‘I wonder if Frances has been to visit you. She wouldn’t talk to you as she has to me. Oh, yes, she’s been to see me in hospital several times, just as if we were friends. No, she’s not interrogating me, nothing like that. She tells me about her everyday life, and I tell her what little there is to tell of mine. She didn’t take up my offer of tickets for the Brodsky Quartet – legal problems, she said. But she did go, and she said they hadn’t lost any of their brilliance and energy. She herself seems to have a new lease of life, now she’s not hurtling around the country. Yes, her father died: it was all quite sudden in the end. She thought that would make her life more complicated, but it seems there was some sort of reconciliation between her mother and her elder sister, with the result, would you believe, that her mother’s gone to live in the Hebrides or somewhere. She did say, but I’m sure one of these damned pills is wreaking havoc with my memory. It doesn’t matter anyway, does it? Anyway, as Frances herself said, it solved her dilemma for her, rather than her having to make the decision. Dea ex machina, I said, and I must say I was surprised that she not only knew the term but also understood why I’d changed it. She has to retire from her present post soon, but seems resigned to that: she says you can get too old. But I doubt if she’ll be unemployed, should she want work: at least two universities want her, and the Home Office is head hunting her too. And there’s some body that looks into miscarriages of justice. I should think she’d be most at home in that.
‘Any dreams I had of courting her have evaporated, I fear. Not just because of what I did, either, she assures me of that. She’s in what looks a very sound relationship with another officer, very senior. No, no wedding bells yet. But there’s something about the way her face changes when she speaks of him, and she wears this lovely ring. Victorian, I should say.
‘Now, is there anything else? Of course! They’ve found both the men who – who did this to you. The man who cracked your skull and the man who raped you so terribly. Life sentences, I’m glad to say. They tried, unsuccessfully, to have their sentences reduced by turning Queen’s Evidence and shopping their bosses – an unsavoury group by anyone’s standards. They’re looking at long sentences and deportation – see how police lingo has affected my own vocabulary!
‘Ah, Elise – it’s no good, I simply can’t think of you as Marjorie Gray! – it’s time for me to say goodbye. I shall be allowed to come to the funeral, of course, but I wanted one last word with you alone. So, goodbye, my dear: I wouldn’t have had this happen for the world.’
About the Author
Prize-winning short-story writer JUDITH CUTLER is the author of nearly thirty novels, including the successful crime series featuring Fran Harman, police woman extraordinaire. Judith has taught Creative Writing at Birmingham University, and has run writing courses elsewhere, including a maximum-security prison and an idyllic Greek island. She now lives in the Cotswolds with her husband, fellow author Edward Marston.
www.judithcutler.com
By Judith Cutler
The Chief Superintendent Fran Harman series
Life Sentence
Cold Pursuit
Still Waters
The Josie Welford series
The Food Detective
The Chinese Takeout
The Tobias Campion series
The Keeper of Secrets
Shadow of the Past
Scar Tissue
Drawing the Line
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Copyright
Allison & Busby Limited
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London W1T 6DW
www.allisonandbusby.com
First published in Great Britain by Allison & Busby in 2005.
This ebook edition first published in 2014.
Copyright © 2005 by JUDITH CUTLER
The moral right of the author is hereby asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All characters and events in this publication other than those clearly in the public domain are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent buyer.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978–0–7490–1579–4
Life Sentence Page 27