House of Correction

by French, Nicci

  ‘How did you find me?’

  ‘It wasn’t that hard. You didn’t leave a forwarding address with the coach company, but I talked to Joe Simons.’ McBride’s eyes flickered but he didn’t answer. ‘I talked to this woman in the office at the coach station and I looked at the schedule. Joe was the one who was driving the coach that day. You were just a passenger. You got off at Okeham and you didn’t get back on.’

  ‘How did you know?’ he said.

  He took a tin from his pocket and rolled himself a thin cigarette; his fingers were yellow and his teeth stained.

  ‘I kept seeing it,’ said Tabitha, ‘but I didn’t see it. It was in plain sight and nobody noticed. It was the bus.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘On the CCTV. When it arrived in the morning, there was a cracked window. I watched it over and over again.’

  She could see it now: a boy was staring out of it and his face was criss-crossed by the spider’s web of glass.

  ‘But in the afternoon, when the bus returned, the window wasn’t cracked anymore.’

  A different boy was staring into the camera through a clear pane of glass.

  McBride wasn’t looking at Tabitha, but at the baked earth.

  ‘You told me you drove that bus all day. You said it twice. As soon as I realised about the window I looked at the CCTV properly and, sure enough, it was a different bus. You didn’t mention that.’

  Sam started making another cigarette. She watched his long fingers deftly rolling the piece of paper round the shreds of tobacco.

  ‘It was driving me crazy,’ Tabitha said. ‘Everybody hated Stuart except for me but nobody apart from me could have done it. And now there’s you. You were his passenger that morning. You got off the bus at Okeham, the way you often did, bought cigarettes in the village shop, went back behind the bus and anyone seeing it on CCTV would automatically assume it was you driving away. The bus hid the sight of you walking in the direction of Stuart’s house.’

  Sam didn’t speak. He was smoking steadily and gazing out towards the distant sea.

  ‘You killed Stuart,’ said Tabitha. She waited and he didn’t react. ‘You planned it in advance. You made arrangements with your friend to drive the bus that day. You called up Laura a few days before and made an appointment for a viewing, just so you knew she wouldn’t be there. After the bus left, you must have holed up somewhere out of sight and watched the house. There are several places round there, in the trees by the cliff. You waited till Laura had left and then the delivery man arrived and you waited till he went as well. You went to the house and you killed him and you wrapped him in the plastic and put him in the boot of his car and drove away with him. But of course the tree had come down and you realised you were stuck. What is it? Sod’s law? Murphy’s law? If anything can go wrong, it will.’

  Still nothing from Sam.

  ‘So you came back and dumped him in my house.’

  ‘I didn’t know anyone was there. It looked a wreck. I didn’t mean for it to fall on you.’

  For a moment Tabitha could barely speak. ‘You didn’t do much about it when it did fall on me, did you? I guess your plan was to drive Stuart’s car somewhere, dump the body and leave the car somewhere else. You had to think of a plan B. All you had to do was hide out and then do what you’d done in reverse. When the bus came back in the afternoon, you just walked behind it, out of sight of the camera again, and stepped aboard.’

  Sam looked around warily, dropped the glowing end of the cigarette onto the earth and carefully ground it out. ‘Now what?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Why’s it you’re here, not the police?’

  ‘I knew before the trial ended,’ said Tabitha. ‘I realised after the delivery man’s evidence.’

  ‘So why?’ he asked again.

  ‘When you were talking about seeing Dr Mallon running, you said something about how he was probably going along the coastal path. But the coastal path is closed off round Okeham. Years ago part of the cliff collapsed and they had to divert it inland. But when you knew it, when you were a boy, the path was still there.’

  McBride gave a faint smile.

  ‘So I knew it was you,’ Tabitha continued. ‘But I didn’t know why. I think I do know now. The thing is, I was puzzled by Joe Simons. All right, I can imagine him giving you a lift in the coach and covering for you. But once he heard about the murder, why wouldn’t he go to the police? What was in it for him? Unless he was a real friend and you had a good reason and you told him the reason.’

  She looked him full in the face. A spasm of pain, or maybe it was more like a recoil, gripped his features. There was something feral about him, she thought, and then she remembered the court drawing in which she had looked so savage: was she like him, then?

  ‘He did it to you as well, didn’t he?’ she persevered.

  There was a long silence. Sam sat leaning forward on the bench, looking at his hands that were folded loosely on his knees.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said at last.

  ‘Was he your teacher?’

  ‘Sports club.’

  ‘How old were you?’ she asked.

  ‘Nine.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘The first time,’ he said. It was obviously an effort for him to talk; the words came in small spurts. ‘It went on.’

  ‘You never told anyone?’

  ‘I lived with my nan and then with foster parents. Who would I tell? Who did you tell? You’re the first person I’ve said it to.’ He thought for a moment. ‘The second, after Joe.’

  ‘So you came back to the area to kill him.’

  ‘At first I thought I’d just give him a fright.’

  He said he’d seen a ghost, Laura had told her. Everyone had thought it was Tabitha he was fearful of, but it had been Sam: one thing to have sex with a fifteen-year-old girl, quite another to rape a nine-year-old boy. The respectable Mr Rees, pillar of the community, churchgoer, member of the parish council, finger in every pie.

  ‘He put the house on the market. He was going to get away with it all over again. I had to do it before the school holiday, see, while he was still there and I still drove the bus into the village every day.’

  Tabitha nodded. ‘Can I have a cigarette?’ she asked.

  He rolled her one and then lit it, lifting his hand to shield the flame. The acrid taste filled her mouth and she coughed violently.

  ‘I thought I’d feel better somehow, once I’d killed him,’ said Sam.

  ‘But you didn’t?’

  ‘I don’t feel guilty, if that’s what you’re thinking. He was wicked. What he did to me—’ He stopped, unable to find the words. ‘I was never right after,’ he said instead. ‘So he got what he wanted in the end.’

  ‘What did he want?’

  ‘I don’t know. Turn me into rubbish. I used to be sick sometimes; he liked that.’

  Tabitha stared at the smoke curling between her fingers.

  ‘That day, when he opened the door,’ Sam continued in a low, flat voice, ‘and saw me, he seemed, like, almost relieved.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Like he’d been waiting for me. Like he didn’t mind.’

  What was it Stuart had said to the vicar? He said he was damned for what he had done. She thought of him in his little car, looking at her without expression, lifting up her skirt: it had nothing to do with sexual desire. It was something else. Some kind of power.

  ‘Well,’ she said eventually, ‘it’s over, anyway.’

  ‘I didn’t mean for it to harm you,’ said Sam. ‘That’s why I turned up in court for you. I wanted you to be OK.’

  Tabitha considered this. He had been quite prepared for her to spend six months in prison and be tried for murder in a case that had seemed cut and dried. Turning up as a witness in her defence, with a paltry bit of supporting evidence, didn’t seem like much. She thought of saying so, but what was the point?

  ‘The police have no other lines
of inquiry,’ she said instead.

  ‘Unless you give them one.’

  ‘If you think I’m going to tell you that people know where I am, you’re wrong. Nobody knows I’m here.’

  He could strangle her, she thought. Or drag her into the van and kill her there. They sat in silence. The sun was low in the pale sky and there was a smudge of mosquitoes above them. He shook his head.

  ‘I’m done,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve brought something with me,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  She opened up her little rucksack and took out a sheet of paper.

  ‘I wrote down in advance what I thought had happened and it’s pretty much right. I want you to date and sign it.’

  ‘A confession.’ Sam’s face darkened.

  ‘I won’t show it to anyone unless you do anything else.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘I don’t know. But if you do anything bad, then I’ll go to the police with this.’

  ‘You’re blackmailing me.’ He sounded aggrieved.

  Tabitha started to laugh. It hurt the back of her throat and made her eyes sting and it felt unpleasant, but for several minutes she couldn’t stop.

  ‘You killed a man,’ she said at last. ‘He might have been a bad man, but you killed him. And you were going to let me go to prison for years in your place. This’ – she waved the paper before his face – ‘is just a guarantee that you won’t harm someone else.’

  ‘I’m not like that.’

  ‘No one’s like that, until they are.’

  She handed him a pen and watched as he read the words slowly, his index finger moving along the lines. He put the paper down and wiped the back of his hand across his forehead. Then he signed his name.

  When she left, she didn’t look back, not once, though she felt his eyes on her as she walked away.

  * * *

  On the shore, the sun nearly set and the tide coming in, little waves licking at her boots, she took out the piece of paper and read what was written on it. Then she tore it into tiny shreds, which she scattered into the sea. They drifted pale on the dark surface of the water amid the straggle of seaweed, and after a while they disappeared.

  ‘Home,’ she said to herself, though the word held no meaning for her.

  SEVENTY-SIX

  Tabitha went back to Okeham one more time. She couldn’t avoid it. She had put the house on the market and an estate agent had managed the process, arranged for the house to be cleaned, shown prospective buyers around, everything. He was very enthusiastic about the property.

  ‘Short walk from the sea, perfect,’ he’d said. ‘Any preferences?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Tabitha had said.

  He had explained that some people preferred to sell to local people, even if it involved taking a slight loss. It was to do with maintaining the community.

  ‘No preferences,’ Tabitha had said.

  Within a few days, she accepted an offer for the full asking price. She didn’t know anything about the buyer except for the name and she didn’t care.

  But she still had her possessions in the house, her furniture and other stuff. So, one dawn in early October, she drove back to Okeham in a van she hired for the day. She had asked Michaela if she wanted to come with her.

  ‘You don’t have to,’ Tabitha said. ‘It’ll probably be boring.’

  ‘Are you kidding?’ said Michaela.

  It was before seven o’clock on a Tuesday morning when they drove into the village. There was nobody around. Tabitha felt like she was returning from the dead, a ghost that nobody could see. She pulled up outside her house.

  ‘We’ll be in and out before anyone knows we’ve been here,’ she said. ‘Except for the CCTV.’

  She unlocked the front door and they stepped inside. There was a smell of emptiness and abandonment.

  ‘Do you want some tea?’ asked Tabitha.

  ‘All right. Have you got milk?’

  Tabitha shook her head. ‘I haven’t got tea either.’ She rummaged in her jacket and produced a five-pound note. ‘I don’t want to show my face, but you could go to the village shop and buy some tea and milk. Biscuits as well, if you want.’

  While Michaela was gone, Tabitha looked around. It was all rubbish really. She should probably just have dumped it in a skip. She started piling plates into a cardboard box. She shook open a bin bag for mugs and plates that were chipped or cracked or just too awful to take. She put the kettle on and it had come to the boil when Michaela arrived back with a box of teabags, a carton of milk and a packet of chocolate biscuits.

  ‘They seemed a bit suspicious,’ Michaela said. ‘They asked me what I was doing in Okeham. I told the woman I was here with you. Then she got very interested.’

  ‘Terry.’ Tabitha nodded.

  They walked round the house with their mugs of tea and decided to leave the beds and sofa and the kitchen table.

  ‘Some people take the light bulbs with them,’ said Michaela.

  Tabitha looked around. ‘You know I still wake up in the middle of the night and for a moment I think I’m back in the cell and I want to scream out.’

  ‘Yeah, I know. Think of the ones who are there for decades.’

  ‘I can hardly bear to.’

  ‘What happened to that girl you shared with after I left?’

  ‘Dana?’ Tabitha looked away, out of the window towards the grey water. She could see Dana’s woebegone face, hear her halting voice as she sat beside Tabitha and spelled out words. ‘I don’t know. I wrote to her in prison but she never replied. She would have been released just a few weeks after the trial. I don’t know how to find her.’

  ‘Maybe she doesn’t want to be found. You have to let some things go.’

  ‘I’m not so good at that.’

  In the end, they didn’t take much at all. Half of Tabitha’s clothes ended up in bin bags. They took towels, rolled up a couple of rugs. Of the furniture, they took only four kitchen chairs and a workbench and a piece of driftwood Tabitha had found washed up on the beach and had thought of carving into something, some day.

  When they were done, it was only mid-morning.

  ‘We hardly needed the van,’ Michaela said.

  Then Tabitha thought of something. She stepped inside the back of the van, retrieved a towel and her swimming costume.

  ‘We’re going for a swim,’ she said.

  ‘You’re going for a swim,’ said Michaela.

  * * *

  Down on the beach, Tabitha took off her clothes and pulled on her swimming costume. She had lost so much weight in prison that it hung off her, absurdly.

  ‘Fuck it,’ she said and in front of Michaela’s amused gaze slipped it off and ran naked into the sea. The water was cold, like a steely grip on her body. It was also rough and she had to push through the breakers until she was away from the shore. She felt like a creature being born into a new element and she let herself slip under the surface. It was suddenly so dark and quiet and cold and good that she felt an impulse to stay there, to breathe the water in. They said that to drown was strangely peaceful, it took just that first breathing of water rather than air.

  But she couldn’t do it. She didn’t want to do it. Not really. She burst up into the light, spluttering, and turned to the shore and saw a shape standing beside Michaela, a shape that she couldn’t make out. She swam towards the shore and just as she was approaching it, she was overtaken by a huge wave that turned her over and landed her on the pebbles on her back. It felt undignified and comic and she stood up dripping and laughing and looking into the slightly bemused face of the Reverend Melanie Coglan. She was wearing a heavy-duty anorak and a woollen cap and Tabitha was wearing nothing, until Michaela stepped forward and wrapped a towel round her.

  ‘It’s a bit rough,’ said Mel.

  ‘I like the sea like that.’

  ‘I heard you were here.’

  ‘On the grapevine.’

  ‘Someone said they had seen you.’
>
  Tabitha dried herself, let the towel fall and dressed herself.

  ‘I should have got in touch,’ said Mel. ‘To see how you were.’

  ‘That wasn’t necessary. But I’m fine. How are you?’

  ‘I’m fine too. I’m transferring. To another parish.’

  ‘I would have thought your parishioners needed you,’ said Tabitha. ‘At a time like this.’

  Mel flexed her jaw. She looked pale.

  ‘The people in this village do have certain issues, conflicts, problems, call them what you will, but I’m too…’

  ‘Involved,’ said Tabitha.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Embroiled.’

  ‘Well, there have been various kinds of conflict, you know, between people, in the…’ Melanie seemed to be searching for the right word. ‘Aftermath of… er—’

  ‘Me. The trial. All that.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good,’ said Tabitha. ‘Good. They deserve it.’

  She was all dressed now. She looked at Michaela. ‘Shall we head off?’

  Michaela nodded in response.

  As they turned to go, Mel put her hand on Tabitha’s shoulder.

  ‘The police,’ she said. ‘They’re not going to find the truth, are they?’

  ‘How should I know?’ said Tabitha, then gave a little shrug. ‘Probably not.’

  ‘That’s going to be a torment,’ said Melanie. ‘They’ll never know. They’ll suspect each other.’

  ‘That sounds awful,’ said Tabitha and she and Michaela left Melanie Coglan there on the beach, staring at the waves.

  * * *

  ‘What are you thinking?’ asked Michaela as they drove out of Okeham: past the village shop and the bus stop and the camera, past the church and the vicarage, the row of small houses where Andy lived, where Shona lived, up the hill with the cliffs rearing up on one side, where the tree had fallen. The sea was beneath them now, and from here you couldn’t tell how cold the water was and how the undertow sucked you into its churning depths.