The Dead Ex

by Jane Corry

  ‘What do you see in me?’ I’d ask, more often than any self-respecting girlfriend would.

  He’d trace the outline of my breast and nibble my ear, making me squirm with pleasure, before answering. ‘You’re different, Vicki. You’re the strongest person I know. You’ve done things that no one else I’ve met has ever done. You don’t pretend to be someone you aren’t or attempt to flatter me like the others. You’re just … you.’

  It was as though I was living in another universe – one that was as far from prison as I could imagine. Sometimes I felt guilty. Sometimes it was relief.

  Then came a weekend trip and a ‘spontaneous’ visit to an antique shop where David slipped an emerald ring on my finger. I hadn’t needed to think twice before saying yes.

  ‘Are congratulations in order?’ asked the head of the prison trustees when he spotted it a few days later.

  I nodded, both embarrassed and flattered.

  ‘I hope this won’t mean you’re going to turn down our offer,’ continued the trustee head.

  My mouth went dry. Did he mean …

  ‘You’ve achieved a lot here with your mentoring schemes for the newly released offenders and the awards for the mother-and-baby unit. The way you handled the drug scam was most impressive. So we thought you might like to try your hand at running your own show. You’re aware that the governor is stepping down for health reasons. We’d like to put you forward as acting governor. With a view to making it permanent.’

  David cracked open a bottle of champagne when I broke the news during my next visit down. ‘It’s an amazing promotion. My future wife. Number One Guv!’

  Female governors are few and far between. So my promotion thrust me into the public eye. The features editor of the Daily Telegraph rang to ask if she could interview me. This resulted in a whole page on the ‘attractive woman’ in charge of a high-security HMP who had just got engaged to a handsome property developer. The journalist enthused about my ‘radical ideas for prison reform’ and described how the ‘happy couple’ had also just bought a house in Kingston, close to the river, for ‘chill-out time’.

  ‘You’ve given our David some respectability,’ said a man at one of his many ‘business dinners’ that I now attended.

  ‘What do you think he meant by that?’ I asked later in bed.

  ‘He’s jealous.’ My fiancé drew me to him. ‘That’s all.’

  The old me might have probed further. But a new one had taken my place.

  40

  Helen

  9 January 2018

  ‘Eight o’clock,’ David had said. ‘Don’t be late.’ I’m not. In fact, I’m five minutes early. I press the DG button on the security pad and wait.

  Nothing.

  Is he in? I hope that decoy present did the job. It was only a cheap copy of a designer pen, but it looked pretty good.

  I am carrying something bigger now. A framed photograph of his office taken from a rather unusual angle which involved some gymnastics on my part, leaning out through my own office window. I am rather proud of it.

  But if he doesn’t bloody open the door, I can’t give it to him.

  I try again. Still nothing. I am nervous now. Freezing, too. I should have worn something warmer than a short skirt on a cold winter night like this. But I know he likes my legs. And I need to keep him happy.

  It’s dead on 8 p.m. now. Where the hell is he? I ring the bell once more. ‘Hello?’ says the voice on the intercom. At last!

  ‘It’s me. Helen.’

  ‘Come on up.’

  He’s waiting for me as the lift door opens. He kisses me long and hard.

  ‘I’ve been ringing the bell for ages,’ I say, finally breaking away.

  ‘Really?’ He checks his watch. ‘But I thought we said eight.’

  ‘I was early.’

  He gives me a sideways look. ‘That can be as bad as being late. My dad would lock us in the cellar if we weren’t exactly on time.’

  So that explains his fear of being cooped up in small spaces. I’m sure that David has kept me waiting deliberately, but it won’t serve my purpose if I accuse him and get even more on his wrong side. So instead I follow him in. The lighting is low.

  ‘Sit down. Please. Champagne?’

  I take a small sip. It tastes sharper than last time.

  ‘I could get used to this,’ I joke, trying to introduce some levity into the air.

  ‘I expect you could.’

  There is no sign of food. My stomach feels empty.

  He gives me another hard look. ‘What are you doing next weekend, Helen?’

  ‘Seeing friends,’ I say casually. ‘What about you?’

  ‘Working.’

  I wait for him to suggest a date, but there’s silence.

  ‘That’s some television,’ I say, eyeing the huge screen on the wall. It’s one of those cool designs with a static screen picture, presumably to make it a feature in its own right before it’s switched on. I’ve seen them advertised in glossy magazines. This one shows a beach with a long line of palm trees and parasols.

  He seems amused. ‘You like it?’

  ‘Course I do.’

  ‘I love hot places,’ he says, as though talking to himself. ‘Especially when they’re remote and no one can get to you.’

  It’s all right for some. I’m still eyeing the telly. ‘Shall we watch a film?’

  ‘Like a couple, you mean?’

  ‘That would be nice.’

  ‘But we’re not an item, are we? Come on, Helen. I know you’re only here for one thing.’

  My throat goes dry in terror. Somehow he’s sussed me out.

  Then he drapes an arm along the back of the sofa behind me and kisses me so hard that it hurts.

  ‘Hey,’ I say, trying to push him away. But he doesn’t apologize. Instead, he moves away and is now studying me closely.

  ‘You weren’t really in my office to hide a birthday present for me, were you?’

  ‘Yes!’ Fear makes me sound indignantly righteous. ‘OK. I know that pen was crap. But it was all I could afford. That’s why I’ve made you something else. It’s not great but …’

  I hold out the package. ‘Sorry – I didn’t have any wrapping paper.’

  He pulls the photograph from the supermarket carrier bag and examines it. ‘You have a certain knack for capturing the ordinary things in life from an unusual angle.’

  The next bit happens so fast that, at first, I barely realize what’s going on. One minute we’re looking at my picture and the next I find myself being yanked up and pushed against a wall, face first. My hands automatically go up against the cold surface, palms flat, like one of those films where the heroine is about to be shot and knows it. Except that there is a hot body behind me. David’s. Pulling down my knickers and pressing me into the wall even harder.

  ‘You’re hurting me,’ I gasp but he puts a hand over my mouth. Presumably it’s to stop me making any noise in case someone hears us, but for a few minutes (though it feels far longer) I am genuinely scared. His urgent movements and the animal-like grunts are so very different from the other, gentle side of David that I’ve seen in the last few weeks. This one is out of control. Dangerous. To my shame, I find myself coming harder than I’ve ever done before.

  Then it’s over. Just as abruptly as it had begun.

  I sink to the floor, trying to gather myself. When I look up, he is gone.

  41

  Vicki

  26 June 2018

  I’m on the cleaning work party today. This can mean anything from scrubbing floors to wiping excrement off bathroom walls like I’m doing now. I wish I could wipe away my memories too. It’s five months since the night David went missing. I remember the last words he spoke to me all too well. Of course, I shouldn’t have done it. But it was too hard not to.

  I rub harder now on a dried brown lump to try and block out the thought. The action makes a hole in the rubber gloves. They’re the cheap, thin variety. I could lodge
a complaint but I’m not sure it will do any good. They all hate me here.

  Indeed, the staff take pleasure in belittling me at every opportunity. ‘Don’t fancy the food then?’ asked one last week when she saw me picking through ‘vegetarian pasta’, which tasted of cardboard with tomato ketchup on top. ‘Not like the governor’s posh dining room, then.’

  ‘Actually,’ I retorted, ‘I used to eat in the staff café, like everyone else.’

  ‘How very democratic of you.’

  The other women on my wing regard me with a mixture of disdain and interest. ‘Heard you killed your ex-husband,’ says my new padmate.

  ‘Actually –’ I start to say.

  But she continues before I can make a denial. ‘Reckon they’ll make an example of you because you used to be a prison guv?’

  I’ve wondered that myself. And now my biggest fear has come to pass. I’ve been told to report at the MBU with my cleaning trolley. Please no. The thought of facing all those poor mothers on countdown to losing their babies is too upsetting. ‘Couldn’t I go somewhere else?’ I ask.

  The prison officer fixes me with a glare. ‘What do you think this is? Multiple choice at the bleeding Ritz? You’ll go where I say.’

  My heart thuds as I press the security button next to the MBU sign. One of the officers lets me in and then checks my trolley. A previous cleaner had smuggled in drugs that way. ‘You can start in the nursery,’ I am told.

  I walk past the huge, hand-painted murals on the walls depicting farmyard animals and a smiley sun. There’s a sign to say that this is the work of inmates. In my old life, I sometimes attended the Koestler Awards, a national competition for prison art and writing.

  A little voice now comes floating out of the room on the right. ‘Mummy!’ it sings. My stomach feels as if it is plummeting out through my body and into the ground.

  Then there’s a furious screech. ‘Mine! Mine!’

  I push my trolley in. Before me are two women arguing over a push-along toy, each fiercely clutching a child as if brandishing a shield. ‘My son had that first,’ snarls one.

  ‘Then it’s about time he bloody learned to share,’ hisses the other.

  I want to intervene and suggest that they take turns, as I might have done when I was on the other side of the fence. Instead, I stand stock still. Transported back to the day that Zelda Darling came back into my life …

  ‘Congratulations on your engagement, by the way,’ Patrick said as we walked towards the mother-and-baby unit together that day in 2012.

  I’d felt guilty about asking him back to work for me in the new prison, but told myself that those feelings were long dead. And it was good to have him around.

  Nevertheless I experienced a small twinge when he mentioned the engagement. ‘I presume you’ve learned this from the staff.’

  His voice softened. ‘I don’t gossip, Vicki. You should know that. I’m just glad you’re happy. We go back a long way.’

  Something lurched in my chest. I had to put that behind me, I told myself fiercely. Concentrate on the job. So I began talking about the changes I had in mind for the MBU. As long as we stuck to work, it was as if nothing had changed between us.

  Much as I loved David, he didn’t really understand my job – mind you, I didn’t understand his. But Patrick’s world centred around prison life and, just as importantly, he loved it. He ‘got’ the intensity and the excitement and the terror and the responsibilities – and danger – which came with the power. The other month, a woman had threatened to throw boiling water over another during kitchen duties. I’d been on the wing at the time and had managed to talk her out of it.

  Not long after that, I’d caught a prison officer taunting a woman because she hadn’t had any post since she’d arrived. ‘Kids forgotten you, have they? Not surprised after what you did.’

  It wasn’t the first time this member of staff had been seen to bully or reprimand prisoners over their crimes. I suspended him immediately. Thank goodness for the many prison officers here who did fantastic jobs; people like my old friends Jackie and Frances, who recently saved an inmate by cutting the cord around her neck with a ligature knife. And then there was Patrick.

  Patrick understood, whereas my fiancé’s initial admiration of my job frequently turned to irritation when my shift work interfered with our social life. ‘Can’t you just cancel it?’ demanded David when I explained I couldn’t meet his daughter Nicole on a particular Tuesday because of an appointment with the board. He wasn’t pleased when I replied that no, I couldn’t.

  When I was finally introduced to her, I was faced with a sulky little thing who was rudely ungrateful for the Mini which her father had given her for her eighteenth birthday. ‘I wanted silver,’ she’d pouted. ‘Not black.’

  ‘That’s not what you told me,’ he’d said, almost as if he was amused.

  ‘I changed my mind.’

  At no point during the dinner did Nicole look at me.

  ‘Only jealous,’ David said simply as if this was perfectly normal. ‘It’s a father/daughter thing. She’s never liked any of my girlfriends.’

  Nor, it seemed, did David’s PA, Tanya, who was distinctly frosty every time I rang. Maybe they wondered, as did the rest of the world, what he saw in me: a red-headed prison governor without the dress style displayed by David’s previous girlfriends. I still thought about the chic cream linen dress I’d found at the back of his wardrobe when I’d moved into the London apartment. Apparently it had been ‘left behind’.

  Patrick and I were on the way to see a new ‘tricky’ inmate. I remembered her from 2008 in a previous posting. She was the woman who had been fighting with Sam Taylor that day – someone I still can’t get out of my head. Like poor Sam, she’d been separated from her child a few months later and had blamed me for it, even though it was the rules. I’d tried to help her with extra counselling, but the woman had taken out her grief by lashing out at whoever was nearest, accusing me of ‘picking on her’. This wasn’t true although I did have to send her to solitary for hitting another woman. I felt bad, but you had to be fair in this job.

  Now she was back – and as angry as ever. To make it worse, she’d recently managed to get into the mother-and-baby unit by escaping from her work party and pretending to be one of the cleaners. ‘I only want to cuddle the babies,’ she’d told the officers who found her there. But when they’d tried to make her leave, she’d bitten one of them.

  She was punished by having visiting privileges removed and a spell in solitary.

  ‘Imagine never seeing your child again,’ I found myself saying to him on our way to see her. Then I stopped, appalled by my blunder.

  ‘It’s all right.’ He bit his lip. ‘I’m coming to terms with it; more than when we last worked together. Time is a great healer. You never forget, but you learn to live with it.’

  We were approaching the security gate now to A wing. All personal chit-chat had to stop. We signed in. The officer looked serious. ‘You’ll need someone with you. Been sounding off all day, she has.’

  ‘I’m sure we can manage,’ I said briskly. What sort of message would it send if a prison governor needed hand-holding?

  Other women lined the corridors as Patrick and I made our way to the cell. Some called out to me. ‘Guv? I need to talk to you. My kid’s foster parents want to adopt him even though me mum says she’ll have him. Can you help me?’

  ‘Guv? They won’t let my other kids visit cos they say I’m a risk. At this rate, they won’t bloody recognize me when I get out.’

  ‘Guv …’

  We knocked on the cell door, more out of courtesy than anything else. Then I unlocked it from the outside. Zelda was sitting on the narrow bed, her long hair greased and matted. She had scratches all down her arms, which I suspected were from her own fingernails.

  ‘You!’ she roared, leaping up. ‘You took away my daughter.’

  ‘That’s enough,’ Patrick started, but I put my hand up in a let me handle this
gesture.

  ‘I didn’t do it personally,’ I said firmly. ‘You know that. We went through it before at the time. Children over the age of eighteen months can’t be with their mothers in prison. They have to be fostered or adopted or brought up by a member of the family. I understand your distress. I really do.’

  ‘Do you have kids?’ Her eyes were glaring like a wild animal’s.

  ‘No, but …’

  ‘Then you don’t know what it’s like to lose one. To not feel that soft cheek against yours or a little pair of arms around you. I know I did wrong but why do the kids have to be punished too? What kind of law separates a mother from a child? You say it’s not your fault but you’re the one with power. Do something about it.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I can’t. It’s the law.’

  ‘Then make someone change it.’

  Her eyes were red. Raw. Angry. I couldn’t even look at Patrick, who had remained silent. Then I remembered what he’d once told me. Sometimes you just have to listen. I felt a wave of grief as I thought of poor Samantha Taylor. ‘Can’t you even say anything to me? Stuck-up bitch.’ Then suddenly Zelda lunged towards me.

  Thanks to my training, I was faster. I caught her hand before it had a chance to hit me, placing it in the restraining position.

  ‘Officers,’ yelled Patrick.

  It was all over in seconds.

  ‘Are you all right?’ my friend and colleague asked me, briefly touching my shoulder in concern as we walked away.

  I nodded, quaking inside. But if I’d known what the repercussions were going to be, I’d have run. As far as possible.

  42

  Helen

  31 January 2018

  I go into the office early before anyone else, knowing that David often did the same. This isn’t a conversation I want anyone else to overhear.