Blood Sisters

by Julie Shaw

  The physio lady, one of two who’d been working with her since she’d returned from the hospital, dabbed at her cheeks tenderly. She was middle-aged. Mumsy. Unemotional in her tone, but not unkind. ‘It’s not up to me, love,’ she said. ‘I wish it was, I really do. But you’re healing. The difference just this past week has been incredible. You’re young and strong. You’ll heal well, I promise.’

  Vicky didn’t feel young and strong. She felt old and weak. So much so that they’d put her on suicide watch. Could they see the will to keep going weeping out of her as well? But she was strong enough, just, to find the strength to keep on living. Whatever horrors lay ahead for her she had something to live for. She understood depression. She had been fearful of her mam’s for so long. She knew depressed people often found themselves in such desperate places that they thought their nearest and dearest would be better off in a world without them in it. But she knew she wasn’t one of them, and never would be. Chantelle was her flesh. A part of her.

  Vicky also understood abandonment all too well. Knew how it felt to have a parent who had walked away from you. So there was no way in the world, even if she couldn’t look after her for a while, that she was going to allow Chantelle to experience the agony of feeling that you weren’t quite enough, weren’t quite loved enough, to persuade that absent parent to stay.

  She nodded sadly. Of course she would heal. On the outside, at least. And the physio lady looked like she knew what she was talking about. And while she healed she at least had the pain of the burns to distract her from the far greater pain in her heart. After all, what were a few jeers and stares and catcalls in comparison to the evil that had been unleashed on her in Paddy’s name?

  If she’d been frightened before, she was terrified now. It didn’t matter how much they reassured her that the women in question had been dealt with and removed to another prison, the fact that they could do such a thing to her so easily meant she wasn’t reassured in the least. That Paddy could get to her, from a distance of however many miles and all those brick walls, all those coils of barbed wire. They meant nothing. He could get to her despite them. Could have his orders – and since when did he become so powerful that he could even make them? – carried out so easily. It was chilling.

  Via visitors, they said. That crucial link to the real world. Paddy hadn’t even bothered to deny it, apparently. It had come to his attention that she intended to serve him up – how? She fucking hadn’t! – and, via his cell mate, who was mates with a lad who had a girlfriend in New Hall, he had managed to orchestrate the entire thing.

  ‘But why?’ Vicky had wanted to know, desperate to make some sort of sense of it. Of a fellow girl – girls – being prepared to do something so vile. ‘Who would do that to a stranger? For what? What would persuade them to do something so cruel? They don’t even know me!’

  ‘Vicky, they don’t need to,’ Miss Teague had told her, in weary tones. And then reminded her, sadly, just how much she had to learn about prison life. She had been perceived to be a grass. The world was a cruel place. There were bad people in it. There were people, even females, who did such things for kicks.

  And the upshot was a terror that had increased eightfold. The inability to sleep and, when she did sleep, the nightmares. And all her waking hours consumed by the ultimate nightmare – that Paddy, who she’d truly believed loved her, had disfigured her. Tried to re-model her in his own monstrous image, and succeeded. And in doing so, had killed her love for him dead.

  ‘So now is the time,’ Mr Grey had said, ‘to talk.’ He’d come to see her just a week after the attack, when she’d still been in Pinderfields Hospital, to prepare her for her upcoming preliminary hearing, and was anxious that she now tell the truth.

  But Mr Grey, for all the letters after his name, didn’t get it. There had been many hours for her to think about everything. And she could not have been clearer that she mustn’t do that.

  Mr Grey had become rather exasperated. ‘How can you possibly not tell the truth now?’ he’d asked her. ‘After all this. How can you possibly maintain any loyalty to Allen?’ And in a way that made Vicky realise he really did imagine that she might be that stupid. But why wouldn’t he? She had been, for so long.

  But of course, she couldn’t explain what was so bloomin’ bleedin’ obvious, as her mam might have said. (Thinking about her mam, for all her failings, made Vicky cry as well.) She couldn’t explain, because to admit what really happened would be to tell Mr Grey the truth, and if she told him the truth he had a duty to act on it. Yes, he could still defend her, because it was the court that had to prove stuff – she got that – but he could no longer stand up and say ‘my client wasn’t there’.

  So she stuck to her guns. ‘I wasn’t there,’ she told him. ‘I wasn’t there,’ she kept telling him. Till eventually, he had no choice but to accept it.

  And she knew she’d keep doing so till the end. The bitter end. Bitter, like her mam had been since her dad left. Because the alternative – to spew up all the poisonous gloop inside her, which would be such a relief, such a purging – would be to condemn herself, almost certainly, to many years behind bars. It was all so obvious. For some reason, Paddy thought she had betrayed him. And he must therefore know the upshot – presumably informed by his own lawyer – would be her testifying against him and, in all likelihood, a life sentence for murder.

  Which was why she couldn’t even flirt with the idea of confessing everything. Because she knew without doubt that he would take her down with him. He’d made it clear that her life was of no consequence to him, hadn’t he? And, oh, how he’d enjoy all that power and revenge. He’d say she helped him. To arrange it. To lure Gurdy there. To do it. To hide all the evidence. To lie to the police.

  And half of this she had done, had she not? She was an accessory to murder. There was no getting around that wretched fact. And she had since knocked several nails in the coffin of her own making, by lying, withholding evidence, continuing to protest both their innocence. It would be a small job for Paddy – how her heart thrummed with hate now – to apply the hammer to the nail that sealed the lid. And who would care? She was scum. He would take her down with him. And, were it not for Chantelle, perhaps they should.

  But as things stood, there was hope. There was that slim thread of hope. And set against the certainty of long incarceration, it was the one thing she couldn’t help but cling to, for her daughter.

  Were it not for the guards, the police wandering about, the officials and the many preoccupied-looking barristers, Vicky thought she might be standing in a place of worship or a stately home. The golden scrolls sprouting from the walls, the words etched in Latin, the sweeping staircase, like something out of a Hollywood movie, down which some legendary actress might well glide. Such a beautiful place, to deal in such ugly business.

  Her ‘preliminary’, the first step on the road to a frightening future, was the first time Vicky had been out in the wider world. Yes, she’d been offsite to Pinderfields Hospital, but of that she remembered nothing. She’d been unconscious when they’d taken her – they’d put her under, they told her, to spare her the pain – and though she’d been conscious when she’d been brought back to the hospital wing in New Hall, she’d been blinded by the bandages, and barely able to feel anything bar the hollowness in her heart.

  Being out in the world now, albeit shackled to a prison warder, was a powerful reminder of the enormity of the future she was facing. To be locked up, perhaps for a decade or more. She’d tried not to, but in the long, sleepless nights since her return from New Hall, she kept doing it anyway; all the sums. How old she might be when she got out. How old Chantelle would be, too. How many more milestones in her infant daughter’s life she might – would – never see. Lucy had written only the other day, as she did, full of news. This time, in particular, about a tooth. About how it had just appeared, as if from nowhere, and how they’d all laughed so much. And how Jimmy’s dad had started calling her ‘Toothy Gonzales�
�, because of how she’d whiz around the place, mostly on her bottom, laughing like a lunatic, looking like a character out of The Beano. God, it hurt. It hurt so fucking much.

  But she’d kept it to herself. Kept herself to herself, pretty much. She was back in the same dorm – albeit in a different bed – with the same group of girls and women, and though she did her best to ignore the stares, to accept the support, to join conversations, she couldn’t quite get her head round the way things worked in prison. The fact that no one – not a single one of them – had come to her aid. No alarm raised – not till her screams did the job by themselves, anyway. No wrestling off her attackers. No running for help. And absolutely no telling tales.

  She tried not to hold it against them. That was how it worked, and there was nothing you could do about it – not if you didn’t want to become a target yourself. You kept your head down and your nose clean and you never told tales. If the world was a cruel place, a prison was an even crueller one. No place for principles. Every woman for herself.

  Mr Grey was waiting when they went in, but seemed to have other things on his mind and, bar nodding an acknowledgement to her, barely spoke to her. This was a small thing – just a bit of necessary admin in a busy day. She knew what was required of her – turn up, confirm who she was and how she was going to plead, go back to New Hall. Then wait for the next bit, while the preparation for the trial got under way.

  Well, so be it, she thought, as her number came up and she was ushered into the courtroom. She would just make the most of being able to look around her, breathe in the sweet, free air, and contemplate all the things she might now lose.

  The judge’s bench looked like an altar. It made it seem as if she’d entered some sort of holy place, as if she was already gone from the world. The empty court, vast and echoing, and a chill breeze on the air, as if the spirits of all those condemned before her. And everyone dressed in the same funereal shades of black and grey, as if to allow so much as a scarf’s worth of colour into the room would be a mark of disrespect to the law.

  In contrast, Vicky’s worn and too-bright clothes (what had her mother been thinking?) seemed to shriek for attention, and she kept her head down for fear of meeting the expressions of distaste she was now so familiar with, but would never get used to. The ones that were whipped away so hurriedly and guiltily, to be replaced by worse ones – expressions of pity.

  The judge, who’d swept in in robes, putting Vicky in mind of a retired Batman, had only one job to perform today. For both Vicky and Paddy, coming separately to court from their places of incarceration, he was there to hear them confirm their identities and how they intended to plead. A secret ritual – no members of the public allowed, thankfully – that set in motion the process that would see her here again, and the course of her life be decided.

  She felt herself being nudged by the female prison officer who’d accompanied her to court. A stern, hefty woman who she didn’t really know. ‘This way,’ she said, leading Vicky to the dock, where, in a few months’ time she would submit to her fate. A bizarre thought came into her head as the gate was shut behind her. That this box in which she stood was in reality a basket, and that, by some miracle, the roof of the courthouse would open, and above it, a bright hot air balloon would be bobbing in the sky, a rainbow of colours.

  Up she’d go then, up and up. And away. Not guilty, not guilty, not guilty, she’d sing down to them all. Then fly away with Chantelle over the rainbow.

  She was given a card. ‘Place your right hand on the Bible in front of you,’ the court speaker said. ‘And, when you’re ready, read the words on the card.’

  Vicky did as instructed. She had always been good at doing as instructed. Particularly where Paddy was concerned. Had that, in the end, been her undoing? It was almost noon, and she found herself wondering where he was now; had he stood in this exact spot already this morning? Or would he stand in her shoes later on today? She didn’t know what she’d do if she saw him. Lunge for him? Scream at him?

  ‘I swear by almighty God,’ she said, shocked at the thinness of her voice. You always were a mouthy bitch, Vic. Her mam’s voice. Full of gob. ‘That the evidence I shall give,’ she went on, pushing the words out more forcefully, ‘shall be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.’ Except that it wouldn’t be. It couldn’t be. She dare not risk it.

  You’re insane, Lucy had written to her. In letter after letter. You will not get away with this. You will make everything worse. Yes, you’ll have to serve time (Lucy was suddenly so fucking well informed about everything) but if you don’t serve him up then you might serve even more. You will. She’d kept saying that. Will, Vic, you will.

  But what did Lucy know, really? She hadn’t been there, had she? Didn’t know how Vicky’d scrabbled around, trying to clean up the evidence. Didn’t realise – because Lucy never once seemed to succumb to it – how readily Paddy could wind people around his little finger. Didn’t know, because how could she, the things she had been witness to.

  The things she had borne witness to. Myra Hindley. She kept thinking about Myra Hindley too. All the time. Myra Hindley, who got life. And got life. Years and years. Was she out, even now?

  The judge startled her. ‘Please state your full name for the court.’

  ‘Victoria Alice Robinson,’ she said. After Alice in Wonderland. One of the very last pretty memories she had of her dad. My idea, that, he’d said to her. On account of your beautiful blonde hair. Which hadn’t stayed blonde. In protest at his abandoning her? She often wondered. Her mousey but precious hair, which wasn’t even there anymore.

  ‘And you live at 23 Tanton Crescent, Clayton. Is that correct?’

  Home. ‘Yes, it is,’ she said, aching for it.

  ‘Victoria Robinson,’ he then said, his voice growing sterner, his eyebrows gathering above his pale eyes like thunderclouds. ‘You are charged with being an accessory to the murder of Gurdip Banerjee. How do you plead?’

  She thought of Gurdy then. How he’d pleaded – for his life, all shit and gore. Sideways on the floor with that fucking chair around him, cords biting into his ankles and wrists, face contorted in pain. And something else. Disbelief that this could actually be happening. That the man he called a friend could snuff his life out so easily. Utter shock. The question ‘why?’ burned onto his bleeding lips. Forever burned there. In freeze-frame, as his life ebbed away.

  And she’d just stood there. Appalled, yes, in shock, yes, in terror, yes. All of those. But still she’d stood there. No matter that she couldn’t have changed anything. She hadn’t tried hard enough. She hadn’t tried soon enough. No wonder that the sound of the bar finally connecting with Paddy’s head had had such a hollow ring about it.

  She would have to live with that knowledge for the rest of her life. And the knowledge that, right now, she was about to do the same. To stand by and let the process of law take control of her, in some vain hope of mitigating what she’d done – what she’d done.

  She tensed, already anticipating the gasp from Mr Grey.

  Then she cleared her throat. ‘Guilty,’ she said.

  Chapter 32

  Leeds Crown Court, March 1989

  Lucy saw the bandana before anything else. And despite knowing Vicky had planned on wearing it – she had said so in her letter – the sight of it, a flash of black and white amid the greyness of the day, made her heart sing.

  ‘Come on, Jimmy,’ Lucy yelled as she ran across the cobbles leading to the entrance of the court. ‘We can’t be late. We’ve got to get in there before she does. Sitting right there, where she can see us. I promised her. Come on.’

  Who knew Jimmy would turn out to be such a great dad? Well, everyone, Lucy supposed. She watched him shift Chantelle higher on his hip. She clung to him with all four limbs, like a baby koala, and, strong man that he was, he carried her weight effortlessly.

  Chantelle was sixteen months old now. A ball of endless energy. No longer a baby, but a toddler, and a br
ight one. Though didn’t everyone say that about their kids? Though not their kid, and she’d never once let herself forget that, even though they’d been charged with looking after her full-time ever since Vicky had stunned everyone by changing her plea. She wanted them to look after her so she’d have ‘continuity of care’, she’d written. Vicky saw counsellors regularly in prison, and their language had begun to pop up so often that it was almost as if it had become a part of hers now. Continuity of care, and because her own mam, with her bad back and her drinking, simply couldn’t manage it. So for now, Chantelle was theirs. On loan for the duration, however long that was likely to turn out to be.

  Which, despite knowing they really had now reached the final hurdle, Lucy also knew was still an unknown. She didn’t dare to second guess it in case she jinxed it.

  Because that bastard Allen – now safely back behind bars, given life – had done his very best to have her friend go down with him. Lucy had therefore attended as much of his trial as she’d been able to, both for Vicky, and so Paddy would make no mistake about how vehemently she wished to see him locked away again. Though it hadn’t been easy. She’d never had such an education in shameless depravity – not least in the way, whenever he clocked her in the public gallery, his eyes would sweep up and down her in the same way they had always done. His dead, cold, reptilian eyes.

  Gotta pity him. Who’d said that? Irish Pete? Vikram? But she didn’t have to pity him and she wouldn’t ever pity him. There was no mitigation, no extenuating circumstance, and no chemical justification, that could allow a chink of pity to infiltrate her heart.

  But she’d been there, stuck it out. Used up half her holidays so she could keep Vicky informed, via the letters that were the only communication they’d had, because Vicky would not allow anyone to see her in prison. No one. And that included Chantelle.

  So Lucy had this real fear, this afternoon, when it had come to the sentencing, that she might have done the wrong thing by having Jimmy take a half day off work, pick her up from her mam’s and bring her down. Vicky’d told her not to. Do not bring her. She had triple underlined it. And gone on to explain, as she did all the time, that it was the only sensible option, for both their sakes. If she saw Chantelle, and was immediately returned to incarceration, she’d written that her heart might break into so many pieces that she’d never be able to put it back together again.