Read Unsafe Convictions Online
Authors: Alison Taylor
Trying to redeem some control over his life, Dugdale waited until the late-evening television news was over, then telephoned his wife. ‘How are the kids?’
‘
Fine,’ Sue replied. ‘Asleep, of course.’
‘
And your mother?’
‘
Fine.’
‘
And you?’
‘
OK.’
‘
The police came back,’ he said. ‘Not McKenna, but that Turner woman who’s doing the admin.’
‘
Why?’
‘
Linda’s dad had a heart attack this morning, for one thing.’
‘
Oh, no! That’s awful! Is he dead?’
‘
No. They think he’ll pull through.’
‘
I hope he does.’ She fell silent, and he could hear her breathing. Then, she asked: ‘Surely, she didn’t come just to tell you that?’
‘
They wanted to warn me. Some woman’s writing articles about Smith in one of the nationals, and the town’s overrun with reporters again. They’ve heard about us.’
‘
What?’ Sue drew in her breath sharply. ‘Heard what? How could they?’
‘
People talk. I expect someone overheard the row last night, and saw you go off this morning with the kids.’
‘
Have you told anyone?’
‘
Only Turner, but I had no choice. She reckons I should tell Hinchcliffe, but I haven’t. Not yet. Anyway,’ he went on, ‘you’d better be prepared. I can see the headline now: “Wife runs out on dodgy copper”.’
‘
I hope you’re not lying,’ Sue said. ‘You didn’t come clean about that woman, did you?’ When he failed to respond, she asked: ‘Why didn’t you? Why did you never tell me about her?’
‘
I don’t know.’
‘
Are you still in love with her?’
‘
It’s almost eighteen years ago!’
‘
I think you’re trying to protect her, although I haven’t a clue why you should.’
‘
Last night, you said I was trying to protect
myself
.’
‘
I’ve had time to think.
Are
you protecting her?’
‘
I don’t want to cause her more grief. She’s got nothing to do with this business, so I don’t see why she should be dragged into it, but I couldn’t keep quiet because McKenna already knew.’
‘
How d’you think he found out?’
‘
No idea, and there’s no point asking him.’
‘
Ryman probably told him,’ Sue suggested. ‘He had his fingers in a lot of pies when he worked in Haughton. I expect he told McKenna about you and Linda as well.’ After another silence, she said: ‘Incidentally, what grief has that woman already had, apart from what she made for herself? You said you don’t want to cause her
more
grief, or was that just a figure of speech?’
‘
No, it wasn’t. D’you know something, Sue? You’re turning into a jealous harpy. We flogged this to death last night.’ He took a deep breath. ‘If you can’t accept you weren’t the first woman in my life, there’s nothing I can do, but I’d be grateful if you’d stop referring to Julie as “her”, “she”, or “that woman”. She’s as much right to her name as you have.’
‘
And what name is that? Tart? Trollop? Whore?’
‘
This is pointless! Maybe you should stay away!’
‘
Maybe I will!’ she snapped, and dropped the receiver with a clatter.
Sitting bolt upright in her friend’s fireside chair, with her nerves strung like piano wire, Ida had the telephone within hand’s reach, but she kept nodding off, then snapping awake with a pounding heart, terrified that she might have missed the summons. She had dreamed of telling the doctor how, if she sat in a soft chair, or even a hard one, her eyes fell shut of their own accord in less than five minutes, as forceful with him as she had been on the telephone, and refusing to be fobbed off with platitudes about age and worn-out bodies, and yet another prescription for anti-depressants. The next time she returned to full consciousness, another twenty-five minutes had been lost.
‘
She won’t ring now,’ the other woman said. She had kept her own part in the vigil by padding back and forth to the kitchen to make cups of hot, sweet tea to fortify her friend. ‘There’s no point you hanging on.’
‘
Damn her eyes!’ Ida scowled. ‘She’ll be sorry.’ She struggled upright, her legs planted far apart. Her ankles were swollen with tiredness and fiery with the heat.
The
other woman stood by the door, holding Ida’s jacket and scarf.
‘
I’ll be back in the morning,’ Ida said, fighting with the jacket sleeve. ‘As soon as I’ve done my shopping. We’ll get that madam sorted, you see if we don’t!’
‘
If you say so, Ida.’
‘
What d’you mean by that?’ Eyes narrowed, Ida stared. ‘I’m doing this for you. It’s your problem. No skin off my nose either way.’
‘
I’m just not sure we’re going about things the right way,’ the other fretted.
‘
What other way is there? If there was another way, we wouldn’t be doing this, would we?’
As
the door closed behind her, she realised how ferocious the wind had become while she dozed by the fire, for when she turned to make her way to her own front door, the wind caught her in the back and pushed violently. She tottered along the walkway, scuttling past darkened windows, almost lifted off her feet, and slammed into the high iron railings which caged each level of the maisonettes. By the time she reached her own place, she felt as shaky and fragile as a leaf bowled in front of that wind.
‘Jools? Jools! Are you coming down? Father Brett’s going now.’
Seated
in front of the silent television, Julie put her head in her hands, wondering for the thousandth time why her colleague made the long trek up several staircases to the attic flat to speak to her, instead of picking up one of the telephones. ‘I’ll be down in a minute.’
‘
Right. Don’t be too long, will you?’
She
heard the footsteps shuffling away and padding downstairs, the sound of doors opening and closing, of voices mumbling, then Fauvel’s educated tones, so clear and sharp he could be outside her door. She began to shiver uncontrollably, teeth gritted, wanting to hit herself for being so stupid. Nevertheless, she listened like a hunted animal until his car crunched down the gravel drive.
*
‘You’ve missed him,’ her colleague said. ‘You were ages, and you said you’d only be a minute.’
‘
There’ll be another time,’ Julie replied, leafing through the log book. ‘Anything happened?’
‘
Since when? You’ve been around most of the day, even though you were on duty last night. Don’t you need sleep like the rest of us?’
‘
Night shifts ruin my routines.’
‘
Well, for goodness sake get some sleep tonight, otherwise you’ll be like a zombie tomorrow.’ The other woman smiled. ‘I saved you some supper. Make us a fresh pot of tea while I do the rounds. They should all be abed by now.’
Once
again, Julie stared through the kitchen windows as she waited for the kettle to boil, watching lights pop off downstairs in the houses which sprawled over the once exclusive grounds of the Willows, while other lights clicked on in bedrooms and bathrooms. It was colder tonight, she thought, pulling her sleeves over her hands and knowing it would become even colder before there was that rush of warmer air which always preceded the snow. She had lived her whole life in this place, its seasons defining memories, events pinioned in her mind by the weather and the colours of the earth which formed their backdrop. Last week had seen the twelfth anniversary of her mother’s death, then of her funeral, the earth where her grave was dug frozen two feet down. The first snows that year spiralled from a blackening sky as Fauvel, wreathed in incense and the earth’s misty vapours, proceeded to the graveside. When he began to eulogise over the remains of a woman who suffered wholesale rejection by the Christian community during her lifetime, Julie was so enraged she had to bite her tongue. Briefly, her loss allowed the community to embrace her, but she had no idea what to do with their condolences, or whether to trust their warmth, so she thrust both away, and returned to the known wilderness she and her mother had always inhabited.
On
the day she had asked her mother why she chose to be a prostitute, a spring sun shone with the first real warmth of the year.
‘
D’you really think it was a
choice
?’ Kathy asked.
‘
You could’ve got a normal job.’
‘
Not when you were little. There was no one to look after you.’
‘
I wasn’t always little.’
‘
It was too late by then.’
‘
No, it wasn’t. You didn’t try!’
‘
Nobody would
let
me try, Julie. Other people made me what I am, and wouldn’t let me be anything else.’ Kathy smiled with resignation. ‘Especially the women. The men aren’t so bad. They don’t judge you the same way.’
‘
We could’ve moved,’ Julie insisted. ‘Gone to live somewhere else, where nobody knew.’
‘
Where? There was nowhere to go.’
On
an earlier spring day, Julie had demanded to know about her father. Kathy had been young, then, yet somehow seemed so old. The rain was falling, gurgling in the gutters and splashing under the wheels of the trucks and cars and buses, which roared incessantly along the road outside their house.
‘
He was my first boyfriend,’ Kathy remembered wistfully. ‘I was only seventeen when you were born.’ She sighed. ‘Your gran and grandad put me in the Willows when I said I was expecting. I was supposed to give you away, then go back to them as if nothing had happened.’
‘
I know. You’ve said before.’
‘
If I’d put you up for adoption,’ Kathy mused, ‘you’d have had the best of everything, like Beryl Kay. Are you angry with me because I didn’t?’
‘
How can I be angry about something I’ll never know about? And who wants to be like Beryl Kay?’ Julie’s voice was snappish. ‘What was my dad like?’
‘
Sweet,’ Kathy said. ‘Gentle.’
‘
Then why didn’t you marry him? Weren’t you good enough for him?’
‘
I couldn’t. He died.’ He was a merchant seaman, and had died not from age or sickness, but by accident, drowned in the Bay of Naples, and in ignorance of the child he had fathered. ‘You look like him.’ Kathy ruffled the girl’s hair. ‘You’ve got his eyes.’
Julie
had one faded photograph of that stranger, and she kept it, with other precious relics, in a locked wooden box on the chest in her bedroom. The key to the box hung on the fine silver chain she wore around her neck, even though it often chafed her scars.
Her
colleague’s footsteps thumped overhead, and her voice called cheerily as she checked each small dormitory. Julie scalded the pot, brewed the tea, took a film-wrapped plate of sandwiches from the refrigerator, and carried the tray to the office, trying to imagine how her mother had felt to be carrying a child. She had never been pregnant, and not, she thought wryly, for want of youthful trying, especially with Barry Dugdale. She had been fond of Barry, and of some of her other lovers, which was, she thought, too grand a name for any of them. The vow of chastity, which crept up on her after the event and without her knowing, proved so much easier to keep than the vow of silence, self-imposed in the bleak years before Barry warmed her frozen little heart.
‘
Jools? Jools!’ Her colleague’s voice held that low, intense tone people reserve for anxious moments in the near dead of night.
Julie
went to the bottom of the staircase. ‘What is it?’
The
other woman leaned over the banister. ‘Have you seen Debbie? Did she come downstairs? Only, she’s not in her room, or the toilet.’
‘
Did she go up?’
‘
I can’t remember. I thought she did, but I was seeing off Father Brett.’
‘
Look again,’ Julie said. ‘I’ll check down here.’
The
living-rooms and dining-room were empty of all but their perpetual institutional odour. Julie tried the bolt on the front door, and returned to the kitchen, switching on lights as she went through the building. The back door was locked, and the laundry contained only the usual heaps of soiled, stinking linen. Wondering where to look next, she heard a faint, strange noise, and followed it down the stone-flagged passage to the unused sculleries, while the sound grew as if the walls around her were moaning. She found Debbie sitting on the floor of a tiny room with an old stone sink, her back against the cracked tiles which covered the lower half of the wall, her bare feet scuffing backwards and forwards in the dust on the floor. She needed to be taken to the hairdresser soon, Julie thought, looking at the girl’s unkempt gingery hair, and she had made a terrible mess of the best clothes obviously donned in honour of Fauvel’s visit. Her blouse was undone, exposing a lacy white bra, and her new black shoes were flung into a corner.
‘
What on earth are you doing in here?’ Julie knelt down, and began to button up the blouse, sniffing as a faint odour of stale tobacco drifted under her nose. ‘You’ll catch cold.’
Debbie
giggled, her mouth slack, and slowly lifted her hands, then ran them over Julie’s breasts. ‘Soft,’ she said. ‘Nice.’
Wincing,
Julie moved the kneading fingers. ‘I’ve told you before not to do that, Debbie. Not to me, not to anyone else, and not to yourself.’ Out of the corner of her eye, she glimpsed other footprints in the dust. ‘How long have you been here? You’re ice cold.’
‘
Don’t talk,’ Debbie said, clamping a hand over her own mouth.
‘
Of course you can talk!’ Fatigue, and a total mind-numbing weariness, suddenly hit Julie. ‘Don’t be so silly.’
‘
Not allowed,’ the girl insisted, mumbling through her fingers.
Julie
’s hands stilled themselves in mid-air. ‘What did you say?’ Her voice was a whisper.
Debbie
pushed her feet against Julie’s knees, almost toppling her, then lunged forward, and began beating Julie with a violence to match the swelling growl in her throat.