by Paula Daly
‘Ants in my pants,’ she says, brushing it away. ‘Can’t seem to stay in one place.’
‘Or maybe you don’t like the thought of any unexpected visitors?’
‘Something like that … Anyway, Morecambe’s looking good, Bill,’ she says, avoiding his question. ‘What the hell happened? The town used to be so ugly.’
‘They ploughed money in. Cleaned it up. It’s nice, isn’t it? Don’t tell anyone, though, will you? We’re trying to keep it a secret. We don’t want people moving here and enjoying it for themselves … What brings you back?’
‘I’m working on a case.’
‘Carrie Kamara?’
Tess shrugs as if to say she’s not at liberty to divulge, and Bill says, ‘You know she’s innocent.’
‘Aren’t they all?’
‘No, I knew Carrie. We all did. She’s not capable of doing something like that.’
‘Nobody is until they do it the first time.’
Bill laughs. He hasn’t changed. Not really. Sure, he’s greying at the temples, and he’s lost a bit of height, lost some of that young man’s vitality that she could have found attractive if they’d met under differing circumstances. But other than that, he’s the same. Still the same kind-eyed gentleman. Still the same decent human being who tried his best for her even though she wasn’t his client.
‘What is it that you wanted, Bill? You seem pretty determined to get hold of me.’
‘Ah, yes,’ he says, standing and heading towards a filing cabinet. He pulls open the second drawer and flicks through the suspension files until he comes across what he needs. He pulls an envelope from the file. ‘I promised I’d hand this to you face to face.’ He pauses, choosing his next words carefully. ‘Wanted to make doubly sure you got it … There’ve been some developments. Things have changed. It’s important you’ve been informed.’
He hands the envelope over and she puts it in her handbag without looking at it. Tess doesn’t ask ‘What developments?’ and Bill knows her well enough of old not to push.
He smiles awkwardly. ‘It’s so good to see you. I often wonder how you’re doing. Are you OK?’
‘I’m OK. You?’
‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘Life’s been good, all things considered.’
‘That’s good to hear, Bill.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Well, I should be going,’ Tess says, and she stands. There’s a moment of awkwardness when she thinks Bill might go to hug her, but he doesn’t. He holds out his hand instead.
‘You take care.’ He squeezes her palm and she tells him she will. Then they break off and she heads towards the door. She’s glad she came. She needed to. If only to stop Bill trying to track her down.
‘Tess?’ he calls out just as she’s about to descend the stairs. ‘Do you think you might read it?’
And she says, ‘Sure, Bill.’
But they both know she won’t.
Now
WITH A LARGE glass of wine in her hand, and dressed in her pyjamas, Tess stares at the whiteboard which runs almost the entire length of the exterior wall of her home office. Boxes of case files are stacked from floor to eye level and Tess can feel the muscles in the middle of her back – around the site of her bra strap – starting to complain. It seems as though every case takes some new toll on her body, and carrying the boxes up the stairs, stacking them, then restacking them every time she needs access to a different set of notes, is not the way to be kind to your body. Or maybe Tess is just getting old. Or maybe the visit to solicitor Bill Menzies’ office today has left her feeling tense and uneasy, and it’s showing up in the musculature of her back. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time her body’s taken the brunt of her emotional state.
There is very little space left on the whiteboard. This is how Tess likes to work; she likes to have the information all laid out in front of her, so she can stand back and make sense of it. The crime scene photographs of thirty-year-old Ella Muir don’t make for pleasant viewing. Neither do the ones from the post-mortem. The nature of the attack – frenzied, violent – left Ella’s neck and upper torso covered in an array of two-inch, vivid gashes. To Tess, each of these wounds looks like a tiny open mouth, or the inside of a fig.
Tess is relieved she lives alone because she can plaster the walls of her spare bedroom with evidence and photographs, but this life is not for everyone and she wonders how Avril will deal with this aspect of the job. She wonders how the ‘wonderful, brilliant, fantastic’ William will deal with Avril bringing her work home each evening, and whether he’ll have an issue if Avril decides to redecorate their spare bedroom with pictures of prisoners, bloodied corpses, CCTV stills, route maps.
Tess takes a gulp of wine and sits at her desk. Her laptop is open, the screen frozen on news footage taken on the night Ella’s body was found. She presses ‘play’ and sits back in her seat, ready to watch it all over again. She sees Ella’s street, a number of police vehicles, crime scene tape, and then a young reporter fills the screen: ‘Police say Ella Muir was found by a neighbour. The bubbly thirty-year-old is said to have died from multiple stab wounds to the neck and chest. Specially trained officers are with Ella’s family and—’
Tess closes the window. She takes another gulp of wine and clicks on a new tab. She mutes the audio, so she can concentrate. This news footage is from sixteen months later. Carrie Kamara is arriving at court and is dressed demurely. Carrie is an attractive woman. She has pretty blonde highlights running through her short, Sharon Stone-style hair, and she has a smooth, blemish-free complexion. Tess thinks this is the result of clean living, rather than from any cosmetic procedure, but she can’t be sure. Carrie is slim, but not gaunt, which Tess thinks has to be some kind of miracle, since the build-up to this trial will have been the single most terrifying thing to ever have happened to a woman like Carrie. Newsreels of most of Tess’s clients show them arriving at court looking haggard and twitchy, like addicts. But Carrie has an assured air as she mounts the steps, as if she’s fully expecting justice to be done. Tess plays the clip again, and again, and again, and she finds Carrie’s body language difficult to read. Is she assured because she’s innocent, and certain the court will find her so? Or is it because she really did murder Ella Muir, and a woman capable of such a cold-blooded crime has no trouble presenting a mask of deceit to the world?
Impossible to tell. The very nature of Tess’s work means she must start from a position of doubt. It’s very easy for a prisoner to proclaim their innocence, to write letter upon letter to the likes of Innocence UK, asking them to hear their story, to recount the errors committed at their trial. What have they got to lose? Very little. With time on their hands, prisoners will go to the greatest lengths to try to persuade those on the outside that they’ve been betrayed by the criminal justice system. That the real murderer is walking around free – ‘Free to kill again!’ – if nobody does anything about it.
Tess unmutes the audio and watches the clip once more. The newscaster is speaking over the images. ‘Carrie Kamara, accused of stabbing Miss Muir, who the court heard today was in a relationship with Mrs Kamara’s husband.’ Tess pauses the clip on a close-up of Carrie’s face.
‘Are you a killer, Carrie?’ she whispers.
The following morning, Tess and Avril arrive at Styal Women’s Prison, south of Manchester. Behind the chain-link fence are a number of red-brick buildings. These were built at the end of the nineteenth century for Styal’s original purpose: an orphanage.
The site was converted into a women’s prison in 1962 when the female prisoners from Strangeways were transferred. It has a village feel to it, or perhaps that’s making it sound nicer than it actually is, but it is quite unlike many of the category A men’s prisons Tess has been inside, in that behind the perimeter fence and the barbed wire, you can imagine civilians living here. Should there be a sudden decline in women offenders, Tess can imagine this place being bought by property developers and converted into a well-to-do gated community. Ju
st as they did with many of the psychiatric hospitals when deinstitutionalization took place in the eighties.
Tess has never been to Styal in her current capacity. As Tom rightly pointed out at the last case meeting, Innocence UK has, to date, only investigated alleged miscarriages of justice involving men. So it was in Tess’s previous life, as a probation officer, that she was required to visit Styal Prison regularly. And it was in that role that she developed her skills as a listener, a reader of people, and where she came to the understanding that the person a prisoner presents to the world is often very different to the one inside.
The place is busy with bodies when Tess and Avril walk through the doors. There are two lines, each with two prison officers in charge of validating visiting orders, as well as checking property and allocating lockers for the visitors to place their belongings into. Tess is authorized to take in the case notes, as well as the materials needed to record any statements made by Carrie, so when she and Avril reach the head of the queue, their briefcases are checked by the officers rather than placed inside the lockers. One officer is wearing a pink sash with ‘YVONNE’S HEN PARTY – AMSTERDAM’ written across it which she appears to be trying on for size; she’s unhappy with the way it’s falling across her midriff. The officers chatter amongst themselves as they work, searching Avril’s briefcase first.
‘I’ve told her,’ says one prison officer to the other, ‘I said, “I’m not sharin’ a room with Teresa again. She’s an absolute disgrace.”’
Avril appears nervous. She has appeared nervous since Tess collected her this morning and chattered non-stop in the car about nothing that Tess can recall right now. Avril tells the prison officer that she’s never been inside a prison before, but if the prison officer is at all interested in Avril’s announcement, she doesn’t show it. She chooses to ignore Avril and instead continues her conversation with her colleague, telling her that ‘Yvonne said she’s not switching the rooms round again on account of me’ before looking back at Avril and handing her a box of antacids, saying, ‘You can’t take these in with you, love.’
Their bags are returned, and they’re instructed to move along the hallway, following the signs for the visitors’ area – which is on the right. As they walk, Tess is about to ask Avril more about her previous job as a legal secretary, when out of nowhere Avril stops dead in her tracks, as if she’s received a bullet to the small of her back.
‘I’m afraid,’ declares Avril.
‘Of what?’
‘Of going in there. I tried to tell you … I’ve never done this before.’ She pauses. Takes a breath. She’s unsteady.
‘What are you afraid of?’
Avril drops her head. This admission, whatever it is, is not easy for her and it takes a moment for her to answer. Tess wonders if there is an element of PTSD going on here. Something she failed to divulge in her interview with Tom.
‘I’m scared of being attacked,’ she admits, and Tess can’t help it but she laughs. She doesn’t mean to but she laughs out loud right in Avril’s face.
‘You’re laughing at me?’ Avril says. ‘You’re laughing? This is not some joke. I am not some joke for you to poke fun at. I didn’t come here – I didn’t take this job so that someone could—’
‘Avril,’ Tess says levelly, and she looks her right in the eye. ‘I don’t know what’s going on inside your head right now, but I promise you, scared is the last emotion you are going to feel in there. Now come on. Let’s go. We’re going.’
Now
THE VISITORS’ AREA has been renovated since Tess was last here. She looks around, impressed. Real effort has been made to make this a non-threatening place for visiting children: the chairs are soft, there are prints on the walls, and the whole place has been painted in a sunny shade of yellow. On the floor, in boxes, there are toys and drawing materials; Tess even sees two trikes.
They stand next to the doors and wait. Avril is trying to appear relaxed but she shifts from one foot to the other, intermittently wiping her brow with the sleeve of her coat, and so far she has sighed twice. Tess ignores her and surveys the room, looking for Carrie. There are several young women prisoners, children on their laps, sitting opposite older women – their mothers, Tess supposes. The atmosphere is jovial, gossipy even, but to Tess, and she imagines to Avril too, the scene is just very, very sad.
They wait for five minutes and there is still no sign of Carrie.
Avril says, ‘Should I go and ask someone?’
Tess tells her they’ll hang on. ‘There must be a problem. If she’s not here by quarter past,’ she says, ‘I’ll go and check.’ But then Tess’s eyes alight on a woman shuffling towards them from the far corner of the room. She’s four dress sizes bigger than the Carrie Kamara of old, and her short, serious hair has grown out. This woman looks as though she belongs on The Jeremy Kyle Show : her skin is acned and her eyes are sunken. She is a woman beaten down by her situation and Tess lets out a quiet, emphatic ‘Fuck’ under her breath.
Gathering herself, Tess strides towards Carrie, her hand outstretched. ‘Carrie,’ she says, briskly, as they shake. ‘How very nice to meet you. I’m Tess Gilroy. Where would you be most comfortable talking?’
Carrie gestures to the far corner of the room, whence she came, and they head over there, Avril following closely behind. ‘You didn’t recognize me from my photographs, then?’ Carrie asks. Her tone is challenging but she’s half-smiling and Tess sees a flash of mischief in her eyes.
Tess can only assume Carrie knows she looks terrible. Tess does think about lying, pretending Carrie doesn’t look quite as changed as she does, but decides it would be insulting. ‘You do look a little different.’
‘I’ve given up on my appearance,’ Carrie explains. ‘It can take a month just to get deodorant in here.’
They sit.
‘This is my colleague, Avril Hughes,’ Tess says, and Carrie offers Avril a wan smile. Tess gets her case notes out. ‘So, we don’t have a ton of time, Carrie, and there’s a lot to get through, so it’s probably best if we get straight to it …’ She smiles as she organizes herself. ‘That OK with you?’ and Carrie intimates that it is. ‘Excellent … So, you understand the role of Innocence UK? That’s already been explained?’
‘You try and get my case before the Court of Appeal.’
‘That’s right,’ replies Tess, ‘but as I explained to Mia yesterday—’
At the mention of her daughter’s name, Carrie’s whole bearing changes. She sits up, and her eyes, previously sunken, kind of glassy-looking, are now alert and focused. ‘How is she?’ she asks. ‘Did she say if the baby’s turned yet? I was on the list to call her last night but the girl ahead of me overran and I didn’t get to speak to her. Is she OK? I didn’t realize you were visiting her first. Did she tell you anything about the baby?’
Tess is a little embarrassed that in the whole hour she spent with Mia the day before she didn’t once think to enquire about the health of either mother or child. ‘She seemed fine,’ she says weakly, and tries not to watch as Carrie’s face falls. ‘She said to tell you not to worry,’ she adds, avoiding Avril’s gaze. ‘Anyway, as I said, lots to get through, so …’ Tess pauses and looks at Carrie, making sure she’s got her full attention. When she’s certain Carrie’s back with her, she continues. ‘Now, I’m sure it’s already been explained to you too that if we’re to take on this case, we’ll follow the evidence wherever it leads … even if it reinforces your guilt. But I think it’s important to reiterate that point.’
‘I understand.’
‘And if I ever believe you’re lying to me, or if you ever provide me with false information, your case will be dropped immediately.’
Carrie nods.
‘There are no second chances here, Carrie. Is that clear?’
‘Crystal.’
‘And you still want to proceed?’
Carrie nods again.
‘I’d prefer to hear you say it.’
‘I would like to p
roceed.’
A baby girl starts crying at a nearby table and a young, skinny inmate – broken teeth, skin of a user – stands, cradling her daughter against her shoulder. She begins to sway her baby, walking around the room, singing to her softly. As she passes, Tess hears her words and remembers her own mother singing the same nursery rhyme, ‘Miss Polly Had a Dolly’, to Tess when she was a little girl:
He looked at the dolly and he shook his head,
And he said, ‘Miss Polly, put her straight to bed!’
Tess is momentarily taken out of her surroundings and is back on her mother’s knee. She is four years old. She is happy.
Tess leans forward. ‘OK, Carrie,’ she says, ‘tell me why a jury wrongly convicted you of Ella Muir’s murder.’
Avril pauses from taking notes and looks up. Again, she appears rattled by Tess’s straight-to-the-point talk, but Tess takes no notice. It’s Carrie she’s interested in, and if she’s rattled, she doesn’t show it. Carrie begins the process of repeating her narrative, her tone uniform, her delivery colourless, as if she’s done this a million times over.
‘The police made me fit the story they’d concocted. I was a woman scorned. I had a massive grudge, they said. It didn’t matter that there was no murder weapon, that they didn’t find blood on my clothes or in my car or in my house. It didn’t matter that I didn’t care Pete was screwing that girl.’
Tess pauses. ‘But you did care, Carrie,’ she says. ‘I read in the case notes that you went around to Ella Muir’s house just a few weeks before she died. Why did you do that if you didn’t care?’
‘Because they were embarrassing me. It’s no secret that me and Pete had not had what you’d call a traditional marriage,’ she says. ‘He saw other women, Ella Muir certainly wasn’t the first, and if I turned a blind eye to what he got up to then things tended to run smoothly. But with Ella it was obvious pretty quickly it was different. He was really taken with her, and he’d got sloppy. Friends were seeing them out together, flaunting their relationship, and even though they were aware Pete liked to play around sometimes, they weren’t used to seeing him out with someone. Like a proper couple. They started asking if me and Pete had split up. It was humiliating. And it was bad for Mia.’
