Whitethorn Woods (14 page)

   Well, he only wanted to do what was best, Kevin said. He really was such a kind and considerate man. Sometimes I allowed myself to think how much easier life would have been to love someone like that. But I didn't waste time going down that road of specula tion. Since the incident when Franklin had told me about Janice, I had become very focused.

   Sometimes Kevin wondered, was he right to take his own life? Was it his to take?

   I dealt with that too. People preached about a loving God who understood everything. If this was so, then this God would understand that Kevin couldn't hang about and wait for what was inevitable. That he was just speeding things up. For everybody. Usually it worked after about ten or fifteen minutes but it was utterly exhausting.

   During this time, Mother, Franklin, Wilfred, people at work and even poor Kevin himself told me I was not looking myself. Wild, somehow. Unhinged, Mother said. But I put on more makeup and smiled a nightmarish grin.

   The big night eventually came, the date that would be the night of the accident. I had met Kevin earlier that day and reassured him that he was doing the right thing about himself, and that we were both doing the right thing about Janice. He turned up, just as we had planned, outside the door of the hotel where the charity bridge function was taking place.

   "Oh, here's a taxi for you, Janice!" I said, sounding pleased.

   "You are marvelous, Becca, everyone else is rushing about looking for them and you find one immediately." She looked genuinely admiring.

   Kevin got out of the driver's seat and came to open the passenger door. He and I gripped each other's hands.

   Janice was going back to her flat, where Franklin would join her later. He and Wilfred were out at yet another business meeting. I said that I must run now, as my bus was just coming and we were going in different directions anyway.

   "Bye, lovely Becca," Kevin said.

   "See what I mean, Becca, everyone's mad about you," Janice said enviously as she waved me good-bye.

   And I went home and I talked to my mother for a long time and then went to bed. Franklin telephoned to know what time we had all left the bridge function because Janice wasn't back yet. I said I couldn't understand it, lots of people had seen her getting into a cab hours ago. And in the morning he telephoned again and said she hadn't come home all night.

   I was so sympathetic and said I had no idea what could have happened.

   In the afternoon he rang to say that poor lovely little Janice had been killed and the taxi driver too, they had plowed into a wall. Everyone was shocked. Franklin didn't move out because he was so shattered, and soon he began to love me again. The whole thing should have been perfect, it
would
have been perfect if it hadn't been for Kevin.

   I was right.

   He did love me.

   And he had insured his life in my favor. I was going to get a small fortune. This of course destroyed the whole plan. No one would ever have connected it with me if it hadn't been for this policy.

   That and the letter Kevin left, thanking me for all I had done for him.

   Now everyone is investigating it. Insurance people, police, everyone. And the whole of Rossmore is talking about me. They say that Janice's mother and sisters went up to that ridiculous well in the woods and a kind of procession went after them. As if that was going to bring her back!

   People say I am as hard as nails. I never used to be, I was always as soft as a kitten.

   Of course I may not get charged with anything. But Franklin is nervous of me. He didn't say so but he started to move all his things out last week.

   It had been such a perfect plan—if only Kevin hadn't tried to be generous. Tried to give me something as he ended his life.

   Instead of which he managed to take my whole life away.

All my friends at the bridge club have been very kind. Very kind indeed.

   They glare at one another if someone accidentally mentions prison, or murder, or convicts, or anything. They think I have been very brave to go to visit Becca in jail every week and to hold my head up everywhere I go in Rossmore. It's not all that hard to have confidence actually. It depends, really, on how you look. I always knew that but I never had the money to look well.

   My ex-husband, that bloody Eamon, left me penniless when he went off with that appalling, vulgar woman, Iris. The upkeep of the house was amazing, so I was always very stuck for cash when it came to it. Which, of course, was why I was so grateful to the tabloids.

   Now, I know we have to pretend to think they are terrible and that we only let them into the house for the maid to read, but they were hugely interested in what poor Becca had done and in fact I was secretly delighted with them. One of them bought the story of Becca's childhood and the "What Made Her the Woman She Became" angle. Another bought stuff about her life in the chic fashion boutique. I should have got a retainer from that hoity-toity madam who owns the place—I bet I doubled her business.

   Then there was a piece about how Becca had changed after her father, bloody Eamon, had left home. I enjoyed helping to write that. Nowhere did they say that I was collaborating but I gave them all the information and all the pictures. It made a magnificent set of articles.

   Of course I didn't like titles like "In the Mind of the Murderess" but on the other hand it did sell papers, and in many people's minds that's exactly what poor silly Becca actually is.

   Every time I visited, she asked how had the reporters found out all these details. I reassured her that I had told them nothing new, they knew it all already. What they didn't know, they made up. Like all that silly business about poor Becca going up to the well in Whitethorn Woods to pray to St. Ann that Franklin would love her.

   "I never did, Mother, you know that," she had wept at me.

   I soothed her and calmed her down. Of course everyone knew it was nonsense. They just made it up out of their heads . . .

   I had been very well paid for that particular story. It gave the newspapers freedom to take pictures of the terrible shrine. And did that sell papers! Obviously Becca knew nothing of this and I reassured her and reminded her that I
had
managed to keep Franklin out of the story and she was naturally very grateful. When she came out of jail she would marry him, of course, so she didn't want him attracting unpleasant limelight and attention until then.

   She had begged him to come and visit her until I told her that the reporters were outside the jail all the time and they would spot him and the careful privacy we had all been keeping would be blown. She saw the sense in that.

   They were quite nice in the jail, really. Basically out for the prisoners' good—which must be quite hard when you think of the kind of people they have to deal with normally. Of course, Becca is different, and they saw that, naturally they would. She's a lady, for one thing, and she hasn't the
mind
of a criminal, for another. She's so far above everyone in the place and yet gets on perfectly pleasantly with them all, which is a true sign of good breeding.

   She was learning embroidery at recreation time, from one of the warders, a nice woman called Kate. Becca said it was very restful, therapeutic even. She gave me a perfectly horrid little cushion cover she had made and I told her it had pride of place in the sitting room. Poor dear Becca! She thinks she'll be home any day to see it. She has risen above her whole terrible situation by refusing to acknowledge it. It's a way of coping and for Becca it's working very well.

   She started a huge coverlet for her bed with the words "Franklin" and "Rebecca" intertwined.

   I had to remember not to wear my best finery going to see her because Becca can spot a designer outfit at half a mile, it was all those years working in the boutique. She would know I couldn't ordinarily afford Prada or Joseph jackets. I had what I called my prison visiting outfit, so that she wouldn't make the connection between the publishing of the tabloid stories and her mother's new wardrobe.

   Becca herself looked a lot better as the weeks and months went by. She walked straighter, she didn't fuss about her hair and sort of twiddle with it like she used to; it was just straight now and classylooking. There was one of the warders, Gwen, who was a friend of Kate, the nice one, and apparently she trained as a hairdresser and still worked part-time in a beauty parlor, and she gave them all a regular trim. They were not allowed to hold a pair of scissors themselves, of course. Which is idiotic in Becca's case—I mean, what harm would she do to anyone with a pair of scissors?

   She seemed less anxious than when she was out in the real world, somehow much calmer. Very interested in shading and matching threads, and whether she'd be chosen for a netball team. Becca! Interested in sports and embroidery! Who would have thought it? Well, who would have thought any of it, really?

   Sometimes the tabloid people asked me, did I have any sympathy for poor Janice, who went unsuspecting to her death because of Becca, but I reminded them that I could not be quoted; my opinions and my natural, deep, deep sorrow could not be entered into. And then before they started to turn against me I fed them another picture of Becca or tidbit about the parties she used to go to, launches, receptions, to which she hadn't even been invited. They would run another story describing her as a good-time party girl.

   Imagine!

   You know the way they talk about people becoming institutionalized? Well, I think it's absolutely true. Becca had few interests outside the terrible place where she was. She told me of horrid lesbian affairs between the prisoners, and sometimes between prisoners and warders. The only thing that united her to the world outside was her future with Franklin.

   It's marvelous, of course, that she is so positive about everything but then she does seem to have lost touch with reality since she doesn't realize how long she is going to be in there. Nor did she ever refer to the enormity of what she did. She sort of waved it away.

   And yet it was a terrible thing. Killing Franklin's fiancée—or getting her killed, which was just as bad. "A deliberate and coldblooded killing," as the judge said when he sentenced her after a unanimous verdict from the jury. She never once spoke of Janice or, indeed, that sad chap Kevin, who did the driving, or anything at all about that night.

   And I didn't want to distress her. Poor lamb, her life hadn't turned out at all as she had hoped.

   So when she talked about Franklin and the future, I did nothing to discourage her. Once she realized he couldn't come to see her, she stopped asking about him and what he was doing.

   This was a great relief.

   A huge relief in fact. It was getting more and more difficult to field her questions about him. I tried to tell her about the bridge club but Becca had lost all interest—she barely reacted when I told her about the grand slam that I had got. I think she barely took on board that Wilfred and Franklin and I play regularly together, getting a fourth where we can find one. But then I suppose bridge might have been a bit of a sore subject, what with Janice's having met Franklin there, being a bridge partner and everything.

   So maybe better not to mention bridge.

   Trouble was that there were so many things it was better not to mention. I talked on about whether this thread is cerise or fuchsia, and how hard it is for Kate the warder to support two children on her wages, and I listened to stories about how Gloria's romance with Ailis was over, and how it was all political getting on the netball team.

   And I listened to stories about women who were prostitutes, drug dealers, or murdered their husbands in self-defense. It's such an uncanny sort of an existence. That bloody Eamon, my exhusband, asked, would Becca like him to visit, and I said certainly not. He had been no help to her before all this business and he would only upset her further now. So that softened his cough.

   Kate drew me aside from time to time when I visited and told me that Becca was adapting very well and was very popular with the other prisoners. As if I would somehow be pleased that these terrible women liked my Becca or not! But Kate meant well; she couldn't help it if she had no advantages when she was growing up, and from what Becca said, Kate too had been a victim like I was, her husband had left her. Bastards, really, all of them, when you think about it.

   So I took to bringing Kate little presents as well when I visited. Nothing huge, just a nice soap or a glossy magazine, or a little jar of tapenade. Poor dear, I don't think she knew what it was, but she was pleased all the same. And as I say, it wasn't her fault that she didn't grow up in a proper home. And she was very kind to my Becca.

   Franklin was relieved that I had sorted out that he shouldn't visit. Very relieved, I imagine. But Wilfred, who was so polite and always tried to do the right thing, asked, should he come and see Becca? I thought about it for a while but I said, not really, what would there be for him to say? And he too was frightfully relieved. I could see it. I didn't want Wilfred in there anyway, blabbing and saying the wrong thing. He was only offering to be polite.

   He was still Franklin's partner in this mysterious mobile phone service they were doing, downloading or uploading or offloading something onto people's cell phones, impossible to understand.

   Then the mother of that poor Janice asked, could she visit

Becca, but I told Kate to tell the authorities that this would be the wrong thing. This poor woman was born-again or something very dubious and she thought Becca would find peace if she went to tell her she had forgiven her, but I think Becca has actually forgotten about Janice, to be honest, so I discouraged it and Kate must have passed the message on because she never went.