House of Correction

by French, Nicci

They both got in the back seat and the car moved off. Tabitha stared out of the window. Everything she saw looked like something in a dream: a woman pushing a buggy, a man and a woman smoking a cigarette on the pavement outside their office, a few teenagers in school uniform laughing and jostling. All completely mundane and familiar and yet she felt she was moving past them like a ghost.

  ‘Must be weird,’ said the driver, not looking round. ‘Working in a prison.’

  Tabitha flashed a look at an unresponsive Mary Guy. Clearly the driver hadn’t been told she was a prisoner. Tabitha was tempted to tell him, just to see the shock on his face. But she didn’t. Suddenly she wanted to savour these few moments of being treated as a normal person.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s pretty weird.’

  ‘I suppose it’s not like it is in the movies.’

  ‘No,’ said Tabitha. ‘Not really.’

  ‘Showers and strip searches,’ said the driver.

  Tabitha could see in the rear-view mirror that he was grinning. She had a strong impulse to say something or even to do something. It might even be worth getting into a row with the driver. It might even end with him stopping and making them get out. How would Mary Guy deal with that? Reluctantly she stayed silent. They were heading to see the physical evidence that the police were holding. Examining it was a right she had as part of her defence, but if she caused a scene, Mary Guy was entirely capable of making things difficult. She could start talking about ‘security concerns’ and going straight back to Crow Grange.

  The driver began to describe at length a female prison drama he’d seen on TV but Tabitha let her attention drift and it turned into a comforting background drone like the wind blowing or a radio playing in another room. Instead she just continued to look out of the window. It was all so interesting. The most boring things – other motorists, the occasional cyclist, men dressed in yellow peering into a hole in the road – seemed magical to her, fresh and gleaming. She tried to store them in her memory, something she could smuggle back to the cell with her like contraband.

  They were driving on the edge of town past car showrooms, furniture stores, a garden centre, a DIY wholesaler.

  ‘Couldn’t we stop nearby?’ asked Tabitha hopefully. ‘Go for a little walk?’

  Mary Guy looked at her watch. ‘We’re five minutes late. And any road, the answer’s no.’

  The cab pulled into the forecourt of a large yellow warehouse store: ‘24-Hour Storage Solutions!’ was the large, jaunty logo on the front. Next to the logo was a picture of a cheery, rubicund man in overalls, brandishing an oversized key and smiling a gleaming smile.

  ‘Is this right?’ said Tabitha.

  Mary Guy got out, so Tabitha followed her, still thinking there must be some mistake.

  ‘It’s storage,’ said Mary Guy.

  ‘I can see that. I just thought we were going to a police station or a government facility.’

  The cab drove away and Tabitha looked around. A young woman was standing on the steps clutching a clipboard. She was dressed for business in conservative navy with a white blouse and black shoes. Tabitha would have guessed that she was an estate agent. She stepped forward, looking a little uneasy, and suddenly very young.

  ‘Are you the… you know, the er…?’

  Mary Guy showed her pass and a typed letter. The woman checked the name off on her clipboard.

  ‘It’s on the second floor,’ she said. ‘It’s a bit of a walk, I’m afraid.’

  Tabitha looked at the woman curiously as they were led inside and up a stone staircase.

  ‘Are you police?’ Tabitha asked.

  ‘Oh no,’ said the woman, looking almost alarmed. ‘We, I mean Sunburst, that’s the company I work for, we carry out all kinds of services for the police. Catering, logistics, storage like here.’

  ‘You own this?’

  ‘No, no. We rent it and arrange the transport and all that.’

  They reached the second floor and walked past a series of spaces, each locked behind a grille. Tabitha glimpsed piles of furniture, packing cases, an upright piano, a rowing machine, fragments of people’s lives, the things that they could do without for a while but couldn’t dispense with. The woman looked at her clipboard.

  ‘Two stroke twenty-nine,’ she said. ‘This is us.’

  Tabitha peered through the grille. The space was lined on three sides by very basic shelving. There were objects on the shelves and various bundles on the floor. The woman unlocked the padlock and pulled open the door that was itself just a heavy grille on hinges. The three of them stepped inside. Tabitha stared around.

  ‘A lot of stuff,’ she said.

  The woman glanced at her clipboard.

  ‘I think the material relating to your case is over there.’ She gestured to the left-hand side. ‘Everything is labelled with the reference number.’ She read the number off the clipboard.

  ‘Hang on,’ said Tabitha. She took her notebook from her pocket and got the woman to read the number over again until she had it written down.

  ‘And each piece of evidence has a separate number.’

  ‘You mean like “Exhibit A”?’ said Tabitha.

  ‘I think they’re numbered actually.’

  ‘What can I call you?’ said Tabitha.

  ‘Kira,’ said the woman.

  Tabitha looked around once more.

  ‘So, Kira,’ she said, ‘if my stuff is over here’ – she gestured to the left – ‘then other people’s stuff is everywhere else.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So other people come in here,’ said Tabitha. ‘People connected with other cases.’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘Doesn’t this evidence need to be kept secure?’

  Kira was looking more and more uneasy. ‘It is secure.’

  ‘But you just said that people unconnected with the case are coming in and out of here?’

  ‘Yes, but it’s police and lawyers mostly.’

  ‘They could pick things up. They could pick up the wrong things. They could get them mixed up.’

  Kira gave a nervous little giggle and her eyes flickered between Tabitha and Mary Guy.

  ‘But they wouldn’t,’ she said.

  ‘Who’s making sure?’ said Tabitha. ‘Other police?’ She thought for a few seconds. ‘Have you got a business card?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I might want to get in touch with you,’ said Tabitha. ‘For the trial. Just to ask about storage and security. The sort of thing you do.’

  Kira fumbled in her bag and produced a card.

  ‘Don’t let her get to you,’ said Mary Guy to Kira.

  ‘I’m just asking for her card,’ said Tabitha, taking it.

  ‘You’d better get going,’ said Mary Guy. ‘You’ll run out of time.’

  There was nowhere to sit, no desk. Kira and Mary Guy just stood awkwardly to one side as Tabitha made a quick initial assessment of what was being stored. It was mainly the contents of her outhouse, the outhouse that she had constantly been planning to clear out. Well, it had been cleared now and put here as evidence against her. She walked along the wooden shelf. She noticed her kitchen knives, wrapped in plastic, arranged in a row. She picked up her breadknife and examined it. She looked round. Both of the other women were staring at their phones.

  She had a sudden, terrifying, vertiginous idea. She could jot down the exhibit number of this knife. She could peel the label off, hide it, swallow it, whatever. Then she could move the knife across the room and hide it with the evidence of one of the other cases. She would call for it during the case. She could claim that it was crucial evidence for her defence. And it would be missing or it would be found but without the label.

  ‘What kind of a case is this?’ she imagined herself saying. ‘If they’ve done this, then what other mistakes have been made?’

  Would that sow enough confusion? Would it be enough to create reasonable doubt? She carefully put the knife back on the shelf and almost
smiled to herself. Lucky she was an honest woman.

  She looked along the shelf and saw the scraps of her outhouse neatly bagged up: a couple of ceramic tiles, a small tin of paint, a small stick that had been used for stirring paint, an old chisel, a bare tennis ball, a double-plug adaptor, a metal bolt. On the ground were larger objects, also wrapped in plastic sheeting, which gave them a sinister, morbid appearance, corpses made of some rolled-up chicken wire, a Christmas tree base. Slightly surreally, there was some plastic sheeting that was itself wrapped in plastic sheeting. Her old paint-spattered stepladder was leaning against the wall.

  She felt suddenly disheartened. It was just rubbish, the stuff of her life, the clutter that everyone had at the back of a shed, in a loft or a spare room or by the side of the house, the stuff they meant to get rid of and never quite got around to.

  But now they were evidence. Would some of them be produced in court as evidence against her? Presumably some had blood on them and that was why they were here. There had been so much blood around.

  These were the objects that would be used by the prosecution. Was there anything that would be any use to the defence? A lawyer or a police officer might know. She didn’t have any idea where to begin.

  With a feeling of utter pointlessness, she opened a new page of her notebook and began to write a list of everything that was there, along with the exhibit numbers. When she had finished, she noticed a bin bag she had overlooked. She looked into it and saw clothes, the sort you might take to a charity shop, except that these were also wrapped in plastic. She tipped them on to the floor and then saw the dark stains and recognised them with a lurch. These were the clothes and the trainers she had been wearing when the body was found. On top of everything else that had happened, she had been taken to one side by a female officer and made to take them all off. Even her underwear.

  She wrote a list of them in her notebook.

  The list filled two pages. She looked at it. It all seemed meaningless. She decided she needed to be more thorough. She looked at the knives one by one. Each of them had a maker’s name on it. She wrote them down. Perhaps one of them wasn’t actually hers. She would check. The chisel didn’t have a maker’s name. She looked at the plastic sheeting within the plastic sheeting. It was spattered and smeared with blood. There was a paper label on it saying ‘Reynolds Brown’ and a long serial number. She copied it all down.

  She looked at the two tins of paint. Umber. Clunch. She didn’t recognise them although presumably she had chosen them. She wrote them down along with the brand names.

  Was that it? She stepped back and contemplated them as a whole. The sight made her feel somehow blank and nauseous at the same time. It was like those few hours of her day, which hadn’t mattered to her while she was living through them and now she was trying to retrieve them minute by minute. And there were these scraps from her shed, these bits and pieces on the edge of her life, which had been individually wrapped in plastic and kept in the dark.

  She had a painful sense that somewhere among them, there, right in front of her, was something that could be of help, if only she could see what it was.

  But she couldn’t.

  She turned to Mary Guy.

  ‘I guess we can call another cab now,’ she said.

  FORTY-FIVE

  The letter was very short and written by hand, a spidery and barely legible scrawl with no address and no date.

  It’s late and I’m pretty stoned so I probably shouldn’t be writing this and anyway I probably won’t send it, but here goes. You keep asking why I came back at Christmas after so long away. I’ll tell you why. I came back to tell Mum to leave him. I never got why she stayed until I talked to you, but now I see she was his victim just as much as me, or you, or anyone. We were all his fucking victims.

  We didn’t kill him. But I wish Mum had left before he died. I wish she had told him she was done with him and wiped the smile off his face and I wish I’d been there to see that.

  Something was heavily scratched through here and though Tabitha lifted the letter up to the light she couldn’t make out the words.

  It was probably you, anyway. Everyone thinks so. That inspector was certain. But I wanted to say that I don’t blame you if you did kill him and I’m glad he’s dead and I’m sorry about what he did to you and it’s not fair.

  Tabitha sat for several minutes, holding the letter, thinking.

  Then she wrote a reply.

  Dear Luke,

  I’m glad you told me that. Will you be one of my witnesses? Please.

  Tabitha

  FORTY-SIX

  Two days later, she watched the entire CCTV footage once more. She didn’t really need to, but she had no idea how else to fill the days between now and the trial. This time, she didn’t make notes, she just stared at the grainy film until it became like a dream, or like something that had happened far away and long ago.

  The camera gazed at the leafless birch. Figures appeared, disappeared. The bus arrived and left. She saw Stuart’s car go by and she saw it return. She saw Mel, Rob, Shona, Owen Mallon, Luke. She saw the delivery man.

  The delivery man. She had interviewed everyone except him – and he’d been there all day, waiting patiently for the tree to be cleared.

  She rifled through all the bundles she had received from the prosecution: Lev Wojcik.

  * * *

  He was solid, with round shoulders, broad hands and brown eyes that were almost green. The lines on his face gave him a worried air. He sat opposite Tabitha and fixed his gaze on her.

  ‘Thank you for coming,’ she said. ‘I was hoping you could help me.’

  He didn’t say anything, just waited.

  ‘As you know,’ she continued, ‘I’ve been charged with murdering Stuart Rees on the twenty-first of December. The day you were in Okeham because of the tree.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You were there practically all day.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you were the last person to see Stuart alive.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The person who killed him was the last.’

  ‘Right. Apart from the killer. Who wasn’t me,’ she added a little desperately.

  ‘What do you want from me?’ he asked. ‘The police have already asked me everything.’ He suddenly sounded grim.

  ‘Did they give you a hard time?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I see.’ She gave him a small smile but he didn’t smile back. ‘But you saw Stuart.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can you tell me about that. I mean, you arrived in the village at nine-forty,’ she said. She didn’t need to look at her notes; she had that day off by heart now.

  He nodded.

  ‘And you went to the village shop first.’

  ‘To buy a sandwich,’ he said.

  ‘Nobody else was in the shop?’

  ‘No. Then I drove to the house of Mr Rees.’

  ‘You only had the one delivery in Okeham?’

  ‘Only one.’

  ‘Do you know what the parcel was?’

  He shrugged. ‘A book perhaps. Not big.’

  ‘So you went to the house and rang the doorbell?’

  ‘I didn’t need to ring. He must have heard the van so he opened the door before I rang. I gave him the parcel.’

  ‘And that was it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How did he seem?’

  ‘I just gave him a delivery.’

  ‘He didn’t say anything about going out later?’

  ‘No. How would he, with the tree down?’

  ‘And you just left.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And went back to the shop.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And stayed there pretty much all day?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I bought coffee. I bought a paper. I waited in van. It was very cold. Sometimes I ran the engine to ge
t warm.’

  ‘You got out a few times. Why?’

  ‘It was many hours,’ he said. For the first time he looked uncomfortable. ‘I had drunk much coffee.’

  ‘You didn’t go back to Stuart’s house?’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  But she knew, from looking at the CCTV, that he hadn’t been away from his van or the shop for long enough to get to Stuart’s house and back again. Something nagged at her, but she couldn’t put her finger on it. She felt she wasn’t asking the right questions.

  ‘Did you see Stuart drive past you at about half past ten and then back again?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘Perhaps?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Did you see me?’

  He looked at her with his mottled eyes. ‘I don’t know,’ he said again. ‘I wasn’t looking. I was just waiting. It was boring. It was cold. I was losing money. What do you want me to say? It was just one of the days when nothing goes right. I was happy to leave.’

  ‘How did you know when the tree had been cleared?’

  ‘Like when I came, the woman in the shop told me.’

  ‘Terry.’

  ‘She didn’t say her name.’

  ‘So you can’t remember anything you saw as you sat there all those hours?’

  ‘I didn’t say so. There was the woman with her dog. I like dogs. She walked back and forward several times. There was a man who ran.’

  ‘But you saw nothing odd? Nothing that grabbed your attention?’

  He shook his head slowly, his eyes resting on her. ‘Nothing.’

  FORTY-SEVEN

  Michaela looked at Tabitha with an expression of concern, almost of dismay.

  ‘You should wash your hair, you know, maybe get it cut.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Before the trial, anyway. It’s not long to go now.’

  ‘Just over three weeks.’

  ‘You’ve got to look smart for that.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘What’ll you wear?’

  ‘I haven’t thought. I don’t really have the right kind of clothes. I’m not really a suit kind of person. Or a skirt and blouse kind.’