House of Correction

by French, Nicci

  ‘My solicitor is coming,’ said Tabitha to Michaela. ‘I hope she has news.’

  * * *

  ‘Can I remind you what you said to me on my last visit?’ said Mora Piozzi.

  ‘This sounds like I’m already in court,’ said Tabitha.

  She forced her bruised lips into a smile, which hurt. Mora Piozzi did not smile back.

  ‘You said that you couldn’t think of anything that you hadn’t told me that might be relevant to your case.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Tabitha warily.

  ‘Really? Nothing, Tabitha?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Yesterday, the prosecution received a letter that stated you had been in an inappropriate relationship with Stuart Rees when you were a schoolgirl.’

  Tabitha felt like someone had punched her hard in the stomach. She heard herself give a gasp of laughter and put a hand across her mouth for a moment in case more laughter should escape.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘What do you mean, a letter?’

  ‘I mean a letter.’

  ‘Who wrote it?’ Tabitha asked indignantly. She could feel her face flaming; her whole body felt intolerably hot.

  ‘That’s hardly the point. Is it true?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘And yet Laura Rees has confirmed it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said—’

  ‘I heard what you said. Why did you ask me if it was true if you already knew it was? You were just trying to trick me.’

  Mora Piozzi was white around the nostrils and her mouth was a thin, straight line.

  ‘I think you’ll have to come down from your moral high ground,’ she said, her voice clipped and sharp. ‘You explicitly assured me there was nothing you were keeping back. And now I learn from the prosecution that when you were fifteen, you were sexually involved with the man you stand accused of murdering. Are you going to tell me that’s not relevant?’ There was a long pause. ‘Well?’

  ‘Hardly sexually involved,’ said Tabitha, dragging her gaze up to meet the solicitor’s hard stare. She was aiming for a scoffing tone but it came out a weak squawk.

  ‘You were underage. He was your teacher. He had sex with you. You return to the village and buy the house that is nearest to his.’

  ‘Five minutes away,’ Tabitha interjected feebly.

  ‘A few weeks later, he is found stabbed to death in the backyard of your house. You don’t tell anyone about the relationship; indeed, just now you denied it.’

  ‘None of that sounds quite right.’

  ‘It might not sound right – but are you going to tell me it’s not true?’

  ‘It’s not not true. But you’re putting sentences next to each other that don’t belong next to each other, and it makes it seem that each thing leads to the next, but it doesn’t. Not necessarily.’

  ‘Why in God’s name didn’t you tell me? You must have known it would come out.’

  ‘It’s no one’s business,’ Tabitha said. ‘It didn’t matter.’

  Mora Piozzi brought her fist down on the table and Tabitha jerked backwards. ‘Wake up! Do you have any idea of how bad this looks?’

  ‘It was years ago. It has nothing to do with now.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  ‘Don’t be insulting,’ replied Tabitha. ‘You’re supposed to be representing me.’

  ‘Exactly. I’m supposed to be representing you. You don’t tell me about your history of depression and I have to learn about it from Dr Hartson and from reading your medical history. You don’t tell me that the murder victim sexually abused you—’

  ‘That’s not true.’

  Mora Piozzi gazed at her. She didn’t frown so much as draw her whole face into an expression of forbidding incredulity. ‘You were fifteen, Tabitha. He was your teacher.’

  ‘It wasn’t like that.’

  ‘So what was it like?’

  Tabitha folded her arms round herself and looked away. Her mind was working very slowly. She couldn’t explain to herself why it was that she hadn’t mentioned to the solicitor her… what was the word? Not ‘relationship’, not ‘involvement’, surely not ‘abuse’? – her thing with Stuart. She realised now that at some level it must have occurred to her to do so. Without consciously making the decision, she had withheld the information, pushed it deep down inside her. She felt bewildered and suddenly, shockingly, scared.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

  ‘You don’t know what it was like?’

  ‘I don’t know. I can’t say. I don’t want to talk about it. Please.’

  ‘I’m afraid you don’t get to choose.’

  ‘Don’t I? I thought I could just remain silent.’

  The woman sighed and passed a hand in front of her face. When she looked at Tabitha again, she no longer looked angry, but distressed.

  ‘I’m representing you,’ she said. ‘You need to trust me. I want to help you but I can only do that if you let me. Do you understand?’

  Tabitha nodded.

  ‘You can see how this looks, can’t you?’

  ‘How does it look?’

  ‘Frankly, it looks bad. And the fact that you concealed relevant information makes it worse.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Let me try again. Can you tell me what happened between you and Stuart Rees when you were fifteen?’

  Tabitha stared down at her hands with the bracelet of eczema round the wrists and the bitten fingernails. She felt small and soiled and didn’t want to be looked at.

  ‘There’s not much to say. You need to understand it was a whole different life. Something that had gone and I never thought of it. That’s true,’ she added, seeing the disbelief in her solicitor’s face. ‘When I came back and met him again, I barely recognised him, you know. It was like meeting a stranger. When I was at school, he looked normal but now he’d got properly overweight, and his hair had receded and he’d grown a beard, like he needed to compensate.’

  That was the first thing she’d said to him when they had met again, two days after she had moved into her house: ‘You’ve grown a beard.’ He had stroked his chin, as if pleasantly surprised to feel the hair growing there, and said it was easier than shaving but Laura didn’t like it. He’d said she was looking well, though his gaze had never settled on her but shifted rapidly this way and that. Then he had added how nice it was that they were neighbours, and that she must come round for tea sometime, for old times’ sake. She never had, though once Laura had left a lemon drizzle cake on her doorstep.

  ‘What are you saying, Tabitha?’

  ‘I’m saying that he was a different person and so was I and that’s why it wasn’t relevant. It was like it had never happened.’

  ‘Like it had never happened?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m not sure a jury would find that very convincing.’

  ‘I don’t care. It’s true.’

  ‘You need to care. How many times did he have sex with you?’

  ‘Not many.’

  ‘Once, twice, ten times, more?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Tabitha. She could feel herself shutting down, the lights going off one by one. ‘More than twice,’ she made herself say.

  ‘You never told anyone.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It didn’t feel right. It was private.’

  ‘Were you infatuated?’

  Tabitha heard a snickering sound coming from her. She put her fist into her mouth and bit down on it.

  ‘No,’ she said eventually.

  ‘Was he violent?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did he—?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Tabitha, listen to me.’

  ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘Your hearing is in a week’s time.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘In the light of this new information, we need to think about how to proceed.’

  ‘You’r
e telling me they’re not going to throw the case out.’

  Mora Piozzi looked aghast. ‘They certainly are not,’ she said eventually. Then she continued, carefully, as if worried that Tabitha might not understand her. ‘It is my opinion that on the seventh of February, we have three options: you can plead not guilty, you can plead guilty to manslaughter and you can—’

  ‘Wait,’ said Tabitha.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I need to ask you something.’

  ‘All right.’

  Tabitha took a deep breath. ‘Do you think I did it?’

  ‘I’m your solicitor. I’m here to represent you as best I can.’

  ‘That’s not an answer.’

  ‘My job isn’t to find the truth.’

  ‘So you won’t answer?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Which means you think I might have done it?’

  ‘It means I’m acting as your solicitor.’

  ‘But I need my solicitor to believe in me.’ To her dismay, Tabitha felt her eyes fill with thick tears. She turned her head away and blinked furiously, feeling Mora Piozzi’s steady gaze on her.

  ‘No, Tabitha, you need your solicitor to do the best that he or she possibly can to represent you. Which is what I want to do, but I need your help.’

  ‘I’m in trouble, aren’t I?’

  ‘We’re only at the beginning of a long process.’

  Tabitha couldn’t speak. The room was bleary through her tears. She had been counting the days until 7 February, but now she understood that that was only the start of it. She thought of her cell, where the sky was just a tiny square in the concrete wall and where at night she felt she would suffocate. She thought of footsteps echoing down corridors, doors shutting, keys being turned; of howls in the darkness, eyes watching her.

  ‘Tabitha? Did you hear what I was saying?’

  ‘No. Sorry.’

  ‘I was saying that you have to take things one step at a time.’

  Tabitha nodded.

  ‘The next step is the court appearance. You have to consider your options.’

  ‘Yes, you said that. You said you thought I had three options. Not guilty. Guilty of manslaughter. And you didn’t say the third.’

  ‘Guilty with diminished responsibility.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Stuart Rees abused you when you were a vulnerable minor. Since then you have been clinically depressed and have struggled to cope.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘I am saying you need to think about your best course, Tabitha.’

  ‘You think I murdered him.’

  Mora Piozzi stood up. ‘One week,’ she said. ‘Think about it.’

  FOURTEEN

  At secondary school, Tabitha had been good at maths, chemistry and art (though she liked drawing more than painting). Small, strong and wiry, she had been good at cross-country running. But she hadn’t been good at making friends or joining in or keeping her head down. She hadn’t been good at being sweet, or flirting with the boys, or giggling with the girls, or buying the right trainers, or knowing the latest dance moves, or going out on Friday night, or boasting about sexual experiences she’d never had, or getting the right amount of drunk or the right amount of stoned, or sharing secrets. She hadn’t been good at being a teenager, especially after her father had died. At its best, school was a lonely business for her; sometimes it was much worse than that. She coped by pretending she didn’t care, and bit by bit she actually didn’t care. Or not really. Not so that it hurt and shamed her as it used to when she was younger.

  Tabitha lay in her bunk and remembered herself at fifteen, half her lifetime ago: an awkward and fiercely cross only child, short and flat-chested and looking much younger than her age, disguising her shyness by being grumpy and taciturn. Gradually, people stopped picking on her until at last nobody really took much notice of her at all – until Mr Rees the maths teacher singled her out. For several years, he was just another teacher at the school, not one of the charismatic ones who the girls giggled about, nor one of those who were bullied, like Mr Wheedon with hair combed over his bald spot. Mr Rees didn’t have trouble keeping order. He sometimes got angry but not in an uncontrolled way like some of the others who would shout and flail their arms. His anger was deliberate, contemptuous and effective.

  He had never taken any notice of her either, until the GCSE years. Then she suddenly found herself the focus of his attention. At first, it was just about her work – she was his star pupil, and he used her as an example to others who were struggling (which hadn’t helped her popularity). Then he started keeping her back after the end of class. He set her more advanced work, told her she should study maths at university. It seemed to Tabitha that he had recognised her like no one else had done.

  He wasn’t young and handsome. She didn’t have a crush on him. She didn’t think of him like that at all. He was just kind to her at a time when she was badly in need of kindness. A friendly face.

  When he had put an arm around her shoulder, she had let him. When he placed a hand on her knee, she didn’t push it away. When he told her she was the reason he looked forward to coming to work, she had believed him. When one wet day in winter he offered her a lift home and drove instead into the woods and lifted up her skirt and pulled down her knickers and in the muggy darkness of the car slid on a condom and deflowered her, her blood spotting the seat, she hadn’t protested, just turned her head away and watched the rain. Numb, just waiting till it was over. She had never thought of telling anybody what had happened. Nor the next time, or the ones after that. Eleven Wednesdays, Tabitha thought, as she lay in her bed beneath Michaela who mumbled in her sleep, and remembered those days. Or was it twelve?

  Then there was the Wednesday when she had waited behind in the classroom and he had walked past her without looking at her, and it was like she didn’t exist anymore. She had gone to the window and watched him drive away in his car. That was how it ended, as if it had never happened, like he had simply erased her. She sat week after week in his lessons while his glance slid over her and felt she had disappeared. In her place was just an absence, a hole where Tabitha Hardy used to be.

  She had felt neither relieved nor upset. She had felt nothing at all.

  It was like a dream – a dream in the darkness and she couldn’t piece the fragments together into a story that made real sense.

  Why had she – small, cross, fatherless Tabitha Hardy who stood her ground against the bullies and read passionate books about women’s rights – let it happen? Why hadn’t she thought about it for all of these years, not even mentioning it in her therapy sessions? Why hadn’t she been upset, angry, ashamed? She was a fighter, but she had never once thought of fighting for herself.

  She stared out into the night. Perhaps she had been wretched, she thought; perhaps she had been damaged; perhaps she had minded so much that she had pushed it down as deep as she could. Maybe Mora Piozzi was right and it was abuse and she was traumatised. Of course she was right: she had been fifteen and he, what, something like forty-five?

  And now the person who had abused her was dead. Mr Rees the maths teacher. Stuart Rees her neighbour. The pillar of his little community. His body in her shed, his car parked outside, his blood all over her.

  She bit her lip so hard that she tasted iron in her mouth. She put her hands over her eyes to make the darkness darker. She couldn’t remember that day, or only a few snatches. It had been a day of wild weather and of a crouching fear. The kind of day she had to crawl blindly through, just to get to the end.

  What had happened? Why had he come to her house and why had he died and what had she been doing?

  Her solicitor believed she had murdered him. What did she, Tabitha Hardy, believe? She didn’t know. She didn’t know, and not knowing tipped dread through her like poison.

  She didn’t know what to do. She had no idea. She had no one to turn to and the night went on and on and on and when morning came she still di
dn’t know.

  FIFTEEN

  ‘Are you all right?’

  Tabitha looked around. Ingrid was watching her with concern. Tabitha had been standing in a corner of the exercise yard. The prisoners were legally entitled to one hour of exercise in the open air every day. It was on the schedule; many things were technically on the schedule and available, but schedules could change at the last minute and availability was always liable to suspension without notice. Even during Tabitha’s time at Crow Grange, the exercise had been suspended several times for reasons of security, because of staff shortages, and once for no reason at all.

  Today, after her awful night, Tabitha had just felt grateful to get outside. The yard was surrounded on three sides by buildings and on the fourth side by a high fence, beyond which was another vacant yard. But you could look up at the sky and that was a relief, even on a day like this that was cold and grey.

  Some of the women used the hour for exercise. One woman was preparing to run a marathon. She was serving a thirty-year sentence for her part in the murder of three gang members so she wasn’t going to be running through the streets of London. Her marathon was going to be on the day of the marathon but limited to circuits of the nearby football pitch: two hundred of them. The yard reminded Tabitha of the school playground, the girls dividing into groups of the cool ones, the hangers on, the excluded, the defiant, the bullied, the lonely. Tabitha did what she had done at school, which was to retreat to the furthest corner and hope that nobody would pay her too much attention.

  When Ingrid spoke to her, she had been leaning against the wire fence, with her eyes closed and her head tipped back.

  ‘You don’t have to be polite,’ said Tabitha.

  ‘I’m not being polite,’ said Ingrid. ‘You looked worried.’

  ‘Are you going to tell me another of your prison rules?’

  Ingrid looked around. ‘You don’t want to be too stand-offish,’ she said. ‘I’m not saying you should try and join one of the gangs. But if you’re too much on your own, people get suspicious.’

  ‘I’m not going to be here for long,’ said Tabitha, though dully and without conviction. ‘I don’t care how suspicious they are.’