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Two months earlier
Beginning January 2005
I’d been in the library every day, all day, for three days. It was an ugly 1970s building both inside and out, although I was oblivious to the décor as I trawled through microfiches while drinking diabolical vending-machine coffee.
Today was the beginning of day four, and today I decided who I was going to be, although I’d actually been sure enough a week before, when the big envelope from America arrived. For the past three days I’d been doing more research. Because it was now time.
She had died of a heroin overdose fifteen months before. She’d lived in Ohio with her three children, who were seven, ten and seventeen.
I found an article about her in the New York Times, published a few months after her death, by a journalist who was investigating the growing incidence of letter writing from females of ‘low socio-economic status’ to death-row prisoners. She was thirty-six years old when she died. Slightly younger than me, but looking at her photos, that wasn’t an issue. Heroin ages the over-thirty woman quicker than any tragedy, I knew; I’d seen enough of them. She had been writing letters to a killer on death row for a few years prior to her own death. The killer’s ‘outside’ best friend had supplied the fatal overdose of heroin to her. The letters she had exchanged with the executed killer and ‘lover’ were retrieved from the Chillicothe Correctional Institution, Ohio, where he had spent most of his sentence before being shipped to the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville. In Lucasville, after too many stays of execution, he finally (thank God, in my opinion) met his death with Old Sparky.
Before he died, and, of course, knowing he would, he’d returned all the woman’s letters to her and, when she passed away, the letters went to her eldest daughter. I intended them to become a template for my own.
A week after my bank transfer hit the eldest daughter’s account, the letters landed on my doormat. The money I sent for both the letters and for a little background on her would, I hoped, help all her children. The abstract innocence of her daughter, coming through so strongly in the letter she sent me made me feel guilty; but guilt was my constant companion. The underlying disquiet I felt at what I was doing brought an instant coolness to my body.
The letters to her death-row boyfriend were, on the one hand, revealing, and on the other, left me with questions, but studying them allowed me to find some essence of her. And it was through these long and badly spelt correspondences I learned how a woman like this would think, and what drove her to seek the love/friendship of a man with no hope of seeing American daylight again. A man who had systematically battered his wife and three young daughters to death, and then burnt all four bodies in a bonfire on his back lawn.
Uninterested neighbours had thought he had been barbecuing pork. For three days.
It was hard to comprehend why she’d befriended such a man; but she had, and I had to pretend to do the same thing, so it was imperative to discover how she would behave, her likes and dislikes. The woman I was to become had to be different from me. Very different.
For my next round of research, I made my way to the psychology section of the library. Like any self-respecting officer who had been promoted to DI as early as I had, I’d devoured every morsel of information on the criminal mind. Today, my intense concentration was not to understand the mind of a killer, but of a twice-married, divorced and widowed Ohio mother, who had been lonely and isolated in a world that had long ago abandoned her.
I sat back in the uncomfortable library chair, and, closing my heavy eyelids, a firm outline of how I would play this woman emerged. In two concentrated hours I’d imbibed the literature on women who befriended and sometimes even married convicted killers. In one famous case during the late 1980s, an adoring fan had been allowed ‘intimate’ time with a convicted death-row prisoner, giving birth nine months later, three months after his execution.
I picked up another book, Families and Abuse, which made for interesting reading, written by an American psychiatrist who, for thirty years, had specialised in interviewing prisoners on death row. Most were men who abused and murdered children, but a handful of women were included in the case studies. I saw something within the personalities of the women described that made me sit upright and think of Margaret.
I squeezed my eyes shut and a picture of her strode through my tired mind; I allowed a few more bricks from my mental wall to be removed. The closer I was getting towards realising my plan, of seeking out Hemmings and killing him, the more often Joe would visit, but his visits made me hesitant in my goal. And the more I remembered my son and our life together, the way he nibbled at muffins and Doritos during every Disney film, how we would play for hours on the zipwire at the park, how he would get bored with me in the school holidays and go and find Liam in the den, the more the memories would return. Memories I’d pushed away for so long. What came back were things I’d buried because I’d known my dad wouldn’t want me to remember them, some of them he hadn’t even known about.
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Mr Roberts had dropped Rachel off from Sunday school and, despite the cramps in her stomach, her mind still jingled with the lovely songs Mr Roberts got them all to sing.
She had opened her mother’s bedroom door.
The first thing she noticed was Michael. He was twelve. Small for his age, but with the trademark gangly legs and, even then, a tight, muscular body. His legs hung over Rachel’s mum’s bedroom chair. He sat on her lap. The white starched blouse she had been wearing when she’d dropped Rachel off at Sunday school was unbuttoned; not only at the neck, which in itself was unusual, but all the way down. That is what hit Rachel. Her mum with her blouse undone. Rachel saw the crêpey, white skin of her sagging, tiny breast and a large, purple nipple protruding from the left side of the open blouse. This was a shock. Rachel never saw her mum without clothes. The other nipple was firmly lodged in Michael’s mouth. Michael had not heard her. Her mother’s eyes were closed. Rachel stood for what seemed like long minutes, trying to work out what was happening. Her tummy was very sore. She could feel it moving under her jumper. They still didn’t know she was there. Then a spasm overwhelmed her and she moaned quietly. And her mum opened her eyes. Rachel was right in front of her. Margaret started. Michael stopped, taking his mouth away and revealing an engorged aubergine nipple. Margaret jumped up. Michael fell to the floor; a subdued terror, mixed with devotion in his eyes, all the time watching Margaret. He didn’t seem to see Rachel.
‘What have I done wrong?’ he asked. She had quickly buttoned up her blouse, right to the top.
‘What are you doing home, Rachel?’ ‘I’m not well, Mr Roberts brought me’ ... ‘Michael, wait for me downstairs,’ Margaret said to him.
‘You don’t want the other today, Aunt Margaret?’ he asked, confused.
Margaret become cross. ‘No, Michael, go downstairs and get yourself a glass of milk.’
The library seemed unbearably hot and I stumbled out to find air.