‘So how was your day, Annie?’ he asked.
More than anything, I wanted to tell him about my conversation with Liz that morning—someone believes me, it’s not all in my mind, no matter what you think—but I knew perfectly well it wouldn’t make any difference, he’d still see things in exactly the same light. He’d think that Liz had been humouring me, or that she just hadn’t known the full story.
‘Oh, not too bad,’ I said. ‘Liz came round for a coffee earlier, and I did some housework. What about you?’
‘Harmless enough. I had to go and check up on the Dorchester store for the first time in a while. It was straight out of Night of the Living Dead. I swear to God, we’re going to have to do something about that place, and soon—you’d see more life in a morgue.’
It was his old tone of voice, familiar to me as his face and way of sitting—only it wasn’t, it wasn’t at all. He was trying too hard to be himself, and a false edge rang out clearly. I could sense him trying to ignore his deepening misgivings about me the way someone might ignore the early symptoms of some terrible disease, reassuring themselves as much as anyone else, look, I’m perfectly all right, I can still do everything quite normally. And I tried to ignore my own knowledge of that, aware that any reference to it would inevitably spiral into a second, fiercer argument; my simmering frustration at his lack of understanding finally bubbling over into fury.
Silence fell again, and we ate. After we’d finished dinner, we sat in the living room together watching TV. We watched it in a way we always did recently, but had never used to—intently, not talking, barely glancing at each other—as if the predictable Monday-night schedule was packed with the most riveting programmes in the history of television. I’d thought all my reserves of fear were fully accounted for elsewhere, but, as I looked at him out of the corner of my eye, I realised I still had some to spare. Our relationship had been entirely healthy when we’d come here, but freak accidents could kill the healthy as easily as the dying; recent events had swerved into its path like an out-of-control juggernaut, and I watched it clinging desperately to life in a hospital bed.
It could still recover, I told myself desperately. All it would take was some kind of conclusion to these terrible events, a rational explanation and proof that I’d been right. But I knew that, if recovery was to take place, it would have to happen soon. In the not-so-distant future, this tension and mistrust would destroy our marriage beyond repair; every day, I could feel us moving a little further apart emotionally, soon we wouldn’t be able to hear each other even if we shouted.
I glanced at him when I was sure he wasn’t looking, seeing his profile in silhouette. A tense, distracted look hid just below the surface. And, from time to time, as I looked straight ahead, I thought I could feel him glancing at me too; I wondered what he was thinking, and what he imagined he could see in my face.
In bed that night, I lay and listened to him brushing his teeth, then the bathroom light snapped off in the doorway and I saw him coming in, a slightly darker shape against monochrome moonlight. He got into bed. Wordlessly, we moved closer together, a kind of low-level telepathy inspiring mutual knowledge of one another’s need; it was desperation rather than desire, a longing to be together again at any level at all. But while it was good in its own right, it wasn’t enough for either of us—Sellotape instead of surgical thread, a pitifully inadequate gesture in the direction of healing. As we moved together in the darkness, the pleasure was empty, anonymous. We loved each other in the marital bed, and felt like strangers.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
‘I WAS REBECCA’S personal officer for two years, before she was released,’ Patricia Mackenzie told me, ‘so I suppose you could say I knew her quite well. I was a bit unnerved when I heard I’d been assigned someone so notorious—she was the only murderess in the whole place. I honestly had no idea what I’d be taking on, before I met her.’
From the woman I’d spoken to yesterday, I’d got a decidedly negative impression of Sandwell’s officers, but this voice went a long way towards changing that; Patricia Mackenzie sounded pleasant, serious, thoughtful. A conscientious voice. ‘I should have known that, if she’d been the monster I’d imagined, they wouldn’t have sent her to Sandwell in the first place,’ she went on, ‘but it still surprised me, how normal she was. I know you can’t always judge from appearances, but she seemed as sane and unthreatening as anyone I’d ever met.’
‘How old was she when you first saw her?’
‘Oh, eighteen, nineteen. It’s funny, really. Prisoners in that age group often seem quite vulnerable—impressionable, you know, not much common sense—but she was certainly the exception to the rule there. Very self-possessed, I was struck by that; not in an aloof way, just kept herself to herself. I don’t think she had a single close friend in the place, but I’m quite sure she didn’t have any enemies.
‘She knew how to handle the staff, as well. She wasn’t manipulative, at least not maliciously, but it seemed that she’d struck the perfect balance from her first day here. Very polite and well-behaved, but not so as she’d be seen to suck up by the other inmates. She had a long-term job in the canteen kitchen thanks to good behaviour, quite a responsible job, and from what I saw and heard, she was good at it. A very efficient young woman. I imagine she’s made a good life for herself, on the outside.’
I could see only too clearly how the girl I’d read and heard so much about had become that young woman; Eleanor Corbett had taught her a devastating lesson regarding intimacy, and good behaviour had been drilled into her from early childhood. Again, I approached the only question that really mattered to me. ‘Did she ever tell you anything about her adoptive father?’
‘God, yes. It’s funny you should ask me that. It’s what I remember best about her, even now. I talked to her in private every week, for half an hour or so. It was all very informal, more a chat than anything else, just so she could let me know if she was having any problems. She never was, so we mostly just talked. I tended to do most of the actual talking…she seemed far more comfortable in the listener’s role, and I have to say that she made a very good one. But, on the rare occasions that she opened up herself, it was always about her adoptive father. Not that she ever mentioned the adoptive part. Daddy, she called him, when she was discussing him with me. Like a child.
‘I have to say, I couldn’t help but find all that a bit disturbing—there was something almost incestuous about it, she sounded so devoted to him. How wonderful he was, and how much he cared about her, and how much she loved him in return. How she couldn’t wait for his next visit, that she literally counted the days between them, and how they were so close that they could talk about anything. It was odd how different she seemed at those times—not self-possessed at all, far from it. She seemed desperate to impress me with it all, as if I was supposed to think, isn’t she lucky…
‘I tried not to show how odd I thought it was, to react the way she’d want me to…it wasn’t just politeness; I didn’t want to upset her. She was very sweet in her way, even though I found it impossible to really understand anything about her. I told her it was a wonderful thing to have such a good father, a lot of girls would give anything for that. And she’d smile. I never really knew her to look happy, as she did at those times—not just as if everything was all right, but real joy. It was very strange, when you saw it for yourself.’
‘Did you ever see them together at visiting times?’
‘I was just coming to that part. As a matter of fact, I did. I was on duty in the visiting room a few months after I’d first met Rebecca. Normally, I wouldn’t really have noticed who was there and who wasn’t, but when I saw her at one of the tables, I couldn’t help but look closer. Especially when I realised that the man across from her could only be her father.
‘God only knew what I’d been expecting—from Rebecca’s descriptions, I’d imagined a cross between JFK and the Second Coming. In the flesh, he came as a real disappointment, and a real shoc
k. Older than I’d have thought, more like a grandfather than a father, and gaunt, sickly; he looked really ill. And this might sound fanciful, but the whole mood between them was miles away from the impression I’d been given. I’d imagined them acting almost like some of the women did with their boyfriends and husbands, all hugs and chatter and affection, but the two of them couldn’t have seemed much more distant from each other. I remember the way Rebecca was sitting, bolt upright, as though she was in a job interview. She seemed a hundred times more relaxed when she was talking to me.’
It was everything Tom Hartley had told me about Dennis Fisher’s visits to the Southfield Unit. Patricia continued. ‘I thought there must be a lot more to their relationship than met the eye—and I was right, I suppose. About a year later, I was called into the governor’s office unexpectedly. He told me he’d just received news Rebecca’s father had died—the hospital had phoned, he said, and there weren’t any other relatives at all. He said it’d be best if I passed the news on to her myself. I was very shocked. I knew she’d be devastated, and I said so. “Well, of course,” he said, “but it won’t come as a bolt from the blue for her. Apparently he’s been dying for years; he was diagnosed with cancer a very long time ago. The doctor told me it was a minor miracle he lasted as long as he did.”
‘It amazed me, when he said that. All the times Rebecca had talked about her father, and she’d never so much as hinted at it. Still, I dreaded telling her, as much as I would have done if he’d been killed in an accident. I thought maybe she’d kept it to herself because she just hadn’t wanted to think about it, that she’d found it too painful to discuss.
‘Of course, I had to break the news somehow, and it was every bit as difficult as I’d expected. She didn’t collapse in tears, or anything like that. She was silent, shell-shocked, like it hadn’t fully sunk in. It looked the worst kind of bereavement to me, the kind you can’t even let out with a good cry. The kind that runs far too deep for that.
‘She carried on like that for the next few weeks, anyway. She said next to nothing during our talks, and when I saw her round the prison, she looked like a different person. She hadn’t often seemed happy before, but she’d always seemed contented—neutral, you know, as though nothing was actually wrong. After her father died, she seemed indifferent, blank…she was just going through the motions on autopilot. It’s hard to describe that change in her, but it was obvious when you saw it for yourself. I was very concerned about her. But I knew she was never at all comfortable discussing her feelings, so I didn’t bring the subject up again for some time—when we talked every week, we both pretended nothing was wrong and nothing had changed. It was hard to know what else to do.
‘After she’d been that way for a month or so, though, I couldn’t just ignore it any more. I asked her if she was coping all right, if she’d like to talk to someone about it. “You must miss him deeply,” I said, “I know how close you were.” And she just stared at me. Her eyes looked so lost. “No, you don’t,” she said. “You think you do, but you don’t. We weren’t close at all, never were, never would have been.”
‘I couldn’t have been much more shocked, as she carried on talking—it was like listening to another person, one that I’d never met before. Normally she was so quiet and placid and guarded, but she sounded so bitter that day—cynical and frank. As if she couldn’t see the point in hiding anything.
‘“If he hadn’t been dying, I wouldn’t have seen him once since the trial,” she said. “I never saw him when I was growing up, I didn’t mean any more to him than a bit of furniture. At least it wasn’t personal; he was the same to everyone. He’d been the same with his own family, cut them right out of his life—I’ve never once seen any of them. He didn’t even have any time for his wife; it was half his fault she was like she was.”
‘I don’t quite know what she meant by that. I suppose it doesn’t matter. “He made out that it was so sentimental,” she said, “his sudden interest in me. He came to see me at the young offenders’ home soon after I got there. We got a private room to talk in and he was almost crying. He’d been for a check-up at the doctor’s, and they’d diagnosed the cancer then—it was just a matter of time, could be years, there was no way of knowing. He said it made him realise he should have been a better husband and father and everything else, he didn’t know what it had been for, all the work and all the rest of it…he talked about it like he’d had some kind of religious conversion, but it wasn’t anywhere near that noble. It wasn’t atonement, or anything like that. At the end of the day, he was just scared of dying with nobody in the world who cared about him, even a murderess he’d adopted to keep his wife quiet had to be better than nobody. He’d driven everyone else away, but I’d always be here to talk to him, a captive audience, you might say.”
‘That’s practically word-for-word what she told me. I can remember it all very clearly. “I wanted to believe we were close just as much as he did,” she said, “it was what I’d always wanted most, ever since I can remember. But it was never the same as I’d wanted it to be, not when he was actually there. I don’t think he really knew me from a hole in the ground, just saw me as someone who loved him. He sent me things all the time, but he might as well have bought them for someone else, some stereotype of a teenage girl he had in his mind: makeup, perfume, skincare things. They were the last presents I’d ever want, I saw too much of that kind of thing with my mother…but he just didn’t seem to realise that. Or to care.
‘“Well,” she said, “I suppose it doesn’t matter any more. I can’t even pretend there’s someone out there thinking about me, not now.”’
So much clicked into place for me, a thousand tiny details suddenly coming together and making sense. Behind the shock revelation drifted something else, a diffuse sense of kinship. I thought of myself in that fresher term, losing my last tenuous connection with a place I’d never really belonged in the first place. Rebecca’s bereavement had cast her adrift, too.
‘It seemed to—to exorcise it all for her,’ Patricia went on, ‘letting everything out like that. Afterwards, she went back to normal very quickly, at least on the surface. And, not long after that, something else happened. It had been going on for months without any of us knowing a thing about it, lawyers and accountants and God knows who else working it out behind closed doors. The first I heard was when I was called into the governor’s office again, out of the blue.
‘He told me I’d have to keep quiet about it, and I understood that perfectly well—if anyone had talked, the papers would have been all over the story, back then. Rebecca’s father had left a very specific will. He’d named her as his sole beneficiary.’
‘Could she inherit? A convicted murderess?’
‘I must say, that was my first thought. But you must bear in mind, she was an exceptional case. She was well below the legal age of responsibility when she’d killed that girl, and there were God knows how many cracks in the law there. And you can imagine, a rich businessman like her father had the kind of lawyers who could smash them to pieces. I imagine there were quite a few loopholes to be got round; that’s probably why we weren’t told straight away. But she could inherit in the end, make no mistake about that.
‘It was a huge amount of money by most people’s standards, well over a million pounds—and that was almost twenty years ago. I can’t begin to guess what the equivalent would be today. When Rebecca finally left prison, she was going to leave as a very rich woman.
‘It was hard to tell how she took the news. As I said, she was back to her guarded old self again, and I always found it impossible to guess what she was thinking. I don’t think she was exactly overjoyed. Money didn’t seem to mean a great deal to her. One thing I was quite sure of, she wasn’t going to throw it around when she got out. You only had to talk to her to know she’d end up leading a quiet sort of life…she wasn’t the sort of person who’d want to attract attention to herself, and she was anything but stupid. She knew only too well how the
public hated her. If she was recognised out there, it would be disastrous. Of course, she’d changed dramatically since that famous photograph of her was taken, but—’
Silence crashed down, and something in the quality of it implied fast-dawning unease, the realisation that she’d let something potentially important slip without thinking. ‘Anyway,’ she went on quickly, in a determinedly matter-of-fact voice, ‘that’s really all I can tell you about her. I hope it’s been some help.’
We said our goodbyes, and I thanked her profusely before hanging up. Then I went into the kitchen and lit a cigarette, sat taking deep occasional drags like a form of self-hypnosis, barely aware of my surroundings.
It was extraordinary how obscure the picture had been before that phone call, and how well-lit it had become. Too well-lit, in some ways. The essential tragedy of Rebecca’s relationship with her adoptive father haunted me as I sat in the dazzling sunlight. Two people frightened and lonely beyond expression, struggling to discover an illusion of happiness, knowing that its reality would always remain out of reach. Two people who shared nothing whatsoever, apart from complete isolation…
But there was something else there, too, niggling away in the back of my mind. An unplaceable sense of unease that intensified as the minutes passed; as if I’d forgotten something crucial, and had begun to realise it, and still couldn’t quite decide what it might be. Whenever I tried to focus on the absence, it eluded me like the answer to a riddle. In no time at all, it had swelled to fill my mind completely, and establishing the name and nature of my preoccupation had become all-important.
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