by Laura Powell
She had pulled out the blank, slightly creased sheet of paper that she carried in her diary for emergencies, and begun writing but the words had clogged up after the first three.
Now, in the darkness of the toilet cubicle, her words unbung themselves. You might remember that I was one of your neighbours in St Steele, she begins. I lived at Hotel Eden with my late mother, Dolores Broadbent. She stops. It sounds formal and vague but she only has one piece of paper and crossings-out would look worse.
For many years I followed what happened to you with… With what? Disgust? Concern? Guilty fascination? She leaves a gap, she can find a fitting phrase later. …and like many others I was convinced of your innocence, not only because I knew you a little, but also because I believed I had seen the real killer. It sounds so blunt that she almost wants to laugh. I saw the real killer? It’s something a teenage character in an adventure novel might write. She also recognises that phrase from somewhere else, only she can’t remember where.
Shortly before she was killed, I saw Patricia Hollinghurst in the woods with a man. I have always believed that man was our neighbour George Paxon. I’m sure you remember him – he owned the biscuit factory and I read that he died around the time of your trial. I believe he was having an affair with Miss Hollinghurst, which soured and led him to kill her, and, for some reason, the other girls before her.
Yes, she has definitely felt the rhythm of these lines before. In fact, she is certain that she has written them too. Her throat seals over as she remembers that this is just as she described it all to Gallagher in the letter she wrote to him all those years ago. It had been clinical and factual then too. She swallows with difficulty and ploughs on.
I do understand how incredibly strange this will sound to you, but every word is true. I never believed you’d be found guilty and, as soon as I found out you were, I told everyone what I saw and about George Paxon, but no one believed me. It was an incredibly difficult period as my mother had recently passed away and there were certain people who believed that I was – She stops. She can’t write ‘mad’ or ‘unstable’, or he might think she still is. Unwell, she finishes.
I was taken to hospital and when I was finally let out, I wasn’t sure what I believed any more. For three years, I told doctors and nurses and even other patients over and over that you were innocent and what I had seen, but they all told me I was deluded. It took me a long time to start trusting my memories again and, at that point, I should have tried again to tell the police; I planned to but backed out last minute. This sounds so weak in retrospect but, in all honesty, I had just given birth to my daughter, Cath, and I was terrified of them locking me back up.
I want you to know how deeply sorry I am. If I could provide a statement or help clear your name in some other way, now retrospectively, please contact me or advise your solicitor to do so. I will do anything I can to help you.
I would also like to properly explain why I didn’t tell anyone straight away when I first saw George Paxon with Miss Hollinghurst. The reason was – She stops. Nothing sounds sufficient. I have breast cancer, she writes instead on a new line. I don’t write that for sympathy. I just want you to know that whoever is up there is punishing me, finally. I deserve this.
It was easier than she expected, though she feels no better. She sets down her pen and picks up her bag. Her hands shaking, she pulls out the newspaper and carefully unrolls it, smoothing it on her lap. She should read it all but his bruised eyes glare at her from the front page and her stomach lurches. She hides him away again and smacks the button to open the toilet door. It slides open too slowly and she dives out into the train corridor. A young boy, no taller than her waist, looks quizzically at her. He steps into the toilet and she is left alone in the space between the train carriages, unsure where to sit or how to finish the letter or how to muster the strength to read his words.
‘Always line your stomach before you attempt anything important.’
Jerry’s words pop into her mind. He said that to Cath before her school exams, before her driving test, even before she gave birth to Holly. Mary smiles sadly and wishes for the first time that he was here with her. Jerry would know what to do; he always knows. Yes, she wishes he were here desperately, but she switches off her phone before she can do anything about it because, if she rang him this minute, everything would pour out. The words would gush until every scrap of her story was laid before Jerry; kind, loving Jerry. He would see who she really is. She would disgust him.
Mary finds herself in the buffet carriage. The sandwiches all contain mayonnaise so she orders a hamburger, Jerry’s favourite, and is handed a warm, damp bun with a flaccid round of pale meat lopping out. By the time she has finished eating, the sickness is quenched and she is ready to read it.
She skims the front page article, still standing at the buffet counter and avoiding Forbes’s mugshot eyes, but she can’t find any words from his own lips so she opens the newspaper and leafs through, blotting the pages with greasy finger-marks.
The first Cornish Cleaver spread is devoted to the history of the unsolved murders. The only comments are from people she doesn’t recognise who call themselves psychotherapists and criminologists and other long titles that were once all bundled into one. A crackly voice announces that the next stop is St Erth, so she flips through the pages quickly until she finds the interview.
It spans four pages. There is only one new photograph of Forbes, a flat silhouette, but his face is blanketed with such a heavy shadow that she can’t even see the contours of his features. She can tell that he is elderly though, by the hunch of his shoulders. There is a second photograph too, it is yellowed and fuzzy but it is definitely him at roughly twenty-five years old. He stands outside his butcher’s shop, scowling and wearing a blood-soaked apron and holding a shoulder of cow. She scans the words until she finds the first line that is wrapped with quotation marks. She reads it and almost drops the newspaper.
Stunned she reads it again, then again, and a third time because she never imagined that he would say that. The conductor is announcing the next stop again and the train brakes are squealing. Mary skims through every quotation, ignoring the journalist’s paragraphs of stuffing, as she tries to digest it all. Then she is off the train, her handbag bundled under one arm, the newspaper tucked under the other, not quite registering the hordes and not shielding herself from the rain. She replays the words over and over.
‘From today I’m not battling to clear my name any more,’ says Forbes. ‘I wish I could have proved to the world, and in particular to Maureen Cardy’s family, that I was innocent but I’m not angry or bitter the way I used to be. I’m just a tired old man with little time ahead of me and, what time I do have left, I want to enjoy with my grandchildren in peace.’
It takes Mary a long time to leave St Erth station. She is still standing on the puddled platform long after the train has rolled on. The rain has stopped, the other passengers have dispersed and the lone taxi driver at the far side of the car park has given up flashing his lights at her.
She shakes dry the newspaper and looks at it again. The words are the same ones, still stuck down fast. How could she not have read it and learnt all of this when she first saw the headline at Star Newsagents? How can he sound so forgiving and at ease? She rereads the final paragraphs to be sure that it is not her conscience tricking itself:
‘I’ve never spoken publicly about this before and I only did today for my family,’ says Forbes. ‘I wanted my version of events to be published so that if, after I’ve died, my sons and grandchildren ever find out who I used to be, they’ll be able to read this story in my own words and know that I didn’t lay a finger on Maureen Cardy or any one of those girls. Whoever killed them was wicked and deserved the severest of punishments, but that man wasn’t me. Sadly he walked free.
‘I also want my family to know that, though these years have been unbearable at times and though I’ve often thought of taking my own life, I didn’t because of them.
’ He added: ‘They might know nothing about my past, but they were my salvation.’
*Payment for this interview has been donated to The PAI Foundation, a charity that supports people affected by imprisonment.
* * *
The taxi man is still waiting. Mary moves towards him on autopilot. She doesn’t register that she is speaking or that the engine is starting or that they are speeding through the country lanes, past a strip of ocean, a herd of cows, over a hill and into St Steele.
Her pleasantries feel scripted. She doles out the correct change but she doesn’t remember counting it. Then she is walking along a street littered with fudge wrappers and seagull mess and cold, salty holidaymakers who are scuttling back to their holiday homes as the clouds thicken and blacken. She passes a souvenir shop, the window filled with paper windmills and candy-striped buckets and spades, but she doesn’t recognise any of it; not even the sign at the start of the cobbles that reads Newl Grove.
She only jolts out of her trance when a small girl wearing a bulging nappy and a sandy vest slips on a cobble and howls. Blood pours from her left knee. A mother and father crouch around her, dabbing the knee with a tissue and plugging a green jelly sweet in her mouth. The cobbles are spotted red. Mary stares. The parents see her staring and frown in unison. They pick up the child and walk on, though she still cries. Mary looks at the blood on the cobble stones and at the shut-up bucket and spade shop. She presses her nose to the cool glass until it fogs over with her breath. Mother would hate all of those garish colours, that’s all she can think. Mother.
She threads her way deeper into Newl Grove, though it doesn’t look like Newl Grove any more. It is narrower, the houses are tinier. She slows as she catches up with the family who are laughing now and hoisting the girl with the cut knee onto her father’s shoulders. Mary looks at the houses, so as not to stare, and on a blue front door she sees the number “22”. She stops. Hotel Eden was number twenty-two.
She doesn’t recognise the building and it takes her a minute to click that the hotel has been severed into two houses. The house to the right says “22B” above a tarnished brass doorknocker, but the one to the left has a wide blue door with a wooden sign hanging above it; it is the same shape as Hotel Eden’s front door. Bumblebee Cottage, reads the sign. There is a tiny painting of a bee next to it. A tinny wind chime jangles somewhere within and Mary is pimpled with goosebumps.
The curtains are creased and drawn so she pushes a hand through the letterbox and finds herself looking at someone else’s carpet, the colour of marmalade. She jumps back, ashamed, and hurries along the street, not planning where she is going. Someone is calling her name but she ignores it; her imagination is playing with her again.
Minutes later, she finds herself sitting on grass, a pond in front of her, her back pressed against a willow tree. She tries to block out the abandoned diggers and JCBs and the carcass of a half-built holiday complex that she can just make out through the trees. She tries harder to picture it all as it once was, but it has shrunk and withered, even the pond.
When she clenches her jaw and dares to imagine a fifteen-year-old girl and a man lying here, it looks exposed and grubby. Cheap, somehow. She tries to picture the girl tossing a paper bag into the water and she tries to imagine the contents of that paper bag, but it is too difficult to grasp onto, though not in a remorseful way. It is simply disconnected from her own life, as though she is visualising someone else’s history.
She realises with surprise that the hard ball isn’t sitting in her stomach any more. No one is crushing down on her shoulders either, and his voice isn’t whispering into her ear; it hasn’t been for some time. Since the taxi ride perhaps, or since she stood on that puddled station car park and read his words.
She feels inside her handbag for the newspaper – that will surely jolt her back to remorse and secret longing and normality – but it isn’t there. Nor is her letter to Forbes. Maybe she left them in the taxi or dropped them in a puddle. Oddly, it doesn’t matter any more.
She is glad to be pressed up against the willow trunk with her bottom on the firm earth, for suddenly she is rootless. So rootless, she has a strange urge to grasp fistfuls of grass, just to keep herself earthed.
Seconds pass. There is a crunch and a pant. Someone is calling a name. It is her name, she realises. She is Mary Sugden now. The light has almost faded but she squints and sees him between the arched branches of two trees, striding towards her.
She takes him in: the wide kind pools of his blue eyes, his curls of hair, all tangled and tawny and flecked silver, the familiar creases on his face that she could trace with her eyes closed. He is wearing his boyish blue blazer and a sheepish half-grin that makes her grin too. She wants to kiss him. Has she ever wanted to do that so urgently before? He is clutching a bunch of keys and the gold golf ball keyring that Holly bought him. It jingles louder as he walks closer, closer. She is incredibly light, almost weightless. She jumps to her feet to greet him, a smile eating up her face.
‘I’ve found you,’ says Jerry with such relief that she clasps his hand.
It is cold and papery. He looks surprised but pleased too. She never holds his hand; she hardly touches him at all.
‘Thank you,’ she blurts out.
His eyes are baffled, but his lips are still curved in that thin, pleased smile of his. She clutches his hand tighter. She should explain where she has been and ask how he found her, but her eyes are prickling in an unfamiliar way. Her cheeks twitch. Jerry’s face blurs out of focus. Then she cries; she really cries.
Chapter 21
November 1956
‘George Paxon,’ he calls again. ‘Come out here and face me.’
John Gallagher steams along the corridor, squinting through the windows. The offices are all dark but for the last one with a dim yellow light inside. A figure is moving around a desk. He is stooped over. His body shudders as he half-carries, half-drags a bulky object to the centre of the room. Gallagher takes a sharp breath inwards and flings open the door.
Paxon is on his feet holding a black chair with metal legs. His face is white and he is slighter than Gallagher remembers. His hair has thinned and greyed, his flannel suit hangs off him and his brown tie is loose around his neck. It takes him a few seconds to register Gallagher.
‘What are you doing? This is private property,’ he tries to shout but his voice is raspy.
‘What have you done to her?’ growls Gallagher.
‘Done to who?’
Gallagher’s eyes edge around the room but there is no sign of Betty.
‘What are you talking about?’ cries Paxon, pushing the chair between them. ‘And what do you think you’re doing in my factory without my permission, today of all days?’
‘Where’s Betty?’
‘You’re that reporter, aren’t you?’
‘I asked you where she is.’
‘Is this how you bully stories out of people?’
Gallagher stops.
‘What do you mean, today of all days?’
‘Just leave.’
Gallagher kicks the chair out of the way and lunges.
‘You’ll tell me where she is or I’ll snap your neck right now.’ He grasps Paxon’s collar. His neck is surprisingly skeletal. ‘Murderer!’
‘You’ve got it all wrong,’ splutters Paxon between coughs.
‘Where’re Betty and her mother?’
Paxon strains for breath.
‘Answer me,’ he booms but his grip slackens slightly.
‘Dead,’ croaks Paxon. ‘Dolores choked.’
Gallagher swells with rage. He squeezes Paxon’s neck again; so hard he can feel the bones against his fingers.
‘You killed her.’
‘Me? It wasn’t me. It was an accident,’ squeaks Paxon, his face purple.
‘And Betty?’
‘She’s gone.’
‘Gone where?’
‘Hospital.’
‘If you laid a finger—’
> ‘A lunatic hospital. She was mad, shouting nonsense. She needed help.’
Stunned, Gallagher lets go and Paxon flops into a heap on the concrete. He lets the words settle: she needed help.
‘I didn’t hurt anyone, I swear,’ says Paxon.
He smells of liquor and the whites of his eyes are watery and drooping, like soft wet strawberries. Gallagher glares at him.
‘You’re going to come clean.’
‘It wasn’t me, I swear on my son’s life,’ cries Paxon, trying to pull himself to his feet. He collapses but tries again. ‘Please, just let me show you. I can prove it.’
He reaches for the desk drawer but Gallagher swats away his hand. He doesn’t fight back.
‘You must think I’m a fool,’ says Gallagher, opening the drawer himself. ‘What’s in here? Another knife? A pistol?’
He looks inside but there is only a pile of blank papers, a mound of rubber bands and a packet of new envelopes. A handwritten letter sits on top of them.
‘That top letter,’ says Paxon in a tiny voice, his eyes closed and his head tipped up to the ceiling as though he is silently praying.
Gallagher keeps his hand on Paxon’s wrist for a minute longer, then pulls out the letter. The envelope is smudged with greasy finger-marks and the single sheet of paper inside is folded into a tiny square. It says: I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.
Slowly, nervously, almost not wanting to know what it says, he unfolds the next section.
I’m sorry but all I did was love you.
‘What is this?’ says Gallagher.
‘She was probably drunk,’ replies Paxon.
Halfway down the page is a letter of sorts, scribbled on a slant. The writing is tangled and smudged.