station than an undertaker’s. Everything was very dark, in different shades of brown. There was a short, bearded man standing behind a counter, wearing an ill-fitting suit and a yarmulke: the funeral director or perhaps one of his assistants. As if in a nightmare, I see a crowd of people surrounding me. Were they other customers or staff? I seem to remember that there was no privacy.
My uncle was negotiating the price of the funeral, which was to take place the following day. He didn’t ask me what I thought. He was discussing the various coffins and different options with the counter man and, as I stood there listening to them, their voices became more and more heated until I realised that the two of them were actually engaged in a full-blooded argument. My uncle accused the funeral director of cheating us and that was what finally did it. The other man exploded in rage. He had gone quite red in the face and now he was jabbing a finger at us, shouting, with saliva flecking at his lips.