Authors: Val McDermid
'I told Nadia you were just coming,' Maria said, slipping her free arm through Charlie's and steering her towards the lift. 'Good night, Lisa.'
As the lift doors closed, Maria giggled. 'Nadia's got a face like thunder. She's not keen on being left sitting alone in a busy bar, not when she thinks she's the trophy girlfriend.'
'She really thinks that?' Charlie couldn't stifle a laugh.
'I reckon so. Oh, what it is to be young and full of illusions. She'd better watch her step, that one.'
'Nadia? Why?'
'That Lisa. She's not somebody you'd want to mess with.'
Clever Maria, Charlie thought. Maybe we should do a job swap. 'Well, chances are we'll never have to see them again.'
And so the evening had ended. They'd fallen into bed, still too full for anything but sleep. Waking with a clear head, the prospect of finishing Jay's book ahead of her, Charlie finally began to see how things might be made to come together.
6
T
hey were on the road by ten. As if to make the leaving easier, the weather had changed. Mist and rain covered the landscape in a grey veil, turning the Cuillins into a vague looming presence in the distance. 'Nick's in court tomorrow. I think I should go down to London and talk to him,' Charlie said gloomily as they crossed the ocean back to the mainland. 'We need to make a decision about how much further we can pursue this. And what we do with our pitiful findings. Not a lot, I suspect.'
'It's not all been wasted,' Maria said. 'You've re-established contact with Corinna and Magda. And we've had a glorious weekend in Skye.' She took a hand off the wheel to pat Charlie's thigh. 'And it's taken your mind off the other shit. This has been the first time in a while when you seem to have let go of what's hanging over you.'
'Maybe I should start offering it as an alternative therapy,' Charlie said drily. 'Immerse yourself in a wild-goose chase. Perfect for taking your mind off what's oppressing you. Now, put your foot down and drive. I'm going to immerse myself even deeper.' She pulled
Unrepentant
from her jacket pocket and found her place.
Afterwards, when I asked my mother why we'd gone to see Blair Andreson in the big tent at Sunderland, the only possible answer was the one she always gave: because God called us. That's probably as far from the truth as it's possible to get.
By the time the American evangelist Blair Andreson launched his 1984 crusade to the UK, our lives had dipped to an all-time low. We were living in a squalid caravan encampment on the outskirts of one of the big towns in Teesside. I'm not even sure which one. The police and the local residents waged a constant war of attrition against us. I can't say I blame them. I'd probably do the same myself. We were not a romantic New Age camp of people who believed in beautiful things. We were scum. My mother was selling sex to keep herself in drugs. I was running wild with a bunch of other kids, stealing food and money whenever I got the chance.
We went to the conversion service at Andreson's big top with a couple of other women from the site. I suspect our intentions were criminal. They must have seen a way to make money out of the service, picking pockets or stealing collection plates. I don't know for sure because nobody confided in me. It was a cool afternoon in July but the tent was packed, the air heavy with the smell of too many bodies crammed together. My mother and I were sitting towards the back of the steeply banked seats, letting Andreson's hysterical rhetoric wash over us. At least, I thought that was what was going on. I was completely unmoved by the oratory. I'd far rather have had a lamb kebab than be washed in the blood of the lamb.
But something happened to my mother that afternoon. All she would ever say was that she was touched by the hand of God. I wanted to know what it had felt like. Whether it was a sudden, blinding revelation or a gradual, creeping realisation that there was a very different path open to her. But she would never go into detail. 'Filled with the spirit'was another of her meaningless phrases that was meant to make clear to me what had happened to her.
From where I was sitting it was more like demonic possession. When Andreson called upon people to come forward to be received by God, my mother stood up like an automaton and walked to the stage like she was sleep-walking. I assumed it was part of a scam, so I just sat there. Waiting for it to be over.
She looked very frail up there beside Andreson, who had the bristly pink sheen of a prize pig. She knelt before him and he placed his hands on her head, giving her a full measure of the mumbo jumbo. Then she was led away by two of his acolytes, taken off through the curtains at the back of the stage. At that point, I was just bored. I was barely ten years old and watching a bunch of weirdos being born again was not my idea of a good time.
After what felt like half a lifetime, we all had to pray together, then we got to sing a rousing hymn, something about God walking beside us on the hard road of life. And then it was time to leave. An army of clean-cut young men in suits lined the exits with buckets for our donations. I was impressed with the amount of money they were scamming. Whatever Jenna and her pals had in mind, they'd picked a target that had plenty to go round. And weren't they supposed to be all about sharing in Christ's bounty, after all?
I hung around outside the tent but after the audience had emptied out, I didn't know where to go. In the end, I went up to one of the lads with the collecting buckets. 'My mum went up to the stage,' I said. 'And she hasn't come out.'
He nodded, as if this wasn't an unusual occurrence. 'Coming to the Lord can be an overwhelming experience,' he said, trying to sound important and portentous. 'If you think about it, being born the first time is a pretty traumatic happening. The second time isn't any less momentous.'
Even at ten, I wanted to slap him. 'But where's my mum?' I said instead.
'Come with me,' he said, leading me round the back of the main tent to a smaller enclosure. Inside, small knots of people were kneeling together. Blair Andreson was moving from group to group, laying his hands on whoever was at the heart of the group. After the bright lights and noise of the circus tent, this place felt very peaceful and cocooned. It took me a few moments to spot my mother, but at last I saw her in the far corner, being tended to by three other women. I had no idea what she was up to. Most of our scams were simple and quick. I didn't know what was going on here or why it was taking so long.
I started weaving my way towards Jenna, but I'd hardly taken a step when Blair Andreson himself blocked my path. 'Now, who do we have here?' he said in the deep rich voice that seemed to fill whatever space he occupied.
'You've got my mum over there,' I said. 'I want to go to her.'
'Your mom's having a pretty intense encounter with her Heavenly Father right now,' he said, taking a firm grip of my shoulder and steering me towards the entrance. 'Howsabout I get somebody to get you something to eat, then when your mom's done here, we'll come get you?'
It wasn't a suggestion. I thought about running for it but there was nowhere to run to. I didn't know where the other women from the camp had got to and I had no idea how to find my way back. So I pretended to be meek and mild and let one of the young men take me to another tent that was set up like a buffet. There were long tables of sandwiches and salads. And piles of muffins, which I had never seen before. I'd seen other kids tuck into home baking before - fairy cakes and butterfly buns - but never anything on this scale. So it wasn't much of a hardship, waiting there among the born again. I will give them credit for leaving me alone and not trying to cram Jesus down my throat along with the grub.
Eventually, somebody came for me and took me back to the tent. Jenna looked dazed, like she sometimes did when she'd smoked heroin, but when I appeared, she smiled and pulled me to her. I was surprised. She wasn't usually that demonstrative. 'Something wonderful's happened, Jennifer,' she said, stroking my hair, which was probably a mass of greasy rats' tails. 'I've accepted Jesus into my life.'
If you've ever seen
The Invasion of the Body Snatchers
, you'll have an idea of how I felt right then. I just wanted to get Jenna away from there and back into our scrappy shitty life where at least I knew what was what. 'When are we going home?' I asked her.
She smiled then, one of those radiant, peaceful smiles you get from people with a poor connection to reality. 'We're going to live in a new home, Jennifer,' she said. 'In a proper house. We're part of the Christian family now.'
And that was how I learned my life was being turned inside out.
Charlie looked up from the book. 'I tell you, she knows how to keep you reading. She gives you enough to latch on to but not so much detail that you get bogged down. And I suspect she uses a trick that comes up a lot with psychopathic personalities. And politicians. Not that I'm suggesting there's anything in common between those two groups.'
'What's that?' Maria turned down the volume on the CD player.
'Managing to give the appearance of candour without actually revealing anything she doesn't want you to know.'
'We all do that, don't we? We always want to give a good impression of ourselves.'
'Yes, but with most of us, it's not a consciously constructed process. And it ends up being a bit hit and miss. Sometimes we end up saying or doing something that can give away rather more than we intended. But with this narrative, it's all perfectly calibrated. The charm never slips. Every bad thing Jay has a hand in is somehow transformed into a scenario where she is the heroic victim.'
'Isn't that a contradiction in terms? Heroic victim?'
'Not the way Jay writes it. And she's far from alone in that. I've come across a lot of them over the years.'
'You think she's a psychopath?'
'I'm not sure. But I do think she has some degree of personality dysfunction. It's not surprising, given her early life. And what I sense is about to unfold now.' Charlie turned back to the book and read on. Jay and her mother were taken to live with a couple attached to the Andreson crusade, the inappropriately named Blythes. Mrs Blythe took Jenna back to the camp the next day to fetch their belongings. Jay was shocked by how little they brought back. Most of her clothes and books had been abandoned. Apparently they were 'inappropriate'.
Life became a tight little tunnel of school, church, Bible study and bed. The Blythes, it turned out, were members of a Pentecostal sect so restrictive and narrow that they made Andreson's evangelicals look positively liberal. Jay was like a caged animal at first, raging against the constraints and fighting against every curb on her freedom. But it was useless. The more she struggled, the tighter the rules became. And Jenna was no help. She'd found her new drug of choice and she couldn't get enough. The threat that ultimately brought Jay to heel was that she would be sent away to a Christian boarding school where she would be forbidden to have contact with her mother. Jay was tough, but the prospect of losing the only constant in her life was too much. So she buckled down, hating her life with a rage whose fires were never banked down.
The thought I clung to was that it couldn't last for long. Nothing in my life ever had. Men came and went, friends came and went, the rooms where I fell asleep changed so often I seldom knew my address. Jenna would get bored, or someone would come along with better drugs or a better pitch and it would be all change again. So I believed all I had to do was wait it out.
It never occurred to me that it could get worse. We'd been with the Blythes about eight months when a new man joined our prayer circle. Picture an ascetic saint in a medieval Italian painting and you'll get a sense of Howard Calder. Only Howard made those holy hermits look like party animals. Pleasure was an invention of the Devil, Howard believed. We were put on earth to dedicate our lives to the greater glory of God. Living among the ungodly was the Lord's way of testing us. I thought he was a royal pain in the arse from the first.
But Jenna didn't. Like any addict, she was after the pure stuff. And Howard Calder was definitely pure. I didn't cotton on to what was happening at first. My experience of Jenna and courtship was that it generally took a few hours plus some drugs and alcohol. From first shag to him being a fixture was often only a matter of days. So it didn't register that Howard coming round and being polite to my mother was the trailer for the main feature - marriage. When she told me they were getting wed, I didn't believe her at first. When it dawned on me that it was for real, I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.
I had thought nothing could be more joyless than the Blythes' house. That was before I saw inside Howard's two-up and two-down terrace in Roker. It was like walking into a black-and-white film - no colour anywhere. White walls, beige carpets, beige three-piece suite, white kitchen, white bathroom. Nothing on the walls except Bible texts. I swear the most visually exciting moment was when he turned on the gas fire and flames of blue and red and yellow licked at the discoloured ceramic element. 'This will be your new home,' he announced. 'You will address me as Mr Calder. I'm not your father and I won't have people thinking I am.'