My Last Confession (18 page)

I was a genius investigator. If investigating were my job, I would be promoted. I would be given a bigger car and a more powerful gun and an easily impressed partner. If investigating were my job.

It all became so clear. Rachel, the angry mother-hater, was more put out than anyone at the arrival of this new family member.

I did a risk assessment using assessment tools I’d not yet been trained in using – LSI-R, RA1-4, GUT-FEELING-313b – and it all added up. Rachel was at least at medium risk of violent re-offending, I reckoned – past history, alcohol abuse, suspected drug use, suspended from school twice, poor relationship with her mother, mates who’d been in court, unemployed … the list went on.

I rang the solicitor’s office.

‘Have you checked out Rachel McGivern?’ I blurted. ‘She has a history of violence.’

‘Listen,’ the lawyer said, excited. ‘He’s on the scraper, in the wee bit at the end. There’s loads of him, and loads of her.’

Bingo.

‘You are a genius!’ the lawyer said. ‘But that’s not all. This morning, Mrs Bagshaw came through with it. She rang an hour ago. Said you convinced her.’

‘Really?’

At this point I noticed that Danny, who had been
listening
to me with a worried look on his face, had been beckoned into Hilary’s office.

‘Aye,’ said the solicitor. ‘After she was discharged from hospital, he spent all night and all morning at her house. Jeremy couldn’t have killed her. He was four hundred miles away. I’ll have him out by the end of the day … He’s asked if you could collect him. I’ll pass on your concerns about Rachel, but leave it to the police, eh?’

‘What are you doing?’ came a hard-as-nails voice. I looked up to find Hilary hovering over me angrily.

‘Say goodbye,’ she said with none of that feathery-soft jargon bullshit she’d used when we first met.

‘Come to my office now.’

My face was burning as I walked past Danny, Penny and Robert and into Hilary’s office. Hilary slammed the door behind us.

‘Just had a nice chat with PC Wilkinson.’

‘Bond?’

‘Wilkinson. He mentioned you’ve been working as a private detective. And Danny tells me that was a defence lawyer on the phone just now.’

‘I …’ She didn’t let me continue. She had lots to say, including the following: I was unprofessional, naïve, silly, making an idiot of myself, who did I think I was, she could investigate me for misconduct but she wasn’t going to. What she was going to do instead was limit my
caseload
to road traffic offences for six months. Till I realised who I was and that it was not my place to play fucking homicide detective.

‘But he was innocent. Because of me he’s getting out.’

‘It’s not your job or your concern. You can get yourself into serious trouble crossing the line like you have. Tell me, why did you became a social worker, Krissie?’

‘What?’

‘Why did you do social work? You’re a straight-A
student
. First-class honours degree in history. Why social work?’

‘Why not?’ was my response.

I knew what she was asking. Did I think I was too clever for the job? Was I using social work as some kind of therapy, as a quest for justice because some bastard had abused me and poor Sarah? I knew what she was asking because I’d heard the same questions banging around in my head sometimes. If I’m honest, the answer to both questions was yes.

‘You have a lot to learn, Krissie,’ said Hilary.

Blimey. Numbed the good news of Jeremy’s release a bit. Not so much as a thank you for being a genius
investigator
, a saver of the universe, for rescuing Jeremy from ten years behind bars, from being beaten by large hairy men with scars and fists, for saving Amanda from a life without the love of her life.

‘You’re right. I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘But he’s expecting me to collect him.’

‘After that I have three court reports for you – all of them for driving with no insurance.’

When I sat down at my desk, Danny made a kind of
apology
. ‘She asked me and I just told her I was worried about you. It’s not your fault. You’ve had no training or support at all through this.’

‘Don’t worry about it.’

‘Are you all right?’ asked Penny kindly. ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’

Farty woman. Posh huffy old bird. As she held out her hand to offer her support, I realised that she had the kindest eyes I’ve ever seen. If I was a client, it’d be her I’d want to talk to.

‘I’d love one,’ I said, and it was the most comforting cup of tea I’ve ever had.

When I phoned Amanda afterwards, she didn’t swear at me for a change. She was excited, thankful and
apologetic
.

‘Do you want a lift to the prison?’ I asked her. ‘I’ll call as soon as we know what time they’ll be letting him out.’

Next I phoned Mrs Bagshaw to ask her if she wanted me to take her too. She was as odd as ever. ‘Yes, I told the police he was with me. I am ready to forgive him now. I’ve asked them not to tell him I confirmed his alibi, because I want to surprise him here, at the apartment. Don’t tell him yet. Would you bring him here, Krissie? I’ve made his favourite meal – you remember? I can’t face the prison, but I still want to surprise him.’

‘I’ll drop him off as soon as he’s out,’ I promised,
shaking
my head at her persistent weirdness.

I drove to Mum and Dad’s for lunch. It’s funny, when you have good or bad news, you need to tell everyone
immediately
, as if saying it over and over makes it real, somehow. But when I got to Mum and Dad’s I realised that this news wasn’t real to them, it had nothing to do with them, me either really, and so it became less exciting by the second.

‘You need to make up with Chas,’ Dad said over stew.

‘I think he’s with someone called Madeleine,’ I said.

It was like taking home a trophy won gloriously, before crowds. I had helped Jeremy, helped Amanda, but now I was home and all I had was a bowl of stew. I was miserable.

Even Robbie looked miserable. ‘Potion!’ he said in between swear words, and I tried to mix flour with fairy liquid and be excited about it, but he could tell it wasn’t really magic potion, wouldn’t really give the fairies faster wings, that it was just soap and flour and very messy, and we both sighed at each other in Mum and Dad’s kitchen and wished for two weeks ago.

Mum and Dad felt almost as bad. They loved Chas as much as they loved me, and him being with someone else hurt them the same. But they couldn’t believe it – he was their boy, their lovely Chas, the best thing to have ever been in their daughter’s life.

‘Are you sure?’ Mum asked.

‘I keep seeing them together. Since the party, when I kissed Danny, he’s been with her, putting roses in her hair, telling her she’s his best friend and his light, and I heard them kissing.’

‘Heard them kissing?’ (Mum’s moment of hope)

‘And talking, too.’

‘Oh.’ (Dashed)

‘Do you want to stay here tonight?’

‘No, I need to go home. I need to put this lovely little boy to bed with a story and a cuddle and then I need to not have a glass of wine.’

I took a Nicorette inhaler out of my pocket – Danny had given it to me that morning as part of my action plan – and sucked hard on it.

‘Looks like a tampon,’ Mum said.

‘I know.’

The solicitor still hadn’t phoned when I got back to work after lunch. He was in court. I left him a message with my home number, tore up Jeremy’s report, sent another one to court that I’d somehow managed to complete in forty minutes, and left to get money out of my dwindling bank account and buy a present for Jeremy and Amanda – a silver quaich.

When I nipped home to wrap the present, I noticed that Chas had been there. He’d left the stepladder in the wrong place, and a note on the kitchen table – ‘Can you please call me?’

I dialled his number immediately, my heart racing. But it rang out, so I left a message. Fuck.

I sniffed out other hints of Chas. His favourite jeans and T-shirt gone, a photo of Robbie moved slightly to the left, toothbrush and shaving cream gone, the kitchen window left open. He’d had a glass of water and left it in the sink, looked through the mail and taken a bank
statement
and a letter from the art gallery. Then he’d written the note, closed both sets of doors and left.

Another thing I noticed on the way out was the
wedding
dress I’d bought.

It was hanging on the back of the bedroom door. I touched the bodice, the Nutella stain still alive and well, and found myself kissing my hand and then it, that soft white thing that was the future I’d probably lost.

The phone rang. It was the solicitor. Jeremy was being released. He was waiting for me to come and get him.

‘Good thing you did Jeremy’s nails,’ I said to Amanda, after picking her up en route to the prison.

‘I looked for that manicure set for hours,’ she replied. ‘Glad you stole it, though.’

I thought of the things Chas and I did together. Chas grew fly-legs from his nose, and I would gather them between my two fingers, yank and then count the number of black nose hairs on my fingertip. We even did this as a party trick to freak people out. (The best was fifteen.)

Then there was the tiny gap between my two front teeth, that I could squirt water out of by pressing my tongue hard against it. I would often catch Chas’s eyeball unaware from impressive distances. Oh, and there was the time he used his razor to make me Brazilian and all the times he used mine to make his face smooth. When I thought about it, Chas’s DNA was everywhere on me still, and mine on him, but that was all we had of each other, just flakes of dead cells.

Was it another life? Would I be able to return to the realm of the loved, take a cup of coffee in bed, be parents together with Chas, cook meals in on Friday nights and read stories together beside a chubby smiley little
curly-haired
boy?

Amanda was about to re-enter
her
previous life, the one where she was married to a successful property
developer
and living in a lovely flat in Islington and showing off to the friends she’d left in Glasgow. She’d missed him, but missing him had been overshadowed by the events
following
the wedding party in Glasgow.

Finding Bridget.

Feeling things she hadn’t known know how to express.

Expressing them in a way that made her feel confused and guilty.

And Bridget’s brutal death, a constant nightmare, in her unconsciousness and consciousness.

Then Jeremy’s arrest. The man she loved. How could anyone think he could do such a thing?

As Krissie’s car neared Sandhill prison, Amanda’s heart beat fast with excitement and nerves. Would Jeremy have changed after his experiences in prison? Would he blame her? Would he cope with her grief? With the fact that she sometimes cried all day, and sometimes all night, and hardly slept or ate?

Would Jeremy still love her? Would he love her if he knew that jumping naked onto beds was the last thing she felt like doing?

She was nervous, but she believed he would. He was her Jeremy. The man she had fallen in love with that night
in the Earls Court hostel, who had forgiven her that day in the police cell when she told him about what happened with Bridget, who was a poor vulnerable soul who
needed
the love he’d been denied from the age of four.

She spent all day preparing for him. Hair and skin and clothes and perfume. She made the bedroom welcoming and comfortable, bought chocolate she knew he liked, and prayed. Dear God, please let this be the end of it. Please let us be as happy as we can, and please let Bridget be in heaven. Amen.

The horn beeped. It was the weirdo social worker who seemed to have nothing better to do than ferry her around and talk non-stop about Jeremy. Why the fuck were taxpayers paying for people to have manicures and drive people around like that? It was scandalous, and something worth taking to her local MP once she got a lift to the prison because she didn’t have a car.

Oh God, she was nervous. In an hour she would hold him, take him home. They would be together. She would ask him to move to Scotland and he would say yes, and they would begin a family. A boy and a girl. Or two girls and a boy, three … Charlie, Rachel and Anna. She was smiling, despite the nerves, as she got into Krissie’s car to find a present on the passenger seat, and her smile
subsided
as she wondered what the taxpayers would say if they knew they’d just paid for a useless wedding gift.

Overjoyed at the news of his release, Jeremy walked towards the confessional again. Father Moscardini had become a friend, or at least a trustworthy confidant, and he liked him. He wasn’t patronising or mean, didn’t call him a ‘body’ or call lunch ‘feeding time’. He treated him like a human being.

The last time Jeremy had seen the priest was a week ago at lunchtime. It had been Friday, which meant the ‘lucky bucket’. This extra menu item excited the men in C hall beyond belief, that they could have more food than the usual hospital portions – but a bucket of the week’s leftovers – baked beans and fish fingers and hamburgers and chips and rice and curry, all mixed to warm mush in a prison cauldron – did not excite Jeremy at all. In fact it made him feel sick. Jeremy took a roll instead, and the priest smiled at him with understanding.

‘How are you feeling?’ asked Father Moscardini.

‘Good,’ Jeremy had lied, and the priest followed him to his cell.

He’d had the cell to himself since his last co-pilot moved onwards and upwards to the convicted hall, and he’d been feeling scared. If he got out, how would he cope? What would happen next? Father Moscardini talked to him for hours, first about music and sport, then travelling and then love.

‘From what you’ve said over the past few weeks,’ said the priest, ‘you seem like a romantic. You love with every piece of you, give with every piece of you, and there is nothing wrong with that. You will get over this terrible time, but first you must get over what happened to you when you were a tiny boy. Come to confession again. Don’t be scared off this time.’

‘It does scare me,’ Jeremy said. ‘I’ll think about it.’

That was a week ago. He was free now, about to face life head-on, and he knew he couldn’t leave those prison walls without seeing Father Moscardini once more.