Bloody Women

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Bloody Women Page 8

by Helen FitzGerald


  ‘I didn’t recognise his voice. He was odd, monosyllabic, stern even.’

  Cat downed another whisky, thinking to herself that he hadn’t phoned her much, that he was already sick of how she went on about Scotland all the time, that his mother wouldn’t even come over for the wedding, that he was sleeping with someone else, that she was giving up everything for him and he didn’t give a fucking shit. Just like all the others.

  Another whisky.

  When Johnny walked into the bar, Catriona stood up, hugged him, pecked him on one cheek, then the other, then on the lips, then tongue-kissed him in full view of a regular, Mr King from Beaumont Avenue.

  ‘She threw herself at him,’ Mr King says. ‘I couldn’t believe my eyes.’

  ‘He couldn’t believe his eyes,’ Mrs King confirms.

  Catriona’s obsessive notes state that she thought of her exes in different ways.

  Sometimes their lips, their tongues, their mouths: cracked or moist, thin or fat, tight, gaping, smooth, scratchy. Johnny’s mouth was perfect. He made me dizzy . . . Rory’s tongue was a tight, thin, speedy lizard. In and out, in and out . . . Mani’s, a dripping sponge.

  Stewart’s mouth was not memorable, she notes. She doesn’t write about Joe’s mouth.

  In the Hammer Bar that fateful night, Catriona recalls in her notes that Johnny kissed with technical perfection as ever, but ‘his moist fat lips, his smooth, confident tongue and scratchy, rash-inducing stubble did not take me to the bright, “Oh my, I might faint!” place it used to. I felt nothing, and all I could think of were the stories I’d heard about how he used to sleep around on me, allegedly trying to get it on with Anna and every other girl he got anywhere near.’

  She says she didn’t know why she let him take her by the hand and drag her out of the pub to his car, saying, ‘Jesus Christ, you’ve got dirty. When did you get so dirty?’

  She didn’t know why she let him open the door of his shiny black Golf, jump in, and pull her inside to straddle his lap.

  Afterwards, she stood at the door and watched as he wiped the stain further into the dark grey fabric of the front passenger seat, saying, ‘Fuck and bugger and bugger and fuck’ and ‘Should’ve just paid the fuckin’ extra and got the leather.’

  She says she never saw him again after they had sex in the dingy car park. She says she felt sick and drunk, and woke in her bed in Edinburgh hours later, unable to recall anything. She says she only discovered he’d gone missing days later in the police station after her arrest.

  But all the evidence suggests she’s lying.

  Johnny Marshall’s jacket washed up on Portobello beach on the afternoon of Cat Marsden’s wedding. He’d been thrown off the pier. Almost simultaneously, his penis was found in the bottom of a large complimentary bowl of peanuts at the Hammer Bar in Glasgow.

  Mr King, the regular who lives in Beaumont Avenue, has vowed never to eat peanuts again.

  ‘Never again,’ Mrs King says.

  16

  NO FUCK-FACES: THE DEATH OF RORY MACMANUS

  The following morning Cat woke up in her flat with a headache. She rang Joe immediately. He didn’t answer.

  ‘He’s got the ’flu,’ Pietro told her when she phoned him at work. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘Fine,’ she replied.

  She downed a glass of old wine and drove to her mother’s house to ‘eat chips and bury [her] head in a pillow’.

  When she woke up, she tried Joe’s number again and then phoned Pietro.

  ‘Why won’t he answer his phones?’ Cat asked.

  ‘When he gets sick he likes to be alone to sleep it off. Even Mum knows to keep away. I’m sure he’ll call when he feels better. Is everything okay?’ Pietro, as usual, was naively sympathetic.

  Catriona tried Joe’s number several times more before dialling Rory’s. It wasn’t hard to find him. His do-goodery and professional triumphs were plastered all over the internet. He agreed to meet her straight away. She walked to a café in the West End of Edinburgh where Rory and his mates used to discuss the course of the revolution in their Hugo Boss suits. Cat didn’t recognise him when he and his briefcase waddled in. He was at least seventeen stone and, for a man of five foot nine, did not hold his weight well. He had gone bald and had compensated by not making appointments to wax his back, the tufts peeping out from the collar of his well-ironed shirt. Catriona hugged him warmly, bought him a cappuccino, and chatted about work, old friends and Tuscany.

  ‘I’ve been watching your show,’ Rory said. ‘Susan gets a bit jealous.’

  ‘I missed you, you know,’ the café owner says he clearly heard Cat say. ‘I sometimes think about the time we did it in your office.’

  ‘I think about that too,’ the waiter is sure he heard Rory reply.

  ‘Does Susan visit your office?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘Bring you muffins?’

  ‘Never muffins.’

  ‘Does she shut the door and take her top off?’

  Rory’s bald patch glistened with sweat. ‘I can work late tonight,’ he said.

  ‘See you at eight.’

  That afternoon, Catriona took four carloads of personal belongings to her mother’s house. By the end of the day, her flat was empty except for a television, a made-up bed, two suitcases and a half-empty bottle of vodka. Sitting beside the suitcases, phone in hand, she dialled Joe, to no avail.

  She hung up, downed the rest of the vodka, and headed to the financial district.

  ‘Is Rory MacManus there, please?’

  A female had answered the buzzer of Rory’s building. Cat hadn’t expected that. She pushed the door open, took the lift to the fifth floor, and walked along an empty open-plan area towards the closed offices at the end.

  She undid two buttons, sprayed freshener in her mouth, and knocked on the door with Rory MacManus’s name on it.

  A pretty woman with blonde hair answered.

  ‘Congratulations, Catriona,’ the woman said, stretching out her hand. ‘I’m Susan. You look different in real life. I’ll see you later, Rory,’

  Rory and Cat grimaced as the lift door opened and closed in the distance.

  ‘Shite,’ Cat said, still standing at the door.

  ‘I told her you were dropping off a wedding invitation.’

  Cat offered him a muffin and a swig from a fresh bottle of vodka. She watched him drink the clear liquid, walked towards his desk, lowered herself to her knees, and crawled towards the chair he was sitting in.

  One can imagine it wasn’t the Bill Clinton blow job Rory had hoped for. At first it felt like it might be, zipper coming down, mouth kissing inner thighs, getting closer, hot air, oh, but then there was something cold and it didn’t feel good and the drink had gone to his head and he was dizzy and couldn’t move . . .

  The drug wore off just before Rory fell out of the car. He tried to run. He tried really hard. But he was blindfolded and bleeding and he ran the wrong way – right into oncoming traffic on the four-lane motorway. A Ford Escort, a Porsche and a cement truck greeted him, one after the other.

  His penis was found in the back of the television set that Catriona gave to charity the following day.

  Rory’s wife, Susan, feels terrible about the note she’d left on the kitchen bench the night he died.

  ‘You are a fucking bastard,’ the note said. ‘We’re at Mum’s.’

  17

  SEVERED PENISES ARE NOT FUNNY:

  THE DEATH OF MANI SHARMA

  After taking her television set and bed to Oxfam, Catriona drove to Glasgow and met Mani in the BBC canteen.

  ‘She looked slightly mad,’ a radio producer called Alison Edgar recalls. ‘Her hair was all over the place and her eyes were red.’

  They bought sandwiches and went for a walk.

  ‘It was weird not feeling calm with Mani. I’d always felt calm with Mani. I was buzzing. I was hungover and emotional. He looked different to me while I was in this frame of mind. He looked more gorgeous. H
is eyes were beautiful. He had a perfect body. And his smile . . . I never loved his smile enough.’

  In the Botanic Gardens Cat asked him for a goodbye kiss and before they knew it they were heading towards room 218 of the Hilton West End.

  ‘This time I wanted to do it. I wanted to touch him. I thought maybe by touching him I would feel calm again.’

  Catriona wasted no time in undressing him.

  ‘I ravaged him. I’d never ravaged Mani before.’

  ‘You’ve got better,’ she told him afterwards.

  ‘You still won’t give head,’ he replied.

  Mani had to get back to work, but he had time for a quick coffee.

  Catriona made it for him.

  After Mani’s death, the family grieved behind closed doors. The local community rallied around as best they could. Casseroles and curries were delivered to the doorstep and left with kind notes: ‘If you need us, please call.’ ‘You may not be hungry, but we’re here to help if there’s anything we can do.’

  One morning, Mani’s mother opened the door to find frozen lamb kebabs in a Tupperware container. There was no note.

  ‘I defrosted it.’ Her words turn to sobs.

  Two days later, Cat Marsden identified it.

  ‘She laughed as she came out of the room,’ the pathologist recalls. ‘Laughed out loud. What sort of person would do that?’

  The police had told Catriona that Mani’s family were away, and that his wife was in no state to identify him. Actually, they wanted to observe her, to see how she behaved. Unorthodox and probably unethical, but it worked. She laughed.

  ‘A smirk at first,’ Police Inspector Alan Tait recalls, ‘then a full-blown guffaw. She put her hand over her mouth, but it was too late. We all heard it.’

  At the time they didn’t know she’d killed twice already. It took several days of painstaking searching to tie the deaths together. And at the time they didn’t know that the rest of Mani’s body was in Lambhill cemetery, squashed into a freshly dug grave meant for a still-born baby.

  18

  SIGHING IN BED: THE LUCKY ESCAPE OF STEWART GILLIES

  Stewart Gillies was in his gym in Tottenham when the phone rang. He’d taken weeks to recover from Cat’s betrayal but had managed to get back on his feet with the help of a move south, a gym manager’s job, more steroids and Barbara, who, he says, ‘never sighed in bed’. He didn’t expect to hear from Catriona or ever see her again, and was taken aback at how much her voice affected him. His face went hot and his heart throbbed. He felt angry and excited and nervous and anxious and he wanted to meet with her more than anything in the world, even though Barbara had booked a table for two at the Thai Palace in Islington for their six-week anniversary. Catriona had bought his plane ticket, which was a little strange, he had to admit, but he did want to see her, and when she said, ‘I don’t only want to see you, Stewart, I want to make love to you once more. As a goodbye gift.’ He forgot all about Barbara.

  Stewart’s flight was cancelled, and he made it to the Thai Palace after all. As he ate his banquet, he was unaware that a British Midland’s cancellation had saved his life.

  But I didn’t need to read on. Were they even there? I’d imagined them, surely, like everyone talking about me, like everyone hating me. Like the flashes, of me, waking in bed, reaching for headache tablets.

  I flicked back, frantic, until I had returned to the page in question. Were they still there? The seven words?

  19

  ‘I need her to be with me.’

  Seven words hiding among thousands of others. I re-read the words, then ripped them into tiny little pieces and placed them under the dripping tap in the sink. I still had the pencil in my right hand. The Freak had got caught up in a one-sided scuffle with the Masturbator and had forgotten to let me out for breakfast. The stodge had long been cleared away anyway. It would be four hours till she came again. Four hours alone with my wet paper and my pencil.

  She needed me to be with her. She always needed me to be with her. As an infant my presence brought her doctors and midwives and breastfeeding support counsellors. As a child, I gained for her the attention of teachers. She acquired kudos through my television career. And now I brought journalists, lawyers, paparazzi, even a biographer.

  I could hear the Freak supervising the bandaging of the Masturbator’s ‘accidental’ cuts. An image of my mother came to me. One I’d forgotten. I was really little and had gone into the kitchen to ask for another sandwich.

  ‘Mum?’ I asked quietly, and she turned from her corner holding the scissors. Bits of Brett Dalgetty’s school fleece were at her feet on the linoleum.

  Then came flashes: of her talking to me, always with another, always a third, never alone, saying:

  ‘She was silent when she came out . . . Serious, deadly serious.’

  ‘She failed to thrive.’

  ‘She wouldn’t stop crying.’

  ‘Yes, she knew how to talk to them. She was always very clever.’

  ‘Full approval!’

  ‘I need her to be with me.’

  ‘Your loosest ends are your exes.’

  ‘Thanks to Mrs Irene Marsden, without whose wholehearted co-operation this book would never have happened.’

  ‘I need her to be with me.’

  It was clear. Since I was born, my mother had deliberately set out to hurt me. I remembered Dad saying something when I was little: ‘She’s not as nice as she seems.’ And, according to Janet’s book, he’d told his friends, ‘My wife is evil.’

  Did she even love me? Or was love too much to expect? Like wanting someone with chronic depression to laugh, someone with agoraphobia to get the hell out of the house for goodness sake? Perhaps she was never capable of loving me, only of hurting, a means to an end.

  I could hurt her back. I could put her here, in this cell, in this place that is worse than death. She could wait for breakfast and then lunch and then exercise and then dinner and then she could wait for hours in the darkness of the night to be let out to urinate, with the noises of desperate masturbation her only company. She could count minutes and hours and days. She could count circuits of the concrete exercise yard. She could touch photos while lying on her bunk and name names that might rhyme and look for irregularities in the 3,198 painted bricks that encased her.

  I could put her here.

  But a good daughter wouldn’t do that. A good daughter would do something else altogether. She would write a note about remorse and, recalling the wise suggestions of Mousey Nursey, she would take a pencil to her temple, dry paper to her wrist, or wet scrunched paper to her nose and throat.

  PART TWO

  20

  Anna Jones was eating a warm croissant with strawberry jam and sipping a latte in the café beneath her Glasgow flat. It was her day off. The paper she was reading only had one small article about Catriona and it took her a while to find it. When she did, she put her latte down on the table, pushed a five-pound note under its saucer, and ran upstairs. Her flat was on the top floor and it was enormous. With stripped floors, bright walls and stuff everywhere, the space was testament to the busy, varied life of its owner. Anna grabbed her car keys and her wallet and ran down the stairs and down the road to where her red Mini was parked.

  The drive to Cambusvale took fifty minutes, most of it on the motorway, and by the time she reached the prison gates it was around eleven. She parked in front of the visits area and gave her name to the officer.

  ‘No visits till the afternoon. She’s with the doctor,’ the officer said.

  Before Anna had started her car, she had phoned Irene Marsden. They’d always got on well, ever since she and Cat had become friends at the age of thirteen. But Anna thought Irene was a bit attention-seeking – she always took her painted nails from one social gathering to another in the hope of telling stories about her unwell/naughty/difficult/famous daughter – and at times her self-absorption was inappropriate and tiresome. No more so than since Cat’s arrest, which wo
uld send most mothers into an orbit of worry and sorrow, but which sent Irene Marsden into the arms of newspaper and television reporters, biographers and tables filled with people who wanted to know more, more, about Scotland’s infamous ‘Killer X’.

  ‘Irene? It’s Anna.’

  ‘Anna, have you heard?’

  ‘Yeah. How is she?’

  ‘She’s fine. They were right next door, got to her just in time. Meet me this afternoon. Maybe we could go in together?’

  Irene Marsden put the phone down.

  Anna sat in the car a while wondering what to do with three hours. Driving home and back again would be a waste of time, so she decided to mooch around the nearby town, have lunch, a think, and then head back to the prison.

  She parked out the front of the Tea Tree, a nice deli-cum-café in the centre of the village, and ordered her second latte of the day. As she sipped her coffee, she thought about how Catriona always blamed herself for things that were not her fault – like when Anna tripped over at netball at the age of thirteen. Catriona was filled with guilt and self-loathing: ‘I’m terrible! I’m bad news!’ she’d cried. She’d also blamed herself for Anna’s moody possessiveness as a teenager, feeling that their falling out was her fault because she had got involved with Johnny Marshall. The wee soul, believing the worst of herself.

  At 2 p.m., Anna parked in the space next to Irene Marsden who, unsurprisingly, had someone else with her, a man in a suit with terrible acne scars.

  ‘Hiya, Frank,’ Irene said to the visits officer. She was on first-name terms with almost everyone at the prison. ‘Can we all get in?’

  The officer smiled.

  Anna imagined Cat as she sat in the waiting room. Green eyes, red hair, talent and a smile that sent her somewhere sunny every time. She would probably not see the smile today. She remembered the first time she’d laid eyes on her on the netball court. Poised, she was, with perfect legs that bobbed and bounded before her, always keeping her out. Why could Anna not move on? Why had she driven endless women, including Diana Rossi, away? Why did she think of little else but Catriona Marsden?

 

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