Two Women (47 page)

What Matty was saying to a young black prostitute was actually making sense and she went up in Susan’s estimation then. As long as she wasn’t trying to rip anyone off Susan was all for free enterprise, and the prison system and that seemed to go hand in hand. It was amazing what some people would do for a filter cigarette or a Mars bar.

Suddenly Lionel Richie was blaring out of the radio as one of the girls, hearing a favourite song, turned it up full volume. She was dancing around, singing, ‘Hello, Is it me you’re looking for?’ when the PO turned it down and one of the more rampant lesbians shouted out, ‘No, it fucking ain’t, you ugly whore!’

Everyone laughed and the girl carried on singing to herself.

Susan, still grinning, listened to Matty giving advice.

‘You’re in for affray and threatening behaviour, right?’

The girl nodded. ‘And GBH.’

‘Well, then, tell your brief to do a deal. Say you’ll hold your hand up to the GBH but to drop the other charges and you’ll plead guilty with mitigating circumstances. You was on drugs and not in complete control. Ergo you will have the twelve steps on the unit and be out in no time. I mean, you’re up for a wedge on your previous anyway. This way you can get a reduced as well as a cushy time on the wrap programme.’

The girl smiled, full of hope now.

‘Thanks, Matty. I’ll do that.’

Susan watched her skip away happily. She knew that for many the worst part of prison was finding out what was going to happen to them so they could get their head around it. When they knew the score they could cope.

Susan was enjoying being on the remand wing while her so-called appeal was going on, though she had only agreed to it in the first place so as to get nearer the kids for a while. What she really wanted was to be placed nearer London if possible. It was hard only seeing them now and again, when the social services could find time to bring them up. It was such a journey for the kids as well, Durham not being the most accessible prison in the country. Nor the most comfortable either.

What she really wanted was Cookham Wood or somewhere with a secure unit and not too much travelling. Somewhere the kids could run about a bit, have a bit of a laugh.

She watched all afternoon as women came to Matty and she gave them advice. Susan listened and found most of it pretty sound. Then a young girl with long blonde hair and wide-set eyes approached and Rhianna stepped in front of her.

The girl held up two cigarettes. Matty shook her head and pulled a face.

‘Fuck off, bitch, we ain’t got nothing for you here.’

Rhianna’s voice was hard. One of the women round the table stood up menacingly and the POs moved nearer, fearing a tear up as a fight was called in prison.

‘Write to your boyfriend and ask his advice, you little bitch. He helped you kill the kid, didn’t he?’

The girl dropped her head on to her chest.

‘She still writes to him. He stabbed her little boy, burned him and tortured him, but you still write him love letters, don’t you, darlin’?’

The women were getting annoyed, reminded of their own children in the care of relatives or the state. Children who were loved and wanted though their mothers were banged up in prison. In fact a lot of the time women were there because of their kids. Prostitutes, shoplifters, fraudsters were often trying the only way they knew how to feed and clothe their kids, as everyone expected them to. They had men who did nothing other than impregnate them and then walk away, on to the next woman and the next kid, and the next.

When someone like Caroline Hart came along they hated her with a vengeance because she had let someone destroy what was to others the most precious thing in their lives. They might kick each other’s heads in, fight and argue, but none of them would harm their kids. It was the unwritten law.

The PO escorted the girl from the rec room. They were trying to defuse the situation before it got out of hand. In fact she should be in isolation but it wasn’t happening for some reason and so they had to be extra-vigilant in case one of the women decided to take the law into her own hands. Something that frequently happened in prison.

The tension left the room with Caroline and Matty started to pack up her stuff. Rhianna would give her the ‘split’ later in the day, and Matty, who didn’t smoke anything except the occasional joint, would sell it on to the other women. Rhianna was also taking bets, and running a protection racket.

Susan watched it all. She knew Rhianna was watching her as hard as she was watching Rhianna; the other woman was probably worried Susan was going to try and take over from her. But she wasn’t. She would have to talk to her about that at some point and put the record straight.

Until then she had to look hard, well able to take care of herself, and like she wasn’t in the least bit bothered that a big black violent lunatic wanted to fight her at some point in the near future.

As she rolled another cigarette Susan wondered what her kids were up to and longed to see their little faces, bright with glee and happy because they were near her. She shook off the depressing thought that she could only see them at someone else’s whim and made herself accept the fact once more.

One day, she promised herself, all this would be over. Really over. She would have done her bit, paid the price for being stupid enough to let Barry Dalston into her life.

 

Wendy poured coffee for herself and Roselle from the percolator. Roselle watched her, touched by the girl’s obvious happiness at going to see her mother. In the last two years she had changed so much.

On the night Roselle had picked her up after the murder, the girl had been in a terrible state, shaking and stuttering with fear. Like a young gazelle caught in the hunter’s trap. Roselle had introduced herself as a friend of her mother’s and explained that Susan had asked her to take Wendy for a while until everything settled.

What was so shocking to Roselle, and so sad, was the fact that she knew without being told exactly why Susan had killed her husband. It was obvious what had happened to the girl. Roselle wondered then how she had ever seen anything in Barry. How she could have deluded herself that with her he was okay. Wendy was his own flesh and blood and he had taken her as if she was a nothing, lower than a paid whore. Roselle saw it in the way the girl walked, in the bruises all over her body and in the blood she was losing for a week after the event.

Hatred for Barry had entered her heart that night. She only wished she could have seen what Susan had done to him, been there with another hammer so she could have struck a few blows for righteousness herself.

She also understood Susan’s reluctance to let on what had happened in her home that night and throughout her married life. She was protecting her daughter and herself. Why should people know that a man diagnosed with a venereal disease only a short while previously had taken his young daughter and raped her? The girl would have to live with everyone knowing that for the rest of her life. She did not deserve that, she was the innocent in it all.

Part of Roselle also felt responsible for what happened. If only she had not dumped him like she had . . . he must have suffered. But how could he bring himself to make his own child suffer so terribly?

She took her coffee from the girl and they smiled at one another. They had never discussed exactly what had happened and Roselle would never force things. Her home had become a haven for the girl from everyone who knew what her mother had done. Who looked at her as the daughter of a woman who had slaughtered her husband in cold blood, without a thought for the four children she was leaving both fatherless and motherless. The woman made out in the tabloids to be a ruthless sort who happily lived off her husband’s immoral earnings and embraced his way of life.

Barry had somehow been painted as a loveable cockney rogue who had become dependent on drink and drugs and therefore was not wholly responsible for his own actions.

As usual excuses were being made for him because he was a man. Men could be violent, it was in their nature, why wars came about. But not women. When a woman was violent it was deemed morally wrong. It was Susan who was the bad person because all she ever said at her trial was that she would kill him again if she had the chance.

The papers had jumped on that statement. Deprived of a Myra Hindley figure for so long, they’d turned her into a monster.

It was ludicrously unfair and something Roselle did not fully understand. Why didn’t Susan let on what her life had really been like? That she wasn’t some kind of gangster’s moll who, after a night in the pub where her sister had had a fight with another woman and Susan herself had been drunk, had come home and decided to kill her husband.

By rights she should be out now and looking after her kids, the only thing in life she had ever wanted to do.

Wendy cut them both a small slice of cherry cake. Putting one carefully on a plate, she passed it to Roselle with a small linen napkin. Roselle took it, trying to hide her smile. She realised poor Wendy thought she was quite genteel. If only she knew!

‘Are you going in to see Mum now she’s nearer home?’ the girl asked.

Roselle shook her head.

‘I can’t go. I can’t bear her to be in there, to be honest.’

Wendy nodded in understanding and her face was so painfully beautiful, and so like her mother’s, that Roselle felt an overwhelming urge to cry.

Wendy had embraced the new eighties fashions whole-heartedly and Roselle had indulged her. Although she helped out financially with the other children, she didn’t see that much of them. Only now and again when she did a check on Sue’s behalf to see how they were
really
faring.

If people wondered at the close friendship between a night-club owner and a murderess, no one questioned it. Roselle knew her car, clothes and carefully modulated voice gave her all the creds she needed. She also kept in close contact with Doreen, and between them they did what they could.

Though Susan had once asked her to take on all her kids Roselle had refused, and Susan being Susan had understood and never asked her again. Roselle knew she was pleased Wendy had her to turn to when she needed her.

Wendy was Susan’s biggest worry and privately Roselle knew why that was. But the girl seemed to have got over her trauma, one most people assumed was over her mother’s violence. It had been a silent conspiracy. Everyone in the know had kept stumm and let nature and the courts take their course.

‘I’m really looking forward to seeing her, though, Roselle. I do miss her. Sometimes of a night I think about the little things she used to do for me and the others. The times she went without food so we could eat. The times she sat up with us when we were ill. Made us laugh when we were down. I remember once, it was the summer holidays and she was skint as usual so we all had a picnic in the back garden. It was hilarious, all the neighbours thought we was mad. Like we were the Royal family or something. We had Marmite sandwiches and Mr Kipling cakes. It was a scream.’

Wendy smiled, her eyes misty as she remembered that day. The heat, the flies, the kids playing cricket in the alley.

‘Then me dad came home and spoiled it all as usual.’ She shook her head, remembering.

‘He didn’t half give her a hiding that day. We all ran into Doreen’s when it started like we always did. But we could hear him shouting at her, and her hitting the furniture as he cracked her one.’

She was quiet again, full of her own thoughts.

‘I hope she listens to me on Friday. If she doesn’t, I don’t know what we’ll do.’

Roselle shrugged.

‘Your mother has her own reasons for everything, and they’re good ones. Don’t you ever forget that.’

Wendy smiled but her face was so sad behind the smile that Roselle felt an urge to take her into her arms.

‘I’ll never forget that. I could never forget what me mum’s done for me. Never. And one day I’ll pay her back.’

Roselle sipped her coffee and nodded.

‘Of course you will, darlin’. Of course you will.’

 

Susan was filling her mug with hot water on the bottom landing when she was approached by Rhianna. She had been expecting it since her arrival and was amazed that it had taken so long.

Three days, in fact, before Rhianna asked her just what the score was.

Now it was finally happening she felt sick with nervousness. For all Susan’s reputation, she wasn’t a hard case. She just pretended she was to save herself being used as a gofer.

From her first days in prison she had realised that what had happened to Barry frightened people. They did not want the same thing happening to them, so they afforded her respect. Gave her the kudos they thought she expected. All she really wanted was to get her head down and do her time in peace.

Hopefully once she’d explained this to the other woman she’d be left alone.

Rhianna had her hair in plaits, hundreds of them, tiny tight curly plaits that made her look younger and softer than she actually was. She had also filled a mug with scalding water and Susan watched her warily.

‘So, what’s the score, Dalston? What is it you want?’

Susan looked her in the eye, hoping her own rapidly beating heart and shaking hands would not betray how scared she really was.

She shrugged nonchalantly.

‘All I want is to wait for me appeal in peace. I don’t want anything you’ve got or that you’ve already worked for. I have no intention of taking over any rackets or causing you any difficulties whatsoever. But I won’t take any shit either. I’ll walk side by side with you, but I will not be put down or used by you or anyone. In short, I just want to do me time. Okay?’

Rhianna, who had been half expecting a fight of some kind, also relaxed. Susan’s arms looked very meaty and big and more than capable of giving someone a good crack. Just thinking about what she had done made the other woman fearful.