Bloody Women

by Helen FitzGerald

  In the Special Visits area someone yelled ‘Marsden! Two!’

  It was his back that I could see as I walked into the small room. He was sitting opposite an empty chair. It was his hair, his shoulders, his shoes. My doctor, Joe. My man, who was supposed to look after me for the rest of my life, make me safe. He was with my mother. Before I arrived at the chair in the corner, the one that faced the camera on the wall, I collapsed in fits of tears, my trembling hands reaching, begging, at the ground before his feet.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Joe! I’m so sorry! Please, please forgive me!’

  He and Mum didn’t say anything. I sobbed alone on the floor for a few moments, then wiped my face and picked myself up.

  ‘Sorry, I’m sorry,’ I repeated more audibly from my plastic chair.

  Joe sighed and fidgeted. ‘I’m here because I care about you.’

  ‘Oh God, what a terrible situation I’ve got us in. I told you I’d hurt you!’

  ‘Catriona!’ Joe’s voice was stern. It made me stop the convulsing for a moment. ‘I forgive you.’

  ‘You what?

  ‘I forgive you.’

  Initial shock turned to hysterical howling. ‘Really? Really, Joe? You forgive me?’

  He touched my hand, nodded his head ever so slightly, and stood up.

  ‘Will you come back again?’

  He’d left.

  ‘You see? You’re going to be fine,’ Mum said, walking out after him.

  Joe had forgiven me: for sleeping with other men, for being a nutcase, for probably killing people. He was a wonderful man. His mercy reinvigorated me, made me walk briskly back to the hall. For the first time since my remand began, I didn’t cry all the time and do silly things involving my head and the mirror. Joe had given me hope, which had been rapidly extinguished since the nightmare began. As my cell door closed me in for four hours, I imagined collecting the suitcases I’d packed, buying an over-priced vodka and tonic on the Ryanair flight to Pisa and running out of baggage reclaim to his arms, his love, the rest of my life.

  I was seeing clearly again. Not counting things so much or obsessing about the book. I could still have a life, and I should fight for it. I picked up the manuscript and looked at it. It could be useful. As much as it was total bullshit, its contradictions might help me understand myself, and might help me remember, especially the chapters about how they died. I decided to comb through the manuscript for any discrepancies.

  I would begin after dinner. Before then, I would do some deep breathing and try to forget that my mother assumed my guilt even more than I did and that Anna hadn’t written that day, and that several people had been talking about me when I came back to the hall, and that Janet Edgely and the world thought I was a monster.

  I tried to think of Joe’s words. He had forgiven me, no matter what I had done. Perhaps I could forgive myself. Perhaps there was nothing to forgive myself for.

  ‘Breathe deeply, Catriona Marsden,’ I chanted. ‘Your brain needs to be clear.’

  What was that in my bag?

  ‘Breathe deeply, Catriona Marsden, serial monogamist. Your brain needs to be clear.’

  People were talking about me at dinner. I looked straight at them and held their gaze till they stopped. I hardly ate a thing. I marched back to my cell, watched it being locked, sat on the edge of my bed, and looked at the manuscript. I took another deep breath and began to read out loud, taking time to absorb each and every word. I read each page twice before moving to the next, testing myself on it at the end, going over details I could remember, checking my own notes if I couldn’t, pacing the room, adding to my notes, doubting everything, trusting nothing, no one.

  Some time in the middle of the night the truth hit me. It came in the form of one short sentence, seven innocent words to anyone else, but the joining and ordering of them made me shudder.

  Looking back, I’d been too depressed to consider the facts logically. I’d been overwhelmed with self-hatred and self-doubt, burying myself in the grief of losing my entire life because I had responded to a severe case of the jitters by fucking every man in sight. But there it was – the truth. And it wasn’t what I’d anticipated.

  Seven words.

  My knees landed on the concrete floor and I prayed I was wrong. I could hear the officers outside not talking about me, but about Benidorm. I prayed that if I opened my eyes and re-read the sentence the words would disappear.

  Praying, like promising, had never worked for me.

  It was morning. The sun was shining through the tiny grate at the top of my cell. The setting up of breakfast clanged from the hall and ricocheted about my four brick walls. The Freak’s keys got closer – three cells down, then two. She was opening the Masturbator’s door to let her out for breakfast.

  There was only one option for me now and it would never involve an expensive drink on a budget flight. Standing in front of my cell’s mirror, I held the pencil in my hand and Janet Edgely’s manuscript in the other. I could hear the Freak scolding the Masturbator.

  ‘Wash your hands, you’re filthy,’ the Freak bellowed.

  The Masturbator yelled back. There was a thump. A scrape. The footsteps of two officers rushing to the room to make the ‘three-man team’ required to shut her up. BANG. THUMP. THUMP. They’d be a while.

  I looked at one hand, and then the other, and recalled the wise suggestions of Mousey Nursey.

  Seven harmless little words hidden in those death chapters.

  Most people wouldn’t even notice them.

  14

  DOCTOR JOE ROSSI: THE ONE WHO GOT AWAY

  Joe Rossi was forty years old when he met Catriona Marsden. He had lived in Glasgow until he was ten years old, at which time his younger brother, Pietro, was born, and the family moved back to Sasso. He speaks angrily of Scotland: ‘It’s a miserable place.’ But he also states that ‘for some reason, I always imagined my wife would have pale skin, and red, red hair.’

  He excelled at school in Glasgow and in Sasso, completed a medical degree in Milan, and became a successful general practitioner, opening a surgery in the ancient walled city of Lucca. He had always been very close to his family, particularly his Nonna Giuseppina, who died one year before the murders.

  ‘She taught me many things,’ Joe says. ‘It’s because of her that I’m the man I am.’

  Each evening Joe would drive home to his hilltop village, eat with his family in their three-storey stone farmhouse, and retire to the spectacular two-bedroom barn he’d renovated next door. Relatives and friends had argued for many years about suitors for charismatic Joe, who was the best-looking man in town by a long shot, spoke three languages, enjoyed cooking, had a four-wheel drive and a big house with stone floors and exposed chestnut beams. He was a perfect catch, and many attempts were made to direct him towards an abundance of suitable girls. He was happily directed, but never tempted to marry, not till he met the red-haired, non-Catholic, non-Italian, non-Italian-speaking Catriona Marsden. The town and the family and some of the patients at the surgery were up in arms. Signora Rossi, Joe’s mother, admits to praying hard that the whole terrible affair would go away, and that Joe would come to his senses and marry Giulia Conti’s daughter who taught English in Lucca and made tremendous nettle ravioli. Joe’s father, a monosyllabic man who enjoys grappa and the sports channels, admits to agreeing with his wife whenever she raised the whole terrible affair. He nodded then, as now. Joe’s youngest brother, Pietro, recalls meeting Catriona for the first time: ‘I liked her immediately, and I don’t believe she did it.’ According to neighbours from a nearby hamlet, Pietro – an estate agent based in Bagni di Lucca – has questionable morals himself and has never liked his older brother.

  Cat and Joe spent a week together after the sex-filled meal at Diana’s flat, when she shamelessly offered herself as a palate-cleanser between courses.

  ‘We could hear her squealing from the living room,’ Joe’s cousin Diana recalls. ‘It was disgusting. Anna had to block her ears and
hum out loud.’

  During the first week of their relationship, they did day trips to St Andrews and to Oban, by which time Diana had phoned her sister Laura who had informed Joe’s family during Sunday lunch of the goings-on in Scotland. When Joe returned to Italy, a well thought-out plan had evolved which included not asking him too much too soon, then asking him a great deal. He responded by telling them to shut up because he was in love.

  Joe and Catriona phoned and texted each other daily after the holiday in Scotland. Signora Rossi accidentally came across some of her son’s texts, which she transcribed. She argues these snippets (of Catriona’s messages only) clearly demonstrate the vileness of the girl’s behaviour.

  I bought some new underwear.

  No, black.

  I have.

  I will.

  Are you?

  I am too.

  Mmm.

  After a week of ‘filth’ as Signora Rossi calls it, Catriona bought a Ryanair ticket to Pisa, and Joe instructed his family to ‘at least give the poor girl a chance’.

  They agreed, and they did. They cooked her three meals a day, took her to a chestnut festa in nearby Cascio, took her to church, let her help Joe polish Nonna Giuseppina’s gravestone way, way, up in the mountains, and remained pleasant and non-judgmental throughout.

  But Catriona was immediately on edge with them. She constantly asked them if they could speak in English, didn’t try to understand anything they said, arguing that ‘Joe doesn’t mind if I don’t speak Italian’.

  ‘She just sat there!’ Signora Rossi’s best friend Rosa says. ‘No intention of learning the language.’

  Catriona admits Tuscany was less glamorous on first impression than she’d expected. Pisa Airport was like any other airport, the motorways like any other motorways. But as they drove past the ancient walls of Lucca, then through tunnels along the River Serchio, beside the hump-backed Devil’s Bridge, through more tunnels, along the valley, and up hairpin-bend mountain roads, she realised she’d been delivered into another world . . .

  ‘. . . where the air was cleaner, where clouds hovered beneath me yet I was still warm, where the trees were greener, rooftops redder, skies bluer, where marble mountains formed the shape of the Uomo Morto, a dead man lying on his back, where high-up houses twinkled in the night like stars.’

  It was less glamorous than Catriona had expected, but it was pure magic.

  ‘They’ll like me in time,’ she said to Joe.

  ‘They already do,’ Joe lied.

  During Catriona’s first visit to Tuscany, she and Joe had coffee in the garden of his beautiful house (while his mother banged rugs out of the window of the farmhouse a few feet away), took walks along mountain tracks (one uncle chopped wood at one end, a second at the other), dined in the cobble-stoned alleyways of the old town (served by cousin Mario), visited Vagli di Sotto and his Nonna’s grave, and mooched around the shops and buildings of Lucca.

  They parted in love, with a ticket already purchased for Joe’s next visit to Edinburgh.

  At work the following day, Catriona told Anna (who told Diana) that she wanted to marry Joe. He was the one, despite the fact that the family were ‘fucking arseholes to whom control over each other was the primary goal in life’ and ‘completely bemused and threatened by an outsider’.

  Still, she wanted to be with Joe more than anything in the world. He made her laugh. He made her coffee. He made her feel looked after.

  ‘It doesn’t matter where we live. He is my home,’ she told Anna, who told Diana, who immediately rang her mother, who hitched a lift to Signora Rossi’s in a neighbour’s three-wheeled trucklet, his Ape, to relay the bit about the family being controlling fucking arseholes.

  The long-distance thing lasted two months. Each parting became harder. Nights were spent on the phone pawing at each other’s photographs, thinking up ways to be together.

  ‘You could do houses up,’ Joe suggested.

  ‘You could open a deli in Edinburgh,’ Catriona suggested, right-back-at-him.

  ‘I hate the rain,’ he admitted to her. ‘You could sell your flat, buy two village houses . . .’

  ‘You could sell Parmesan cheese on the Royal Mile.’

  ‘Help Pietro with his business. Be all mine. Move into my house. Marry me.’

  ‘I could marry you.’

  And that was that.

  Joe announced their intentions after lunch one steaming hot Sunday. The family were sipping their post roast-pork-and-sformato espressos when Joe took to his feet.

  ‘I have an announcement to make!’ he declared in English.

  You could hear his mother gulp.

  He continued in Italian. ‘I’m in love with Catriona and I’ve asked her to marry me.’

  Everyone, except Pietro, took a while to clap.

  The following day, Cat sat in a coffee shop in Lucca and phoned Anna Jones.

  ‘I’m getting married,’ she said. ‘Will you be my best woman?’

  On the other end of the phone, a jealous and disgruntled Anna Jones pretended to be pleased.

  After lunch, Cat went for a walk with Pietro to discuss the possibility of working with him in his business, Buy in Tuscany. He’d set it up several years earlier. Pietro was snowed under and in desperate need of an efficient English-speaking assistant. Her energy and her ideas excited him. She could make the houses look better, and sell them to the Brits at ‘non-Italian prices’.

  It couldn’t have seemed more perfect – a glorious setting, a wonderful man, a large house, and a perfect job.

  Several hot mosquito-filled nights were spent discussing the logistics of the wedding. In the end it was agreed that since Cat was leaving her homeland, she should have a proper goodbye and, as such, the wedding should be in Scotland.

  Cat returned home to organise the ceremony and reception and settle her affairs. She booked the registry office in Glasgow, as the beautiful Victorian mansion used to be the Italian Cultural Centre and had the right vibes for a Scots– Italian wedding. She booked Airth Castle for afterwards and chose a solidly Scottish menu. She bought a vintage wedding dress from Armstrong’s in the Grassmarket, and booked a band she used to know during her radical phase. Most of the guys now worked as accountants and did the occasional pub gig if their wives let them.

  As for her job, Cat had done ten years of A Change Is As Good, the credit crunch had bitten, and figures were down. Viewers seemed tired of the format and a local paper had recently reported that Cat could do with losing a few pounds. Colleagues also suggest she was losing her concentration and behaving oddly – on one occasion, she covered an entire bathroom in gold glitter stencils. She jumped because she was being pushed. At her leaving do, she reportedly got so drunk that she couldn’t drive back to Edinburgh. Anna had to let her stay the night at hers.

  She visited Joe in Italy once more before returning home a week before the wedding. Events took a sinister turn almost immediately. Catriona met her mother, Irene, at a café in Edinburgh. Irene, a kind-hearted woman, brought a friend, Judith, along because she wanted advice about decorating her Morocco-themed PVC conservatory.

  ‘My daughter will have the answer!’ Irene told Judith when they made the arrangement. ‘That’s why I need her to be with me. She always has the answers.’

  Not long after Catriona arrived at the café, she burst into tears.

  Her mother advised her to tie up loose ends.

  So Catriona set about soaking up as much Scottishness as she possibly could, and driving around the country to say goodbye to old friends, many of whom found her melodramatic farewells awkward and uncalled-for.

  ‘I hadn’t seen her since first year,’ an ex-flatmate named Meredith Bentley comments.

  ‘I never liked her,’ offers Jim Mann, who met her, ‘totally pished’, during a pub crawl in the Old Town in Freshers’ Week.

  When Cat visited her mother the following day she was still crying.

  ‘Your loosest ends are your exes,’ Irene said.<
br />
  So, with one week to go before the wedding, Catriona made four phone calls. The first was to Johnny Marshall, the boy with the mustard jumper.

  15

  SALTED PEANUTS: THE DEATH OF JOHNNY MARSHALL

  Johnny was not listed in the phone book. His family no longer lived at their old address in Edinburgh. He did not have his own website or blog. He had not joined the Friends Reunited site of his old high school. But he was on page twenty-two of the Johnny Marshall Google search results.

  For in formation regarding Salsa and Ballroom classes at the Plaza, contact Patricia Withington on 555 7686 or Johnny Marshall on 555 4352 (Evenings only).

  He had a telephone beside his bed, which he answered sleepily at first. ‘Yeah?’ then more animatedly, ‘No way, Cat? Is it really you? It is you!’

  There was a woman in bed with him who grumbled ‘Who’s that?’ in the background.

  A television was on somewhere, the ten o’clock news blaring.

  He had divorced the Australian wife he’d acquired two years after splitting up with Catriona. He had no contact with their two children and didn’t seem to think this was an issue. They were boys, thirteen and eleven, he told Cat. He had moved to Glasgow, working as a barman and part-time dance instructor. He didn’t have a steady girlfriend.

  ‘Oh, her?’ he answered when Catriona asked about the woman in the background. ‘She’s a student. We’ve been doing the rumba.’

  The student giggled and ducked under the cover.

  He wanted to see Cat. ‘Yes, oh, yes. The Hammer Bar at seven thirty. Ooh, got to go. Ahh . . . hang on, Cat. I’m judging a ball-room dancing competition at the Palace till eight. Make it nine.’

  He was late, and Catriona had a pang of guilt as she drank her third whisky and rang Joe. Joe seemed distant on the phone.