My Last Confession (10 page)

The period after moving back to the flat and getting myself a full-time job had been hard.

For the previous two years, Mum and Dad had done all of the work of making sure sleep was had, food was eaten, and clothes were cleaned and ironed. Of course, Chas and I had helped with housework and contributed to bills, but during that time I hadn’t needed to get a job, and could devote all my energy to Robbie, Chas – and me. Meanwhile, Chas had been able to procrastinate with his painting. All in all, we’d been cocooned from the hard reality of day-to-day life.

But now there seemed to be no time to relax and enjoy each other. Mornings were a frantic race to make
breakfast,
get clothes on everyone and pack lunches. The evenings often felt as if a whole other day of work
needed
to be squeezed in – cooking, bathing, washing, tidying, getting Robbie to sleep.

We often slept badly, too. I seemed to have inherited Mum’s fidgety feet. Chas snored. And Robbie invariably crawled in between us in the early hours, wriggling and pushing at us till Chas and I were perched at the edges of the bed.

Then we finally woke to the alarm and the whole process began all over again.

Weekends didn’t seem to be much better. Most of
Saturday was spent recovering from work, while Sunday involved a fair bit of dreading the week ahead.

No matter how hard we tried, neither of us was able to leave our work in our respective workplaces. Jeremy was on my mind constantly, as were several other distressing cases I’d been allocated. And Chas was always off in a dwam, his face blank and distant as he thought about what stroke, what colour, what frame he might use for a painting. His opening wasn’t far away, and I could tell he was terrified.

Sometimes I wondered if it would have been different for me and Chas if we’d been together before I had the baby. At least then we’d have had some ‘us’ time. As it was, Chas and I got together when Robbie was nine months old. Chas loved him with all his heart, but Robbie wasn’t his baby, and our relationship had been plunged into a very domestic routine, with little time for us to get to know each other as people, and not just as parents.

But the thing about us, the thing that separated us from so many of my other friends who’d had affairs, or
withheld
sex and affection, or split up, or just whined on and on about each other, was that we talked.

The Nutella rinsing out in the bath, Chas and I went over our mistakes, which included:

Me expecting a tidy house when a tidy house was indicative of nothing more than tidiness.

Chas working all night every night towards his
exhibition
, being preoccupied and nervous about it, and
worrying
all the time about whether he would ever be able to provide for us.

Me getting too close to a client and needing advice at work but not getting it.

Chas feeling left out of the whole orgasm thing and wondering if there was something wrong with him.

Me thinking I was a bad mother because I didn’t look after Robbie 24/7.

Once again, we made some plans:

Nine to five was a rule, for both Chas and me. No late nights, no excuses. Family time was sacrosanct.

I had to talk to my colleagues more if my bosses were never there.

Chas had to stop beating himself up re my orgasms being machine-induced.

I had to stop beating myself up about Robbie, who loved the nursery in the mornings, and spent the rest of the time with people who adored him.

Chas had to switch off worrying about his painting when he wasn’t at the studio.

I had to find a bloody cleaner!

I had to leave off about marriage for a while. We’d only just moved in together and we needed to take one step at a time.

Spooning in bed, we felt confident that work and domestic difficulties would never get the better of us again.

There were ten cases and three court reports in my pigeonhole the next morning. My boss – newly returned to work – had also left a note saying she would be out of the office attending a training course. I had to laugh when I saw the course was called, of all things ‘Absentee Management: everything you need to know about
dealing
with and reducing staff absences’. ‘Any questions, ask Eileen,’ the note concluded.

I had no idea who Eileen was but could be fairly
certain
she would either be off sick, in a meeting or doing a training course, or have a queue of hyperventilating child protection workers waiting at her door.

I had the usual fag and gossip, listened to Robert sing a song he’d written about a famous glamour model, and leafed through my new cases.

The first was a fifty-year-old lifer. Back when he was twenty, he’d shaken his baby to death, his defence being that his girlfriend should never have left him to look after the screaming wean all the time. He’d done ten years, and then been recalled to prison three times since his initial release for drink-related offences – drink-driving, assault and breach of the peace.

‘Ah, that one used to be mine,’ said Danny. ‘I asked
Hilary
not to give it to me again ’cause his couch is so sticky.’

‘Cheers, Dan,’ I said, skimming two other cases: an
elderly Asian woman who’d bought £13,000 worth of marble for her kitchen, hall, bathroom, en-suite and
living
room using other people’s credit cards; and a
seventeen-year-
old girl who’d deliberately set her house on fire (‘’cause she was in a bad mood’), leaving her cousin chronically ill and seriously disfigured.

I’d just finished the sending out of a batch of letters introducing myself and asking people to come into the office when the phone rang. It was Jeremy’s mother, Mrs Bagshaw. And she was in Glasgow.

I arrived at the Clyde View Self-Catering Apartments half an hour later. Mrs Bagshaw was in number 12, a modern flat in a glass building overlooking the murky Clyde.

‘What a view!’ I said, in an attempt to endear myself to her.

It took a cup of tea and several minutes before our conversation turned to the more pressing topics of murder and suicide.

Anne Bagshaw was a cold, intense woman with a tight, unlovable face. She was over-ironed, smelt of gin, and asked about her son in what felt to me like a very odd way, wanting to know about the details of the offence he’d been imprisoned for and the nature of his injuries. ‘Was he hit on the forehead?’ she asked when I told her he’d been beaten.

I could understand that Anne Bagshaw had difficulty talking about her son. Her life had been torn apart by Bella’s death, and its circumstances must have haunted her constantly.

But shouldn’t she feel for her son as well? I’d been wondering how I’d feel about Robbie if he did something
dreadful as a toddler, and believed that I would feel terrible for him, love him more and do everything I could to protect him from the guilt and pain of what had
happened.
But then it hadn’t happened to me.

The past aside, Anne Bagshaw’s lack of concern for Jeremy’s current situation surprised me. Why was she asking such bizarre questions? What did it matter? Her son, her little boy, whom she had loved with all her heart when he was wee, whom she’d breastfed and pushed on a swing, was on remand for murder. He hadn’t been found guilty yet. He’d been beaten and perhaps raped. And he wanted to kill himself.

‘You must love him very much,’ I said, accusing her of the very opposite with my tone.

‘No,’ she said flatly. ‘And it’s very hard when you don’t love your child. It’s hard because you feel guilty. Hard because the child will never go away. Hard, in my case, because I have a very good reason to not love him. Bella never got to have a birthday because of him, my little Bella … I have it in mind to surprise him,’ she said,
snapping-to
suddenly.

That was another odd thing. She wanted to surprise him. She’d come all the way from London – I assumed she was intending to corroborate his alibi – but she couldn’t quite face seeing him yet and made me promise not to tell him.

By the time I left I was thoroughly bamboozled by everything about her, from the way she looked into my eyes intensely as if she was trying to read my soul, to her inability to forgive her son, to her refusal to see him. I hated that she hadn’t got a taxi straight to Sandhill and run to him saying, ‘It’s okay, it’s okay, I’m here!’

When I got back to work I looked at Jeremy’s report. I’d practically finished it. As required, I hadn’t discussed the offence or meshed my assessment of Jeremy with the crime he was accused of. But as I sat there thinking about Jeremy, his wife and his mother, I became overwhelmed with curiosity about Bridget McGivern, the woman Jeremy was accused of killing. I googled her name: Bridget McGivern.

Several snippets caught my eye:

1. Obituary,
Glasgow Herald:

2. Article,
Daily Record:

3. Article,
The Scotsman:

As I read about the crime, I realised how terrible and how wrong I’d been to forget about the victim, to push her to one side as if she wasn’t relevant. No matter what my job was, this was unforgivable. I’d become so involved with Jeremy Bagshaw that I hadn’t even thought about poor Bridget McGivern.

Bridget McGivern, who’d been married. Who’d left behind an eighteen-year-old daughter. Who’d been a successful dermatologist …

… and who’d died just two weeks after meeting her long-lost daughter for the first time.

Amanda Kelly met Bridget McGivern for the first time in a large dining kitchen in Ballon, Stirlingshire.

Well, that wasn’t
really
the first time. The first time they met was twenty-eight years earlier, in a little white hospital room in London with a silver bed and a thin mattress and a metal bench on which there were various contraptions to do with childbirth.

Before Bridget met her untimely death, she’d dreamt about this room often. There’d been paint peeling from one of the walls and a pair of shoes in the corner with blood splattered all over them. There’d been a cheap wee radio beside the metal bench with music so gentle and so soft she’d wanted to hurl it out the window.

There’d also been three people with her: a thin midwife with smoker’s skin and breasts a smidgeon higher than is humanly possible; a trainee midwife of twenty or so who seemed more concerned with the perky-bosomed smoker than the prospect of being in charge of the placenta. And then there’d been Bridget’s mum, Margaret, who wasn’t at all happy that her genius girl was lying back with her fine legs spread wide apart, making no noise. Her
daughter
, only seventeen, who’d skipped two grades she was so bright and had already started medicine.

Margaret Garden, who was forty at the time, had big plans for her daughter, none of which involved the early
production of children. She’d been planning a wonderful graduation party for Bridget, had looked forward to showing her off in the old neighbourhood where none of her friends’ children had achieved anything beyond
nursing
school or, in one case, three-quarters of a
wishy-washy
arts degree. Margaret had no intention of letting all her plans go to pot because Bridget had had sex with some boy called Hamish in Stirling, who hadn’t even
finished
school yet.

If only she’d kept Bridget at home, she berated herself, not sent her off to halls in London, then she’d have realised in time. God, her friends would gloat if they knew about this baby, especially the ones who’d been aghast at her allowing Bridget to live on campus so far away. ‘Bridget’s such a sensible girl,’ she’d told them back then. And it was true she’d never had any trouble with Bridget; she wasn’t like other teenagers who smoked Marlboro Lights down at the bus stop and spent their time speaking to boys or sometimes kissing boys on the lips in the lane behind Croftwood High School.

If only Bridget had taken her advice about sex: don’t use condoms, don’t use the pill, don’t use anything, just don’t do it. It’s unhealthy, it’s overrated and it will hold you back.

If only she’d known sooner, this would never have
happened.
But Bridget hadn’t come home for Christmas, had made excuses at Easter, and by the time Margaret
travelled
to London to surprise her beloved daughter with two day-passes to the Haymill Baths she was almost in labour.

‘Jesus!’ Margaret screamed at her daughter as she burst into the grotty shared student living room. ‘Jesus, Jesus, Jesus!’

After that she’d fanned herself and sat on the edge of a chair saying Jesus a lot more.

The next day she sprang into action, and before Bridget knew what was happening she’d signed away her baby.

Bridget remembered the face of her mother in that white room – overseeing the procedure, there to the end, ensuring that the post-birth cuddle wasn’t long enough to allow indecision.

She remembered the feeling of relief when the baby plopped into the midwife’s arms, and the feeling of need when the nurse soothed her crying baby – a little girl who howled so loudly it scared Bridget.

Bridget had held her, and the baby’s howl had turned to a kind of whimper. Like a sexual noise, almost. Ecstasy. Relief. Release.

The baby’s mouth distorted sideways, reaching for something, and suddenly Bridget understood she needed to lift her T-shirt and make herself available for the
reaching
. The little mouth sought her nipple and the distorted lips honed in, eyes closed, knowing somehow exactly where to go. Bridget was overcome with joy, melted by it. She needed to touch this person, hold her, stroke her arms and legs and tummy and kiss her forehead and her ears and her little perfect hands and look endlessly into those eyes, those beautiful eyes.

‘That’s it!’ said her mother, and the baby was taken away, its high-pitched cries reverberating down the
corridor
.

And Bridget was left on the white bed with her T-shirt up, and her right breast exposed, and her legs open.
‘How Deep is your Love’ dripped from the radio while a trembling student nurse pulled what looked like a large lump of liver from between her legs before slapping it onto the metal bench under the window.

So that was really the first time they met, Bridget and Amanda. And while it was heart-wrenching and tragic and disturbing and unforgettable, it was nothing
compared
to the second time.