She was happy to leave him with Alys for the evening, especially when Neil called to say he was going out to meet Alan Crookshank. She could still remember her feelings from a few days ago, when she hadn’t wanted Darren near the children, when she thought he was trying to poison their minds and take them away from her, but she found that she couldn’t connect with those fears any more. It was as if she’d been afraid of the bathwater and now found herself adrift on the ocean.
When she got to the hospital, a nurse, one she recognised, ushered her through the corridors, despite Helen’s assurances that she knew her way by now.
‘I was so, so sorry to hear about your son,’ she said, in an undertone, ‘I hope they find him very soon.’
‘Thank you,’ Helen replied automatically.
The nurse glanced over, and Helen had a sinking feeling that she was about to try to take the conversation further. Instead, though, she was talking about Barbara. Mr Eklund had been in today, she said, and Barbara was still wavering about starting chemotherapy. They hadn’t wanted to call the family, what with them having so much else on their plates …
‘What do you mean? Is she in danger?’
‘No, no, of course we’d have contacted you. She’s getting stronger following the operation, but it’s important to have a treatment plan decided. Mr Eklund is a little concerned about her. I can’t go into the detail – you understand – but he asked me to mention, if anyone visited, that he’d like to discuss it with the family in the next day or two.’
‘I see. What about Mum? Has she said anything else about it?’ Helen thought about Barbara’s comments from a few days earlier and remembered her own surprise at her mother’s hesitation. It was like remembering something from years ago – her mother’s treatment hadn’t crossed her mind for a moment since Barney had gone.
The nurse hesitated. ‘We’ve not discussed it with her directly. She’s seemed a little …’ she paused again, looking for the right word, ‘… a bit less lucid. Some of the time. She’s running a temperature. There may be some infection somewhere, but that along with … well, I understand there’s been some old personal history dug up, so to speak. She’s a little confused sometimes. We’re not finding it all that easy to engage her.’
The conversation took longer than the walk to Barbara’s room. They were huddled in the corridor, outside her door, speaking in whispers.
Helen half expected to go in and find her raving. Instead, she was asleep. Her skin looked grey and wan against the warm rose colours of her room, and her body seemed even smaller than Helen remembered it; creating a bare wrinkle, rather than a lump, in the blankets. Her breath was too shallow to shift them at all. Helen hadn’t seen her looking so bad since the night of the heparin overdose.
The nurse withdrew tactfully, and Helen slipped into the chair at the head of the bed.
‘Helen,’ Barbara whispered, her eyes blinking open and closing a few seconds later.
‘Yes. I thought you were asleep.’
She turned her head carefully from side to side. ‘Just resting my eyes.’
Helen expected she would ask about Barney, but perhaps she didn’t have the energy. Perhaps she was too confused to understand that he was missing.
‘How are you feeling, Mum?’
‘Old.’ A smile flickered on her lips.
Helen thought about what Veena had said. She looked at Barbara and tried to see the girl who had supposedly killed a child all those years ago. She imagined the crime occurring in a black and white film, a different age, a different world. Helen had always known, without fully realising, not until now, that Barbara’s love for her wasn’t straightforward, not like Neil’s was, and that her mother was frightened of her – or frightened of something she represented. It must have been her, Helen thought, not Jennifer after all, but Jennifer’s sister, Mary. The girl who would never be a woman, because of Barbara.
‘Well, your secrets are all out now,’ Helen said, and Barbara’s ghostly smile appeared again, somewhere between a smirk and a grimace of pain.
‘They are.’ She spoke slowly. ‘It’s good that your dad knows. Poor Neil’s put up with my woman-of-mystery act all these years. He deserves to have his questions answered.’
Helen felt a stab of jealousy. What about her questions? What about her son who might have been taken purely to make Barbara suffer, when Barbara, it appeared, wasn’t suffering at all?
‘Barney’s still gone,’ she said, hating her mother for making her say it like that. It was the way Helen might drop into conversation the fact that one of the kids’ birthdays was coming up, knowing Barbara might well forget otherwise, and wanting to remind her for their sake rather than hers.
She nodded. ‘I know. You’d have told me sooner if there was news. I didn’t want to rake it up for you.’
Helen let her anger flare a little. ‘You make it sound like he’s dead already!’
‘No, love, I didn’t mean that.’
She waited, wanting to make Barbara work harder, but her mother’s eyes were closed again. Her breathing slackened and Helen sensed she would lose her to sleep if she was too stubborn to keep the conversation going herself.
‘Do you think it’s her – Jennifer, I mean, or someone connected to her? Do you think …’ Her voice broke. ‘Mum, do you think they’ve got my boy?’
‘I know he’s somewhere safe, darling, I know it.’
‘What do you mean? What do you know?’
But Barbara’s eyes were closing, and a sage and saintly smile formed on her lips.
‘He’s not dead!’ Helen’s voice rose to a shriek. ‘Barney’s not dead, how bloody dare you!’ Her rage died back as quickly as it had flared and her cries petered out to sobs.
Barbara lay there, unmoving, unreached by any of it, as far as Helen could tell. The smile was still in place, but her lips were slightly parted now. There was a tiny shred of dried skin that fluttered as she exhaled.
‘You get your strength from me, Helen.’ The words were so quiet that Helen felt almost as if it was a voice in her head. ‘I wasn’t able to give you what I wanted to give you – what you deserved. I was too angry, and too scared, after everything he did to me.’
Her breath came in wheezy, unhurried lengths. Helen inched to the edge of her seat, forcing herself not to speak, grasping every word like a treasure.
‘But we’re strong, you and I. You might not forgive me, but I know you’ll be all right in the end.’
Helen couldn’t say how long she sat there, waiting and waiting for more words that didn’t come. She watched Barbara, and her mother disassembled in front of her. She was no longer a mother, no longer a person, just an array of dissected, desiccated human matter. Helen watched the wiry hair that sprung from Barbara’s head to follow the path that almost seventy years’ worth of her hair had followed: twisting into the cow’s lick set down by a random stutter of DNA all that time ago. Then she turned to Barbara’s papery skin, the origami complexity around her eyes and her neck and the peeling layers on her still-pink lips. Helen looked at her nails, her freckles, her nostrils, her eyebrows.
The fabric of Barbara was utterly familiar, both from those early intimate years and from the echoes Helen saw every day in her own, ageing features. Yet now, Helen took in the ailing – perhaps even dying? – body with the cold eyes that we turn on famine victims or refugees, people so removed from us that empathy comes at too high a price.
She didn’t know how long she had sat there before the nurse came to change the water jug; before she had to reply to a text from Darren about Alys; before there was a tap at the door and Veena walked in, accompanied by a nurse.
‘There’s been a development,’ she said, gently, but without preamble. ‘I think you should come home.’
‘You’ve found him?’ There was fear rather than hope in Helen’s voice, as Veena’s manner was all wrong for good news.
She shook her head.
October 1962
Katy
&
nbsp; The jury returned its verdict on Tuesday 23rd October – the same day that the British public had woken up to the news that Khrushchev had put missiles on Cuba. As the grand court room at St George’s hall filled, Katy gazed upwards, at the distant ceiling and windowless courtroom walls, imagining thick clouds cantering past on a stiff autumn breeze and wondering how the ponderous lawyers would react to the four-minute warning.
They talked about it at school sometimes, as they talked about every subject that they couldn’t mention to their parents. Mary Elton had said she’d let her boyfriend go all the way if the four-minute warning came because she didn’t want to die a virgin. The other Katy – Katy Flannagan – had said God would still see and Mary would be in hell as soon as The Bomb went off. Mary had laughed and said she didn’t expect Kenneth would last very long, so she could probably squeeze a few Hail Marys in before the four minutes was up. Katy Clery had crossed her legs and hoped no one asked her about dying a virgin.
She wondered if Mary and Katy and the other girls at school had been following the trial. Would they believe her version of events, or Simon Gardiner’s? Would they be thinking about her today, or would they be too busy worrying about Cuba? In a way, it didn’t matter. Whatever the verdict, Katy knew she’d never be one of them again.
At last, the foreman was invited to stand. His large, rheumy eyes kept flicking to the piece of paper in his hand, as though he was scared of saying the wrong thing.
The judge’s questions came quickly, almost impatiently.
‘Do you find the defendant, Simon Gardiner, guilty or not guilty of the murder of Mary Gardiner?’
‘Not guilty.’
‘Do you find the defendant, Katy Clery, guilty or not guilty of the murder of Mary Gardiner?’
‘Not guilty.’
‘Do you find the defendant, Katy Clery, guilty or not guilty of the manslaughter of Mary Gardiner?’
‘Guilty, on the grounds of diminished responsibility.’
Katy heard no more. For her, the awesome, terrible nuclear starburst bloomed there and then. Not in the October sky outside, not over the Mersey shipyards, but across the vaulted courtroom ceiling. They thought she had lied. Those seven men and four women. They had all fallen for Simon’s smooth story like a pack of dockyard apprentices sent out to buy a plimsoll line.
The sentencing was a blur; she was still reeling from the verdict, from the horrible realisation that telling the truth hadn’t been enough. In her heart, she’d never believed it would come to this. She couldn’t blame her lawyers – they’d painted it black from the start – and her mother had had scarcely a word to offer beyond ‘oh, Katy’, repeated endlessly. No, she’d been the one who had kidded herself that somehow everything would be okay if she only stuck to the truth. Now it was far from okay, and she only had herself to blame for the shock of it.
Whatever her fate was, the judge pronounced it with a nasal growl and an air of retribution, his fingers seemingly itchy for the black cap. Simon wept tears of relief and his wife Etta howled so loudly she had to be led out by an usher. Joyce Clery dabbed her good handkerchief – the one with the Bruges lace edging – against her eyes and took herself out quietly when the clerk got everyone to stand. Katy wasn’t sure if Joyce would come down to the holding cell or not, but she was there when the policeman led Katy in a few minutes later.
‘He said eight years, but that’s the absolute maximum,’ explained Mr Browning, the solicitor. ‘It could have been a life sentence. This way, it might be as little as four years if you keep your chin up and tow the line, and once the eight years is up they can’t call you back like they could if you were a lifer. Plus, Katy, you must remember you’re not going to gaol. It’ll be more like a boarding school really.’ He smiled weakly. ‘Yes, I think we’ve had rather a good innings there, all things considered.’
‘It could’ve been a whole lot better if they’d believed me.’
‘That’s true,’ he admitted. ‘But we always knew that Mr Gardiner would make a good fist of it, didn’t we?’
Katy wondered if he believed her version of events. She had asked him once, earlier on, before the trial had even started, and he told her it didn’t help to think about whether his clients were guilty, so he didn’t. He certainly seemed untroubled by the verdict, judging from his slightly impatient manner and the occasional, gentle rumbling of his stomach.
Joyce didn’t say much initially, just a few muttered ‘oh, Katy’s whilst she was still dabbing with the handkerchief. As Mr Browning made to leave, though, she became more animated, pestering him for details of how often she could write to her daughter and when she could visit. Despite all her fuss, Joyce couldn’t seem to bring herself to actually speak to her daughter. Katy knew her mother believed her story; she didn’t have any doubt on that score. The problem was, Joyce would probably have been less devastated on the whole if Katy had killed the girl.
Eventually, the policeman on the door stepped in to draw matters to a close. The prisoner had had enough time, he said. There was a van waiting for her.
‘One thing about ruddy Khrushchev’s antics,’ said Mr Browning, as a parting shot to Joyce whilst he did the buckles on his leather briefcase, ‘at least it’ll knock little Missy here off the front pages.’ He stood in the corner, making a show of busying himself cleaning his glasses, whilst mother and daughter said their farewells.
‘I’ll be fine, Mum,’ said Katy, hesitating a moment before throwing her arms around her mother’s waist, pushing her cheek into that familiar shoulder. It seemed that Joyce couldn’t bring herself to say anything, but at least she hugged back. The relief hit Katy like a wave and she clung all the harder for fear that if she didn’t, she might drown. Her sobs came silently, building in force until she was shaking with it.
The policeman stepped in and pulled her back, but gently. She tried to watch her mother leave; she wanted to imprint a last image of her in her mind. But her eyes were too blurred by tears to see her, and, with the policeman’s arms pinning her own to her sides, she couldn’t even wipe them away.
*
The exit from the back door of the court building under a blanket; the long, bumpy journey in the police van; the bewildering induction procedure at Ashdown – all these, too, passed in a haze of confusion and unreality.
At last, though, Katy lay alone and silent between the scratchy sheets of a metal bed that was bolted to the floor. The blackness outside gave no clue as to the time, but she guessed it couldn’t be earlier than two a.m. Never before in her life, she realised, had she been awake for so many consecutive hours. If Khrushchev decided this was to be the Last Day, then, on one view, she’d made the most of it.
As she lay there, and her thumping heart gradually managed to quiet itself, the tears came again. Running rivers of salt water marched down her cheeks and on to soak the thin, dead pillow beneath.
Perhaps it will be better in the morning, she told herself, trying to rally a little. Sleep would give her some strength back, and everything would seem less daunting in the daylight. With some effort she closed her eyes and began to will her adrenaline-wretched body to slow down, to succumb to the forgetfulness that sleep offered. Gradually, her breath deepened, a heaviness settled on eyelids, so that finally keeping them shut was no longer a struggle. The low bed was soft and its faint human stench was oddly comforting.
She was only a whisper away from oblivion when the voices started.
Murderer.
It could have been the breath of the wind in the branches outside, or the rattle of water through an ancient pipe.
Child-killer. Freak. Murdering bitch.
The voices rose, swirling like floodwater, seeping through the walls and under the doors. The vicious chorus was backed by the creak of springs and banging of metal bed frames. Her eyes wide again, Katy pushed herself upright on the bed. The taunts rushed towards her, stinging at her like needles.
‘Quiet!’ It took only a few harsh words for the voices of authority to quell
the noise, but the threat echoed in the air, lingering around her like smoke. There would be no sleep that night.
*
There were always staff around in the Unit. The routine of locking, unlocking, staff escorts and timed checks was ever-present. After a few days, she started to get used to it. Occasionally, however, the hostility slipped through the cracks. A boy in a classroom, pushing a sharpened pencil into her arm; another boy detailed to clean a corridor with Katy, refusing to speak or to look at her. They were virtually all boys here. They were like the bad boys she knew from school – the very worst of them.
It came to a head one teatime, when she’d been there for four or five days. Of course, there were staff in the lunch hall, but they couldn’t be everywhere at once. This was a prime opportunity for insults to be exchanged, secrets to be whispered and, occasionally, for blows to be traded. Katy was in the queue, alone as usual, when a sharp shove to her back caused her to lurch forward.
‘Child-murdering bitch!’ The taunt was whispered just loudly enough for those around to hear.
Heart pounding, Katy turned around. She sensed that this was a test that could define the time she spent here, but she was far from sure she’d pass it.
She faced a huddle of smirking boys, jostling each other and leering at her with unconcealed fascination.
‘Well, it’s true, ain’t it?’ She recognised the voice from the earlier taunt. He was a meaty kid, probably about her own age, with livid acne flaming on his neck, and fleshy lips that sprayed spittle as he talked. ‘We don’t like people who mess with kids in here,’ the boy sneered. ‘We might need to teach you a lesson.’
Katy’s tongue felt thick in her mouth. He was disgusting. But he had friends here and she didn’t. They pressed in on her and, almost imperceptibly, she felt herself shrink back. Panic began to rise in her chest.
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