by Alice Feeney
“What did you do?” I ask.
“Me? Nothing as exciting as you. Online fraud. This time. I’m guessing this is your first time inside?” I nod. “Thought so. It really ain’t as bad as it seems, you get used to it. It normally takes at least twenty-four hours for them to set you up on the system.” She turns on the computer screen. “They give you your code yet?” I shake my head. “Thought not. Once you get your code, you just type it in like this.” She uses the same index finger to slowly type each letter. “Then you get this menu, so that you can apply to do a class: art, computers, hairdressing—that’s really popular, long waiting list for that one—we even have yoga now too. You can watch a TV show or whatever film they are streaming. You can join the library. That’s one I’d recommend, the guard who runs it is one of the good guys around here. It’s also how you book your meals, tell them what food you want, and they deliver it to the cell at mealtimes. A bit like doing an online Tesco shop, or, I guess, Waitrose for someone like you. I’ll tell you now, there’s never any fruit or salads. You’ll get a ten-pound credit on the system once a week for extras, a little gift from the government to help make sure you don’t starve.”
“You don’t eat in a canteen?”
“Hell no! There are some mean bitches in here, but the thing that starts most of the fights is always food. I guess some people just don’t understand the concept of queuing, and I’ve never seen folks get so crazy violent as they do about someone else getting more mashed potatoes on their plastic plate. Canteens are too dangerous when women are hangry.”
“Hangry?”
She smiles again. “Yeah, hangry. Ain’t you never heard that expression? It means when you’re so hungry you get angry. Speaking of which, when did you last eat? I don’t want you attacking me in my sleep.” I think about the question for a while and realize I don’t remember. “You want some baked beans?” She holds up a tin but doesn’t wait for a response. “I can heat them up for you, and you can just owe me a tin when you get your own allowance.”
I watch with peculiar fascination as she boils the little travel kettle and opens the tin can. Just seeing the Heinz logo makes me think of Maggie. Even if I’m not guilty of killing my husband, I have killed before. I just never got caught.
Hilary tears off a square of cling film from a battered-looking box, spoons half a tin of beans into the middle, then twists the bundle to seal it, before dropping it inside the kettle.
“Does that really work?” I ask.
“I guess you’ll find out.”
Five minutes later, she serves me my first prison meal in a chipped Wonder Woman mug with a plastic teaspoon. It tastes like something resembling home, and for just a moment I close my eyes and remember what it’s like to feel safe. I notice a new notch on her face, masquerading as a smile, and I feel so grateful for the kindness she has shown me.
“You’re pretty—without the makeup, I mean,” she says, and I remember what a mess I must look. I haven’t had a shower or washed my hair, or even brushed my teeth for at least forty-eight hours. “You look different in real life to how you look on the internet.”
“Can you search the internet on this?” I point at the computer in the cell.
“Don’t be daft. This is prison, we’re not allowed internet in our cells or anywhere else.”
“How then?”
“I get it on my iPhone.”
“You’re allowed iPhones in prison?”
“Of course not. Are you thick or something?” She reaches down inside the front of her trousers, and it looks as if she removes a phone from her knickers. “I like to make friends with people. I do something for them, they do something for me. Being in here isn’t so different from life on the outside. This prison is just a little smaller than the one you’re used to, that’s all. The modern world has made prisoners of us all, only fools think they are free. There’s 4G in the corner of Building D, that’s why so many people sign up to do the art classes, so they can get internet. It sure ain’t about wanting to paint pretty pictures. I can’t refresh the page in here, but look, here’s you on the TBN website.” She holds out the phone for me to see. I’m reluctant to touch it at first, knowing where it has been, but I soon forget all about that when I see the pictures on the screen. “There’s you on the left, wearing all your makeup with your hair all fancy, and there’s your husband on the right. Why did you kill him?”
I don’t answer. I’m too busy staring at the photo that is captioned Ben Bailey, husband and victim.
My hands are shaking so badly, I’m scared I might drop the phone. I hold it tight, not willing to give it back yet, then sit down on the bunk, unable to articulate or process what my eyes have just seen.
“Are you okay?” she asks.
If I could answer, it would be no.
I look at the faces on the screen again, but nothing has changed. I barely recognize myself, but I don’t know the man pictured next to me at all.
I don’t recognize the man they claim I killed, because the man in the picture is not my husband. It isn’t Ben.
Fifty-one
Maggie is supposed to be clearing a house in Acton, but she can’t resist slowly driving past Aimee’s Notting Hill home a couple more times first. A magpie swoops down in front of the van, and Maggie pulls over and salutes before it flies out of view.
“One for sorrow, two for joy,” she mutters, then takes a noisy sip from her flask of coffee, while quietly observing the scene just ahead. The blue-and-white police tape is still flapping in the wind, sealing off the building, but the police vans and the press are gone. She supposes that they have found everything they need for now; everything that she left for them to find, including the lighter gel, the poorly cleaned bloodstains, the body.
She remembers the first time she visited the house with such fondness. He’d shot himself in the head, the real Ben Bailey. Suicide. He’d lost his job and was quite upset about it. Bits of blood and brains were still on the wall when Maggie was contracted to clear out his possessions, but she didn’t mind that. It wasn’t her job to clean up, only to get rid. She had only recently started the business, which was probably why she got the job: she imagined most people would have turned it down because it was too gruesome and gory. But Maggie had never been afraid of ghosts, at least not dead ones. She had a strange feeling as soon as she stepped inside, as if it were meant to be. Ben didn’t have any real family waiting to argue over his prized possessions. He didn’t have many of those either.
She took her time going through his things, learning all about the man he had been. She found his passport, driver’s license, bank statements, and utility bills. Identity fraud is so easy when you work in Maggie’s business, everything was right there, just inviting her to play God and bring the dead man back to life. She fell for the house he lived in, as well as the idea of him. Not how the house was back then, but how she knew it could be, with a little work. Some people just can’t see the potential in things, but she could, Maggie had always been good at that. Just look at the potential she saw in Aimee as a child. She was right about Aimee, and she knew that she was right about Ben too.
Maggie knew that Ben Bailey would make the perfect pretend boyfriend, and then the perfect pretend husband for Aimee the actress, so she wasn’t going to let a little thing such as his being dead get in the way. All she had to do was find the right person to play his part, and she didn’t have to look very far.
Fifty-two
I don’t know how anyone can sleep inside a prison cell. It is never quiet. Even in my dreams I hear the murmurs, shouts, and sometimes screams of strangers beyond the gray walls. It’s even noisier when I find myself alone inside my head. The familiar cast of my bad dreams delivered a stellar performance this evening. A standing ovation of insomnia was the only suitable response to the story on the stage of my mind. I won’t get the part in the Fincher movie now, that’s for sure. I’ve lost everything and everyone.
I feel stiff, so I stand and stretch a l
ittle, getting a whiff of my own body odor as I raise my arms. The small frosted-glass window in the cell is open just a fraction. As I lean my face against the bars in front of it to gulp the fresh air, I spot a magpie on the lawn outside. I salute the bird, unable to remember when or why I started doing such an odd, superstitious thing.
As Hilary predicted, she has been allowed out for various classes, and to exercise in the yard, but I have been confined to my cell while I wait to be successfully added to the system. I appreciate I haven’t been here long, but I think it’s safe to say that the system is broken. If it weren’t for my cellmate’s generosity, I still wouldn’t have had anything to eat or drink, but luckily Hilary seems to have a never-ending supply of tinned beans and cartons of Ribena. I normally avoid sugary drinks, but I daren’t risk the water coming out of the tap. I’ve already been ill, and having to go to the toilet with nothing but a thin curtain to separate me from a complete stranger is worse than degrading. I keep thinking about the photo of Ben that Hilary showed me on her phone. It wasn’t him. I realize now that the reason I’ve been unable to slot all the pieces of what has happened together, is because they don’t fit. Not that I’ve been able to tell anyone, not that they’d believe me if I did.
I hear the increasingly familiar sound of keys jangling behind the cell door, and I presume that Hilary has been escorted back from her latest excursion. But it isn’t Hilary. It’s a prison guard, the same one who brought me in yesterday. He looks as though he hasn’t slept either. The collection of dandruff has disappeared from one of his shoulders though, and I wonder whether he or someone else brushed it away.
“Well, come on then, I haven’t got all day,” he says in my direction, without actually looking at me.
I get up and follow him out of the cell, retracing the journey we made yesterday. It takes longer than it should, waiting for him to lock each door behind us, before taking a few more steps, then stopping to unlock the next.
“Where are we going?” He doesn’t answer, and my chest starts to feel tight, as though the air has become hard to breathe. “Can you tell me where you are taking me? Please?” As I add the word please, I am reminded of my childhood and of Maggie. I remember how she conditioned me and rationed her love, only ever giving a little at a time. It’s as though she has come back from the dead to haunt me. I stop walking in protest to being ignored, and finally the guard turns around, sighs, then shakes his head as though I have done something far worse than ask a simple question.
“Keep. Moving.”
“Not until you explain where you are taking me.”
He smiles, a twisted shape fracturing his facial features, which were already so unpleasantly arranged. “I don’t know or care who it is you think you were on the outside. In here, you are nothing. You are nobody.”
His words have an undesirable effect on me. I used to think that I was nobody, I still do, but not in the way he means. I think we’re all nobodies, but I won’t have some jobsworth in a cheap uniform, with an overinflated sense of empowerment, and a bad case of halitosis, speak to me that way. Sometimes you have to fall hard enough for it to hurt, to know when to pick yourself up. You can’t start to put yourself back together if you don’t even know that you’re broken. I lift my head a little higher and take a step closer before giving him my reply.
“And I don’t care about you losing your job, your home, your pet porn collection—from your appearance I doubt very much you have a wife—if I have to make a formal complaint and have your arse fired from this establishment. I know people who can end you with one phone call.”
He glares at me through narrowed eyes. “You have a visitor.”
“Who?”
“I’m not a fucking secretary. See for yourself.”
He opens another door and I see her there, sitting at a desk waiting for me.
“Sit down,” says Detective Alex Croft.
I stay exactly where I am. I’m a little tired of people giving me orders.
“Please, take a seat. I’d like to talk to you.”
“I did not kill my husband,” I say, fully aware that I must sound like a broken record.
She nods, leans back in her chair, and folds her arms. “I know.”
Fifty-three
“You know?”
My words come out as a whisper in the cold prison room.
Detective Croft leans forward in her chair, no sidekick today. Her young face, as always, so completely impossible to read.
“Yes, I know you didn’t kill your husband.”
Finally. I think I could laugh, or cry, if I weren’t so exhausted and angry.
Funny how life does that sometimes—throws you a line when you’re drowning, just as your head is about to completely disappear below the surface of your darkest troubles.
“Do you know this man?” She slides her iPad across the table. It’s the same picture from the online TBN article.
“No. Who is he?”
“He’s Ben Bailey.”
“That’s not my husband.”
“No, it isn’t. But that is his name, and it was his body that was found buried in your garden. TBN have verified that this is the Ben Bailey who worked for them, land registry confirmed he owned your house for ten years before you bought it, and this man had already been dead, and buried, for over two years, albeit somewhere else. He committed suicide when he lost his job, was laid to rest in Scotland, and someone decided to dig him up and replant him beneath your decking in West London. There are things I understand about this case, but mostly there are things I don’t. I don’t understand your involvement in it for starters.”
She stares at me as though she expects me to say something, but my mind is busy processing everything she just said, trying to make sense of something that simply doesn’t make any. I feel as though this can’t possibly be real, and yet it is. A contradiction of thoughts and feelings jumble themselves up inside my head, folding into conclusions I can’t seem to iron out.
“Someone has gone to a lot of effort to set you up,” she says.
“And you fell for it.” Hate loosens my tongue. “I tried to tell you I was being framed and you wouldn’t believe me.”
“Your story was a little far-fetched.”
“You fucked up!”
I watch as she tries the idea on for size, before deciding it doesn’t fit and shrugging it off.
I turn my voice back down to its normal volume. “What happens now?”
“You’ll be released. We can’t keep you here for killing a man who was already dead.”
“Then what?”
“Well, we’re trying to find him. The man who pretended to be Ben Bailey, the man who married you using a dead man’s birth certificate and persuaded you to buy the same dead man’s house. To even try to begin to understand the who and what of this case, it would be really helpful to know the why. Why would someone go to such lengths to do this to you?”
“I don’t know.”
“If the man you were married to wasn’t really Ben Bailey, then who was he?”
“I. Don’t. Know.”
She stares at me for a little while and appears to conclude that I am telling the truth.
“How did you meet him?”
“An online dating website.”
“You were on a dating website? Using your own name?”
“Yes. It was before I got my first big role a couple of years ago. My name didn’t mean anything to anyone then.”
“Who contacted who?”
“He contacted me.”
“Then I guess maybe your name meant something to him. Whoever did this to you was planning it for some time. Maybe the dating website was how he found you. And he told you from the start that he was Ben Bailey?”
“Yes.”
“Was there a picture of the man you married on the dating website?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Good, we’ll check that out and see if it might still be there. I’m guessing now that th
e reason you couldn’t find any pictures of him in the house was because he deliberately removed them all. And he told you that he worked for TBN?”
“Yes, we even met outside the TBN offices, several times.”
“But you never went in? Never met any of his colleagues?”
“No.”
“What about his family?”
“He said he didn’t have any left. It was something we had in common.”
“And you didn’t meet any of his friends?”
“He said his friends were all back in Ireland. He hadn’t been in London that long, and it just sounded like he’d been too busy to make any.”
“Why would you agree to marry a practical stranger after just a couple of months?” She looks at me as though I’m the most pathetic and stupid person she’s ever come across. I share the sentiment and start to wonder if maybe I am. I should have learned to let go long before now, but I held on too tight to what I thought I wanted: a chance to start again. This is all my fault. Your past only owns you if you allow it to.
“He said we’d wasted so many years being apart before we found each other. He said there was no need to wait when you knew that you’d met the one,” I say eventually.
She looks as if she might throw up. “You’ve clearly made an enemy out of someone. The stalker you mentioned, the name she used … Maggie. What does that name mean to you?”
“Maggie is dead. It can’t be Maggie. I watched her die.”
Detective Croft leans back, looks unsure about what she is going to say next, which makes me quite certain I won’t want to hear it.
“I’ve read about what happened to your parents when you were a child…”
Her words wind me a little. I don’t talk about this. I can’t. I never have and I never will. She told me not to.
“I know how your mother died. It must have been a horrific experience.”
“My father died too,” I say, remembering my lines.