The Guilty Mother

by Diane Jeffrey

  As I scribble this down, Jennifer Porter stops talking, as if she’s afraid she has said too much.

  ‘Go on,’ I say gently.

  ‘I was just thinking, that could be normal behaviour for some married couples who have just had twins. Maybe Michael was just tired and irritable. Two babies at the same time would put a strain on anyone’s marriage.’

  ‘Uh-huh. What about Melissa? How did she seem to you that evening?’

  ‘She’d made an effort.’

  ‘With the meal, you mean?’

  ‘No, I don’t think she did much of the food preparation or cooking. I meant with her hair and her clothes. She looked lovely.’

  ‘And this was unusual?’

  ‘Sort of. At the time, yes. She’d been very down since the twins were born. I went round to her place one day and she was unwashed, unkempt, you know. She’d been struggling.’

  ‘Depressed?’

  ‘Yes. She was eventually diagnosed with postnatal depression. Anyway, on the evening of the dinner party, she was wearing new clothes, she’d had her hair cut and she was wearing make-up. I remember feeling very relieved to see her that way. I’d been worried about her.’

  ‘So she showed no signs of being depressed that evening?’

  ‘Um …’ Another slight pause. Then she says, ‘I don’t think it would be true to say that. She drank a lot. Michael was concerned she was drinking too much. That’s what he told Rob. Melissa seemed on edge. She wouldn’t let go of the baby monitor and kept checking the volume was turned up high so she would hear Amber when she needed a feed. Ellie had already woken up, you see, and … well, we only realised later why Amber hadn’t.’

  Kelly grabs my Biro and notepad and scribbles something down, then angles the pad towards me. Glancing down, I read FOOD?

  I don’t twig immediately as Jennifer Porter has just mentioned feeding the baby and so I’m visualising bottles of milk, boobs and mashed-up baby meals in jars. Then I nod at Kelly as I get her drift.

  ‘Mrs Porter, you said Melissa didn’t do much of the food preparation. Did Michael do the cooking?’

  ‘No. Clémentine took care of most of that.’

  ‘Clémentine? Was that—?’

  ‘Clémentine … Rouquier, I think her surname was. She was their French au pair. I’d found her to help out Melissa.’ She sounds rueful.

  ‘And she was there that night?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I write the name on the pad.

  ‘Are you aware that Michael Slade was having an affair with the nanny? I don’t like to gossip, but it might be important.’

  ‘Yes, I know. I was in court the day Michael gave evidence,’ I say.

  ‘He was old enough to be her father. They shared a love of French wine, apparently.’ I exchange a look with Kelly. ‘He was actually fucking her – in the house – the night Ellie died,’ Jennifer Porter continues, her innocent voice at odds with the crude words coming through the speaker.

  I struggle to find anything to say to that. As my mouth opens and closes again, Kelly writes something else down on my pad. I arch my eyebrows at her. It wouldn’t have entered my head to ask that, but I think I know where Kelly is going with it.

  I put Kelly’s question to Jenny. ‘Would you say that Michael Slade loved his baby girls?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she says. Judging from her tone, she’s surprised at this question, too. ‘I think so. I doubt he could have killed them, if that’s what you’re driving at.’ I look at Kelly, who gives a satisfied nod.

  ‘What about Melissa?’

  ‘What about her? Did she love Amber and Ellie or do I think she killed them?’

  ‘Either,’ I say. ‘Both.’

  She sighs. ‘That’s what I meant earlier, I guess,’ she says, ‘when I said you never really know people. She was – is – my friend. She wasn’t herself in the months after the twins were born, but she was doing her best. On the other hand … no, it’s nothing … I shouldn’t …’

  ‘This is off the record,’ I remind her.

  ‘She’d packed up the nursery, boxed up all the baby stuff as soon as the police had finished with the room. The clothes and everything. It was all disposed of before her trial. How can anyone be so heartless?’

  I imagine Jenny’s question is a rhetorical one, but I reply anyway. ‘It might not have been heartlessness,’ I say. ‘It may just have been her way of trying to cope with her grief.’

  Jenny clams up a bit after that. I make sure she notes down my mobile number in case she thinks of anything else. She also agrees to give me hers.

  ‘It seems heartless to me, clearing out all the baby things as if they never existed,’ Kelly says once I’ve hung up. ‘It sounds more like Melissa was getting rid of the evidence than coping with grief.’

  ‘People deal with bereavement in very different ways,’ I tell Kelly. ‘There’s no right way or wrong way.’ But as I say that, I begin to doubt myself. Have I been doing the right thing? Have I got it all wrong? I realise that for the first time I’m feeling a sliver of sympathy, and a grudging admiration, for Melissa Slade. I also realise it’s time I let go.

  Chapter 12

  Melissa

  May 2014

  During the night, every night, my girls grow up surprisingly quickly. One night they got their first teeth. Another night they started to walk and talk. They often fight with each other over primary-coloured building blocks. They sometimes play together with dolls and teddy bears.

  I always go to sleep, dying to see them, but at the same time dreading the moment when I’ll wake up, the instant when I’ll experience afresh the horror and anguish of losing my babies. This wasn’t reality, but yet another dream. Another dream that can never come true. I’ll never hear my girls’ first words; never see them take their first steps. The realisation leaves my lungs crushed and withered every time.

  I’ve been at HMP Haresfield Park for five months now and I still feel surprised in the mornings that I’ve woken up at all. I truly believe I might be killed one night by one of my fellow prisoners. They all hate me. I’m a pariah, an untouchable. As both a former police officer and a convicted child murderer, I’m considered subhuman. And treated as such.

  When I arrived, I swore never to proclaim my innocence, or rant and rail against the injustice of the judicial system. There are plenty of prisoners who do that, and it doesn’t gain them kudos in here. I keep my head down and myself to myself.

  I’ve been given cleaning duties to do. This is supposedly safe employment. I think the others see this as dirty work and it seems appropriate to them that I should be assigned these duties. I work hard to show I don’t deem myself above such tasks. But no matter how much I scrub and polish, I don’t seem to earn any respect.

  The prison officers are concerned for my safety and they have offered several times to escort me whenever I leave my cell. But this would draw more unwelcome attention to me and I’m trying to keep a low profile, so I’ve always refused. That has scored me a few brownie points.

  But I think there may have been a turning point recently. I think I’ve made a friend. Her name is Cathy, but everyone calls her Bob. That makes me think of Kate in Blackadder, although she doesn’t look remotely like her. Cathy is small and slim; pretty and pretty tough. She has a skull and crossbones tattoo on the side of her long neck. She could be described as streetwise if there were any streets inside. Like me, she’s a lifer. Unlike me, she’s popular on the wing.

  I found myself sitting next to Cathy in the dining hall about a fortnight ago. Ours was apparently one of the only prisons in the country to have a canteen. In most penal institutions, inmates eat in their cells, or so I’m told. I think I’d prefer to eat in my cell, really, but at Haresfield Park, it’s supposed to be a privilege to eat communally in the refectory, and you can easily lose that right.

  I think that day, the woman sitting opposite me probably did. She was from a different wing and I’d never seen her before, but she must have
known who I was because she suddenly stood up and hurled her tray at me. Half of her meal ended up on my face and in my hair. Fortunately, the food was barely lukewarm, as usual, and I wasn’t burnt. But I wanted to cry. I wanted to run away and hide.

  ‘Sit tight,’ my neighbour at the table hissed. ‘Don’t move.’ I looked at her out of the corner of my eye. She had the other half of the meal over her. As I watched, she wiped her face on her T-shirt and carried on eating her food, her expression impassive, as if nothing had happened. I did the same. I stayed put, but the prisoner who had thrown the food got up and left the dining room. Some of the women laughed; others threw admiring glances our way.

  After dinner, Cathy came into my room uninvited and sat cross-legged on my bed. She scrutinised me through large dark eyes that were partly hidden by her fringe. I stared back. Did she want something? Did she think she’d done me a favour and expect me to pay her back?

  ‘I’m Cathy,’ she said. It wasn’t worth me introducing myself. Everyone on the wing knew me. Or thought they did. I looked her up and down. Her plaits still had flecks of minced beef in them. ‘I know who you are,’ she continued, undeterred by my silence. ‘So, what’s your story?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘I mean, I know what you’re in here for, but you’re innocent, right?’

  ‘Isn’t everyone in here innocent?’

  She laughed at that. ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Oh. What are you in here for?’ I wasn’t sure if I should have asked that question. I didn’t really want to know the answer and I certainly didn’t want to annoy Cathy. But she didn’t seem to mind.

  ‘I murdered my husband. He used to beat me up, force me to have sex with him, that sort of thing. It went on for years.’ I noticed a scar running down her right cheek and wondered if her husband had caused it. ‘One night I’d had enough, so I used a knife to kill the son of a bitch.’

  ‘But isn’t that self-defence?’

  ‘Nah. It was premeditated. I was going to make it look like a burglary gone wrong. My bastard husband was loaded. As in filthy rich. Wealthy family. Huge house. The alarm didn’t always work. He refused to get a guard dog – he loathed dogs.’ She wagged a finger in my face in mock warning. ‘Never trust people who don’t like animals.’

  Cathy seemed to lose track of what she was saying and a vacant expression passed over her face, but in a blink it was gone. ‘Anyway, I figured he’d be an easy target for burglars,’ she continues. ‘I thought I’d get away with it. I thought I’d – literally – get away with murder.’

  ‘So what went—’

  ‘But then I got carried away. Didn’t quite go through with my plans. Once I’d knifed him in the stomach and he was squirming on the floor like the coward he was, an idea came to me and I couldn’t resist it.’

  Cathy had become more and more animated as she spoke and she actually licked her lips at this point. She clearly had no remorse and enjoyed telling her story. She paused again, this time, I think, for effect.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Well, then I unbuckled his belt, pulled down his jeans and skanky pants – he’d pissed himself, of course, and I sliced off his dick.’

  ‘You didn’t?’ I was shocked, but the corners of my mouth were twitching. Cathy was a great narrator and I could feel myself leaning forwards, hanging on to her every word.

  ‘Yeah, I did. It was only small.’ She wiggled her little finger. ‘Thank God. At least it didn’t hurt too much all the times he raped me.’ She paused yet again, her face contorted with memories. I was fairly sure she was joking, understating what she’d gone through. He must have hurt her very badly for her to do what she did to him.

  Then she resumed her story. ‘I laughed the whole time. You’ll only feel a little prick, I told him over and over.’ She laughed now, maniacally. ‘That’s why they call me Bob, you know.’

  ‘What? Why?’

  ‘Lorena Bobbitt. You know, the American woman who cut off her abusive husband’s penis?’

  ‘Oh, I see.’ And then I laughed too.

  An image of my father reading the newspaper in his armchair flashed into my mind then. I recalled his reaction to an article about a teenage girl’s rapist who had been arrested in Bristol.

  ‘He deserves to have it chopped off!’ he’d said to my mother. ‘It’s a crying shame for scum like him that they got rid of the death penalty in this country.’

  It seemed to me that a life sentence was too severe a punishment for Cathy. She was younger than me, early thirties at most. She would have had much of her life ahead of her. So what if she’d had her moment of revenge? Her husband had been abusing her for a long time. He’d got no less than he deserved. Hadn’t he?

  ‘His family paid for a top barrister,’ she said, as if she’d been reading my mind. ‘Screwed me over good and proper in court.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Shit happens,’ she said, making a dismissive gesture with her hand. ‘But, I got sidetracked. I asked about you. Tell me your story.’

  So I did. I didn’t have anything to lose. I’d been wary of Cathy, but I found I already liked her immensely, and even though I’d just met her, I trusted her implicitly. I told her everything. Just as I’d told it to Simon. The exact same words, more or less.

  Chapter 13

  Jonathan

  June 2018

  On the way home from football practice the following Saturday morning, my sons are at it again. They’re playing a game that seems to have two very simple rules. One: the first one to spot a yellow car and pinch his opponent scores a point. There seems to be an extraordinarily high number of yellow cars on the roads around Kingswood. Two: the loser is the one who bursts into tears first. Or, put differently, Noah wins and gloats; Alfie loses and howls.

  I check the rear-view mirror before slamming on the brakes at a bus stop and stunning the boys into silence. Then I get out of the car and yank open the back door, using way more force than necessary. Hauling Noah out of the car, I yell at him, ‘You win!’

  ‘It was just a game, Dad,’ he whines.

  ‘I’m not talking about the bloody game,’ I shout, aware that a few passers-by are smugly observing the dubious parenting skills I’m displaying. ‘Get in the front! Now!’

  I take a deep breath and get back in behind the wheel. Turning to my elder son and forcing myself to drop a few decibels, I say, ‘This has got to stop, Noah!’

  ‘Sorry, Dad,’ Noah says meekly as I pull back into the road.

  ‘It’s not me you should be apologising to.’

  ‘Sorry, Alfie.’

  ‘I hope you’re not going to fight like this when we go on holiday to France this summer.’

  ‘No, Dad,’ they chorus.

  I’ve calmed down a bit by the time I park in the driveway in front of our house, but I need some time alone so I send the boys to their rooms to play separately for a while before lunch. They’ll be on electronic games or tablets, but never mind.

  I open the door to Rosie’s room. It hasn’t changed; I haven’t changed a thing. I take in the pink walls, the rocking chair that Mel fell in love with, the white cot, the teddies sitting on top of the toy box, the rose-coloured bookcase with touch and feel books on it. These books have never been opened; their pages never turned. Everything in this room is unused and amassing dust. This isn’t a nursery, Jon. It’s a shrine.

  Since our phone conversation the other day, I’ve been thinking about something Jennifer Porter, Melissa’s friend, mentioned. She commented on how soon Melissa packed up her babies’ things after their deaths. Jennifer thought it was heartless, but I’d suggested that maybe it was Melissa’s way of dealing with her grief, her way of trying to accept that her babies were dead.

  As I sink onto the rocking chair and look into the empty cot through the bars, I realise I have left this for far too long. I have kept this bedroom the way Mel and I decorated it four years ago, afraid that if I tidied away Rosie’s things, it would be denying her existence
. But Rosie will always exist in my heart and mind.

  I’ve been sending my boys mixed messages, encouraging them to move on while this room has chained us to the past, attesting to what we might have been. The three of us will never get over what happened, but we can get on with our lives.

  I get up and go out to the garage, coming back with some cardboard boxes and a roll of brown parcel tape. Then I get to work.

  I’m pulling out tiny clothes from the chest of drawers and putting them into plastic bags when Alfie peeps round the door. I swipe at my tears with the back of my hand. ‘All right, mate? Are you hungry?’ I ask, my voice trembling. He exits without a word.

  Minutes later, he’s back with Noah, who is carrying a mug of tea. In silence, Noah hands me the steaming mug and kneels down next to me. He pulls out another drawer and starts bagging up the clothes, while Alfie drags a cardboard box over to the toy box and puts the teddy bears inside.

  I’m so touched that I well up again and I tell myself sternly, not for the first time, that I need to focus on what I do have and not what I’ve lost. My boys lost their mummy and their sister and they need me. As I look at my sons through wet eyes, a huge wave of pride unfurls inside me.

  An hour later, I bundle them into the car again. Noah sits in the back seat and chats with his brother. I hear Alfie laugh at his brother’s jokes and it chases away the dark clouds in my head. I ask them if they’d like to help me paint Rosie’s room next weekend. They jump at my idea of turning her bedroom into a games room for the pair of them. I’ll sell the rocking chair, cot and toy box on eBay. I should have done all that a long time ago.

  After a late lunch at McDonald’s, we drop off the baby clothes and books at Oxfam and then go come home to watch a film.

  Noah lets Alfie choose the DVD and all three of us sit on the sofa in the living room. While they’re engrossed in Coco, I open Melissa Slade’s diary. I get as far as the second page, and the boys are up to the bit where Miguel discovers a family photo with the face of his great-great-grandfather torn out, when I decide to fetch a notebook and pen. I need to go through this thoroughly, for once. I’m a single father and I cut corners. My epitaph will probably have an inscription to that effect. But I want to take in every word that Melissa has written.