by Niki Mackay
He shakes his head. ‘Christ.’
Marcia appears from nowhere and asks, ‘You know what yer having?’
I don’t think I can stomach food and tell Marcia, ‘Oh . . . Just coffee for me, thanks.’
Peter says, ‘I’ll have coffee too and a club sandwich.’
We don’t say anything else until the coffee arrives. She has brought Peter’s sandwich and a plate of biscuits which she puts pointedly in front of me. One of those people who seems to need to feed, even when it’s not asked for. I realise I’m hungry and reach for one anyway.
He says, ‘I’ve tried to call.’
He has as well. Endlessly to start with. I didn’t have my phone for the first twenty-eight days while I was locked up. No outside contact is another of the stupid rules. When I came out, I had dozens of missed calls from him. Voicemails, text messages. He wrote a letter that went to my old house. Rob opened it, read it, and came around to the flat, banging at my door. It’s been a year since I went into rehab. I’ve been out for sixteen months.
‘I know,’ I say.
‘I found your new address, thought about coming around.’
‘I’m glad you didn’t.’
He sighs at that. ‘Are you . . . did the . . .?’
‘I’m not drinking.’
He nods. ‘I’m glad.’ And I know he is.
I smile in an effort not to fall apart and tell him, ‘I get tested every two weeks. Court ordered.’
‘That’s awful.’
I fiddle with the paper napkin on the table, tearing away at the corner. ‘It is as it is. I left Molly alone in the house.’
‘You nipped to the shops.’
‘To buy vodka, Peter. I nipped to the shops to buy vodka. At seven a.m. And I didn’t make it back.’
‘I know.’ He looks away from me. I shouldn’t snap at him. It’s not his fault he always wants to see goodness in me. And it’s not his fault that there isn’t any there.
He pours us both a coffee, adding just the right amount of milk and sugar to mine. He slides it over to me, then he says, ‘I’m very much hoping it is, but I don’t think this is a social call?’
I shake my head.
‘Not that it isn’t nice to see me though, right?’
I find myself trying not to smile. ‘Not that it isn’t nice to see you.’
He smiles. ‘Okay, what are you after, Attallee? If not my perfect body?’
I laugh as he spreads his hands wide to show all that I’m missing out on and my nerves evaporate. This is Peter. The boy whose bedroom window I used to climb into in the middle of the night. My first kiss. My last shag.
I sip my coffee. It’s too hot. ‘I’m working on a case.’
He says, ‘Good, and without an awful boss to get in your way, right?’
‘Right. The last one was a tyrant.’
He nods, looking deadly serious. ‘So I’ve heard. But with a perfect body, yeah?’
I giggle. ‘Peter.’
‘Sorry. Your case?’
‘Kate Reynolds.’
He thinks for a moment. ‘God, the angelic teen killer?’
I nod.
He says, ‘Malone ran it. Made his name on it, just before my time here, must be five years ago or so.’
‘Six.’
‘Right, we’ve had the mother of the victim in, I believe. Anthea Andrews. Reynolds is out, back in the area.’
I nod. ‘Yep.’
‘Odd choice of location, nothing we can do about it though.’
‘Anthea hasn’t hired me – Kate has.’
He frowns now. ‘What for?’
I take another sip of my drink. ‘Reckons she’s innocent.’
He doesn’t look convinced. ‘And you?’
‘I don’t know. But she pays well and it’s not another divorce case.’ My voice sounds more defensive than I mean it to.
He still looks dubious. ‘So she wants to what . . . clear her name?’
‘Yes, and find out who let her take the fall.’
He leans back in his seat. A woman at a nearby table looks at him appreciatively. I glare at her, full of the same rage I used to get when Peter would half-heartedly get a girlfriend. She looks away. Peter doesn’t notice, and asks, ‘Does she have any evidence?’
‘Not really.’
The woman is getting up and leaving. She shoots me an anxious sideways glance. I feel instantly guilty, and simultaneously annoyed.
‘I wasn’t involved in the case, but as I recall it was pretty open and closed.’
I nod. ‘She was found clutching the body. The knife a few feet away. She’d been drinking, taking drugs. Couldn’t say what had happened when we took her in.’
‘She was sent down on manslaughter, right?’
‘There were diary entries. They got leaked to the press, and the jury were equally unimpressed.’
‘That’s right. Pretty open and closed.’
I nod.
He’s studying me. ‘Except, you’re not convinced.’
I shrug, he laughs. ‘Come on, Madison . . . it’s not just the money, is it?’
‘I don’t know. I mean it is mostly the money. I’ve been in business for six months and we’re haemorrhaging cash.’
‘Do you need some help?’
‘No.’ I scowl at him. Getting back on topic, I say, ‘It was all just so easy.’
He raises an eyebrow at me. ‘Usually the most obvious answer is the right one.’
‘Usually, but you still have to dig a bit for evidence. Look, I don’t know. It was the first murder I ever worked. I was the first on the scene.’
‘And what? You didn’t like her for it?’
I shake my head, trying to put it into words. ‘Not exactly, and . . . I just thought there had to be more. No history of violence then she just goes and kills her best friend.’
‘Okay. We’re not going to be reopening it with no evidence.’
I roll my eyes at him. ‘No, of course not. That’s why she came to rent-a-cop.’
‘Hey.’
I shrug. ‘It’s true.’
‘So what do you want from me?’
I take a deep breath and just say it. ‘I want to look at the files.’
He looks like he might laugh.
I go on quickly. ‘Look, I know it’s not usual, but the case is old, and solved. A member of the public could request those files.’
‘Then request them,’ he says, frowning.
‘It might take months.’ I sound whiny.
‘Madison,’ he groans.
‘How about you let me look and I put in a request?’ I smile at him. ‘If it comes to anything we can say I went through proper channels.’
There are some police who will never, ever bend the rules. Peter isn’t one of them, but this is a big ask and I know it.
‘Christ. Let me look over them first.’
I grin from ear to ear. ‘Thank you.’
He says, ‘Did you expect me to say no?’
I glance around, trying to avoid his eyes. ‘I don’t know.’
‘I don’t think I’ve ever said no to you in our whole lives.’
My face burns red as I think about the last time he didn’t say no.
‘Thank you, Peter.’
He sighs. ‘It’s okay. Can you stop ignoring my calls?’
Now I’m looking at the table, which is no use because I can still feel him staring. ‘I don’t have anything to give you.’
‘And I don’t want to take anything. I just want to have you in my life. However that works for you.’
I pour more coffee for us both and say, ‘I heard Rob came . . . to the station.’
‘Yup.’
‘I’m sorry.’
He laughs. ‘I’m more
sorry for you, he must have been a prick to live with.’
I don’t want his bloody pity. ‘You didn’t meet him at his best,’ I snap.
‘I’ve met him before.’
‘Not properly.’
He scowls. ‘We were never going to be friends.’
I sigh and say, ‘He hates me.’
‘You didn’t do anything wrong.’
‘I cheated on him.’
Peter says, ‘You should never have been with him.’ The certainty in his voice makes me wince.
I start standing, grabbing my coat. He’s there moving my seat back. He pays the bill and we walk back to the station. The angry words about Rob are between us and neither of us speak. My head is racing with a hundred thoughts, things I don’t usually let myself think. If Peter and I were ever to be, will he forgive me for marrying Rob? Will he love Molly? I push them aside. They’re irrelevant because I’m not going there. I offer him another cigarette but he shakes his head. ‘They’ll kill you, you know.’ I frown and he takes my hand, squeezes it, lets it drop.
We hug at my car. Longer than we need to. He says he’ll be in touch about the files, then I watch him walk back into the station. He turns and waves and I get in my car.
19.
Kate Reynolds
I wake to the sound of the paper hitting the doormat. I instinctively jump up, throwing off the cover and landing on my feet next to the bed. Then I remember where I am and feel something swelling inside. Not exactly happiness but not far off. I am getting accustomed to waking up out here in the outside world more quickly than I thought I might. I get back under the covers, enjoying lying here in my own bed, wide enough to stretch out on.
I became so accustomed to being trapped and feeling claustrophobic that I didn’t even notice it. Lots of people say prison is a cop-out. Not harsh enough. In some ways they seem right – I had a television with five channels, I could make phone calls. I was one of the long-termers surrounded by other long-termers, who generally want less trouble than their petty counterparts. But I had to share a cell. With Janine. Janine was big and angry and aggressive. My accent annoyed her, my hair annoyed her, the fact that I used ‘fancy words’ annoyed her. And she had a whole horde of other girls who liked to be ‘annoyed’ by whatever she was annoyed by. It was six months of sheer hell. I was already panicky and lost, missing my home and family – confused as to where they were, wondering what the hell had happened, if I had killed Naomi and somehow forgotten – and worse still – whether I had enjoyed it. A gang of them waited for me to come back from the showers one afternoon and beat me so badly that I was on the hospital wing for two weeks. I cried solidly, whimpering for my dad. I kept asking if anyone had called him and didn’t believe them when they said they had. Because he would have come. He should have come. I wouldn’t tell the guards what happened – I knew better than that – but I begged and begged for a single cell and after I attempted, pathetically, to strangle myself with a bed sheet, they gave in. Despite the ineffectual choice of tool, I almost succeeded. Janine had been out on exercise so I knew I didn’t have long. I wouldn’t have been able to hang myself. They make sure you can’t, nothing is high enough. Instead I wrapped the sheet around my neck and then around the toilet bowl and I crawled towards the door until it tightened and then I pushed myself forward a bit more. If I hadn’t passed out I might have done it.
Once I was on my own, it wasn’t non-stop violence at least, though the threat was always there. But I wasn’t free. I didn’t feel the wind in my hair or my legs taking me somewhere with purpose. I didn’t lie aimlessly in bed in the morning knowing I could get up and do what I wanted. I sat on my bed, locked in for twenty-three out of every twenty-four hours. But those twenty-three were spent in dread of the one where someone might get me. Those twenty-three hours were spent alone with my own head. So I’m savouring the little things – clean bedding that smells like it has met softener, shampoo in nice bottles, scented soaps. And time. Oh my, the feeling that my time belongs to me again after so long when it didn’t is amazing.
I am no longer owned, trapped by someone else’s rules. In that way, I can’t think of a greater punishment than prison. I ate when I was told, woke up when I was told, and went where I was supposed to go and when. I was detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure. Held firmly in a place not of my choosing for six years. All of my adult life to date. Years that I’ll never get back. It doesn’t end there either. I will always be a criminal, branded by the invisible scarlet letter. Murderer. My sentence will never be spent, I must always declare it. I’m rehabilitated enough to stand on the periphery of life, but not to join the party.
I get up, boil the kettle, drop water over a tea bag and grab the paper. There is a photo of me on the front page. It’s the one all the papers used back in 2011 where I look like the teenage psycho from Poison Candy. Anxiety bubbles up like acid. I try to swallow it down. There is a picture of Anthea Andrews just next to it. She looks tearful and broken. Continued on page four . . . I read it knowing I shouldn’t. I call Dean, barely able to breathe, barely able to use words. He tells me to come to his office.
When I arrive his receptionist smiles and ushers me in. His ‘office’ is more like a living room with a desk in the corner. The main part of the room is taken up with sofas, which he waves me onto, then he boils a kettle and makes me tea. He has his ever present bottle of water.
‘How are you?’ he asks.
I can still barely breathe as I say, ‘Did you see it?’
‘Yes, I had Linda nip out and grab a copy. I’m so sorry.’
I’m shaking my head, trying to clear away the cobwebs and the fear. ‘You warned me this would happen.’
He looks soft, concerned. ‘I’m not glad it is happening though.’
‘I know that. Maybe you were right. I should have gone far away from here.’
He sighs. ‘Maybe, but it’s started now.’
‘What, you mean it’s too late to go back?’
He shrugs but doesn’t offer an opinion either way. He’s worried about me though – I can see it in his tense shoulders. He walks to his desk where there are bits of paper in various piles. I watch him from the other side of the room. He is straightening the papers and tapping the bottom of the pages on his desk, and then putting them into neat stacks alongside each other. I wonder what he’s working on. I don’t think he’d tell me if I asked.
I say, ‘I don’t think I can. Stop. I’m here now, aren’t I? I’ve signed a contract with Madison’s company.’
I watch him shuffle, tap, stack and he says, ‘I’m sure you could get out of it.’
‘I’d have to pay her.’
‘Probably.’
‘I’ve caused this much trouble already,’ I sigh, ‘I don’t want it to be for nothing.’
‘Then I guess you carry on.’ Shuffle, tap, stack. ‘How did coffee with your sister-in-law go?’
I smile and tell him. He is nodding in approval and I’m pleased to be able to have something good to say for once. I think about mentioning Oliver but I don’t. Dean wouldn’t approve, and I wouldn’t blame him. He was always scathing of Oliver and considered him to have taken advantage of me. He’d consider it a step backwards to know that I had contacted him again.
I talk about Bethany instead and I tell him Martha doesn’t want to see me and that I’m not going to push it.
He nods. ‘It’s just for now. Who knows what she’s thinking.’ He carries on with his papers. Shuffle, tap, stack.
I say, ‘God, I’m sorry, I’m distracting you. I’m sure you’ve got better things to be doing than sorting me out.’
He laughs and comes and joins me on the sofa. ‘Relax. I’m researching for a particularly dry paper. To be honest, the distraction isn’t unwelcome. Besides, I’ve said before that I’m here for you and I mean it, okay?’
‘Thanks, Dean.’
He smiles, his head tilting to one side. ‘Now, absent family and bad press aside, how are you?’
‘Everything feels a little bit strange,’ I admit.
‘It’s going to.’
‘I like being outside though. I like walking, and I don’t have any Janines to worry about.’
He smiles. ‘That’s great. She can’t get you here and the main thing is she didn’t break you. None of it did.’
‘This town’s giving me the creeps,’ I say. ‘I can see memories everywhere, but it’s like they belong to someone else. Like another girl lived that life and now I’m someone else with a new life.’
‘You are a different person now.’
I nod. ‘I suppose I am.’
He asks all about my family and he says it’s good that Marcus is trying to include me. He was always more positive about my brother’s letters than I thought he should be. I guess Dean is always trying to keep my morale up. He says, ‘These are good things, Kate.’ I don’t tell him my own thoughts about my brother and my suspicions of the man he’s become. I don’t mention Claudia’s Stepford-wife smile and the picture perfect home. It feels disloyal somehow and besides, maybe some people’s lives are that perfect. Maybe I’m just jealous.
‘I know, I know, they just don’t feel like my things yet, if that makes any sense.’
‘Well they are. This is your life, start getting used to it.’
I smile agreement. He’s right, of course he’s right. ‘I’ll feel better once the investigation’s finished.’
He frowns at that. ‘You should make a decision to feel better now. You have to be prepared for the fact that nothing may come from it. You need to live now, not wait to live. Haven’t you waited long enough?’
If only I could. I ask him, ‘What are you doing for the rest of the day?’
He laughs. ‘Working.’
‘And tonight?’
‘Probably more of the same.’
‘Not going to divulge any more than that?’ Our friendship has always been one sided by its nature. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t curious about his life.
He laughs again. ‘I should be getting on now, if you’re all right?’
I’m not. But I need to go. ‘I am.’