It is clear from the details we have shown that the time-line Jim Perrin gave about our sister’s death was completely false. He was not, as he wrote, with Jac when she died ‘as she sank into her last sleep’. And there is a marked disparity between what he told her sisters when they rang him on Tuesday evening (he had chosen not to telephone any of her family to keep them informed and at no point had he done so) and his particularly graphic descriptions afterwards — in West — of Jac’s worsening condition.

What he told them was noticeably brief and couched in ‘hospital-speak’. He ‘thought she was a little brighter’ — ‘that she was a little better.’ They were hardly the words of loving concern or which shared any meaningful detail; we were aware of a marked inadequacy. Might he have telephoned the hospital on that Tuesday, before or instead of going there himself? The journey from Jac’s house to Chester takes about an hour; was it what he had been told? The words do sound more ‘hospital’ than ‘Perrin’, and he did write, later, in West that actually he drove to Derbyshire — very far indeed from Chester…

It is beyond dispute that he was not with our sister when she died; nor was he there during those morphine-drowsed hours before. What he wrote was so at variance with the truth that we are now querying whether he was there for any part of that Tuesday at all, and his extremely late arrival next day might well be explained by the strong circumstantial evidence that he was actually many miles away.

We know that our phone-calls to Jac, and to Jim Perrin, were made on that Tuesday when he was not at the hospital and he never again saw Jac alive. We spoke to the nurses who confirmed that he had not been with her that night (and we remember that she had been on the ‘phone for hours in the afternoon when she rang her daughter and later that evening with her sisters and — the last call of her life — with her ‘first love’).

 Jim Perrin had not been there  at any point in the night-time or in the early hours before Jac’s ‘Welsh’ sister had arrived at 7am. on Wednesday morning and, as we have said in previous posts, we had always known he was not there in the early part of the Tuesday evening before.

That Jac herself telephoned her daughter on Tuesday afternoon and later was able to speak with four others of her friends and family was quite contrary to Jim Perrin’s tale of how she was slipping into sleep, unconsciousness and then dying — deliberately giving his readers to believe that he was there with her, present throughout — and shows, not only how wide of the mark he was, but also his shameless plausibility.

We now believe that when he was asked by Jac’s sisters for up-to-date news of her on that Tuesday evening he was not only distinctly implying that he had been with her when we now know that he had not, but was possibly repeating to them what hospital staff might have told him, and he, not realizing that her sisters would be in touch with Jac themselves, positively gave them the misleading impression that he had just left her.

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In West he described how: ‘I left [the hospital] — I drove to Derbyshire to stay with friends.’ He left her? To stay with friends? And at such a distance when she lay mortally ill? And then, he wrote: ‘I hurried back to her side.’

He would have had a considerable journey ‘back’ to the hospital in Chester and it may be assumed (as by then he had been told about Jac) that he would have ‘hurried’: although, knowing his trick of twisting his time-lines, perhaps it was not from Derbyshire. Had he sought sympathy from an ‘understanding friend’ nearer to home?

But: how could Jim Perrin have left our sister? Would any caring partner, any ‘real’ man have done so? Certainly he was not where a true lover would have wished to be and, wherever he was, he chose not to telephone the hospital on Tuesday evening knowing how seriously — terminally — ill Jac was, or during those long night hours to enquire about her, or to speak with her, or to pass on any message of love and support; nor did he ring them at any point in the morning either before or after she really had become unconscious. Not one telephone call.

We were told this by the shocked nurses (who said they had also checked the records of those on night duty).

Had we not finally succeeded in contacting him, Jim Perrin would have had no idea that Jac had died…

Jac’s sisters.

NB. For the full impact of this post the preceding two — read in sequence — will make clear how we reached, after some years, the answer to the question which had concerned us since the day of the death of our sister Jac. That is: ‘Where was Jim Perrin when our sister lay dying?’. There has always been, as we explained, some consternation as to the events of that day and the twenty-four hours before she died; some doubts and uncertainties which, as well as our grief, left a sense of uneasiness of which we could not rid ourselves. At last, finally, we feel we have adequately solved that mystery.