The Best of Sisters in Crime (42 page)

As if on
impulse, she put down her notepad. “Children!” she said breathlessly. “That
reminds me! Wasn’t Erma Bradley a prisoner here?”

They glanced at
each other. “So?” said the dull-eyed woman with unwashed hair.

A ferrety
blonde, who seemed more taken by Jackie’s glamour than the older ones, answered
eagerly, “I knew her! We were best friends!”

“To say the
least, Minx,” said the frowsy embezzler from Croyden.

Jackie didn’t
have to feign interest anymore. “Really?” she said to the one called Minx. “I’d
be terrified! What was she like?”

They all began
to talk about Erma now.

“A bit reserved.”
said one. “She never knew who she could trust, because of her rep, you know. A
lot of us here have kids of our own, so there was feeling against her. In the
kitchen, they used to spit in her food before they took it to her. And
sometimes, new girls would go at her to prove they were tough.”

“That must have
taken nerve!” cried Jackie. “I’ve seen her pictures!”

“Oh, she didn’t
look like that anymore!” said Minx. “She’d let her hair go back to its natural
dark color, and she was much smaller. Not bad, really. She must have lost fifty
pounds since the trial days!”

“Do you have a
snapshot of her?” asked Jackie, still doing her best impression of breathless
and impressed.

The redhead laid
a meaty hand on Minx’s shoulder. “Just a minute. What are you really here for?”

Jackie took a
deep breath. “I need to find Erma Bradley. Can you help me? I’ll pay you.”

A few minutes
later, Jackie was saying a simpering goodbye to the warden, telling her that
she’d have to come back in a few days for a follow-up. She had until then to
come up with a way to smuggle in two bottles of Glenlivet: the price on Erma
Bradley’s head. Ernie would probably make her pay for the liquor out of her own
pocket. It would serve him right if she got a book deal out of it on the side.

The flat could
have used a coat of paint, and some better quality furniture, but that could
wait. She was used to shabbiness. What she liked best about it was its high
ceiling and the big casement window overlooking the moors. From that window you
could see nothing but hills and heather and sky; no roads, no houses, no
people. After twenty-four years in the beehive of a women’s prison, the
solitude was blissful. She spent hours each day just staring out that window,
knowing that she could walk on the moors whenever she liked, without guards or
passes or physical restraints.

Erma Bradley
tried to remember if she had ever been alone before. She had lived in a tiny
flat with her mother until she finished O levels, and then, when she’d taken
the secretarial job at Hadlands, there had been Sean. She had gone into prison
at the age of twenty-three, an end to even the right to privacy. She could
remember no time when she could have had solitude, to get to know her own likes
and dislikes. She had gone from Mum’s shadow to Sean’s. She kept his picture,
and her mother’s, not out of love, but as a reminder of the prisons she had
endured before Holloway.

Now she was
learning that she liked plants, and the music of Sibelius. She liked things to
be clean, too. She wondered if she could paint the flat by herself. It would
never look clean until she covered those dingy green walls.

She reminded
herself that she could have had a house,
if.
If she had given up some of that solitude. Sell your story to a book
publisher; sell the film rights to this movie company. Keith, her long-suffering
attorney, dutifully passed along all the offers for her consideration. The
world seemed willing to throw money at her, but all she wanted was for it to go
away. The dowdy but slender Miss Emily Kay, newborn at forty-seven, would
manage on her own, with tinned food and second-hand furniture, while the pack
of journalists went baying after Erma Bradley, who didn’t exist anymore. She
wanted solitude. She never thought about those terrible months with Sean, the
things they did together. For twenty-four years she had not let herself
remember any of it.

Jackie Duncan
looked up at the gracefully ornamented stone building, carved into apartments
for working-class people. The builders in that gentler age had worked leaf
designs into the stonework framing the windows, and they had set gargoyles at a
corner of each roof. Jackie made a mental note of this useful detail; yet
another monster has been added to the building.

In the worn but
genteel hallway, Jackie checked the names on mailboxes to make sure that her
information was correct. There it was: E. Kay. She hurried up the stairs with
only a moment’s thought to the change in herself these past few weeks. When
Ernie first gave her the assignment, she might have been fearful of confronting
a murderess, or she might have gone upstairs with the camera poised to take the
shot just as Erma Bradley opened her door, and then she would have fled. But
now she was as anxious to meet the woman as she would be to interview a famous
film star. More so, because this celebrity was hers alone. She had not even
told Ernie that she had found Erma. This was her show, not
Stellar
’s
.
Without another thought about what she would say, Jackie knocked at
the lair of the beast.

After a few
moments, the door opened partway, and a small dark-haired woman peered
nervously out at her. The woman was thin, and dressed in a simple green jumper
and skirt. She was no longer the brassy blonde of the sixties. But the eyes
were the same. The face was still Erma Bradley’s.

Jackie was
brisk. “May I come in, Miss
Kay?
You wouldn’t want me to pound on your door calling out your real name, would
you?”

The woman fell
back and let her enter. “I suppose it wouldn’t help to tell you that you’re
mistaken?” No trace remained of her Midlands accent. She spoke in quiet,
cultured tones.

“Not a hope. I
swotted for weeks to find you, dear.”

“Couldn’t you
just leave me alone?”

Jackie sat down
on the threadbare brown sofa and smiled up at her hostess. “I suppose I could
arrange it. I could, for instance,
not
tell the BBC, the tabloids, and the rest of the world what you look
like, and where you are.”

The woman looked
down at her ringless hands. “I haven’t any money,” she said.

“Oh, but you’re
worth a packet all the same, aren’t you? In all the years you’ve been locked
up, you never said anything except,
I
didn’t do it,
which is rubbish, because the world knows you did. You taped the
Doyle boy’s killing on a bloody tape recorder!”

The woman hung
her head for a moment, turning away.

“What do you
want?” she said at last, sitting in the chair by the sofa.

Jackie Duncan
touched the other woman’s arm. “
I
want you to tell me
about it.”

“No. I can’t. I’ve
forgotten.”

“No, you haven’t.
Nobody could. And that’s the book the world wants to read. Not this
mealymouthed rubbish the others have written about you. I want you to tell me
every single detail, all the way through. That’s the book I want to write.” She
took a deep breath, and forced a smile. “And in exchange, I’ll keep your
identity and whereabouts a secret, the way Ursula Bloom did when she
interviewed Crippen’s mistress in the fifties.”

Erma Bradley
shrugged. “I don’t read crime stories,” she said.

The light had
faded from the big window facing the moors. On the scarred pine table a tape
recorder was running, and in the deepening shadows, Erma Bradley’s voice rose
and fell with weary resignation, punctuated by Jackie’s eager questions.

“I don’t know,”
she said again.

“Come on. Think
about it. Have a biscuit while you think. Sean didn’t have sex with the Allen
girl, but did he make love to
you
afterwards? Do you think he got an erection while he was doing the
strangling?”

A pause. “I didn’t
look.”

“But you made
love after he killed her?”

“Yes.”

“On the same
bed?”

“But later. A
few hours later. After we had taken away the body. It was Sean’s bedroom, you
see. It’s where we always slept.”

“Did you picture
the child’s ghost watching you do it?”

“I was
twenty-two. He said— He used to get me drunk— and I—”

“Oh, come on,
Erma. There’s no bloody jury here. Just tell me if it turned you on to watch
Sean throttling kids. When he did it, were both of you naked, or just him?”

“Please, I—
Please!”

“All right,
Erma. I can have the BBC here in time for the wake-up news.”

“Just him.”

An hour later. “Do
stop sniveling, Erma. You lived through it once, didn’t you? What’s the harm in
talking about it? They can’t try you again. Now come on, dear, answer the
question.”

“Yes. The little
boy—Brian Doyle—he was quite brave, really. Kept saying he had to take care of
his mum. because she was divorced now, and asking us to let him go. He was only
eight, and quite small. He even offered to fight us if we’d untie him. When
Sean was getting the masking tape out of the cupboard, I went up to him, and I
whispered to him to let the boy go, but he . . .”

“There you go
again, Erma. Now I’ve got to shut the machine off again while you get hold of
yourself.”

She was alone
now. At least, the reporter woman was gone. Just before eleven, she had scooped
up her notes and her tape recorder, and the photos of the dead children she had
brought from the photo archives, and she’d gone away, promising to return in a
few days to “put the finishing touches on the interview.” The dates and places
and forensic details she could get from the other sources, she’d said.

The reporter had
gone, and the room was empty, but Miss Emily Kay wasn’t alone anymore. Now Erma
Bradley had got in as well.

She knew,
though, that no other journalists would come. This one, Jackie, would keep her
secret well enough, but only to ensure the exclusivity of her own book. Other
than that, Miss Emily Kay would be allowed to enjoy her freedom in the shabby
little room overlooking the moors. But it wasn’t a pleasant retreat any longer,
now that she wasn’t alone. Erma had brought the ghosts back with her.

Somehow the
events of twenty-five years ago had become more real when she told them than
when she lived them. It had been so confused back then. Sean drank a lot, and
he liked her to keep him company in that. And it happened so quickly the first
time, and then there was no turning back. But she never let herself think about
it. It was Sean’s doing, she would tell herself, and then that part of her mind
would close right down, and she would turn her attention to something else. At
the trial, she had thought about the hatred that she could almost touch,
flaring at her from nearly everyone in the courtroom. She couldn’t think then,
for if she broke down, they would win. They never put her on the stand. She
answered no questions, except to say when a microphone was thrust in her face,
I
didn’t do it.
And then later in prison there were adjustments to make, and bad
times with the other inmates to be faced. She didn’t need a lot of sentiment
dragging her down as well.
I didn’t do it
came to have a truth for her: it meant, I am no longer the somebody
who did that. I am small, and thin, and well-spoken. The ugly, ungainly monster
is gone.

But now she had
testified. Her own voice had conjured up the images of Sarah Allen calling out
for her mother, and of Brian Doyle, offering to sell his bike to ransom
himself, for his mum’s sake. The hatchet-faced blonde, who had told them to
shut up, who had held them down . . . she was here. And she was going to live
here, too, with the sounds of weeping, and the screams. And every tread on the
stair would be Sean, bringing home another little lad for a wee visit.

I didn’t do it
, she whispered. And it had come to have another meaning.
I didn’t do it.
Stop Sean Hardie from hurting
them. Go to the police. Apologize to the parents during the years in prison.
Kill myself from the shame of it.
I didn’t do it
, she whispered again.
But I should have.

Ernie Sleaford
was more deferential to her now. When he heard about the new book, and the size
of her advance, he realized that she was a player, and he had begun to treat
her with a new deference. He had even offered her a raise, in case she was
thinking of quitting. But she wasn’t going to quit. She quite enjoyed her work.
Besides, it was so amusing now to see him stand up for her when she came into
his grubby little office.

“We’ll need a
picture of you for the front page, love,” he said in his most civil tones. “Would
you mind if Denny took your picture, or is there one you’d rather use?”