She loved me too, Amanda thought to herself. Didn’t she?
As the eulogy drew to an end, Amanda snuck out of the church. She was an impostor. She had always been an impostor. She longed to walk behind the pall bearers as they carried the coffin out, to drive in the main car, to stand at the front at the cemetery and throw dirt on the coffin. But she couldn’t. Her rightful place in this woman’s life, as always, was nowhere. Amanda walked down the steps of the cathedral, beside the empty hearse, and to her car.
She’d long been an atheist, but as she drove home she prayed out loud. She prayed that someone was listening. She prayed that Bridget was at peace. She prayed for forgiveness. She prayed that justice would be done, that her husband would be released, and that the police would find the monster who’d killed her beloved Bridget.
40
Who killed Bridget McGivern?
FUCK! I had woken late, trudged my way into the kitchen and stubbed my toe on the blackboard I’d placed right in the middle of the room when I was pissed as a fart the night before. What a drunken idiot. Who killed Bridget McGivern? Incident room! Jesus Christ, I needed therapy. I needed detox and therapy. I also needed a drink of water because my mouth had been invaded by rabbit fluff that’d been mixed with rabbit shit and rabbit sawdust. I put the blackboard back in Robbie’s room and brushed my teeth for seven minutes.
*
I’d never really experienced a proper break-up. I’d watched two friends go through it, though. One, Laura, was surprised by it on an unusually hot afternoon. She’d come home from work with an organic chicken to find him gone. Three years living in the same flat, never a hint of unhappiness, and all she had was a huge and extortionately priced chicken, which she still cooked, and this surprised me as much as his leaving surprised her. That she just got on with it, even roasted some potatoes Delia-style, which isn’t easy, didn’t run fast on roads looking for him, stand on bridges in snow begging, stay under her dark duvet till she was crusty. She just got on with it, let him go, like that.
The other friend wasn’t surprised by it, because she orchestrated it. Bored with twice-weekly encounters and arguments over Sky Plus management, Jane found it simpler to fuck the brains out of the guy at the corner shop than just politely ask her husband to leave.
I’d never experienced it because I’d never been in love, and I surprised myself, actually, because I never thought I’d be more sensible than organic Laura or Sky Plus Jane, but I was. I was sensible, despite the previous night’s madness, and I decided I would think this thing through and save it, which, I knew above all else, required the support and advice of my mother.
*
‘Where’s Chas?’ Mum asked when I arrived at the door the next morning.
‘Can I say hi to the Robster first?’ I asked, kissing her.
Robbie and Dad were in the back garden. Robbie was digging a hole with his wee garden fork. ‘I’m building a tree,’ he said. ‘Then Granddad’s going to make a new tree house.’
‘There’s something wrong, isn’t there?’ Mum guessed when I came back inside. ‘Sit down, have something to eat before you go to work. Where’s Chas? Robbie says he paints all day and all night’
‘We’ve split up!’ I said, then cried and blew my nose melodramatically for quite some time.
‘What? How? Tell me, darlin’.’
‘I kissed someone at our party!’
Mum and Dad were long-suffering. I’d long been a difficult daughter. I’d always got into trouble as a kid, teenager, and now as an adult. They’d always been there for me, with words of comfort and advice, always at the end of the phone, on their way over …
Until now.
‘Right, Kristina, that’s it.’
‘Excuse me?’ I said.
‘You moved out less than a month ago and you’ve already stuffed it up?’
I bawled with resolve at this. Little did she know, I’d not just fucked up my relationship, I’d also:
– Become addicted to the manicures of the wife of a client, who was therefore by default a social work client herself – i.e. not to be confused with a friend or service provider.
– Become unprofessionally close to a (possible) murderer and (definite) client.
– Hugged said client/murderer in prison.
– Started drinking again. Too much.
– Started smoking.
– Not just tobacco, but joints, at parties.
– Snorted speed.
– Harboured Class A drugs.
– Sexually assaulted a colleague at a party.
– Endangered the life of my family as a result of all the above.
‘How can you say that?’ I yelled at her. ‘How can you be so heartless?’
But she didn’t back down, or sit down, or change her body language and tone to her normal motherly forgiving one. Instead, she stood over me with pointed finger and said: ‘Chas has done everything for you, and you’re a silly brash girl. Personally I don’t think you deserve him.’
‘But you said I did deserve him!’
‘I’ve changed my mind since you’ve moved out! And I’m telling you, if you don’t get off that self-obsessed arse of yours now and go beg his forgiveness, then I’ll punch you in the face.’
‘You will not,’ I said, daring her tight face, which was mightily close to mine.
But she did. Without a moment’s hesitation, she put her little mumsy hand into a fist and punched me on the nose, and while she gasped as if she had not intended to make contact, it bloody hurt, but more than that, it scared the shit out of me. Mum had never so much as smacked me on the back of the hand.
‘We’ll look after Robbie. You go beg that poor boy to come back, and tell him I said I don’t blame him if he doesn’t.’
She opened the door and waited till I was gone, slamming it in my face and leaving me and my tissue on the step.
What was I supposed to do? Go back to the studio again? I sat on the stone wall in the front garden for a few minutes, then I got in the car.
What would I find when I went in? Him touching her? Playing with her hair the way he does? Telling her all the right things?
I’d had bad dreams that Chas wasn’t real, that he told loads of women the same stuff he told me. After all, how could he be real? How could that floatation tank feeling he gave me be real? That feeling of being constantly surprised and interested by what he had to say? Of being so proud to show him off to my friends and colleagues? Of lying on him in bed, nuzzling into the perfect amount of hair on his chest? He was too good to be real … I needed him back … I was going to go in. But first, before going in to beg with heartfelt speech using eloquent prose including some of the above, I tried to look in through a teeny window just to check he was there (liar! I peered to check if she was there).
I couldn’t see him, so I went around to the other side of the building. I jumped up, but the window there was too high, so I found a crate and stood on it, then looked down through the window and into the small kitchen. I couldn’t see anything, but I could hear Chas on the other side …
‘… You are my best friend, my light …’
My gasp caused me to fall from the crate.
When I got up I could hear whispering and giggling in the toilet. I ducked as quickly as I could and listened …
… to a kiss noise.
Kiss-kiss noise.
Mmm, from her.
Mmm, her again.
I fell off the crate again and bashed my forehead. Furiousness fired me all the way back to Mum’s. This Madeleine was his best friend, his light … she had a job he understood, one that didn’t make her drink when she was stressed, who was relaxed and safe; she’d probably had orgasms all her life, without batteries, and she had no children to complicate matters.
I drove back to Mum and Dad’s house and lied to them.
‘He wasn’t there,’ I said to Mum. ‘I need to get to work.’
I kissed Robbie goodbye as Mum tried to apologise for the
punch, which she hadn’t actually meant to do. Had my nose grown? Did she need glasses? She was so sorry, but so glad I’d sorted it out.
‘Good,’ I said.
I did very little at work. I was furious all day.
And that night, after collecting Robbie and putting him to bed, I reverted to the Laura Plan of break-up management, whereby the chuckee submerges him or herself in unrelated business such as chickens or murder investigations.
*
I sat on the window sill with my wine and my cigarette, cigarette, cigarette, and after the tenth cigarette (fourth wine) I quietly retrieved the blackboard from Robbie’s room and placed it by the window so as to not stub my toe the next morning and looked at the columns I had drawn the previous evening. I would do this methodically, because that is how Ms Foster would do it (I could see my reflection in the kitchen window and it was uncanny, the likeness), one suspect at a time, and the first column was Jeremy, but I knew what there was to know about him, so I would begin with the second column, which was Mr and Mrs Kelly.
41
MR AND MRS KELLY … Jealous? Betrayed? Bitter? Angry? Torn? Worried?
I’d written this on the blackboard the evening before and had decided to check them out for myself. I’ve never stopped being surprised by how much people are willing to tell social workers. You can sit down with someone and ask them without any foreplay if they want to kill themselves, if they have Hep C, if their father beat them, if they were sexually abused by a neighbour, if the house they lived in had a landline and a satellite dish, and they will tell you, mostly, unless they have enough money and arrogance to be unused to rude prying thirty-five-year-olds taking smug judgemental notes about them.
I discovered that Mr and Mrs Kelly had neither money nor arrogance. Mr Kelly had worked in construction. Mrs Kelly had been a part-time dinner lady. The people in their neighbourhood were used to social workers knocking at doors and asking things like this:
How’s Amanda getting on?
I’ve been doing Jeremy’s pre-trial report, and I was just worried about Amanda.
How are you?
How did it feel when you found out she’d tracked Bridget down?
You didn’t know she’d found Bridget?
How did that feel?
Oh, you have a satellite dish!
Let me know, won’t you, if there’s anything I can do. And thanks.
Hmm, I thought in my smug judgemental way as I drove back to the office. Hmm.
They were ordinary people, Mr and Mrs Kelly. They lived in a shoebox and shopped in bulk. They said they didn’t know anything about the reunion of mother and daughter till after she was murdered, which is why they’d never been questioned. But what if they were lying? What if they’d found out and watched the love of their life run off to another? Watched the person they’d devoted themselves to never settle because they were never enough? It’d drive a person mad, drive them to Crinan with kitchen knives.
There was nothing on the system about them, and no previous convictions according to Bond, so I did some proper work for a change while Danny ignored me in his blind inimitable way.
*
After work, I struggled through my new single-mother routine. Collect son, thank parents, pretend to be happy, check messages from Chas (none), play, cook, clean, do washing, bath, story, pretend to be happy, put Robbie to bed.
Drink and smoke.
‘Krissie! It’s ten to ten o’clock at night. I’m in bed!’ Amanda said. ‘What the fuck are you doing, investigating shit like this? How dare you? My mum and dad would never do anything bad! Do you hear me? Stay out of this, I’m fucked off with you. They didn’t even know I’d found her! Oh, and they were at church. Ask Aunty Jean and Uncle Brian. No don’t. Just stay out of this for Christ’s sake.’
All right. All right. So they were nice, none-the-wiser and at church with a hundred people. I crossed the second column from my board and moved on to the next.
42
‘HAMISH McGIVERN,’ I had written on my blackboard. ‘Employed, married …’ Then this girl comes along, I pondered, and churns everything up.
He was a teacher, Amanda had told me. A burnt-out chemistry teacher in a posh private school outside Stirling. He spent his weekends with mates, and his weeks working towards the grades the school insisted on. An okay life, but maybe just okay.
‘He was playing golf,’ Amanda said, when I rang her at 11 p.m. to talk to her about Hamish. ‘There are four men who testify to it. He wouldn’t have done it. He’s a good guy, and he loved her, and you have to stop. You’re going crazy. Please don’t call me again.’
Did he love her? Could he, when tragedy marked the beginning for them, and the end? Did he love that she closed her eyes sometimes and imagined him different?
Okay, I thought to myself, he was playing golf, and that was that. As much as he might have wanted to, he hadn’t. I crossed him off, had a ciggie and one last wee drop, and then I began to wonder … Amanda. Why was she so defensive? So odd? Why would she want me to stop helping? Why would she get angry when the love of her life could be behind bars for life? Laughing when she shouldn’t be laughing. Telling me all about Jeremy killing Bella in our second interview, to plant it. Not telling the police about the affair. Not trying hard enough to persuade Jeremy’s mother to tell the truth about his whereabouts. Had she tried at all? She never said she had.
She’d thought of nothing else all her life. Wanted this person, this great Disneyland that was hers but not hers, dreamt of the meeting, of the special understandings, of the shared sorrow and emptiness, and then she finds her, and it’s not good. In fact it’s disturbing. Is it?
Even though genetic sexual attraction seemed to be quite common, the more I thought about it on the window sill that night, the more I doubted Amanda.
Had she harboured resentment against her mother since discovering she was adopted? Had she always wanted revenge? Had she planned it all? The sexual relationship, the murder?
‘The Amanda complex,’ I wrote under her name on the blackboard. I stared at it for a while, then underlined it deliberately with my red chalk. As I did this one of my freshly tended nails broke, which was annoying at first, and then, as I bit the rest off, it hit me.
43
After leaving Robbie with Mum and Dad, I dropped by Amanda’s salon on the way to work.
‘Oh God,’ she sighed. ‘What now?’
‘Nothing. I want to apologise,’ I said, checking to see where she had left her brown leather manicure set. It was on her wee table.
‘Fine,’ said Amanda, turning to escort me to the door. With her back in front of me, I grabbed the manicure set from her table and hid it in my bag.
‘Sorry, Amanda,’ I said, heading out the door she held open. ‘I’ll try not to bother you again.’
A few minutes later I ran into an office, where Jeremy’s solicitor sat at his ostentatious desk sipping very good coffee.
I thumped the manicure set on the desk.
‘Put a glove on!’ I said, and he did, before unzipping it.
‘Toe clippers?’
‘And all sorts of nail equipment. Amanda does it for a living, and she used this particular set on her nearest and dearest.’
‘I’m not following.’
‘The DNA! She did Jeremy’s nails on the sofa all the time, and she told me she did Bridget’s that weekend. That might be why Jeremy’s DNA is under Bridget’s nails.’
The solicitor looked up at me. ‘Maybe, but it’s a long shot.’
*
I drove wildly to the prison, secret-agent style. My heart was thumping with excitement, but I wanted to keep my cool, get as much information as I could from as many sources as possible. Most importantly, I didn’t want to get his hopes up, not yet.
As I walked past the first few interview rooms, I spotted James Marney. He was in with the prison housing officer, who gestured for me to come in.
How are you?’ I asked, desperate to get out of th
ere as fast as possible, to see Jeremy.
‘The police have okayed a flat in the Gorbals,’ said the housing officer, a woman too young and too pretty to work in a prison. ‘And Mr Marney wanted to say something to you, didn’t you James?’
Oh God, I fidgeted. There’d be no getting away for a few minutes at least. I had to sit down and listen to the guy.
‘I’m sorry about Mum and Dad’s,’ he said, his hands shaking so hard he clutched the side of the desk to try and stop them. ‘I love my kids more than anything. They’ve already lost their mum. I just don’t want them to lose their dad as well. I’ve told my parents I did do it.’
‘And what did you do, Mr Marney?’ I wanted to hear him say it.
‘I masturbated to pornography in front of them and made them touch me on the penis, first James junior, then little Robert.’
I coughed. Oh God.
He gulped, looking almost as ill as I felt. ‘My parents understand now that I can’t see them without supervision. Please don’t make me live my life without them.’
He went on and on. Apologetic, remorseful, willing to co-operate with anything so he could see them, desperate to try to make amends for the terrible offences he’d committed against them.
I told him I’d get in touch with the relevant authorities to see if supervised access might be possible. I didn’t shake his hand, but I have to admit I felt a bit sorry for him as I left the room. His mouth had been so dry while he spoke it had made an awful clicking noise.
‘I’ll see you in the next couple of days, okay?’ I said, leaving the room to talk to Jeremy, who was ready and waiting two doors down.
*
‘Jeremy, I want to talk to you about Amanda,’ I said. We sat in the same positions as last time, and by now all thoughts of him being a murderer were gone. He was broken, sadness oozed from every section of him, and I gave him a soft smile that was not a social-worker smile, but the smile of a friend.
My Last Confession Page 15