House of Correction

by French, Nicci

  4.30: Andy arrives at house. Discovers body.

  She stood up again and continued her pacing. She had no idea what time it was. The sky outside was heavy with black clouds; it was the kind of day that was never quite light. Perhaps it was lunchtime, but she didn’t feel hungry. She went into the cubicle and ate another sugar lump, then jumped up and down on the spot for a few minutes to keep warm.

  Stuart had been killed after 10.41am, when he had been seen in his car driving past the village shop, and before about 3.30pm – the forensics made it clear that he had been dead at least an hour and probably longer by the time his body was discovered. Who had been in the village during that time, after the tree had fallen across the road and before it got cleared? That was the question. She started counting off on her fingers, but lost track and so returned to her notebook. She started a new list:

  Me

  Mel

  Shona

  Rob Coombe

  Andy

  Terry

  Dr Mallon

  Luke???? (Under her tasks, she added: ‘When did Luke arrive?’)

  Pauline Leavitt

  Was that all? It was possible: in the summer the village filled up with tourists. Boats bobbed out at sea, visitors came to stand where Coleridge had reportedly stood, the hotel on the outskirts was open and the little café beside the shop often crammed. But in the winter the place was practically deserted. She flicked through all the sheaves of paper again and found in the police report that there had been a delivery driver who had made it into the village minutes before the tree fell. He had handed over an Amazon parcel to Stuart at 9.45 and then got stuck in Okeham until the road had been cleared, so she added him.

  That made ten people so far, including herself. Six of them had seen her during the day. Four of them – Mel, Rob Coombe, Dr Mallon and Pauline Leavitt – had said she had been agitated, or angry with Stuart. One of them – Andy – had said she had tried to stop him from going into the yard where Stuart’s body lay. Every finger was pointing at her.

  Tabitha put her head on the table. After her mother had died and left her enough money to put down a deposit on a house, she had come back to Okeham on a reckless kind of whim. Now she found it hard to comprehend her decision. She hadn’t been happy there as a child or a teenager, although probably she wouldn’t have been happy anywhere. She had been a shy, stubborn and angry little girl with no siblings; an awkward, introverted, abrupt teenager who liked maths and nature, who wasn’t pretty or sporty, had developed late and had had no interest in boys or fashion, more a dread of both. She hadn’t known how to get on with people; she still didn’t. Her father had died when she was barely a teenager. She’d been horribly bullied from the age of seven till thirteen or fourteen; after that, she had been largely ignored. Except by Stuart, of course. Except by Stuart. And yet she had returned to the place of her unhappiness. Why?

  She had told herself it was because of the house, and certainly that was part of it. Something about its ramshackle, worn-out, low-lying charm spoke to her; it had been neglected for decades, left to sink back into the landscape, and she had wanted to rescue it. And maybe she had hoped the village would accept her as an adult and that would somehow make her childhood less sore. Since coming back, she had believed that at least she was a neutral presence – if not liked and welcomed, at least tolerated or ignored. Now, reading through all the statements, she understood that of course the village still didn’t want her. She was an outsider and an object of suspicion, even derision. She wore strange clothes and ate strange food and didn’t brush her hair or wear make-up and she swam in the sea in winter and was sometimes so sad she couldn’t talk in proper sentences. What was there to like?

  Tabitha sat up and stacked all the papers together again. Her anger had gone and she felt heavy with foreboding.

  TWENTY-THREE

  When she got back to her cell, the only sign of a new occupant was a pile of clothes on Michaela’s old table. She looked around. Up on the top bunk was what looked like a bundle of blankets. Tabitha realised it was a person. She had a sudden memory of going to the zoo as a little girl. She would put her nose against the glass to see some exotic rodent and all that was visible was a slightly raised pile of straw in a corner.

  ‘Hey,’ said Tabitha.

  No response.

  With some trepidation, she nudged the bundle. Perhaps it was dangerous.

  ‘I’m Tabitha. We’re sharing a cell. We’re going to have to talk sometime.’

  There was a movement in the pile. The blanket was pushed back and a tiny face, bordered with curly dark hair, emerged. Tabitha almost gasped. She thought there must be some mistake. It looked like the face of a little child. The dark eyes were bloodshot. She must have been crying. Tabitha reached out towards her and then stopped.

  ‘My name is Tabitha Hardy. What’s your name?’

  ‘Dana.’ She spoke in the voice of a small girl.

  Tabitha didn’t know what she should say next. Was she meant to play the role of the experienced protector? She’d only been in Crow Grange for a few weeks. Was she meant to pass on what she remembered of Ingrid’s rules?

  ‘Are you OK?’ she said. The words sounded stupid as soon as she said them.

  Dana shook her head slowly.

  ‘I know,’ said Tabitha. ‘I know it’s strange and horrible when you first get here. You can’t believe it. It doesn’t seem real.’

  ‘I can’t,’ said Dana, almost in a whisper. ‘I can’t.’

  ‘What can’t you do?’

  ‘I can’t be here. I just can’t.’

  ‘How long are you here for?’

  ‘A year.’ A single violent sob shook her frame. ‘Why did I do it?’

  Tabitha stared at the girl. Her head was pounding. ‘A year,’ she repeated. ‘If you don’t get into trouble, that’s only six months.’ She bit her lip, gathering her strength, pushing away her own feeling of fear like it was something solid that she must resist. ‘And that’s about the same amount of time that I will be here. My trial is in June.’

  ‘What did you do?’ the girl whispered and Tabitha almost smiled.

  ‘You’re not supposed to ask,’ she said, ‘but it’s fine. I didn’t do anything. So we will have six months together in this cell. And we will both survive. Do you hear me?’

  She was speaking to herself, of course; instructing herself. Dana nodded, her child’s face swollen with weeping.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Yes.’

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Tabitha couldn’t quite believe it but there she was, sitting across from her in the visitors’ room as straight as a ramrod.

  Laura Rees looked like she was dressed for church or for a drinks party. She was wearing a white blouse with an amber woollen cardigan and an oval brooch at her throat. Her hair looked greyer. Her face was an unyielding square of set jaw and thin mouth and cold glaring eyes.

  For several seconds neither of them spoke. Not a flicker of expression disturbed the granite stiffness of Laura Rees’s face.

  Tabitha coughed unnecessarily. ‘I’m sorry about your husband.’

  ‘How dare you?’ Her voice was harsh.

  ‘What?’

  ‘How dare you pretend to be sorry? The nerve of it.’

  ‘I didn’t do it,’ said Tabitha.

  ‘Is that why you wanted to see me – to protest your innocence? I should get up and walk out right now.’

  ‘I wasn’t sure you’d come.’

  ‘I needed to look at you.’

  And Laura did look at her and Tabitha looked right back, in a way that felt rare, neither one glancing away.

  ‘I’m not going to try to persuade you,’ said Tabitha. ‘And I’m not going to apologise.’

  ‘You’re not going to apologise. Not for anything?’

  Tabitha felt herself flush. ‘I was fifteen years old. I was a virgin. I didn’t know anything.’

  Laura gave a sort of snort. ‘You were a slut,’ she said.

&
nbsp; Tabitha had a sudden flashback, so vivid that it was like she was there. Just once, Stuart had taken her to his house. He had led her up to the bedroom where he had started to undress her. He did it in a businesslike way, as if she were a parcel whose contents he already knew but which needed to be opened. She didn’t have any say in it and the unwrapping was a little awkward. He had pushed her back on to the bed so that he could pull her shoes and socks off. Then he had lifted her to her feet and started undoing the buttons on her blouse. She had looked round and seen his wife’s dressing table, pots of cream, lipstick, little jewellery boxes.

  When she was fully undressed, he had stepped back and looked at her, standing there among his wife’s intimate belongings. Now, all these years later, Tabitha understood that she was an object placed among other objects. Why had she not said no, shouted no? Undressing her there, in his wife’s bedroom, that must have been part of the thrill for Stuart; he was treating both her and Laura with derision, and she – usually so surly and stubborn – had let him. She had had no power, maybe just the novelty of being someone helpless and young and unformed compared with the wife he’d grown tired of. A woman of what? Thirty-five, forty?

  ‘I was a child,’ she replied at last. ‘He was my teacher.’

  For a moment something in Laura’s face shifted, like the stony mask was going to crack apart. Then it hardened again.

  ‘Fifteen-year-olds aren’t children,’ she said.

  ‘I was.’

  ‘I haven’t come here to listen to you saying you’re a victim.’

  ‘Someone wrote a letter to the police,’ said Tabitha. ‘Telling them about me and Stuart. Was it you?’

  ‘If I wanted to tell the police, do you think I’d need to write an anonymous letter?’

  ‘So why didn’t you tell the police?’

  Laura’s expression became even blanker, almost frozen.

  ‘People always blame the wife. They say she must have known. Or they say it was her fault really. I must have been a nag, I must have been frigid, I must have been boring, I must have been a doormat.’ She looked at Tabitha contemptuously. ‘Nobody from the outside can know what a marriage is like. Why would I wash my dirty linen in public? Anyway, I didn’t need to tell them; they had enough evidence without it. Now everyone will have to know.’ She leaned forward. There was a fleck of pink lipstick on her front tooth. ‘My son will know. It makes a mockery.’

  ‘A mockery of what?’

  ‘Of me. A mockery of me.’

  Tabitha stared at her. ‘I’m in prison,’ she said. ‘If I’m found guilty I’ll be here for years and years. And I didn’t do it. That’s a mockery.’

  Laura started to speak and then stopped. It seemed to take an effort to say what she wanted to say. Finally she got the words out.

  ‘He said you made the first move. He said you had a crush on him and caught him at a vulnerable time. You…’ She hesitated again. ‘You were intimate just the once and then he ended it.’

  None of it was true, absolutely none of it.

  ‘Do you believe that?’

  ‘Years ago I decided that it didn’t matter what I believed or didn’t believe.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘No, I don’t suppose you do.’ Her face contorted, became briefly ugly. ‘I’ve watched you walking around the village in your torn jeans and ridiculous jacket and with paint in your hair, in your own little world. But people like me—’

  ‘People like you?’

  ‘Decent people,’ said Laura.

  ‘What do people like you do?’

  Laura looked away, out of the window at the blank grey sky. ‘I don’t even know why I’m talking to you.’ She turned back to Tabitha. ‘Have you had other visitors?’

  ‘Shona came, Shona Fry. And the vicar.’

  ‘Did she offer you religious consolation?’

  ‘I don’t believe in God.’

  ‘Then that made two of you. A vicar who doesn’t believe in God. That’s what we’ve come to.’

  Tabitha wanted to ask her about the day of the murder, but held her peace.

  ‘It drove Stuart mad,’ said Laura. She was suddenly almost chatty, in a fierce way.

  Tabitha made a murmuring sound to encourage her.

  ‘He actually made an official complaint.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘That was one thing about Stuart, he was very good at making complaints. He always knew who to complain to. He used to say you had to go to the top. He once wrote a letter to the CEO of a DIY chain about poor service.’

  ‘Who did he complain to about Mel?’

  ‘The bishop, of course.’

  ‘What happened?’

  Laura seemed suddenly aware that she was talking to Tabitha as if she were, if not a friend, at least not an enemy. Her face emptied of expression and she drummed her fingers on the table.

  ‘Could you tell me about the day it happened?’ Tabitha asked.

  Laura shrugged. ‘I haven’t anything to say. I wasn’t there.’

  ‘Where were you?’

  ‘I had an appointment. I was going to show someone a property, up the coast in Denham. I drove there but the client didn’t turn up, so I drove back to the office.’

  Tabitha considered this. ‘Why didn’t the client turn up?’

  ‘I don’t know. He just didn’t.’

  ‘He.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Have you seen him since?’

  ‘I’ve never seen him.’

  ‘What? Never? He sounds like someone the police should talk to.’

  ‘They haven’t been able to find him. Yet.’

  ‘But isn’t that a really big deal?’ said Tabitha. ‘He rings you… What’s his name?’

  ‘He said he was called Mike Wilson.’

  ‘Mike Wilson. That sounds fake.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It just does. So someone calls you to get you out of the way. That’s important.’

  ‘That’s what it’s like being an estate agent. People make appointments and break them.’

  ‘I suppose they can trace him through his phone.’

  ‘You’d think so.’

  ‘Does that mean they haven’t?’

  ‘I’m sure they will.’

  Tabitha wished she had brought a pen and paper with her. She had to trust herself to remember all of this. She tried to think of something else to say.

  ‘Your son,’ she said. ‘Luke.’

  ‘Leave him out of this.’

  ‘He came home that day.’

  ‘I said, leave him out of this. You seduced and then killed my husband, but you sit there like a…’ She searched for a word. ‘Like a muddy little mole,’ she said at last. Tabitha almost laughed at that. A muddy little mole. That wasn’t bad.

  ‘I just need to know when he came home.’

  ‘Stuart used to poison moles,’ said Laura and she looked at Tabitha with a fixed, glittery gaze. ‘He was very proud of his lawn. I think he quite enjoyed poisoning them.’

  ‘I always thought of Stuart as someone everyone liked,’ said Tabitha after a pause.

  ‘Did you like him?’

  ‘Obviously like isn’t really the right word.’

  ‘There you are then.’

  Again Tabitha couldn’t make proper sense of what Laura was saying. She felt a need to go away and think about this and get it straight in her head.

  ‘Did you like him?’ she asked.

  ‘That’s a ridiculous question.’

  ‘OK, did you love him?’

  ‘I was his wife,’ Laura said, almost dismissively. She made a motion to stand up and then stopped and sat back down. ‘They sent a police officer, a young woman of about ten, to see me. I think she was meant to be showing how sensitive they were to the widow. I made her tea and she sat next to me on the sofa and held my hand, which I didn’t enjoy. She told me that this was the worst time. But it would just be a couple of months and you would be tried and convicted and giv
en a life sentence and that would give me closure.’

  ‘But if I didn’t do it, would it give you closure?’

  Laura’s gaze settled on her. ‘I might dig up the lawn,’ she said. Then she stood up.

  ‘You didn’t say you loved him,’ said Tabitha.

  ‘We were married for thirty-five years.’ She turned away.

  ‘That’s not really an answer.’

  But Laura Rees was already out of earshot, walking briskly across the room, looking neither to the left nor to the right.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Galia, the librarian, had given her several sheets of A3 paper. Tabitha sat in her icy cupboard and spread one out on the table in front of her. She angled the lamp so it was in brightness, and picked up her pencil. Then she closed her eyes for several seconds, summoning the little village into her mind. First she drew the cliff that rose up like a wall behind the string of houses. Nobody could climb that wall: she had tried several times as a girl, hauling herself up by the stunted trees, grazing her hands and ripping her clothes, and always arriving at an impasse. The only way in and the only way out was by the single-track road that snaked its way down from the west, ending at the small shelf of land and the rocky beach. Tabitha scowled at the cliff for several minutes. Then she drew in Rob Coombe’s farmhouse on its top, high above the village, adding a miniature tractor and some sheep.

  The road came next. Very carefully, she pencilled its bends down the cliff and through the village, ending in a loop at the east of the village where cars could turn. Several times, she used the miniature eraser at the top of her pencil to rub out the faint lines before correcting them.

  At the road’s loop, she added the track that led to her house and Stuart’s.

  She stood up and looked down at what she had done. Then she laid a fallen tree across the road at the entrance of the village.

  The sea was next, running all the way across the page. She added a little boat in full sail and a couple of gulls flying low across the waves. She shaded in places where you could reach it, including the rocky beach where every day she swam. Used to swim. She put in the flat rock where she undressed and dressed again, and she put in a tiny figure in the water. Her.