House of Correction

by French, Nicci

  ‘It’s a nice thought, anyway. Thank you.’

  Now what? Tabitha stepped forward but Michaela held up a hand to stop her.

  ‘No hugs,’ she said. ‘I don’t like being touched.’

  ‘I’m not so good at it either.’

  ‘You don’t say.’ Michaela grinned and then hesitated, searching for the right words. ‘Don’t do anything stupid. I can imagine you doing something stupid, picking a fight with the wrong person, something like that.’

  She walked to the doorway and then halted.

  ‘Don’t even think of coming along with me,’ she said. ‘I hate it when people come and see you off.’

  Still she didn’t leave. She seemed to be making up her mind about something. Finally she spoke.

  ‘So you’re defending yourself.’

  ‘It looks like it.’

  ‘Did you do it?’

  Tabitha took a deep breath, then let it out. She met Michaela’s gaze. ‘No.’

  ‘Good.’ Michaela nodded. ‘You asked me what I did.’

  ‘You don’t need to—’

  ‘I hit my boyfriend with a flat iron. Several times. He nearly died. I wish he had.’

  She turned and walked away without looking back, her feet clicking over the hard floor.

  * * *

  When she was gone, Tabitha lay on her bed. She tried to stop herself but she couldn’t: she thought of Michaela going through door after door. They’d give her back her phone and they’d also give her a bit of money and then she’d go through one last door and she’d be out in the street. She would catch a bus or just walk, in any direction she wanted. Would she really come back? Tabitha put her hand against the wall. It felt cold and hard and heavy.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Tabitha followed the warder across the room. It had cement floors and steel girders and long fluorescent lights and was lined with worktables, about forty in all. On each table stood an identical large black machine. Along one side of the room were broad shelves on which were stacked piles of blue drawstring trousers. In a locked cupboard with glass doors, Tabitha saw a variety of implements, including needles in different sizes, pins and safety pins and several long-bladed scissors. It was icily cold in the room. A tracery of frost decorated the windows and her breath hung in the air.

  The warder stopped in front of a door, fumbled with his keys and pulled it open. Tabitha peered inside.

  ‘Here?’

  ‘That’s right.’ The warder, who was enormously tall and bulky and was wheezing alarmingly, smiled at her. Not in a nice way.

  ‘But it’s a cupboard.’

  ‘Don’t blame me. This is what she said.’

  ‘It’s dark.’

  He reached his hand round the doorway and turned on a light. A single bulb glowed inadequately.

  ‘It’s still dark. And freezing. And it’s full of things. What are they?’ She took a step into the windowless space. ‘They’re mannequins.’

  He shrugged.

  ‘There’s no room for me with those things in there.’

  She took hold of the first pink figure and dragged it out, then started on the next, whose plastic arm was raised in a warning gesture.

  ‘Hey, what are you doing?’

  ‘How am I meant to work in there if I can’t even get inside?’ She stood the second figure beside the first and their featureless faces stared at her serenely. ‘Anyway, there’s no desk and nowhere to sit. Is this a joke?’

  ‘I’m not laughing.’

  ‘Help me.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘If we take out these two as well, we can just about fit that little table in here and a chair.’

  ‘Somebody needs that.’

  ‘There’s no one here.’

  ‘There will be tomorrow. This place is popular. The girls like learning to sew.’

  ‘Girls?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You mean the prisoners?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Tabitha pushed the table, which was surprisingly heavy and screeched horribly along the floor, into the cupboard. Her spirits were lifting; she felt almost sprightly with anger. She picked up a chair and put that inside as well. A single mannequin remained in the corner, its back turned to her. There was just enough room to squeeze herself in as well, though she would have to lift the chair up to get the door closed. She put her bundle of papers on the table and turned back to the warder who was staring into the distance, whistling softly.

  ‘I need more light.’

  He shrugged his large shoulders and pushed his hands deep into his pockets.

  Tabitha went to the long table at the front and seized the anglepoise lamp, then bent down and pulled the plug from the socket on the floor. At first she thought there was no socket in the cupboard, then she spied one near the door. Its cracked plastic casing suggested it hadn’t been used for years. She plugged in the lamp, pressed the switch and light pooled into the little space.

  ‘There’s a dead mouse,’ she said.

  ‘It’s a rat.’

  ‘It’s too small.’

  ‘He’s dried up. But he still has his thick tail.’ He prodded it with the toe of his shoe. ‘See.’

  ‘Can you get rid of it?’

  He stared at her.

  ‘OK, OK. I’ll do it.’ She stared around her then spied bin bags in the corner, along with a bristle-headed broom. She ripped a bag off the roll, put her hand into it, bent down and picked up the rat in her protected hand, trying not to look at it as she turned the bag inside out with the creature safely inside. She rubbed her hand down the side of her trousers. ‘Can you put it in the disposal unit for me?’ she asked.

  He sighed, then took it. She was starting not to mind him. ‘What’s your name?’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Never mind. How long do I have?’

  He shrugged. ‘Until curfew, I guess. You’ll miss lunch, though.’

  ‘I don’t want lunch.’

  He pointed to his left. ‘There’s a cubicle.’ Then, seeing her bewildered expression, ‘For when you need to go.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I’ll have to lock you in.’

  ‘To the cupboard?’

  ‘To the workroom.’

  ‘Won’t anyone be coming here?’

  ‘It only operates twice a week. Cuts.’

  ‘How will you know when I’m ready to leave?’

  Once more, he shrugged his massive shoulders. ‘Someone will come,’ he said.

  * * *

  Alone, Tabitha felt almost giddy with the sense of solitude and space. The fluorescent lights hummed above her and the sewing machines sat there, sinister objects that she felt might suddenly stir into life. Going into the curtained cubicle, she washed her hands, shook them dry, then drank some water from the tap. On the side there was a plastic bag with several teabags in it, but no kettle; also a box of sugar lumps that were turning yellow with age. She put one lump into her mouth and sucked it. Her teeth ached. Then she walked up and down between the tables, running her hand over their surfaces, fingering spools of cotton, lifting pieces of fabric and letting them fall again. She unfolded a pair of trousers and held them out. They were thick and looked comfortable; she wondered if she could take a pair with her when she left. She knew she was putting off the moment of squeezing into the cupboard and facing all those pieces of evidence.

  At last she sat down at the table and opened her notebook. For a moment she was a student in the university library, doing research for an essay. But then she looked at the remaining plastic mannequin turned to the wall, and at the photo of Stuart’s body that lay on the top of the pile, and a little shudder rippled through her.

  She had to be methodical. She unstopped her pen and pushed the photos away, out of sight. Underneath them was a photocopy of the anonymous letter that had been sent to the police; she had missed it yesterday. It was all in large capitals, written on a slant, everything leaning backwards as if the words were about to fall in
to a heap. The sight made Tabitha feel slightly sick.

  FYI. IT IS MY DUTY TO INFORM YOU THAT STUART REES WAS CARRYING ON WITH TABITHA HARDY WHEN SHE WAS UNDERAGE AND HE WAS HER TEACHER. THIS IS TRUE.

  Tabitha crumpled the paper into a tight ball and held it in her closed fist. She wanted to throw it on the floor where the dead rat had lain, and stamp on it until it disintegrated. But at last she uncrumpled it, smoothed it out and stared down at the message, frowning.

  ‘Fuck you,’ she said. ‘Whoever you are, fuck you.’

  She put the letter to one side and began with the transcript of her own interview. Though it went on for pages, it turned out that she hadn’t actually spoken a great deal. She had said ‘I don’t know’ many times, often repeating the words over and over in response to a single question. She had said she didn’t know what she had been doing that day, didn’t know when she had been in the house and when out, didn’t know how the body came to be in her backyard, didn’t know when she had last seen Stuart Rees. She had also said, several times, that she had no bad feelings towards him, no reason whatsoever to wish him dead. That wasn’t good. Her lawyer, the blustery young man she vaguely remembered, had occasionally intervened and several times advised her not to answer.

  At first reading, her interview revealed nothing except perhaps a sense of her numbness at the time. She had obviously been mumbling and incoherent – more than once she was asked to speak up or repeat what she had just said. There were several ‘um’s and sentences that trailed away.

  So far, Tabitha hadn’t written a single note. But then, rereading the transcript more slowly, she came to a question that didn’t make sense to her. ‘Why were you anxious to prevent Mr Kane from going into the backyard?’ (The solicitor had told her to say ‘no comment’.)

  She rubbed her face with both hands, trying to clear her thoughts, then leafed through the sheets of paper until she found Andy’s statement, which she skimmed through until she came across the sentence: ‘Tabitha called out to me when I was opening the back door. She told me not to go out there. She seemed anxious.’

  Tabitha laid down the paper. Her heart was thumping with an irregular beat. It was like a heavy object inside her chest, slamming from side to side. She had no memory of saying that to Andy, none at all. She closed her eyes and forced herself back to that dark afternoon. She remembered him coming to the house, but vaguely, as if the details had been erased and all that was left were dark, blurry outlines. She had been lying on the sofa, half awake, listening to the sound of sleety rain falling and trying to push away the thoughts that kept seething into her mind. He had knocked and she had at first ignored him, but finally struggled to her feet when he knocked more insistently. He had brought the weather into the house with him; his long dark hair was plastered to his skull, his face was streaked with rain and his heavy jacket sodden. She remembered him stamping his boots on the doormat.

  She thought that he had asked her if she was all right, and then he had talked about the work they were going to do tomorrow. But she couldn’t recall what he had actually said; everything had felt an enormous effort that day. She had sat back down on the sofa, and he had opened the back door that led to the yard and the outhouse and the wind had sliced through the room like a knife. Had she tried to stop him from going out there? Her mind was blank; it made no sense. But why would he invent such a thing? She turned to the back of her notebook, wrote ‘Tasks’ in her neat cursive script, underlined it, then wrote underneath: ‘Ask Andy to visit.’ Her hand was beginning to cramp with the cold.

  She read through the vicar’s statement in which she mentioned seeing Tabitha at two-thirty in the afternoon. Apparently Mel was coming out of the shop where she’d just bought a newspaper and she had talked to Tabitha about the tens of thousands of passengers stranded at Gatwick Airport because of a reported drone. According to her, Tabitha had been in a distressed and very agitated state. Tabitha wrote down the time.

  There was a brief statement from Rob, the farmer up the road who was always walking around the village, sometimes with his whippet dog, and a sullen expression on his broad, fleshy face. He said he had been in front of Tabitha when she had gone to buy milk in the morning and apparently she had turned to him and said that Stuart was a bastard. She flipped to the back of her book and wrote: ‘Rob Coombe?’ Then she wrote ‘Bastard?’ She didn’t think that was a word she used much.

  None of this felt right to her. Not Andy’s account, nor Mel’s, nor Rob’s, nor Pauline Leavitt’s from yesterday. She was reading about a stranger who had her name and her face, but who she didn’t recognise.

  She came to Laura Rees’s statement. For all sorts of reasons, Tabitha had avoided thinking about her, but now she made herself. She realised with a jolt of shame that she had never paid any attention to Laura or thought of her outside of her marriage to Stuart. She had been the wife in the background of his active, busy life, not a woman with her own internal life and her own story. She was a woman who did not seem to want to be noticed; perhaps made a determined effort not to be. She was of indeterminate middle age, wore sensible, rather shapeless clothes in dark colours, had her hair cut into a neat helmet, was invariably polite but wore an inscrutable expression on her face. She kept herself to herself, as they put it in the village. Shona had told Tabitha that Terry had said Laura had been a bit wild before she married Stuart, but Tabitha had no idea if that was true. It was the kind of thing Terry came out with to liven up the day. She would lean happily across the counter, lower her voice, and offer up titbits of gossip. She had recently told Andy, who had told Tabitha, that Mel the vicar had taken a shine to Dr Mallon. Tabitha wondered what Terry said about her.

  She read Laura’s statement carefully. Nothing leaped out from it. She jotted down times that were mentioned: she had last seen her husband at 9.30am, when she had driven out of the village in order to go to a house viewing, and she had returned about half past three in the afternoon – leaving the estate agent’s earlier than usual because their son Luke was expected home for Christmas that day. That was the gist of it.

  Owen Mallon, the GP with a practice in town, said he had seen Tabitha in the morning when he was out for his run. It was his morning off and he always went for a long run then. It seemed to Tabitha that she only ever saw Owen Mallon when he was out running. He was small and wiry with a neat beard, and he was constantly dashing through Okeham in shorts and a thin yellow top, even in winter, his eyes fixed on the horizon, his legs all muscle and the sinews in his neck standing out. She found it hard to picture him in his GP surgery in smart clothes, putting a stethoscope on people’s backs and asking them to cough.

  Owen Mallon said that when he met Tabitha, she was bundled up in a thick jacket and her hair was wet; he thought she looked unwell. He didn’t know the exact time, just remembered a helicopter flying over when they were speaking so he couldn’t catch what Tabitha had said.

  Tabitha stood up and wandered into the workroom once more. She walked up and down, up and down, between the sewing machines, clapping her hands together to get warmth back into them. She tried to picture the village, to picture herself trudging around in it with her head down, feeling invisible but clearly not so. She could almost taste the salty air and hear the waves rolling in, and her tumbledown grey house with its muddle of outhouses stood clear in her mind. But everything else was indistinct. She concentrated, summoning the almost-sheer cliffs standing like a wall behind it, with the stunted oaks growing impossibly out of the rock face; the sea that every day had a different voice and different face but on that day had been metal-grey and cold and grim. A narrow road snaked into Okeham, and ended a few hundred metres beyond the post office, where it circled back on itself. At the road’s end, a gravel track led to her house – and to Stuart’s. He and Laura lived in one of the larger places in the village, a symmetrical building that looked naked and exposed in the winter when the trees were bare, with large windows looking out to the sea, a front porch, a separate garage for thei
r two cars and a garden that was mostly lawn.

  Tabitha tried to picture the rest of the houses that clustered together on either side of the road. In her mind’s eye, she could see the little round-tower church of St Peter’s, a stone’s throw from the village shop, and beside it the shabby vicarage where Mel lived. But her mind was full of holes; the village was trickling through them. She went back to her cupboard and started trying to draw a map of Okeham in her notebook but quickly ran out of space. Turning to her list of tasks, she wrote, ‘Ask librarian/Shona/Andy for A3 sheets of paper.’

  She needed to think about the case as if she weren’t involved in it. The obvious thing to start with was the timeline of the day. She turned to a fresh page and headed it ‘21 December, 2018’. Then, checking back to the notes she had made and leafing through the bundle of paper in front of her, she drew up a list:

  6.30 (approx): Wake up. Lie there for some time (how long?). Not feeling good.

  7.30 (approx): Get up. Start making porridge and tea. No milk.

  8.00: Go to village shop to buy milk. See CCTV.

  She looked at the image and added:

  In PJ bottoms and wellies. School bus there. Meet Rob Coombe? Insult Stuart?

  ???am: Go for swim. Meet Dr Mallon.

  She looked at the CCTV images once more and wrote:

  10.34: Stuart drives out of village in his car.

  10.41: Stuart drives back again in direction of house (blocked by fallen tree).

  2.30: Meet vicar.

  She chewed the end of her pen. What had she been doing at 2.30? She had no memory of leaving the house after her morning swim, though she thought she did remember a conversation with Mel about drones at Gatwick Airport; the vicar had said it was bound to be the work of eco-warriors.

  3.30: Laura returns. No sign of Stuart.

  In her list of tasks, she wrote: ‘Find out exactly when tree blocked road and when it was cleared.’