‘I’m coming!’
It was the usual breakfast scene. Coffee. Blood orange juice. Thick, crusty olive-oil flavoured bread with no-salt butter and homemade plum jam. It had been the same at breakfast since Joe could remember. Pietro had always gulped an espresso and fled to whichever business was occupying him at the time. Signora Rossi had always worked like a dog to feed and please them, the harsh lessons of her mother-in-law now well and truly ingrained. Signor Rossi always watched the news in the living room, toast and coffee on a tray on his lap.
When Catriona Marsden’s face came on the screen, the breakfast scene altered for the first time in years. Pietro held his empty cup and leaned against the arm of a chair. Signor Rossi put his tray on the coffee table and turned the volume up with his remote control. Signora Rossi stopped serving her men and froze on the spot. All of them glared, silent and grey, as the news unfolded before them. She was innocent, released, free to go wherever she wanted.
The item had finished. The presenter was talking about Iraq. Joe’s mother took the remote from its home on the arm of her husband’s armrest, turned the television off and, after a moment of stunned silence, said to Joe, ‘Don’t forget Giulia Conti.’
It was the fourth time she’d mentioned Joe’s blind date since he came in for breakfast, but this time she delivered the line as a warning: don’t let this change things, my boy.
Joe paused, absorbing his mother’s advice.
‘Have you got a photo?’ he asked, and that was that. They would not talk about it. They would go on as if she’d never existed.
‘She has a great personality,’ his mother nodded, pleased with her son’s response.
‘Dio bono,’ Joe said, grabbing his keys and slamming the door behind him.
The drive to work took forty minutes. Joe’s surgery was in an old square not far from the main drag in Lucca. Joe opened the door, went into his surgery, greeted his twenty-something receptionist, and took his place at the desk in his consulting room. It got busy almost immediately – regulars wanting repeat prescriptions, babies with colds, warts to be frozen off. He tended his patients with his usual charm, giving each the care and attention and time that they deserved.
‘Come in,’ he said to the next knock on the door.
‘Hello, Joe,’ the woman said, entering and standing over his desk.
It was Janet Edgely.
24
Janet Edgely was extremely upset by the news of Catriona’s release.
‘Impossible!’ she said when she heard the news. She was staying in a small farmhouse near Florence she’d spotted on the internet. She’d been there since completing the first draft of the book, spending her way through the two hefty advances her publishers had given her – one for the Cat Marsden book, and another for a celebrity ‘autobiography’ she was to begin ghost-writing in London in a few weeks.
‘They’re cancelling the book,’ her publicist and lover, Davina, said. She was fifty-nine and a drinker of champagne. Janet had been sleeping with her since they met at the Edinburgh Book Festival. Davina had justified Janet’s lengthy quest for everlasting love. They had planned to move to Italy together to grow olives, living off the royalties of her ‘extraordinary’ book.
‘What? But how can they?’
‘They just can . . . Read the contract,’ Davina said.
‘I can rewrite.’
‘They don’t want you to, Janet. You should get on with the ghost-writing.’
‘When are you arriving?’ Janet asked.
‘I can’t come over this weekend. I’ve got a book launch,’ she said, ‘I’ll call you.’
Janet had always believed in the one. She’d endured two arseholes and waited decades for her to arrive, and then she did. Davina Bastow.
‘I adore you!’ Davina had said after the editor’s reaction to the first chapters. ‘My gorgeous, bestselling author!’
‘We’ll have olives and bees!’ she’d declared after the publisher’s annual party, at which Janet was as swarmed as a Tuscan honeycomb.
But for now, Davina would call her. Janet would wait for her to do that.
Desperate not to lose the publishing deal, Janet decided to find out as much information as possible before returning home to Edinburgh to convince the publishers to let her rewrite the book. She looked over Catriona Marsden’s obsessive notes, many of which centred on her ex-boyfriends – ‘the plot points of [her] life’ – and other such nonsense.
She re-read her manuscript. In it, she’d argued that Catriona chose men she never really loved, that she killed them on some kind of crazed revenge spree, fuelled by unresolved issues about her father and her sexuality.
She scoured her own notes and interview quotes.
She combed through clippings about the case.
She phoned her primary school friend Margaret, a police officer in Scotland, and begged her to divulge the details of Irene’s arrest: she’d confessed and handed over the weapon, she’d had no other alibi. The DNA of the victims was on the blades, and Irene’s fingerprints were on the handle. There was enough evidence to charge her ten times over.
Then she packed her things to drive home.
En route, Janet visited Joe’s family home. His parents pretended they weren’t in. She arrived at the estate agent’s office in Bagni di Lucca to see Pietro. He’d been keen to talk in the past, mostly in support of Catriona, but was unwilling to go into much detail and had to rush off to see a house. She went to the old town in Sasso for a coffee, got into a conversation with an elderly Scots– Italian lady who introduced her to an ex-girlfriend of Joe’s, a young mother who was ordering a gelato for her little boy. But the woman didn’t speak English, and began gesticulating and ranting rudely at the mention of Joe’s name.
Next, Janet drove to Lucca to talk to Joe.
‘I heard,’ Joe replied, deadpan, to Janet’s opening statement in the surgery.
‘Are you going to talk to her?’ Janet asked.
‘No. After it happened we put it behind us. We dis-connected our landline numbers and changed our mobiles.’
‘I don’t believe her mother did it. It’s all wrong,’ Janet said, putting it out there. ‘Nothing’s ever as it seems, is it Joe?’
Someone was knocking at Joe’s door. He wanted her to go.
‘I’m going to start again, rewrite the book.’
‘Well,’ Joe said, opening the door to usher her out, ‘good luck with that.’
Then, wearing a marvellously large set of sunglasses, Janet disappeared from Joe’s surgery into the busy square.
When Joe got home from work, he didn’t say anything about Janet’s visit. His parents didn’t mention her either, though Pietro told him she’d been snooping around them too.
Catriona was free to knock on his door now. What would he do if she did? What would he say to her? He’d loved her, yes, but she’d slept with three men the week before their wedding, and, at any given time, at least one member of her family was in jail for a series of grave crimes.
And now this Edgely woman was snooping around. The family had been through enough, he thought as he showered, without some posh lady digging it all up again. As his mother intimated, it was best to ignore her – it – and get on with his life.
He got out of the shower and checked the time. He had to get dressed quickly. He had a date with Giulia Conti of the nettle ravioli.
He didn’t have high hopes. No photo. Good personality. Sure signs of weight issues, old skin, bad teeth et cetera. But when he knocked on the door of the flat Giulia owned down in Lucca, he was pleasantly surprised. She was absolutely stunning. Perhaps thirty, with black shiny hair and a feminine figure perfectly complemented by her fifties-style floral dress. And she was complicated, which he liked. Very unsure of herself, with a nervous tic that involved rapid nostril-flaring mid conversation. Perhaps this one would be right for him, he thought, as she got her bag and keys. Perhaps she’d be faithful.
She was certainly willing to put o
ut. Used tongue at the goodbye stage and asked him in for a drink, then did everything he suggested once they were inside.
‘I’d better head back,’ he said afterwards. ‘Early start tomorrow. Thanks for a wonderful evening.’
As he drove home, he realised it would probably go nowhere with Giulia. He’d see her again to make sure – after all, she had some of the qualities he liked in a woman. But she wasn’t Scottish and, for some reason, he couldn’t get the image of a Scottish bride out of his mind: milky freckled skin, red hair, light green eyes smiling over a breakfast of square sausage with fried bread.
What was it about red hair? This was his one obsession, his fantasy. The thing he called on when alone in bed with a box of tissues to hand, the two words he googled after his last patient had left and he had finished his paperwork and locked his office door.
Catriona.
Okay, he thought as his car clawed its way up the mountain, Catriona had had sex with three men the week before the wedding. He knew she was sexually adventurous. Indeed it was this eagerness that had drawn him to her in the first place.
And so sometimes she drank a little too much.
And so one time she kicked a bin when Joe said he could never leave Italy.
But she was free. Innocent.
And the memories – of her small pale arms as they swung beside him on woodland paths, of the smell of her thick long hair (strawberries, like its colour), of the impish chuckle she often surrendered herself to – made him uncomfortably hot inside.
25
For the first few days, I was very tearful. I didn’t sleep at all and almost mourned the prison noises as they had allowed me to feel something that wasn’t sadness. Mum wouldn’t see me. I tried many times, but she refused to put me on her visitors’ list. I rang the prison repeatedly, and they said there was nothing I could do, except write, which I did. But she never replied.
‘Stop feeling sad,’ Anna would say, hugging me and brushing the hair from my forehead. ‘It’s hard to believe. I can’t really believe it. But your mum’s where she should be. It’s not your fault.’
The devastation I felt at my mother’s incarceration was the worst thing I had ever experienced. Worse than Dad dying. Worse than my arrest. It clawed at me from the inside.
Anna took a few days off work. I’d watch her burn cheese on toast and make terrible meals like fusilli with baked beans, and the devastation would ease a little. She’d float around the flat calmly, lovingly, hugging me without being prompted, telling me happy stories to help me forget for a moment.
She’d always been able to make me feel better. What had I ever done for her?
‘Let’s think,’ she said when I asked her this. ‘You were there for me when Nathan died. Have been ever since. You never forget my birthday. You always listen when I need you to. You make me laugh. You always say yes when I suggest going somewhere, doing something. You’re kind. You’re generous. You have lovely eyes. You’re my best friend.’
‘You should get a lower-maintenance one.’
‘Diana was low-maintenance. She made me yawn. High-maintenance just means high expectations, and I love that you have high expectations.’
The first day after Anna returned to work, drinking took hold immediately. I met Anna for lunch so pissed that she walked me back home and put me on the sofa.
‘I’ll get unpaid leave,’ she suggested. ‘You need someone right now. And lay off the booze, all right?’
‘I’m fine,’ I lied. ‘I didn’t have very much. It cheers me up. I’ll get back on my feet. I just need time.’
She arrived home that night to find me crying under a running shower. My howling was so loud, apparently, that the neighbours had called the police to complain.
‘Forget about the men, Cat,’ Anna said, tucking me into bed. ‘Will you try to forget about them? Anyway, they were arseholes to you, remember?’
‘Don’t torture yourself about your mum,’ she said, holding my hand while I tried to doze off. ‘She’s the one who should feel bad, not you.’
For nearly two weeks, I either cried or wanted to. A lump of rock settled in my stomach somewhere. I stared and I drank, unable to imagine needing to smile or wanting to eat.
Then, one morning, I woke to the sound of Anna slipping out to work. I got up, had a shower, dried and brushed my hair, put fresh clothes on, and shook my head at the person in the mirror in front of me. Who was that person yesterday? Who was it that drank two bottles of Prosecco before lunchtime and stared at the fuzz of a non-existent television channel? Was it me?
It probably hadn’t happened overnight, but it felt like it. Before I’d finished my breakfast of orange juice and toast and Nutella – Anna still ate Nutella! – a huge and unfocused amount of energy suddenly surged within me.
I did the washing. I hoovered. I went outside and bought some food for lunch and dinner at the supermarket. I think I may even have smiled.
‘Hello you!’ Anna said when she got home from work. ‘Nice to see you again!’
We ate well that night, and danced to uncool songs in the kitchen using egg whisks as microphones.
The following day, I rose around five and cooked and cleaned till nine. When Anna was at work, I shopped, cooked, and made lists of things I wanted to do and buy. Anna came home to find I’d rearranged all the furniture in her living room.
‘It looks better,’ she said carefully.
The following day I wore a hat and a scarf and sunglasses and went for a three-hour walk around Glasgow.
I took a bus in the hope of finding someone to talk to.
Anna came in after the six thirty news finished. She seemed a bit nervous.
‘How are you feeling?’ she asked, looking around the flat for signs of my unbridled energy.
I’d taken some cocaine that a man on the number five to Castlemilk had offered me in exchange for money, then I’d come home and cooked an elaborate three-course meal.
I poured her a glass of Prosecco.
‘I’m feeling fabulous,’ I told Anna.
‘Good,’ she said, a little nervously.
She sipped the fizzy wine and sat at the table while I served the starter, homemade duck and pancakes.
‘What’s all this for then?’ she asked.
I walked towards her chair, sat beside her, and laid out five beer mats on the table.
‘You kept these,’ I said. They were the beer mats I’d drawn ‘boyfriend graphs’ on one night in a pub. I’d found them in her jewellery box.
After finding them, I’d drawn a new one to represent Joe – the line went up and down more dramatically than it had with Rory.
‘I realised today,’ I said, looking at the five graphs in line, ‘that each one of these repeats itself, over and over. They never move forward. And I also realised you’ve been there all along. I couldn’t draw a graph of you, you know.’
I knelt beside her. ‘I know I’ve been scared of hurting you, but . . .’
With this, I shut my eyes and kissed her. It was supposed to be on the lips, but she’d moved away and, as my eyes were closed, I hadn’t noticed. I got her shoulder, I think.
‘Stop!’ She was so loud she made me jump.
‘What do mean, stop?’ What did she mean? Wasn’t this what she’d always wanted?
‘No! Listen, Cat. You know what’s happening, don’t you? You’re off your head again.’ She looked at my pupils. ‘What have you taken?’
‘I don’t know . . .’ I sat down on the floor. ‘But it’s true, Anna, you’ve always loved me no matter where I am on graphs.’
She poured me some water, which I drank. It went straight out my eyes.
‘Who am I?’
‘One day you’ll understand exactly who you are and it’ll fill you with pride.’
‘What am I doing?’
‘One day, when you’re ready, you’ll understand what you want, and you’ll just go and get it. You’ll be walking along and you’ll wonder what all the fuss was about.�
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‘I’m fucked in the head.’
‘You’re not fucked in the head. Whenever you’ve gone off the rails it’s been for a damned good reason. I’d have felt scared to death if I was emigrating. I’d have been paranoid and wanted to kill myself in prison. And if my mother had been arrested for multiple counts of murder, I’d be drinking too much. You’re beautiful, you’re talented and you’re the most interesting person I’ve ever known. When are you ever going to stop hating yourself? When are you ever going to see the real you?’
But I could see the real me, and it was ugly and it was awful and I wished it would go away.
‘I know how you can stop hating and fearing yourself. I know what you need to do,’ Anna said. ‘Tomorrow, we’re going to your dad’s grave.’
26
Catriona woke up hungover, and with the memory that Anna was insisting on taking her to the Black Isle after work. This memory ignited an urge she’d had many times before – to run like the wind to a hiding place and stay there, head down, safe.
She would not go to the Black Isle. She rang Cambusvale Prison, asked a social worker to put her on the visitors’ list, and then caught the train to Stirling.
‘How are you doing?’ Catriona asked, but she didn’t need to. She could see the very same glaze in her mother’s eyes that she’d had for weeks on end. A mix of disbelief and fear, a look that says, ‘The only thing that’s making this real is the probability that someone might slash my face any second and that I will die, disfigured, in an eight-by-eight cell that has 3,198 bricks.’
‘The Freak doesn’t like me much,’ Irene responded. Initially, she’d refused to see her daughter, but a desperate need to hear her voice had overwhelmed her. When the social worker came to ask her to reconsider a visit, she immediately complied.
And here she was. Sitting at the table opposite, holding back tears just as she had when the situation was reversed.
This would be the second time Catriona would sit alone with her mother in that room. She moved closer to her mother and held her hand. ‘You should see the leaves.’
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