Till We Meet Again (42 page)

‘But you arrested her. You’ve been there at the searches for the bodies. You’ve met Zoë’s mother. I couldn’t blame you if you were totally against her.’

‘I don’t like what she did, but that doesn’t stop me from seeing what she is,’ he said. ‘Or what she might have been if fate hadn’t conspired against her.’

‘How long ago did she tell you about me?’ Beth asked.

‘It was last Friday morning. It broke up the interview. Then when we started again in the afternoon she said she wanted to confess.’

‘I was going to tell you myself.’ Beth began to cry again. ‘I’m so ashamed you had to find out that way.’

Roy put his arms around her and held her tightly against his chest. ‘There’s no need for you to feel any shame. Lay that at the feet of the animals who did that terrible thing to you,’ he said fiercely. ‘Besides, I think I always knew it was something like that,’ he murmured against her forehead. ‘I think you should tell me all about it now, don’t you?’

‘But you’re tired, you’ve had a miserable time for days now,’ she said, trying to stall him.

‘Not so tired I don’t want to hear something you’ve kept locked away for years,’ he said gently.

Beth told him then, described it in detail, and as she did so she knew she was able to put it behind her at last. His reaction of outrage and pain was the one she had always longed for from her father, and never got.

‘No wonder you despise your father,’ Roy burst out, clenching his fists and thumping them on the arm of the settee. ‘What a bastard! If he wasn’t so old now I could be tempted to go to his nursing home and shake him senseless.’

Beth gave a hollow laugh. ‘He hasn’t got much sense left,’ she said. ‘But there’s something more, Roy, more important to you and me. It’s left me frigid.’

Her words, ones she had never uttered to a living soul, seemed to echo round the room. She had to close her eyes because she didn’t want to see his shock or disappointment.

She felt his big hand on her cheek, smoothing it gently, then he kissed her lips tenderly. ‘Then we’ll work on that,’ he whispered. ‘I’ve got all the patience in the world as far as you are concerned. If we could never have anything more than a platonic relationship, I’d settle for that rather than losing you.’

Roy went home later, after making them both an omelette and insisting Beth had a hot bath and went to bed early. She could see he was exhausted, yet he made light of it, saying he was used to it.

He hadn’t made her dredge up more of the past, nor had he suggested she spoke to a psychiatrist as she’d expected and dreaded. He didn’t speak of what he’d been doing in Wales, it was as though he’d decided the only way forward was to separate the past from the present and just look ahead.

The last thing he said as he left around nine was that he wanted to take her to his cottage on Saturday.

Beth woke from an erotic dream in which Roy was making love to her in a wood. It was so intense and real that her whole body was quivering and sticky with sweat. She had never had an orgasm, or even come close to it, but she sensed she’d had one then. She closed her eyes again, wanting to sink right back into it, but although she could see Roy’s face and relive his kisses, it wasn’t the same.

Unable to go back to sleep, she turned on the light and looked at the clock. It was five o’clock.

All at once she knew what she wanted to do. If she tried to suppress the instinct she might never do it. She leapt out of bed, pulled her coat on over her nightdress, put on her slippers, grabbed her keys and ran out down to her car.

It wasn’t until Beth drove into the village of Queen Charlton that she realized she didn’t know the name of Roy’s cottage. She pulled up by a crossroads, wondering which way to go. It was still pitch dark, there was no street lighting and few of the cottages even had lights outside.

To her right was the church, the houses to her left looked too big, as did the ones she’d already passed, and she knew that the road straight ahead went to Keynsham. She thought Roy would have mentioned if it was that road he lived on. That left only the lane, which she knew was a cul-de-sac with fields at the end.

She drove down it very slowly, peering at each cottage. They all appeared very much grander than how she had imagined Roy’s. It crossed her mind that if anyone should see her they might call the police, thinking she was a burglar. She smiled at the thought of being pulled up and found to be wearing her nightie, while she was looking for a policeman herself.

Then she saw Roy’s car right at the end of the lane, outside a cottage which was bigger and, even in the dark, more attractive than Roy had led her to believe. She parked up behind his car and got out, closing the door very quietly, and tiptoed up the gravel to the front door.

Her eyes were growing used to the dark now. She could just make out the hedge around the garden which presumably led on to fields. It was so quiet compared to where she lived, almost as if the darkness was a blanket muffling her ears. But it was freezing cold, the wind whistling through her coat and up her bare legs.

There was no bell she could see, so she tried knocking on the door. But no light came on, and this was beginning to look like complete folly. She knocked again, louder this time, but there was still no response, so she walked round the side of the house, guessing that Roy would choose a bedroom with a view.

Only one room had drawn curtains, and she threw a handful of gravel at the window. No response. She tried again, but still no response.

She was about to go back to the car when she noticed the tree – probably an apple or cherry tree, judging by its size and shape. Although it wasn’t close enough to the window for her to bang on it if she could climb it, she could shake a branch at the window.

She giggled to herself. As a girl she’d been the best in her village at climbing trees, but she hadn’t attempted it for at least thirty years, and never in the dark before. But she felt as if she could do anything now – climb, fly, do a tap-dance on his doorstep. She had been liberated at last, she could do all the things now that she’d bypassed after the rape.

The lower part of the trunk had no hand- or footholds, but the lowest branch was only a couple of feet above her head. She jumped, managed to grab it, then swinging hand over hand she worked her way back towards the trunk. Her coat hindered her, her slippers fell off and the wind was icy on her bare legs and naked bottom, but the thought of Roy’s surprise when he woke to find her in the tree outside his window kept her going. She reached the trunk, managed to find a foothold on it and hauled herself up into the main part of the tree.

She was only a few yards from the window now. She bounced tentatively on a thick branch which felt as though it would hold her weight, then she edged along it, holding on to another higher one. She was close enough to start banging on the window now, and reaching out she grabbed a slender branch above her, bashing it against the window.

‘Roy!’ she hissed. ‘Roy!’

Although she was freezing, the ludicrousness of her position kept making her giggle. She could imagine newspaper headlines – ‘Knickerless Solicitor Attempts to Break into Policeman’s House’ or ‘No Nicks for Policeman’s Brief.

She pulled the light branch right back and let it go so it made a far louder noise this time. A dog barked in a house somewhere nearby. She wondered what on earth she would do if someone came along.

Then suddenly Roy pulled back the curtain and looked out.

She laughed out loud at his astonishment, for she knew she must look like a witch with her white face and dark hair. But perhaps he heard her laugh, for he opened the window.

‘Beth?’ he said, as if unable to believe it was really her.

‘Yes, it’s me, trying to make an illegal entry,’ she whispered, breaking into a fit of giggles.

‘I’ve a good mind to leave you up there,’ he whispered back.

‘I’ll scream if you do, then your neighbours will all come running out,’ she said. ‘And I warn you, I’ve only got a nightie on under this coat, nothing else.’

He disappeared from the window and suddenly he was below her, looking up, wearing a dressing-gown, his legs bare. ‘How on earth did you get up there?’ he whispered.

Beth shuffled back along the branch, then climbed down to the trunk and the branch she’d hauled herself along on. She sat down on it and held out her arms to Roy. ‘Catch me!’

It wasn’t more than ten feet, and he caught her effortlessly, hugging her tightly to him. ‘What a crazy thing to do!’ he exclaimed in a stage whisper. ‘Why didn’t you phone?’

He was carrying her indoors as if she weighed nothing. ‘You wouldn’t have done this if I’d warned you I was coming,’ she giggled.

‘You deserve to have your bottom smacked,’ he said with mock sternness and put her down by the fire which he immediately switched on. ‘It’s not even warm in here because I’ve been away. I went to bed as soon as I got home.’

‘Well, let’s go and get in there, before it gets cold too,’ Beth said, switching off the fire. She stood up and held out her hand.

His wide smile was a joy to see, and she was glad he didn’t ask if she was sure about it. He grasped her hand, held it to his lips and kissed it. ‘After me, Milady,’ he said, pulling her behind him to the stairs.

Once in the still dark bedroom, he took off his dressing-gown, but Beth could see enough to know he was still wearing boxer shorts. Then he removed her coat and literally bundled her into the bed.

‘You’re like a block of ice,’ he exclaimed as he got in beside her and pulled her into his arms, recoiling momentarily when he felt how cold she was. ‘I shall have to give you not only the kiss of life but a brisk rub-down.’

There wasn’t one moment of fear, dread or even apprehension, for the sure but gentle way he massaged warmth back into her limbs, bottom and back with his big warm hands felt so right. She could feel herself melting as he kissed her, his body fitting against hers as if it was made specifically for it.

He didn’t attempt to touch her breasts until she began to press them into his chest, but when his hand finally cupped round one of them it gave her the same thrill she remembered from when she was sixteen and got her first fondle from a boy in a hayfield.

It was such slow, tender and gradual love-making that Beth lost herself and entered into something so new, so beautiful that the past vanished, nothing mattered but his lips on hers, his caressing fingers. It was like her dream earlier, only hotter, more sensual and thrilling. There was no fear now, only the desire for it to go on for ever. She couldn’t believe that at last she was with a man who was capable of awakening all those parts of her which had lain dormant for so long.

‘Tell me what you like best,’ Roy whispered.

‘I can’t, it’s all so wonderful,’ she sighed in rapture. ‘But show me how to please you too.’

‘It pleases me just to play with you,’ he said, sucking at her breasts as he probed inside her with his fingers, making her gasp with pleasure. ‘I love you, Beth, I want you beside me for ever.’

It seemed to Beth that she was being sucked from the real world into one of exquisite sensations, and her body was not her own any more but a pulsating organ which Roy was playing. The sensations built and built until suddenly she felt some kind of overwhelming, rushing, astounding feeling, and all at once she finally knew what an orgasm meant.

He entered her then as she clung to him, still drowning in the bliss of it all. She could hear herself calling out his name, bucking under him, urging him to drive deeper and deeper into her. It was just the most wonderful thing she had ever known.

Grey light was filtering through the curtains as they lay in each other’s arms, sleepy, but too new to one another to sleep yet.

‘I have to go to work,’ Beth said sadly.

‘No you don’t,’ Roy replied. ‘Play ill and stay home with me.’

‘But I’ve got appointments –’

Roy cut off her argument with a kiss. ‘They are thieves and rogues, let them wait another day or two,’ he said. ‘Besides, you can’t go home in your nightie in broad daylight.’

Beth hadn’t considered that aspect. She couldn’t possibly park her car and walk to her flat the way she’d come here.

‘What will I do then?’ she said.

‘I’ll phone in for you, I’m a good liar when I need to be,’ he chuckled. ‘We’ll stay here in bed until lunch-time, then I’ll go over to the supermarket and buy something for lunch and for you to wear.’

‘I think I feel a really grave illness coming on.’ She giggled and snuggled down further into the bed. ‘I may take weeks to recover.’

‘I’m bound to catch it too,’ he said, pulling the duvet over their heads. ‘We might never be able to get out of this bed again.’

Steven smiled as he put the phone down after speaking to Roy. His story about Beth going down with a stomach upset after a meal at his house would have been entirely plausible to anyone else. But Steven knew Beth was the kind who would have insisted on being taken to her own home if she was ill. He guessed the only sickness in that house was love-sickness.

He was glad for Beth. Really glad that something good had come out of this whole sorry mess with Susan. But then, if it hadn’t been for Susan he wouldn’t have got to know Beth so well, and Anna would still be drinking, the girls unhappy.

He stood up. He had to go and tell Brendan about Susan dismissing him, and that Beth was ill. Brendan wouldn’t like either, but Steven didn’t really care. One thing they, could be certain of in a criminal law practice was that they’d never be short of clients. He just hoped that if another Susan came along, she wouldn’t get under his skin the way this one had.

Chapter twenty-one

‘What are you looking so smug about, Fellows?’

Susan smiled at the woman unlocking the gate for her. Bagnell, or Baggy, as the girls called her, was one of the decent screws. She had a brusque manner but she wasn’t a brute, and she wasn’t gay either. In fact she often came along to Susan’s cell for a chat. She liked gardening and was in charge of the prison greenhouses.

‘Just got back from a chat with my brief,’ Susan said. ‘It looks as if my trial will be in early July.’

It was April now. Susan had been on remand in Oak-wood Park for six months already.

‘You know you won’t get sent back here?’ Baggy warned her. She was a big woman with tight curly fair hair, and a port wine birthmark on her cheek. Susan suspected she’d joined the prison service because it was a way of hiding herself away. ‘You’ll probably be sent to Durham, at least for a while. That’s no picnic, I worked there for a time.’

‘I’ll be a good girl then, and get them to send me somewhere else,’ Susan said lightly.

She wasn’t afraid of prison any more. She knew how to handle herself now. After she’d finished her punishment on the block, she was given a cell on her own. Word had got round she’d knocked Frankie out, and all the teasing and nastiness stopped miraculously. Then Baggy got her work in the greenhouses, looking after the bedding plants they grew there, and being outside for a couple of hours a day had made all the difference to Susan. Plus she’d got some glasses now, and she could see to read at last.

‘You are the only woman I’ve ever known who wasn’t scared of being sentenced,’ Baggy said with some degree of admiration.

‘Why should I be scared when I already know what I’m going to get?’ Susan asked. ‘They’re going to give me life, and that’s all there is to it.’

‘Doesn’t that worry you?’

Susan shrugged. ‘There’s nothing outside for me. If I was let out tomorrow I wouldn’t even know where to go. At least inside there’s people who actually care whether I’m alive or dead. I’m warm, I’m fed, I’ve got people to talk to. I’ve even got used to the noise.’

‘So what’s this new brief you’ve got like?’ Baggy asked as they walked along the corridor together. Steven Smythe was liked by many of the prison officers, and many of them were curious as to why Fellows had dismissed him. She wouldn’t say why, of course, she rarely talked about herself, and they sensed a mystery as Smythe always made a point of asking how Fellows was when he called to see another client. Sometimes he brought in books or sweets for her too.

‘Franklin’s okay. Not likely to send your pulse racing of course.’ Susan giggled as she pictured the sixteen-stone solicitor with white hair and a round, jolly face. ‘The best thing about him is that he accepts me as I am now. He doesn’t keep making me talk about my past.’

‘Well, he doesn’t need to, I suppose,’ Baggy said thoughtfully. ‘What with you pleading guilty and all. Go on, tell me, why did you dismiss the other chap? He’s a nice guy.’

‘Too nice for his own good,’ Susan said with a little chuckle. They were at the door of her cell now. ‘I had this feeling if I stuck with him I’d end up in a place for the criminally insane.’

She smiled as she walked into her cell. Baggy often brought her in gardening magazines, and she had cut out some of the flower pictures and stuck them on the wall with toothpaste to brighten it up. She’d been told that in some prisons, lifers could have a duvet, a bedside lamp, and even their own television. With that in store for her she didn’t mind having to leave here.

‘I thought you must be insane when you first came here,’ Baggy admitted. ‘I don’t mean you behaved as if you were, but –’ She stopped suddenly.

‘Because of what I’d done?’ Susan finished for her. ‘No, not insane, just pushed too far I suppose. If you look around in here, there’s a lot more like me. Luckily for them they didn’t do anything as bad as me though.’

‘Tell me, Fellows,’ Baggy said. ‘Are you sorry now?’

‘Truthfully?’ Susan asked.

Baggy nodded. ‘Just between ourselves.’

‘No, I’m not. Well, I am about the first one, but then I didn’t mean to hurt him, it was an accident. But I’d be lying if I was to say I regretted the others.’

Baggy shook her head in bewilderment. ‘You’re a funny one,’ she sighed. ‘I think for your own good you’d better take to lying about it at your trial. And I’ve got to lock you up again now.’

Susan sat down on her bed as the door clanked shut. She thought she probably was a ‘funny one’, most of the women wouldn’t even tell the truth about what they were in for. They said ‘fraud’ when it was shop-lifting. Or made out they’d attacked a man and were up for GBH, when in fact they’d really hurt their own child. Personally she couldn’t see any point in telling lies, not because of the moral issue, but because once you’d owned up, it was sorted. You didn’t have to spend any more time agonizing over when you were going to be found out.

Most of the remand prisoners who’d been here when she was first brought in were gone, Frankie included, but almost daily new ones arrived. She’d hear them crying at night and feel for them, especially the young ones. So many of them were still children at eighteen, dragged through children’s homes, foster homes and ending up here emaciated from drug abuse. Many could barely read or write, they often had children themselves who had been taken from them, some were pregnant when they were brought in. That made Susan cry, but she couldn’t cry about her own crimes.

It seemed to her that remorse for what she’d done was unnecessary. So instead she tried to help those who needed it in here. Helping them write letters, listening to their anxieties, and preventing others from bullying them, that was useful. Remorse wasn’t going to bring anyone back from the dead, it didn’t change anything for anyone.

Susan walked over to the window and stood up on the toilet so she could see out through the bars. Her cell overlooked the exercise yard. There was a flower bed up the far end, bright with red and yellow tulips. She hoped she’d get to see all those petunias and busy lizzies she’d pricked out into trays in flower before she left here.

She wondered then if Beth had got into gardening. Mr Franklin had given her a note from Mr Smythe on his previous visit. He’d said Beth spent most of her spare time now with her policeman at his cottage. He thought they would get married before long.

‘I hope so, Beth,’ Susan whispered to herself. ‘Be happy. I am now.’

She wasn’t fooling herself either. It was true she’d often looked back to the point when her parents died and wished she’d thought then of applying for a job in a boarding school, or tried to get into nursing. She would have been good at either job. But then, if it hadn’t been for Liam she would never have had Annabel and all that joy of motherhood. Despite all the agony of losing her, those four years were still the golden ones, the best ones in her whole life.

Nothing could ever again give her the sheer bliss she’d experienced in those years, but she was contented now. There was nothing to strive for in here, no real anxiety. She found she liked the orderliness of prison and the feeling of security. Looking back, she could see it was insecurity and perhaps the lack of rigid structure to her life that unhinged her slightly when her parents died. Clinging to Liam, hating Martin all added to it.

Maybe she would find a new prison tougher than this one, but she knew the ropes now and she could, by appealing to the right people, get herself moved to an easier one. Nothing was ever going to be as bad again as living in that cold, damp room in Belle Vue.

The cherry tree Beth had climbed in Roy’s cottage garden was in full blossom in May. On a warm, sunny Sunday afternoon, Beth and Roy were sunbathing on a blanket on the lawn, discussing their wedding.

Roy had stripped off to a pair of shorts, and had tried to persuade Beth to take off her dress and put on her bikini, but she wouldn’t because she was embarrassed at how lily-white her body was. She had however made up her mind to start going to a solarium in her lunch-hours, if only to reach the pale biscuit colour Roy was.

‘We can’t have a white wedding, it would be ridiculous,’ Beth protested.

‘Why?’ Roy argued. ‘Because of our ages, or because you don’t think we’re entitled to one?’

Since that night back in February when Beth had climbed the tree to wake him they had spent every moment of their spare time together. Roy’s cottage had gradually become Beth’s first home, she only stayed in her flat occasionally if she worked late at the office. Even when Roy worked nights or was called away for a couple of days, she preferred the tranquillity of the cottage. Looking out over fields might not be as spectacular as the view of Bristol from her flat, but to her it was far more appealing. They had been talking about getting married for some weeks now, and Beth was every bit as keen as Roy.

‘I don’t know exactly why I think it’s ridiculous,’ she admitted, looking up at the umbrella of pink blossom above them. ‘Too much fuss, I suppose.’

‘It doesn’t have to be a big affair,’ he said. ‘We could have it at the church here, just your family, those of mine who can be trusted to behave, and a few friends.’

Beth laughed. Roy was always a little anxious about his family, but Beth liked his sisters. Perhaps they were a bit rough and ready, but they had good hearts. She knew Serena and Robert would like them too, for snobbishness was one thing none of them had inherited from their father.

She had taken Roy to meet her family back in March, and she still glowed at the memory of that wonderful weekend. Serena and Robert had welcomed him with open arms, and he’d been equally bowled over by them. To see Serena smiling fondly as Roy played football with Robert’s boys, her two nieces asking breathlessly if they could be bridesmaids, was almost enough on its own. And suddenly Beth didn’t feel she was the outsider looking in longingly at a happy family, it was as though she belonged to it.

‘Go on, say yes,’ Roy said, leaning over and kissing her. ‘I want to be up at that altar and turning to see you coming up the aisle in a white dress and veil, your nieces holding your train. It’s like a public declaration of how much I love you.’

Tears prickled Beth’s eyes. Roy could be so soppy and romantic sometimes. She loved it, for it was all new to her, yet sometimes she felt she didn’t really deserve it.

‘What if the vicar won’t marry us?’ she asked. ‘You’ve been divorced, remember!’

‘She left me,’ Roy reminded her. ‘Besides, I’ve already asked the vicar, he’s all for it.’

‘Oh, have you now?’ Beth playfully rolled him over and sat astride him. ‘Going behind my back already! What else have you done in secret?’

‘Tentatively arranged it for the first Saturday in August,’ he admitted, pretending to look anxious. ‘I said I’d ring him to confirm it tonight, if you were agreeable.’

‘And what if I’m not?’ she asked, pulling at his ears.

‘Then I’ll have to torture you till you do agree,’ he said. ‘I shall take you upstairs, handcuff you to the bed and roger you again and again until you submit.’

‘Roger me!’ she exclaimed. ‘What sort of an expression is that?’

He didn’t reply but caught hold of her round the middle and lifted her bodily off him in the same way he played aeroplanes with her nieces.

‘Put me down,’ she giggled, as she wavered in the air above him. ‘I’m too big for this.’

‘Maybe I won’t roger you then, I’ll just hold you here all afternoon instead,’ he laughed. ‘It will start to hurt in a minute.’

‘It already is,’ she squealed. ‘I’ll take the rogering instead.’

He dropped her to the grass and bent over her to kiss her again. ‘I love you, Beth. Let’s do it all properly. It is for ever and ever, after all,’ he said tenderly.

Beth got up a few minutes later and went into the cottage to get them both a drink. As she walked into the living room she stopped to look around her, reminding herself that once they were married this would really be her home.

Before she’d seen Roy’s home, he had led her to believe that it was still something of a derelict hovel. Yet nothing could be farther from the truth. He had knocked several small rooms into a huge ‘L’-shaped one so there were windows all round, and the ceiling was supported with beams. The part of the room nearest the front door and hall was the sitting end, the back part was the dining area, leading on to the kitchen. All the floors had been sanded smooth and varnished.

When Beth had first come here there was little furniture, just the white settee he’d told her about, a television and an old table. She had picked the material for the curtains herself, lovely heavy off-white wool with crewel embroidery in scarlet and soft greens.

Since then, they’d bought a big Indian rug which was remarkably like the curtains, a dining table and chairs, and the beech kitchen had been finished. Beth was intending to sell her flat and most of her furniture, for it was all too modern to bring here. But her paintings would fit in. That struck her as very significant, for they were the only things she really cared about, and Roy liked them as much as she did.

Sometimes she felt she ought to pinch herself to check this wasn’t all a dream. She had found the kind of love she thought only existed in soppy romances, discovered she was far from frigid, and released the young girl who had been frozen deep inside her.

That was really the best part. It was wonderful to be spontaneous, to view each day ahead with optimism, to take an interest in other people and to let her own defences drop.

When Beth thought back to the night she’d climbed the tree to wake Roy, it always made her smile. It was so hare-brained and out of character. And as for the next few days! They had stayed in bed most of the time, hours and hours of love-making, talking, laughing. She would never forget either the dreadful clothes Roy bought her in Asda. Polyester slacks which were four inches too short, a ghastly striped sweater and a red and black bra with matching knickers.

‘I can see you are a high-maintenance sort of woman,’ Roy said with an ear-to-ear grin when she tried them on. ‘Perhaps I should have tried Tesco.’

In those few days Beth felt as if she had shed her old skin and emerged a different woman. She was even afraid to go back to her flat in case the old Beth returned. But she needn’t have worried, the new Beth was stronger. She wrinkled her nose at the so-called tasteful cream decor, and went straight on out and bought half a dozen brilliant-coloured cushions to jazz it up a bit. She got on the phone and told Serena she was in love.