Like This, for Ever (14 page)

The profiler looked at him, wary. ‘Of course,’ she said.

‘We’ve all been talking about the killer as though he’s a bloke. Tell me I’m away with the fairies, but is it possible it’s a woman?’

Dana saw Stenning give a sharp glance her way. Anderson kept his eyes firmly on the profiler. She looked back at him steadily.

‘No evidence of sexual abuse or violence,’ said Anderson. ‘When men kill kids, they don’t do it gently – not in my experience, anyway.’

Richmond was looking troubled. ‘Female serial killers are rare,’ she said.

‘But not unheard of,’ said Anderson. ‘Myra Hindley, Rose West and Beverley Allitt, all of whom killed children.’

‘Two of them didn’t act alone,’ said Richmond. ‘Both West and Hindley were luring victims for their partners. And sex was a motive.’

‘Not with Allitt, though,’ said Dana, thinking that if Anderson could go out on a limb for her, the least she could do was give him a bit of support. ‘Allitt’s motives were altogether more complex. With her it was all about the power, being needed, being important.’

‘There are plenty of precedents for women killing their own children,’ said Mizon. ‘Though that’s often a result of post-natal depression.’

‘What about a woman who’s lost her own child?’ said Dana. ‘I can soon produce a list of nine-, ten- and eleven-year-old boys who died in London in recent years.’ Very soon, actually – it had been sitting on her desk since noon the previous day. ‘Neil, do you want to take a look at it when it’s ready? See if anything stands out?’

Anderson nodded, not quite meeting her eye.

‘OK, thanks everyone. Neil, can I have a word, please?’

Anderson stood up, and followed Dana out of the room. She walked several yards down the corridor, then stopped and turned. He stopped, too.

‘Ma’am, it’s an idea and I thought it needed airing,’ he said. ‘If it turns out it’s a duff one, I’ll be the one to look daft and that’s never bothered me in the past.’

He was right, of course, she should have said something herself. She was just frightened of what it might have revealed about her.

She forced herself to smile. ‘And if it turns out to be spot on, you’ll share the glory?’

‘Nope. I’ll graciously accept my promotion to DI and then I won’t have to call you Ma’am any more.’

‘You don’t have to call me Ma’am now.’

‘We all need something to aspire to, Ma’am.’

‘DAD, CAN I
go into the attic?’

His dad looked up from the ironing. ‘What for?’

Barney had planned for this. ‘Sam’s younger brother is into Lego,’ he said. ‘I don’t play with mine any more, so I thought I’d let him have it.’

His dad looked surprised but pleased. He was always nagging Barney that they had too many toys and that he really should give some of them away, especially stuff he hadn’t played with in years.

‘You be careful near the hatch.’

Barney agreed that he would and left the kitchen. On the way out, he had to move the laundry basket because it was half blocking the doorway. Three loads of washing had already been done, the fourth was in the machine. The first load had dried while they’d been at football, and Barney had folded and piled everything up according to colour and pattern. Plain, darker colours at the bottom, brighter colours next, and stripes and whites at the top. His dad had long since given up asking what would happen if he ironed the dark stuff first, he just got on with the ironing in the order Barney gave it to him.

As Barney climbed the stairs, he realized the striped sheets his dad had washed the day before hadn’t been in the ironing pile.

He found the Lego quickly, and put it next to the hatch so that
when his dad came looking for him he’d be able to claim he’d just that minute found it. Then he started looking for photographs. Barney knew he was going back seven years, at least. That meant starting towards the back.

The attic was in the roof space of the house, low ceilinged, with exposed beams criss-crossing the space. Barney made his way round cardboard boxes and plastic crates, past an old bookcase full of paperbacks no one could ever possibly read again, they were so completely covered in dust and cobwebs and insect husks. By the time he reached the far wall, there were cobwebs in his hair and dust in his throat and his eyes were stinging. This was the place, though. The boxes were cardboard and looked damp in places. He pulled open the first and took a ball of old newspaper off the top, flattening it out until he could read the date: 20 December, six years earlier. The box was full of old china, nestling safely down in newspaper. The next one he opened contained old textbooks of his father’s. Next box – toddler clothes. Barney’s heart started to beat faster. Dads didn’t save baby clothes. That was definitely the sort of thing mums did. His mum had packed this box. Next box – baby books. She’d saved his books and his clothes. Some time when she’d lived in this house, his ultra-tidy mum had hoarded away things she’d never use again, because she couldn’t bear to throw them away.

Four boxes later, he found the albums. He lifted the first, a faded crimson colour, out of the box and sat with it on his lap. This was it. It was like exam results, or waiting to hear if you’d been picked for the cross-country team. Just a second away from information that would change everything.

The first page had nothing on it but three Polaroid-style pictures on thin, shiny paper. Each was in black and white and showed a hazy mass of nothing. Black space, grey shadows and something that might just, if you screwed up your eyes, resemble a human face. They were of him, photographs of an unborn Barney, in his mother’s stomach.

‘Not quite what I had in mind,’ he muttered, turning the page.

Oh God!

It was as if someone had hit him hard in the chest. How could a picture cause so much physical pain? He couldn’t even see her face
properly. She was in profile. The picture was mainly of him as a tiny baby. But she was so beautiful. That was obvious, even in what little he could see of her. Her hair was short and a shiny dark brown, the colour of conkers. It curled around her chin, showing off her long neck. Her hands and her wrists looked large for a woman’s and she was holding him close to her face, smiling down at him. He was looking back up at her, as though her eyes were the most fascinating thing he’d seen in his short life. They looked like they might be the only two people in the whole world.

‘Barney, you alright up there?’

For a second, Barney didn’t trust himself to speak. He gulped, tried to sniff without making a sound and ran his hands over his eyes. He had no idea how long he’d been in the attic. He’d turned the pages of the album, watching tiny baby Barney turn into bigger baby Barney and eventually toddler Barney. Most of the pictures had been just of him, but his mum had been in several and his dad in one or two. Her hair had got longer, sometimes she’d worn it pulled back in a ponytail. He thought she looked less happy, even less pretty, in the later photographs, but she always seemed to be smiling at Barney. She always seemed to love him.

‘Barney!’ Steps on the ladder. His dad was coming up.

‘Coming!’ Barney managed, shoving the album back into the box and turning to face the hatch. His dad’s face appeared.

‘What’s up?’ he asked.

‘Nothing,’ Barney replied, hoping his dad couldn’t see past him to where the boxes were disarranged. ‘Just the dust up here. It’s been making my eyes water.’

‘I see you found it,’ said his dad, who was looking at the Lego. ‘Shall I carry it down?’

His dad climbed back down the ladder and Barney followed. Next time, he’d take a couple of the pictures of his mum out of the album. He’d learn them, until his mum’s face was as familiar to him as his own, and then he’d go out looking for her. He’d go to supermarkets and busy shopping centres on Saturday afternoons. He’d let his focus drift and concentrate on finding his mum’s face. He could do it, he knew he could. In any crowd, he could find that face.

‘
FOUR PROPOSALS OF
marriage, six death threats, two job offers and five churches claiming eternal salvation will be mine once I embrace Jesus and join their flock.’

Lacey nudged her chair further under the table, closer to the slim young woman on its opposite side. All around her in the visitors’ suite people were making the same effort to give their conversations an outside chance of privacy. Trouble was, given the noise levels in the room, at times they invariably had to shout to make themselves heard. ‘And is that this week?’ she asked.

The woman smiling at her across the table looked nothing like the photograph that had appeared, not quite a week earlier, in a Sunday supplement about female serial killers. The photograph had been taken several weeks after her arrest, when the strain of incarceration and the slow grinding of the legal system were taking their toll. This woman – face free of make-up, hair grown longer and its natural toffee brown – didn’t look much older than twenty. She was slim and strong and had great posture. Her skin glowed and her eyes shone. She looked as if she’d never had a sleepless night or a bad dream in her life.

She gave a half shrug, as though conceding a small defeat. ‘Since you were last here.’ Then she grinned. ‘I’m still in the lead though.’

Impossible for Lacey not to smile back. The woman serving a life sentence for murder was brimming over with life. You could almost
look into her eyes and see her heart beating. And her conversation was so quick, so full of energy, ideas just poured out of her. This woman, more than anyone, made Lacey acutely conscious of how sluggish her own thinking had become, how dulled her reactions to what was going on around her. This place, more than anywhere, made her feel as though she were viewing life through a thick screen of opaque glass.

‘I’m very happy for you,’ said Lacey. ‘And at what stage is the winner determined?’

Hazel-blue eyes blinked. ‘It’s more of an ongoing challenge. We just update the board in the dayroom as and when. One of the warders rubbed it off the other week and there was nearly a riot.’

‘Volatile places, prisons.’

The woman tucked a strand of hair behind one ear. ‘You’re telling me,’ she said. ‘Then we had the allegations of cheating, so now we have to supply proof. One of the older women is in charge of the board. Only she can update it, and she wants to see the letters or the emails before she’ll change the scoring.’

‘Strict.’

‘Rachel Copping. You’ve probably heard of her. She put weedkiller into her husband’s tea when she found out he’d emptied their bank account. Took him three days to die and she kept him locked in the bedroom the whole time.’

‘I’m glad you’re making friends.’

A conspiratorial grin. Then a second of silence as both women momentarily ran out of conversation. Lacey’s eyes drifted up to the wall clock and saw that twenty minutes had gone by already.

Time behaved differently in here, she’d noticed. Or rather it misbehaved. It skidded, dragged its heels, sprinted forward and doubled back, catching itself on loose nails and grinding to sudden and unpredictable halts. It was as though the laws governing real time didn’t quite make it through prison security.

‘Are they treating you well?’ she asked, when the silence was nudging towards awkward and even a stupid question seemed better than nothing. As if anyone were treated well in prison. But this woman was probably one of the most notorious killers of modern times. She’d be bound to attract attention.

‘Not bad. I wonder if they’re a bit afraid of me, even the staff.’ As she spoke, she glanced at the middle-aged man in uniform standing just five yards away against the wall. He caught her eye and looked down. ‘If any of them get a bit lippy,’ she went on, ‘I just sort of stop and stare. And I can see them thinking about what I did and they just back down. Nobody really gives me any trouble.’

For a second, the warmth in her eyes flickered out and her pupils took on a darker cast. For a second, it was possible to see the woman who had killed, premeditatedly and brutally; who, despite what she might pretend to the prison authorities, psychiatrists and social workers, felt not a shred of remorse. It was good though, good that she was tough, good that she was feared. It would keep her safe.

‘Good,’ said Lacey.

A second more of silence. Lacey leaned back and took a deep breath, unconsciously pushing back her shoulders to give her lungs more room to move. She still hadn’t got used to how thin the air felt here, as though the place was part of some underhand experiment to find out if prisoners and their visitors might be a bit more manageable if the oxygen content of the room were reduced. Come to think of it, didn’t they do that on aeroplanes?

The prisoner was watching her thoughtfully. ‘Are you still getting headaches?’ she asked.

Lacey nodded. ‘Sometimes,’ she admitted, although headaches were something she was suffering from increasingly. Especially on visiting days. The thin air in the visiting suite, the noise and smell of people around her, then the exhaustion that several hours on public transport brought. And yet, she realized with a surge of warmth, it was all a small price to pay for the sheer joy of having this woman back in her life again.

‘You know what? Having an education is the most enormous advantage in prison,’ said the prisoner.

‘It’s generally considered an advantage out of it as well. But you left school at fifteen.’

‘Yeah, but I didn’t waste my time when I was there. I can read. I can string a sentence together. Loads of the women in here ask me to write letters home for them. Or read the ones they get. One girl even asked me to teach her to read. I said I’d have a go, but you
wouldn’t believe how bad the library is. I’ve written to the minister.’

‘The minister?’

‘Secretary of State for Education. I mean, you’ve got all these women locked up – talk about a captive audience, makes sense to give them something useful to do. And people learn through books, don’t they? You taught me that.’

‘And you want the minister to …’

‘Provide some decent books, of course. Even if they’re only secondhand. I’ve only been here a couple of months and I’ve read everything in the library already. Ten years down the line I’ll be able to recite them. Imagine it, Lacey, ten years reading the same thirty-seven books. What? What’s the matter?’