The Three Women

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The Three Women Page 18

by Valerie Keogh


  ‘Good,’ Beth said with an approving nod. She put the pyjamas on the towel rail and, taking the first pillowcase, wrapped it around Joanne’s right arm, tucking the end in to keep it in place and then repeated with the other on the left. It wasn’t ideal, but it was the best she could do.

  It took several minutes to get Joanne dry and into the pyjamas, every action, every movement a struggle as she seemed unable to understand what they wanted her to do. The makeshift dressings around her arms came undone while they tried to get the pyjama top on and needed to be redone.

  By the time they were finished, Beth and Megan were exhausted and their clothes bloodstained and wet. ‘Are there more pyjamas?’ Beth asked. When Megan nodded, she said, ‘Get a pair for both of us. We’ll get Joanne downstairs and then we can take turns to shower and change, okay?’

  Thirty minutes later, dressed in pyjamas, the three of them were sitting in the lounge, Beth and Megan in the single armchairs, Joanne in the middle of the sofa opposite.

  Beth, shocked and exhausted, was unable to get her thoughts past what they’d witnessed. She turned to speak to Megan, but her stunned eyes and tightly shut mouth told Beth she was having the same struggle.

  Nobody spoke for a long time.

  When Beth saw the dead look in Joanne’s eyes replaced by desolation, she crossed the room to sit beside her. She checked her arms, pleased to see that most of the bleeding had stopped, only a slight ooze from some of the deeper cuts showing through the white cotton.

  ‘I’m going to check to see if there’s anything to eat in that sterile-looking kitchen of yours,’ Beth said, tucking the pillowcases in more securely. She wasn’t feeling hungry, but she guessed Joanne hadn’t eaten since before Capel-le-Ferne and hoped she might be tempted if food was prepared for them all.

  There was nothing of any use in the fridge; some milk that made her grimace when she sniffed it, some limp lettuce and hairy tomatoes. She had more luck in a freezer stocked full with ready meals. Taking out three lasagnes, she looked at the instructions and placed them, criss-crossed, one on top of the other, into the microwave.

  Fifteen minutes later, Beth returned to the lounge with a tray holding the hot food, cutlery and three plates.

  It looked as if neither Megan nor Joanne had moved or spoken since she left. She put the tray down on the coffee table and glanced from one to the other. ‘Before we talk about anything,’ she ordered, ‘we’re going to have something to eat, okay?’ She dished up the lasagne and handed it out, refusing to take no for an answer. ‘You need to eat,’ she said to Joanne, settling the empty tray on a pillow on her lap, putting the plate on top and a fork between her fingers. ‘Can you manage or would you like me to feed you?’

  ‘I can manage,’ Joanne said, proving the point by lifting a forkful of lasagne to her mouth.

  But none of them ate much. They pushed the food around, an expectant silence lying heavily between them. Beth wasn’t surprised when Megan put hers down, barely touched, and fixed her eyes on Joanne. ‘Tell me,’ she said. ‘What did you do?’

  Beth paused with food halfway to her mouth. Joanne, who was making a feeble attempt to eat, dropped her fork and pushed the cushion off her lap, sending the tray tilting, the plate sliding and a splash of red sauce shooting across the white fabric of the sofa. It was the same shade of red as the blood that seeped through the pillowcases wrapped around Joanne’s arms. Beth gulped and her appetite, small as it was, vanished.

  Joanne kept her eyes averted as she spoke to Megan, her voice a dead monotone. ‘As I said, we’d all gone to Capel-le-Ferne in separate cars, because we were heading to different places afterwards.’ She waited a few seconds as if to let them all drift back in their heads to that day, twenty years before. ‘Beth and I were concerned about you driving home to Wales on your own after your… ordeal.’ She laughed, a short bitter sound. ‘Of course, now we know the ugly truth, you weren’t being brave at all, you were being deceitful.’

  Joanne’s eyes lost focus as she went back to that night, unable to understand why neither she nor Beth had seen the lie. She shifted her gaze to where Megan was sitting, transfixed, tears rolling down her cheeks; she would have thought her incapable of such deception. But she knew better now. She and Beth had been spectacularly fooled. Joanne spoke again in the same slow monotone. ‘You didn’t want to tell the police and you made us promise not to.’ Turning her head slowly, she fixed Megan with a piercing look. ‘But I couldn’t let it go. I had to make sure he was punished.’

  What little colour had been in Megan’s cheeks leeched away.

  ‘I could do with a drink,’ Joanne said to Beth, tilting her head to a small cupboard under the window. ‘You’ll find some brandy in there, would you mind?’ She waited while Beth found the bottle and three shot glasses, filled them and handed them around. She lifted the glass with difficulty and took a mouthful, coughing as the alcohol hit the back of her throat. ‘I didn’t go home that morning as I’d planned to do,’ she continued then. ‘Instead, I waited in my car until the pub opened and asked the barman where Matt Peters lived.’ She raised her glass to take another sip. ‘I made up some ridiculous story about having promised to give him something, I needn’t have bothered, the barman told me where he lived without the slightest interest.

  ‘He wasn’t there, of course, but it was his wife I’d wanted to see, not him. The woman who opened the door was a skinny plain-looking woman with kind eyes and a welcoming smile. I told her I had something important to tell her and persuaded her to let me in. Children’s voices were coming from a room at the back of the house. I remember being relieved that she didn’t bring me into the same room. Instead, she opened the door into a small stuffy sitting room that looked as if it were seldom used and invited me to sit.

  ‘And there, in that twee over-furnished room, I told her exactly what her lovely husband had done; how he’d raped my friend and left her traumatised. I was so determined to make him pay, that I embellished the story and told her about all of the disgusting perverted things he’d made you do.’ Joanne’s smile was cruel. ‘She didn’t believe me at first, you know, but when I told her to check with the bar staff who would swear they saw you leaving with him, I could see doubt flicker in her eyes.’ Joanne stopped speaking for a moment, the silence only broken by the sound of Megan’s sobs.

  ‘I felt sorry for her,’ Joanne said. ‘Sorry for any woman who had been so badly fooled. I told her you didn’t want to go to the police but that I wanted to make sure she knew what a rotten filthy bastard she was married to. By the time I was finished, she was sobbing.’ There was ice in Joanne’s eyes when she glanced at Megan. Her voice scathing, she added, ‘Much in the way you are now.’

  ‘Enough!’ Beth said. ‘Stop it, Joanne. She’s paid for her mistake.’

  Joanne’s eyes bored into Beth’s. ‘You think so, do you? But then, I haven’t finished my story, have I?’ She drained the glass and held it out for more, waiting until Beth poured before continuing. ‘I organised to have the local Capel-le-Ferne newspaper sent to me. It’s online now but it wasn’t back then. I was convinced, you see, that a man who would rape so violently would do so again. When he did, when he was arrested for it, I was going to cut out the news story and send it to you, Megan, so you could finally, as I thought, get closure. Instead, a week later, what I saw was one of those clippings upstairs. Local Man Missing. I thought it was a good photo of him, he seemed so full of life.’

  This time the silence lasted several minutes. Megan had stopped sobbing and there was no sound except their heavy breathing.

  ‘It must have been a photograph that his wife particularly liked because they used it again in the next article, several weeks later. It was the report of his body having washed up on the shore.’ Joanne swallowed a mouthful of brandy, the alcohol giving her strength to go on when all she wanted to do was sleep. ‘The coroner’s verdict was death by misadventure. His wife explained how he loved to walk the cliff path and must have slipped.’ Joa
nne took a deep breath. ‘But I knew… I knew… he’d killed himself because I’d told his wife about the rape. And I was glad!’ Joanne’s voice rose and she looked at Megan with a glint in her eyes. ‘Glad he was dead.

  ‘Everything I’ve done since, has been built on what I believed happened to you in Capel-le-Ferne, do you know that?’ Joanne’s smile faded as her lips narrowed and her eyes turned hard. ‘Neither of you know what I really do for a living. I felt so sorry for his wife that day, not guilty for telling her, you understand, but sorry that she’d been fooled by her bastard rapist husband and I swore no man was ever going to treat me that way. Some men use sex as a power trip. I decided I could do that too. And I’ve done it very lucratively ever since.’

  Beth squeezed her eyes shut and took a noisy breath between gritted teeth. She should have known, and perhaps somewhere, she had. That business website of Joanne’s, for instance, hadn’t she always thought it looked a little racy and more than a little ambiguous. Megan, she could tell, was oblivious, blank eyes looking from one to the other as she tried to understand. Feeling suddenly sorry for her, Beth took pity and said, ‘I think what Joanne is trying to tell us is that she works as an escort.’

  Megan still looked puzzled.

  ‘I’m a hooker,’ Joanne said bluntly, ‘a prostitute, if you prefer that term. I sell my body for money.’

  28

  Joanne laughed at the look on Megan’s face; surprise, shock, even disgust washing over it in waves. Beth’s expression, on the other hand, had barely changed. Had she known? Had she guessed over the years that Joanne was something other than she’d said?

  ‘A prostitute?’ Megan said, still unsure if she had it right. ‘You said you worked in corporate entertainment. I don’t understand. You’ve always been the most honest person I’ve ever known and now you’re saying that you’ve lied to us all these years?’

  ‘Did I?’ Joanne said, lifting both hands and grimacing at the stinging pain in her arms. ‘Do I detect outrage coming from a liar? Honesty and prostitution aren’t mutually exclusive. I didn’t lie, I told you I was running a private corporate entertainment business, and believe me,’ she said, arching an eyebrow, ‘I’m very entertaining.’ She ignored the expression on her friends’ faces, especially the look of sympathy – or was it pity – on Beth’s. Joanne didn’t want either from them. She’d made her choice a long time ago. ‘I charge an honest fee and provide an honest service,’ she added. Wasn’t that what she had told herself, time and time again over the years? She watched as Megan struggled to understand and to shift her thinking to incorporate this new version of her friend.

  ‘You’re a prostitute!’ Megan said, the truth finally sinking in. ‘It’s not exactly the same thing as corporate entertainment. Far from it.’

  ‘It’s private, corporate, entertaining and very lucrative.’

  Megan stood as if to leave but then sat again. ‘Why aren’t you saying something?’ she said to Beth. ‘Or,’ she frowned, ‘did you know?’

  Beth took a sip of her brandy before answering. ‘No, I didn’t know… not really… I sometimes wondered what it was that she did.’ She smiled faintly at Joanne. ‘The private corporate entertainment business tag did make me wonder, you know, and your website is classy but a little bit… racy. But,’ she hesitated, ‘you seemed to be happy with whatever you were doing, so who was I to judge?’

  Joanne shuffled in her seat. Blood had oozed through the makeshift bandages, small red circles appearing through the fine white cotton. Lifting her arms, she saw similar red circles marking the seat of the sofa. She couldn’t bring herself to care. Lifting her chin, she stared at Megan. ‘Anyway, you certainly can’t criticise me for living a lie.’ Joanne swallowed. ‘If I hadn’t gone to speak to Matt’s wife that day, maybe I would have chosen a different path. When I got back to London, after Capel-le-Ferne, I had a call from Milcross and Batten offering me the PR position but all I could think of was what that man had done to you, and his poor pathetic wailing wife, so I turned it down.’

  Megan’s mouth opened and closed like a goldfish before she managed to speak. ‘You’re not putting this on me! Bloody hell, I take the blame for misleading you all those years ago but you made your own decision as to how you lived your life.’ She looked to Beth for support. ‘I’m right, aren’t I?’

  It was a freeze-frame moment; nobody moved or spoke. Finally, Beth answered Megan’s question. ‘The law of cause and effect states that every cause has an effect and every effect becomes the cause of something else. When you lied to us, you set a chain of events into motion. If you hadn’t deceived us, Joanne would never have gone to Matt’s wife. Because she did, that incident affected all the decisions she made from that moment on.’

  ‘Yes,’ Joanne said, ‘and because I told her about the rape, she must have confronted Matt, leading to a breakdown in their marriage and his suicide.’ Her anger faded as she saw Megan’s look of horror grow and in a softer voice, she added, ‘All because of your silly stupid little lie.’

  ‘Cause and effect,’ Beth said, emptying her glass and reaching for the bottle. She stood and filled all their glasses, stopping in front of Joanne and pointing at the sauce and the bloodstains. ‘You’ve made a mess of the sofa.’

  Joanne looked down. More blood had oozed through, red spots on the pillowcases and on the sofa. ‘It doesn’t matter anymore,’ she said, lifting her glass and draining half in one mouthful, coughing as she swallowed, sending a spray of amber liquid over her pale pink pyjamas.

  ‘You started something that affected all of us,’ Beth continued, as she sat back in her seat. ‘I–’

  ‘Of course,’ Joanne jumped in, ‘that’s why you joined the police, Beth, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes and no,’ Beth said, ‘joining the police was something I had considered but it pushed me to make that final decision. It’s, also, why I applied to join the Rape and Serial Sexual Offences Unit.’

  ‘At least something good came out of it,’ Megan said, a childish remark that drew sharp glances from the other two. ‘I just meant–’

  ‘I know what you meant,’ Beth said, ‘and you’re not completely wrong, some good did come out of my working for the unit; I’ve made it my priority to save as many women as I could from having to live with the same pain as I thought you’d been through.’

  Joanne looked puzzled. ‘Not that I particularly want to agree with Megan, but that is good, isn’t it?’

  ‘Do you know how many men get off from lack of evidence?’ Beth asked, using the same argument she had used before, the same one she had used for years to justify what she did. She didn’t expect an answer. ‘Far too many. That’s why I had to do something.’

  Megan’s gasp got both their attention. ‘Oh no,’ she said, a hand over her mouth. ‘Oh please, no, don’t tell me it’s you.’

  ‘What?’ Joanne was beginning to think she’d had too much brandy, neither of the two women were making any sense. ‘What are you talking about?’

  Megan put down her glass. ‘The Crown Prosecution Service is holding an emergency meeting tomorrow afternoon.’ Her voice cracked as she spoke, her eyes fixed on Beth. ‘It’s you, isn’t it?’ She groaned when she saw the slight nod.

  Increasingly confused, Joanne looked from one to the other. ‘Will someone tell me what the hell is going on?’

  ‘I was so determined to make the sexual predators we caught pay for their crimes, that sometimes I helped the case along.’

  ‘Helped the case along?’ Joanne put down her glass. Too much alcohol on an empty stomach, it helped dull the pain in her arms but it seemed to have addled her brain.

  Megan explained, her eyes on Beth, her voice grim. ‘Last week, the CPS was informed that a member of the police team had been passing crucial information to victims and victims’ families in order to get a conviction. There was also speculation that the same member had been planting incriminating evidence on suspects. It’s a disaster. As soon as it gets out, and it will, there will
be any number of rapists and child molesters arguing their conviction is unsafe.’ For a moment, Megan’s eyes were full of pity. ‘They’re arguing for a stiff penalty, Beth. You’ll get a custodial sentence. There’s no doubt.’

  Joanne’s eyes filled with horror. ‘No! Prison?’ It was all too much to take in, too much to have to absorb. Glancing down at her mutilated arms, she wished she’d been brave enough to have carried out her plan, to have pressed harder. Everything was falling apart and she wasn’t sure she could take any more.

  No, that wasn’t true. She knew she couldn’t. She’d have to try again.

  29

  Prison! For the first time, the reality of her future hit Beth and a sudden wave of nausea sent her bolting from the room. In the hallway, disorientated, she hesitated before hurrying into the kitchen where she retched into the sink, turning on the tap to wash away the small amount of food and the large amount of brandy she’d consumed. She stayed with her head hanging over the sink for a few minutes as her stomach continued to spasm. The murmur of voices from the other room told her that at least Joanne and Megan were talking. Probably about her. Let them, Beth thought. They didn’t know the half of it.

  When the spasms eased, she turned and leaned back against the sink. She’d never cope with prison, but from what Megan said it looked as if that’s what the future had in store for her. That officer from the Professional Standards department, she frowned as she tried to remember her name – Ling, DI Ling – she looked the type to lift up every stone and poke around in what lay underneath. There was no chance Beth’s fellow officers would cover for her; they’d all be running scared and trying to remember if they’d said the wrong thing to the wrong person or hoping that the bright revealing light wouldn’t shine on them.

 

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