by Jaime Raven
She’d been serious too. Had managed to convince herself that I was her last chance. I shook my head at the memory of those pleading eyes and turned to Scar.
‘So what’s it like to be free?’ I asked.
She said she’d felt lost on her own at first. After the years inside it took time for her to feel comfortable and safe again in the big, wide world. We talked about the bar work she’d been doing in Southampton. The money was poor but at least it meant she didn’t have to sit around by herself in the evenings.
‘I’m not working tonight or the rest of the week,’ she said. ‘So we can party.’
We didn’t talk about our relationship and where it would go from here because we weren’t ready for that. I needed time to adjust to being on the outside and Scar needed to be patient. She knew I was confused so she wouldn’t push me into making a decision. She’d want me to be sure about my feelings and about what I wanted. Scar meant the world to me and it was going to be tough when and if the time came to break her heart.
As we neared the south coast I began to experience a flutter of nerves in my stomach. It felt strange to be heading back to my home town when I no longer had a home there. Before I lost my freedom I’d rented a two-bedroom flat close to my mother’s house in Northam. That was gone along with the furniture I’d managed to accumulate.
I didn’t bother asking my mother if I could move in with her and my brother, Mark. She would only have said no. Ours had always been a tumultuous relationship, and what happened while I was in prison had made things worse. It was a shame as I missed my little brother, and I knew he missed me. He didn’t visit me inside, but he did write me letters. They were short and sweet and barely discernible, but they meant a lot, and I’d kept every one of them.
We reached Southampton in the middle of the afternoon. The city lies between Portsmouth and Bournemouth and is just a few miles from the New Forest. It has several claims to fame, including the fact that the Titanic sailed from its huge port on its first and last voyage. Strangely, the good people of Southampton find that something to be proud of.
The cemetery was on a hill overlooking the Solent, that stretch of wind-lashed sea so loved by yachtsmen that separates the mainland from the Isle of Wight.
We parked at the entrance and Scar said, ‘I’ll wait in the car if you want to be by yourself.’
‘I’d like you to come with me,’ I said.
We strolled up the path with the Solent on our right and the city sprawled out on our left beneath the warm afternoon sun. Much of the cemetery was overgrown. It looked abandoned. A jungle of rampant weeds had grown up between the headstones. There were dead flowers on top of dead people.
Leo’s grave lay in the shadow of a willow tree. The headstone was small and simple. The inscription read: Here lies Leo Wells – a much loved son and grandson who left our world before his time.
My baby died just over a year ago, and they let me out for the funeral. It was a devastating experience. I remembered standing at the graveside between my mother and brother as the coffin was lowered into the ground.
‘This is your fault,’ my mother spat at me. ‘If you hadn’t chosen a path of debauchery my little Leo would still be alive.’
Her words had burned into my heart and added to the weight of my loss. And I couldn’t really disagree with her. It might have been cruel of her to point it out to me at the funeral, but she’d been right nonetheless. Leo died after contracting meningitis. Two months before his fourth birthday. I was sure that if I hadn’t been locked up it wouldn’t have happened. I wouldn’t have let the doctor send him home after deciding he had nothing more than a simple headache and prescribing Calpol. The inquest was told that if he had been admitted to hospital and put on antibiotics he would have survived.
The guilt was an agonising pain I had to live with, and I bore a heavy sense of shame and self-loathing.
But Leo’s death wasn’t entirely my fault. Whoever framed me was, as far as I was concerned, even more culpable. He, she or they had killed my little boy. And I wasn’t prepared to let them get away with it.
‘Are you all right?’ Scar said.
‘I’m fine,’ I lied.
There was a bunch of pink roses on the grave. They were slightly wilted, but still vibrant, and had no doubt been put there by my mother. I knelt down and told my son that I was back and that I was sorry I’d been away for so long. Hot tears welled up then, and this time I didn’t try to stem their progress.
I sobbed uncontrollably for several minutes while clinging to the headstone. I wanted to dig down into the earth to be closer to my son. I wanted him to feel my warmth. Instead I just let the grief work its way through me.
Eventually I got to my feet and dried my eyes. I felt Scar’s hand on my shoulder.
‘This was always going to be tough, babe,’ she said. ‘But you have to be strong if you want to find the bastards who were responsible for what happened. And I want you to know that I’ll be with you all the way.’
The Court was a four-star hotel that catered mostly for business types. It was less than ten years old and had been built overlooking a park in the city centre. The reception area hadn’t changed much. It was still cold and colourless.
We checked in and made our way up to room eighty-three on the third floor. Scar held my hand going up in the lift. She could tell I was anxious. My breathing suddenly became laboured and my stomach began to curl inside itself.
The corridor had a new carpet. The walls were lined with sepia prints of Southampton before German bombs ripped into it during World War Two. They too were new additions.
Scar inserted the key card in the lock, stood back to let me go in first. The moment I stepped through the door it all came flooding back with alarming clarity.
The room had been refurbished since that night, but everything was familiar. Bed, TV, sofa. All in the same places. The colours and shapes were different, but not the feel of the place.
Scar closed the door behind me and I had a sudden vision of Rufus Benedict lying on the bed. Blood everywhere. The knife on the floor.
I rushed into the bathroom and threw up into the toilet. The regurgitated champagne made my eyes water. I stayed there for a few minutes retching into the pan, sweat prickling my face. When I went back into the main room Scar poured me a glass of bottled water from the mini bar.
‘Drink this,’ she said.
It was cold and refreshing, but it failed to wash away the taste of vomit.
‘It must be weird coming back here,’ she said.
I sat on the edge of the bed and looked around. Saw myself in the mirror above the dressing table. Not a pretty sight.
I’d had to come back. Reliving that night was part of the process I knew I had to go through. It was necessary to remember as much as possible.
‘Talk me through it,’ Scar said.
She was sitting opposite me on the sofa, a can of Diet Coke in her hand. She’d removed her jacket, and I noticed she had a new tattoo. The name Lizzie was scrawled across her right forearm, and there was a red heart beneath it.
‘I got a call from Ruby that evening,’ I said, casting my mind back and feeling at once the sharp stab of bitter memories. ‘One of her regulars wanted someone new. I had to turn up at the hotel at eight and come straight up to the room. That was pretty much how it worked most times. All very straightforward.’
‘And businesslike,’ Scar said with a hint of sarcasm in her voice.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And businesslike.’
I’d actually been an escort for five months by then and I told punters to call me The Madam because I thought it had a saucy ring to it. The money was good and having sex with strange men wasn’t as bad as I’d feared it would be. It was usually over very quickly, and the guys were mostly decent and polite. There was the shame and guilt, of course, but it was something I was prepared to live with.
After all, I’d started selling my body out of desperation, not because it was a chosen vocat
ion. I was a single mum with a pile of debt and an addiction to soft drugs. It was an easy way to resolve my problems, or so I thought. The plan was to save enough money to pull myself out of the mire and secure a better life for myself and my son. But that’s not how it worked out.
‘Rufus Benedict opened the door in a hotel robe,’ I said. ‘He was a middle-aged guy with bad breath and a big belly. But he seemed harmless enough. We talked for a bit and just as we were about to get started there was a knock on the door. Benedict put on his robe and answered it. Outside the door there was a bottle of chilled champagne with a note saying it was with the compliments of the hotel.’
Benedict was all smiles as he popped the cork and filled two glasses. He told me to undress and sat there sipping at his drink as he watched me remove my clothes to soft background music. I’d developed a well-practised routine that was designed to tease and titillate. My clothes came off with slow precision as I licked my lips and ran my fingers gently over every inch of uncovered flesh.
‘It all gets a little hazy after that,’ I said. ‘He took off the robe and asked me to get him aroused, which I did.’
Scar was trying not to show her revulsion. I’d told her the story before, but never in so much detail. She looked away briefly and bit into her bottom lip.
‘We eventually moved to the bed,’ I said. ‘But nothing more happened because Benedict was suddenly struggling to stay awake and couldn’t even keep it up. I felt tired too and a little giddy. Then I heard someone’s voice and realised we weren’t alone in the room. I turned round and saw that two men had let themselves in.’
‘So what happened?’
‘Well, everything was distorted so I couldn’t make out their faces. Then I saw one of them attack Benedict and when I started to scream the other one put a hand over my mouth and pulled me down onto the floor. I could barely breathe. It was terrifying.’
Scar put down her Coke and came and sat beside me. She placed an arm around my shoulders. I was trembling.
‘Take it easy, babe,’ she said.
I downed some more water and said, ‘I took a blow to the forehead then and everything went blank. When I came to I was covered in blood and Benedict was lying here on the bed. He’d been stabbed once in the chest and he was dead. The murder weapon was a knife I’d never seen before and my prints were on it.’
I closed my eyes and recalled the awful sense of panic that had consumed me.
‘What did you do?’ Scar said.
‘I couldn’t stop screaming. Before long there were people knocking on the door. When I finally managed to open it I was so worked up that I fainted. The cops arrived and I was arrested. As far as they were concerned it was an open and shut case.’
‘Jesus.’
‘There was no evidence to suggest that anyone else had been in the room. The security cameras hadn’t picked anything up, and the only prints on the knife belonged to me. I couldn’t convince them that someone had come into the room while we were having sex.’
‘What about the champagne?’ she said. ‘Did they check to see if it was drugged?’
‘There was no champagne. Whoever killed Benedict took the bottle and glasses away. The hotel’s room service claimed they hadn’t delivered anything to the room.’
‘But what about the post-mortem? They do toxicology tests, don’t they? That should have shown up any knock-out drugs in your system.’
‘Well, it didn’t. My lawyer said not all drugs can be detected during an autopsy.’
I got up and walked around, touching things, while letting the memories crowd my mind. Benedict’s blood had been spattered across the sheets, the walls, the carpet. It was smeared across my own breasts and face and even now it was the dominant theme of recurring nightmares.
‘The police were certain that I murdered Benedict, but my lawyer put up a convincing argument that I was defending myself,’ I said. ‘There was the head wound and some other bruises. There’d obviously been a struggle, so the CPS agreed to drop the murder charge to manslaughter to make sure they got a conviction, provided I pleaded guilty.’
‘You were lucky you didn’t get life, Lizzie.’
That was true. But I was unlucky to spend time behind bars for something I didn’t do.
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Let’s get out of here. I need some fresh air.’
A few minutes later we walked out into the car park. As we approached the Fiesta I noticed something white under one of the windscreen wipers. I thought it was a leaflet or a flyer. But when I pulled it out I saw it was a piece of lined paper from a notebook. There were two short sentences scrawled on it in black felt tip ink.
Let it rest, Lizzie. Open up old wounds and you’ll regret it.
2
Southampton central police station. An eight-storey building near the city’s enormous port complex.
Scar waited in the car while I went into reception and asked for DCI Martin Ash. I gave my name and explained that I didn’t have an appointment. The duty officer ran his eyes over me like I was something nasty that had been blown in from the street. He probably knew instinctively that I was just out of prison. Maybe it’s something that cops can tell simply by looking at you.
Eventually he picked up the phone and called the Major Investigations Department. After a brief conversation he cradled the receiver. ‘The DCI’s out. But DS McGrath got back a few minutes ago and is coming down to see you.’
And with that he returned to whatever he was doing before I arrived. I sat on a bench and thought about the note. Back in town for less than an hour and already I’d been warned off. But that was cool because it meant that someone was worried. They knew – or suspected – that I was going to stir things up and they weren’t happy about it.
DS McGrath stepped out of a side door into the reception area after about five minutes. He was mid-to-late thirties and looked vaguely familiar. In fact I was surprised that I couldn’t immediately place him because he had the kind of looks that a girl doesn’t easily forget. Dark wavy hair, sharp distinctive features. Handsome in a rugged, natural way. A Holloway pin-up for sure.
‘Hello, Miss Wells. I’m Detective Sergeant Paul McGrath.’
He thrust out his hand for me to shake, but I ignored it as a matter of principle. Despite his good looks and obvious sex appeal he was still part of the establishment that had put me away.
‘I just talked to DCI Ash on the phone,’ he said, withdrawing his hand a little self-consciously. ‘He’s on his way back to the office and he’s happy to see you. He wants me to take you upstairs and give you a cup of coffee.’
‘I’d prefer tea,’ I said.
He flashed a thin smile, showing a gap in his front teeth. ‘That’s no problem. Just come and make yourself comfortable while you wait.’
The corridors were familiar. I was led through them after I was arrested. Very little had changed. The posters that adorned the walls issued the same old warnings about drugs, knives and casual sex.
We walked through an empty open-plan office to a small room at one end. There was a desk and several chairs. View of a bus stop.
‘Take a seat and I’ll fetch you that tea,’ McGrath said.
I sat and stared at the wall behind the desk. More posters were pinned to it, along with memos and newspaper cuttings. On the desk was a photo of Martin Ash with his family – a plump wife and two young sons. There was another framed photo on the grey filing cabinet to the right of the desk. It showed two men together – Ash and Neil Ferris. They were wearing suits and smiling for the camera. I thought back to the hours they spent interviewing me in a tiny windowless room. Playing good cop, bad cop. Trying desperately to get a confession. Pumping me with tepid tea and false reassurances.
God knows how many times they made me recount what had happened in that hotel room. They wanted to know exactly what Benedict and I had got up to before he was killed. Did we have intercourse? Did he pay me in cash before we got started?
They asked me time and aga
in why my fingerprints were on the knife if I’d never seen it before. And why the hotel staff knew nothing about the bottle of champagne I said had been delivered to the room.
It was a tough time for me. I was confused and disoriented. And angry because they refused to accept that I’d been the victim of a well-planned stitch-up.
McGrath returned with tea in a plastic cup. I couldn’t help but notice how tight his trousers were. They showed off a narrow waist and well-toned ass. It was the kind of thing that used to turn me on, and if I was honest with myself it still did. It was a stark reminder of how hard it was going to be to decide which path to follow in respect of my sexuality.
‘Careful,’ he said, as he handed the cup to me. ‘It’s hot.’
I thanked him and drank some. He was right. It was scalding, but it tasted pretty good.
McGrath sat on the edge of the desk and folded his arms. I could smell his sweat and aftershave. After four years without a man it was difficult to ignore.
‘Do you know how long Ash will be?’ I asked.
‘Any minute now,’ he said. ‘He’s probably pulling into the car park as we speak.’
I sipped some more tea and met his gaze. His eyes were pale blue and alert. He seemed to be searching my expression for something.
After a beat, he said, ‘You probably don’t remember me. But I was one of the officers who brought you in. I was a DC then.’
‘That so?’
‘You were in a bit of a state. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much blood.’
I was suddenly conscious of my appearance. I knew I looked pale and drawn. My clothes were ill-fitting and my hair was a mess. I couldn’t help wondering if he’d already given me marks out of ten.
‘I can barely believe it was so long ago,’ he said. ‘It’s flown by.’
A bolt of anger shot through me. ‘I’m glad you think so. But then you weren’t locked up in some poxy cell for most of the time.’
He looked mortified.
‘Shit, I’m sorry I said that, Miss Wells. It came out wrong. It was insensitive.’