I call the guard and tell him I want to go back to my cell.
49
Visitors are like buses, apparently. You wait around forever for one, and then two come at once. When Emma sent her request asking if she could come to see me, I did not hesitate as I had with Mattie. I wanted to see her. I longed to.
I know her. I know all about her. I know her working hours (long), the songs she likes to sing when in the shower (Taylor Swift). I know how she folds her knickers in her underwear drawer. I know she keeps a Chanel lipstick (Beige Brut, costing £46) and chewing gum (Extra peppermint) in her handbag, I know the contents of her medicine cabinet, her bank accounts and library shelves. I know how often she dyes her hair and shaves; I know when she last had a smear test. I know the expression she wears when she comes. For such a long time, the strange and powerful intimacy was one-way. It wasn’t until the night she killed my mother that our relationship became in any way mutual.
She doesn’t know me. The dead wife, the first wife, the not-quite wife. She must want to; she’s the enquiring type. So here we are in the loud, uncomfortable, unwelcoming visitors’ room, face to face. The woman who came before. The woman who came next. We are equally fascinating to each other. She sits across the table and stares at me. She stared at me in court, too. She was up in the viewing gallery most of the time, I was down in the dock. Often I felt the heat of her gaze bearing down on me, like a physical weight. I occasionally looked up, caught her eye. It was a bit like looking into the sun, blinding. I’d have to look away. In court, I thought her glare communicated a laser-sharp, ferocious sense of agony. Others might not have detected as much; the broadsheets reported that she was calm and collected, the tabloids said she was unreadable, icy. I knew she was in pain, physical and emotional. I knew from the way she pulled her top lip over her teeth. Pain as the result of anger or humiliation, I guess. Today her lips are slightly parted. She looks confused but curious.
She opens her tote bag and pulls out a baby-blue cashmere jumper. I know it’s cashmere, but you can’t tell by looking. It’s stiff, rigid as cardboard and shrunken so that it’s only fit for a doll. ‘I found this,’ she declares.
‘When?’
‘Two weeks ago. It had fallen down the back of the chest of drawers in my dressing room. I was doing a big clear-out. I guess it’s been there a long time.’
I nod. ‘Two and a half years in total.’
Her forehead creases. ‘Why didn’t you tell your solicitor where it was?’ she asks, puzzled.
‘I did. He said it didn’t prove anything, that I could have shrunk it on another date, not the night I claimed.’
‘Your own solicitor said that?’ She seems shocked. ‘He didn’t think it might have strengthened your case? He didn’t want to at least try?’ Her voice is high with outrage. I guess that’s a money thing, the ultimate privilege of being rich: you get to believe in the fairy tale of fairness; you think people have the energy to do the right thing, when most of us just get by doing something.
‘My solicitor was paid for by legal aid. He was worth every penny I didn’t pay. You pay peanuts, you get monkeys and all that,’ I explain. She had the best solicitors money could buy; the charges against her were dropped before she left hospital. I mean, that’s fair – she didn’t plan to kill my mum, she was innocent – but it’s weird how fair stuff only happens to rich people.
‘I took the jumper to my solicitor,’ she says.
‘Why?’ I shouldn’t be surprised. I know she channels the paragon-of-virtue vibe and holds the belief that she can change things.
‘I thought it might get the case reopened.’
‘The case against me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why would you do that?’
‘This proves you were telling the truth.’
‘Does it? Or is my solicitor right? Does it just prove I shrank your jumper at some point?’
‘I believe your story,’ she says quietly.
It’s good to hear, even from her, but irrelevant to my legal position. ‘Did your solicitor believe my story?’
Colour creeps up her neck, she sighs. ‘No. He said the same as yours. The jumper doesn’t validate your defence. It isn’t evidence of your innocence, at least not enough to counter the fact that the nut key was found in your flat, in your bedside drawer.’
‘Right.’
‘Did he plant it?’
‘You know the answer to that.’ The blotchy redness has crawled all the way up her face now. She’s probably embarrassed by her own naivety. She should be. I bet she’s regretting her big theatrical gesture. The generous settlement that was supposed to buy her peace of mind will gnaw, disturbing her until her dying day now she knows what he is. At the very least, a cheat, a falsifier of evidence. Maybe a would-be murderer. ‘If you’re here to find out if it was him who tampered with your car or if it was my mother, I can’t help you. I don’t know for a fact.’
She nods stiffly. I guess she’s had long enough to get used to the idea that someone wanted her dead. I suppose it still takes some processing if you’re unsure who that someone is. A woman you barely knew, who you pinned to a tree and is long gone, or the man who made you lose your mind with love. I almost feel sorry for her. Fuck it, I do feel sorry for her. She believes so fiercely in justice and truth and fairness, the world must be hard for her. Truths like this must be mind-blowingly destructive, because they expose unfairness, they don’t prop it up. It strikes me that her attitude is a waste. If I was rich, I wouldn’t squander my time on expecting life to be just. I’d know better. I’d just dress beautifully and drink champagne.
‘That’s not why I’m here.’
‘Oh. So why, then?’
‘I want to know why your mother killed my parents.’
‘This has just occurred to you?’ She’s supposed to be so clever, so logical. But you have to wonder, is she? It’s taken her a while to get to this.
‘In the court case it wasn’t addressed.’
‘It wasn’t seen as relevant to the case,’ I point out.
‘I can see that legally it wasn’t, but in reality that one action led to everything else, this entire mess. I don’t believe Susan Morden’s actions were financially motivated; my parents weren’t wealthy. They didn’t have much money at all at that point in their lives. And why would my grandparents tell me they had died in an accident rather than being murdered, since someone was tried and convicted for their murder?’
‘To protect you,’ I tell her. She looks surprised. It’s not her fault. We’re all the same, we’re all limited. We don’t know what we don’t know. I bet she thought her grandparents were cold and remote. I bet she had no idea they were traumatised by the truth of her parents’ deaths, grief-stricken at losing their son and humiliated that his actions had led to his death. Possibly she resented being sent to that out-of-the-way boarding school, unaware that they were trying to shield her. They were doing their best for her. I still fucking hate them, though.
‘Protect me from what?’
‘What were you told?’
‘Nothing true. Not even that they were murdered. I only found that out when I was arrested. My grandparents said there was this crazy woman who stepped out into the road and my dad swerved to avoid her but ended up ploughing into a tree. He died immediately. My mother died eight hours later in hospital.’
I shift on my seat, uncomfortable. I’ve never considered that it might have been anything other than instantaneous. I’ve never thought of the wife suffering for hours. I want to tell her the truth. I think I’ve always wanted her to know. ‘Your father and my mother were having an affair.’
