by Paula Daly
It’s a man. A young man. He’s dressed completely in black and as Tess goes to step around him, trying to give him a wide berth, he holds up his hand. ‘Wait,’ he says. He has an edgy energy and the two women are immediately on guard. Tess glances behind her. She’s looking for help should this turn nasty but sees there is no one. ‘You came to my house,’ the man says, and he gestures to Avril’s nose. ‘My mam gave you that. I’m Kyle Muir.’
Tess now realizes who the man is. He is Ella Muir’s brother. Earlier, his stringy black hair had been covered with a baseball cap.
‘We really don’t want any trouble,’ Tess murmurs. ‘It was a misjudgement on my part to come to your home. I should have telephoned first. I apologize.’
Kyle frowns. ‘You said there’s been a miscarriage of justice. That’s what you came to tell us, right?’
Tess hesitates. Kyle is standing with his hands in his pockets and is avoiding eye contact. He is completely unreadable and she’s not sure how to play it. ‘An alleged miscarriage of justice,’ she replies carefully, ‘that’s what we’re looking into. Is there something we can help you with?’
Kyle is now nodding. He has something to say but it’s as if he’s finding it hard to come straight out with it. He looks over his shoulder to make sure he’s not being watched. Finally he says, ‘Look, she was my sister an’ everythin’, but I don’t think it’s as cut and dried as they made out. That woman they said killed her mightn’t’ve killed her.’
Tess lets Avril’s arm fall from her grasp and steps towards him. ‘What makes you say that?’ she asks, her unease vanishing in an instant.
‘You can’t tell anyone I’m talking to you.’
‘I won’t.’
‘No, like, they can’t know. No one can know I’m talking to you. Especially my family. Especially my mother.’
‘We are very discreet. Why don’t you think she killed her, Kyle?’
Kyle shifts his weight on to his other foot. He swallows. ‘I heard rumours. You need to talk to Ella’s friend. She knows stuff about Ella that no one else knows. You need to talk to her.’
‘Why didn’t you come forward with this before?’
Kyle looks taken aback.
‘If you had your doubts,’ presses Tess, ‘why not say something earlier?’
‘’Cause everyone seemed so sure it was her.’
‘OK,’ says Tess, taking a notepad from her handbag, ‘what’s the friend’s name?’
‘Steph.’
‘Surname?’
‘Reynolds,’ he says. ‘Don’t say I sent you.’
‘I won’t. Any idea how we can contact her?’
‘She used to work with Ella at the café on the stone jetty. She might still be there.’
Tess jots this down. ‘OK, but what else can you tell us? Why do you think they got the wrong person? Did you—’
Kyle is gone.
Later, they drive towards home, lost in their own thoughts. Tess is trying not to get too carried away. The wrong person? This never happens. Things never fall into her lap like this. For Tess, investigating cases can at times be so boring and laborious she wonders why she ever agreed to take the role in the first place. But the thought that somebody knows something – the thought that someone potentially knows who really did murder Ella Muir – has her twitching in her seat.
‘How do you feel about the CCTV footage of Carrie’s car now?’ asks Avril, substantially perkier than an hour ago.
‘Better,’ replies Tess.
‘Is this how it is? One minute you’re thinking they’re guilty, the next they’re innocent?’
‘Not always. But it’s exciting when it happens.’
She drops Avril at her home and is almost disappointed to see the place in darkness. Up until now, she’d envisioned Avril arriving back to a cosy stone cottage: fire blazing in the hearth, a mug of strong tea and two buttery crumpets waiting for her on a tray, courtesy of William. ‘Will you be OK?’ Tess asks. ‘Do you want me to come in with you?’
Avril climbs out. ‘No, I’m good. Hot bath and a frozen pizza and I’ll be back to myself. Thanks for looking after me,’ she says, and she slams the door shut.
As Avril ambles along her pathway towards the house, Tess pretends she’s checking her phone as she furtively watches Avril until she’s safely locked inside.
Then she knocks the car into reverse, and she heads towards home.
The green Subaru is there already, of course, waiting for her. Watching. Hiding in the darkness.
Now he knows where she lives, he’s there almost every night.
Now
CARRIE HAS BEEN tasked with spending time with a vulnerable prisoner today. The officers do this: pair them up for a time, and Carrie’s not criticizing the programme, she can see how beneficial it is for the younger girls, the girls who come in here without hope and will most likely return to a hopeless situation. What Carrie has to offer other than a sympathetic ear, though, she’s not sure. But apparently it’s enough. Certainly, the girls seem to act as though it’s enough, often thanking Carrie profusely after they’ve aired their life stories, when really all she does is sit in a chair and refrain from speaking for a couple of hours. If she’s allowed to, she prefers to get the girls busy. She likes to get them working in the gardens or helping out with food preparation. They seem to talk more easily when their hands are busy. It’s as if the very act of purposeful movement allows them to forget themselves for a while and they’re able to get out of their own way. Able to talk freely without overthinking things.
Carrie sometimes wishes there’d been a Carrie to listen to her when she first arrived at Styal. Someone to help her see her life wasn’t over. Someone to help find a way through the despair.
Today Carrie’s working with Abi. Abi is a 23-year-old chronic self-harmer, who’s in Styal for the second time on drugs charges. She was brought up in foster care – ‘Nice people, they were very good to me,’ she’s always quick to point out to Carrie, or to anyone else for that matter – and she has five months left to serve of her sentence. In Carrie’s previous life she’d have been eager to know how the disconnect happened: how did Abi go from a loving home, with decent parents, to long-term substance abuse? But after three years of listening to girls like Abi, she doesn’t ask. What does it matter? They’re here because they’re here.
Carrie is waiting for Abi in the television room of C wing. C wing is where the vulnerable girls are housed and where there are systems in place to keep them ‘healthy’. Read healthy as: not dead.
They are all suicide risks and so are required to be in groups a lot of the time so they can be observed. But this comes with its own set of stresses: girls with mental health issues can find their mental health compromised by being in the constant company of girls with mental health issues. This is where the mentoring programme comes in. Pair up a vulnerable girl with an experienced prisoner like Carrie and it’s a win-win. Abi benefits from Carrie’s sympathetic ear, her understanding, her calmness; and Carrie’s day is broken up nicely by ministering to a girl in need. Because, as everyone knows, if you want to feel better about your own shitty situation, help someone out with their shitty situation. Yes, thinks Carrie, a win-win.
Carrie wishes she knew what she knows now back when Mia was struggling with anxiety, during her mid-teens. The vulnerable prisoners she deals with today have taught her she could have done things differently. She certainly wouldn’t be as tit for tat with Pete if she had her time again, as she can see how that only screwed things up further for Mia. She shouldn’t have used Mia to get at Pete in the way that she did. Pete said she used Mia as a pawn, and she’s had to admit that she did. She’s since apologized to Mia for this.
Abi arrives looking washed out and forlorn. She’s taken to dragging a blanket from her bed around with her – as a toddler might do for comfort – insisting she’s always cold. Carrie doesn’t comment on the blanket as the other women have. She can see the appeal as Abi sits and wraps the thin
g around her, cocooning herself from her environment. ‘Is there anything you want to do today?’ asks Carrie. ‘D’you fancy going outside for a walk?’
Abi shakes her head. ‘I don’t feel well.’
‘Your tummy bothering you again?’
Abi nods.
‘Are you up to talking just for a little bit?’ asks Carrie.
‘Can I sit next to you?’
‘Sure.’
Carrie shifts across the small two-seater to make room for Abi. And Abi climbs on next to Carrie, folding her feet beneath herself and laying her head on Carrie’s shoulder. The tactility doesn’t bother Carrie so much any more. She’s used to it. She would even go so far as to say she needs it. She barely gets to touch her own daughter, will barely get to touch her own grandchild when it arrives, and so she must get her fix from these sad, broken girls.
After a few minutes, Abi’s breathing slows and her head starts to become heavy. It’s pressing into a tender spot halfway along Carrie’s upper arm and the arm is beginning to throb. Gently, Carrie shrugs Abi away from her, before putting her arm around Abi’s shoulders and letting the girl cosy in. Abi starts to weep. This is not unusual and so Carrie doesn’t comment. She lets the girl cry, while stroking her hair.
Mia used to do this, Carrie remembers. When life became too difficult: when she’d been shunned by her friendship group for a reason she couldn’t fathom; when a boy called her ugly (a boy undoubtedly uglier than her); when she’d bled right through to the chair in the lunch hall and no one had told her. When these crises hit, Mia would fold herself next to Carrie’s body on the sofa, and Carrie would stroke her hair until the traumas began to melt away.
Sometimes, Carrie pretends girls such as Abi are Mia, and she’s surprised at the comfort she can gain.
‘Can we just stay here for a while?’ Abi whispers.
And Carrie tells her they can.
Now
THE FOLLOWING MORNING Tess wakes late. She is ravenously hungry with a thumping headache behind her right eye. She lies in bed feeling both outrageously angry at the world and unbearably sad. Sad to the extent that she could burst into tears. So, before doing anything else, she heads to the kitchen and takes two Nurofen. She then makes a large coffee, along with a toasted English muffin, dripping with butter, and finally, she collects the large box of Lindor chocolates from the back of the cupboard, chocolates she’d been hiding from herself until today, the start of this month’s bout of PMS.
Tess eats the lot. She knows the signs. No point in fighting it. Best to just give in and let it happen.
An hour later, fortified, Tess feels able to face the day. She has a second coffee on the go and is in her home office, dialling the number she’s found for the café on the stone jetty in Morecambe. As the call connects, she looks at the crime scene photograph of Ella Muir. She makes a point of looking at Ella at least once a day. Even if she doesn’t want to. Even if, like this morning, the sight of poor Ella makes her sick to her stomach. It stops Tess getting ahead of herself, keeps her cognizant of the fact that no matter how hard she pushes to clear her client’s name, someone has died. Also, Ella has a way of talking to Tess from the photograph. Her wounds, the angle of her head, the expression on her face are the only things she has left to communicate what happened to her, so the least Tess can do is look.
There’s a click on the line and a voice says, ‘Stone Jetty Café.’
Tess stops chewing. ‘Hi, is that Steph Reynolds?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, great … I hope I’m not disturbing you. You don’t know me, my name’s Tess Gilroy, and I’m looking into a case that involves your friend Ella Muir?’
Silence from Steph’s end.
‘I appreciate it’s probably a bit of a shock to hear her name after all this time but I was wondering if we could meet? Maybe talk about Ella and what you know about her death?’
‘What do you want to know?’
‘I work for a charity called Innocence UK, and we help people who may have been wrongly imprisoned. We believe that the person serving the prison sentence for Ella’s murder may have been the victim of a miscarriage of justice, and we’re investigating if—’
‘I don’t want to be part of any investigation.’
And Tess hears three staccato beeps.
Steph has ended the call.
Tess frowns. ‘Well, what are you hiding?’ she says aloud.
Later that morning, at Styal Prison, the prison officer searching through Avril’s bag looks at her beaten-up face and refrains from commenting. She hands the bag back to Avril and tells her she can proceed through to the visitors’ area.
‘Why d’you think Ella’s friend doesn’t want to talk to you?’ Avril asks Tess as they walk.
‘Some people just don’t.’
‘Do you think she’s hiding something?’
‘Maybe. But also, you’ve got to think that as far as Steph Reynolds is concerned, justice has already been done. The person who killed her friend is in prison, where she belongs, so from her point of view that’s the end of it … How do you think you would feel if someone called you up saying they believed the person who’d killed your loved one was innocent?’
‘Not great. Or I’d think it was a crank call.’
Tess agrees. ‘Yeah. The general public has no idea that such a thing as Innocence UK exists, so you can hardly blame them for wanting nothing to do with us. I’ll give Steph another try later. Use my powers of persuasion to change her mind.’
‘And if she won’t?’
Tess shrugs. ‘Move on to something else for now, try our next lead.’
They file into the visitors’ area and Carrie’s at the far end of the room again. She tries to smile when she sees Tess approach, but it’s as if she can’t quite make her face work in that way today.
When Carrie catches sight of Avril, following on behind Tess, her black eyes shining, she averts her gaze just as the prison officer did, and this is interesting to Tess. It’s something Tess has done herself in the past upon seeing a woman’s bruised face. The instinct of blurting out: What happened to you? overridden at the last second in case the woman is the victim of domestic violence and is embarrassed. No wonder that shit stays hidden, thinks Tess.
‘Good to see you, Carrie,’ Tess says. ‘How are you holding up?’
‘OK,’ she replies, but she’s clearly not. ‘Mia’s in labour … I should be with her. She’s on her own.’
Carrie is obviously stricken and instinctively Avril puts her arm around her shoulder to comfort her. ‘Will you be Nanna or Grandma?’ Avril asks gently, and Carrie says she thinks Nanna.
‘She won’t get through it,’ Carrie goes on, panicked. ‘Her head’s not in a good place. She’s not prepared and she really can’t tolerate pain.’
‘Can any of us?’ replies Avril.
And Carrie tries to smile a little. ‘I’d just really like to know how she is.’
Tess removes a folder from her bag and sits down. The tension in the air around Carrie is palpable and Tess can see she’s struggling to hold it together. Tess almost says something inane like people have babies every day, but she catches herself at the last second. She decides the best option here is to wait. She’ll go against type and will refrain from advising that speculating about Mia’s labour won’t get Carrie out of prison any faster, and she will wait for Carrie until she herself is willing to proceed with today’s meeting.
This takes less time than she thinks and when all involved appear ready, Tess picks up her pen and says to Carrie, ‘So, we visited your ex-husband.’
‘Did he call me a witch?’
Tess smiles. ‘He might have done.’
‘I thought as much.’
‘I don’t understand why he was never investigated for the murder.’
‘Oh, he didn’t do it,’ replies Carrie matter-of-factly. And when Tess raises her eyebrows, she adds, ‘You met him, didn’t you?’
Tess nods.
�
��Did he strike you as someone clever enough to do something like that and get away with it?’
Tess considers this. It was a bit of a stretch.
‘And his alibi,’ Carrie says, ‘his secretary – June? Did you meet her?’
‘Yes.’
‘She vouched for the fact he never left the office and the phone records show he placed a call. He made one phone call from his office when Ella was already dead. And besides,’ Carrie says, almost sadly now, ‘whatever else there is to say about Pete, he did love that girl. He was besotted with Ella. I don’t see how he could’ve hurt her.’
Tess makes a note of Carrie’s logic. She can see her reasoning. Carrie knows Pete better than anyone so is probably in the best position to speculate on what he’s capable of. Tess decides to cut her losses and move on. ‘OK, let’s go back to what we have.’ She pauses. A prison officer is making her way between the rows of chairs, checking on her flock. Tess waits for her to pass. ‘Look, Carrie,’ Tess says, when she’s out of earshot, ‘I’ll be totally honest with you. So far, yes, we have found a couple of promising bits of evidence to substantiate your claim, but they’re not enough. And we need more. Can you think again for us? Really think this time. Is there anything else you can tell me? Anything at all that will help your case?’
‘I’ve been over it again and again,’ Carrie says.
‘One last time?’
‘I’ve been over it more times than you can imagine, and everything I know I’ve already told to the police.’
‘All right,’ replies Tess, ‘all right. I understand. I know it must be frustrating, it’s just that before we go back to the Innocence UK panel, I could really do with another lead, something else to—’
‘Why did you even go to Ella’s house in the first place, Carrie?’ cuts in Avril unexpectedly. She has removed her arm from around Carrie’s shoulder and there is now some space between the two women. ‘You say that you didn’t care about Pete’s affairs, and yet you visit the woman he’s involved with. Why do that? You could have phoned to tell her to be more discreet. You didn’t need to turn up at her door.’