by Paula Daly
‘So you went around there and – what? You told Ella to stay away?’
‘I asked her to be more discreet. I told her Pete could be a bit of a balloon sometimes and would she mind toning it down for Mia’s sake. We had a cordial conversation.’
‘It says here that you knew her?’
‘In passing.’
‘As in how exactly?’
‘She was married to one of Pete’s friends – before they divorced, that is. So I’d see her at the odd get-together, parties, that kind of thing.’
‘And when you went around to her house to talk to her you never stepped inside?’ At this Carrie sighs and shakes her head sadly. ‘You’re quite sure you never stepped inside?’ repeats Tess. ‘Because, I’ll be honest with you, the presence of your blood inside that house is a real stumbling block for me.’
‘I didn’t get past the front step. I wasn’t with her longer than two or three minutes at the most.’
Tess considers this. Carrie has stuck to this story right from the start. Tess has been over the police interviews, the criminal solicitor’s notes, and every time Carrie was asked, she said the same thing: she did not go inside Ella Muir’s house. This interests Tess for two reasons. Firstly, if she didn’t go in, how did the blood get there? Sure, Tess can debate lab cross-contamination, shoddy forensic work – either in the collection of the sample or the storage of it, she can even discuss whether the blood was somehow planted at the scene intentionally, but each of these ideas is unlikely. When Tess looks at the facts coldly, she comes to the same assumption as the jurors: Carrie Kamara was inside that house. That’s how her blood got there. Which begs the question, and the second thing Tess can’t get her head around: why didn’t Carrie just admit she was in there?
Carrie has never hidden the fact that she went there to talk to Ella. When her blood was found inside, why not simply say, ‘Yes, I went in.’ Why not say that she spoke with Ella, went inside, and then she left? She could have had a nosebleed, a nail bitten down to the quick that happened to ooze? ‘Why, yes, that’s certainly possible,’ she could have said.
But Carrie didn’t say that. She stuck to her story and refused point-blank to admit she’d ever entered the property at all.
‘OK,’ Tess says. She was hoping for something new here, a clarification of a point, something missed from trial records, but it’s clear Carrie has nothing to add and so, disappointed, Tess decides to move on. ‘OK, what I need to know now, Carrie, is: why did you stay with Pete? This is the part that doesn’t make sense to me. Why stay in a marriage like that? Why not throw him out if he was screwing around?’
‘I did,’ she replies. ‘I did throw him out once.’
‘But he came back …’
‘He came back a few months later,’ Carrie says. ‘Pete began seeing someone else, and I made him leave. And we were OK without him, or at least I thought we were OK. I was certainly OK – I was relieved. But Mia,’ and this is when she sighs, saddened by the memory, ‘Mia has always felt things more deeply than other people, certainly more deeply than girls her own age anyway. She didn’t always cope well with just the day-to-day stuff of being a teenager before this, and so when this new arrangement happened, it began to make her unwell. Her emotional state deteriorated, she didn’t want to go to school, I couldn’t get her out of her bedroom, couldn’t get her to engage, and then she stopped eating. It seemed to come out of nowhere but her weight began to plummet – fast – and it was such an awful time, so stressful and so fraught, that I was scared every single minute. I thought we might actually lose her at one point if it went on. We saw a number of different professionals and though none seemed to be able to actually help Mia with what she was going through, they all agreed on the same thing: the trigger for this deterioration in her health was Pete’s departure. So he came back.’
‘Simple as that?’
‘None of this was simple. But he moved back in and we forged a relationship, an arrangement is probably a more accurate description, and we agreed to try our best and see how it went … for Mia’s sake.’
‘And how did it go?’
‘It went fine. We made it work. Pete was discreet in his liaisons, we got along as a family very well, all things considered, and he agreed to stay in the family home until Mia was nineteen.’
‘So all was OK in the world until Ella, then?’
‘Until Ella.’
‘Why didn’t this come out at the trial?’ Tess asks.
‘Because Pete refused to acknowledge that he had ever agreed to stay with us until Mia was nineteen. He said it was fabricated nonsense, and my lawyer didn’t pursue it and so …’ She lets the words hang.
Is she lying? Tess wonders.
Hard to say for sure. Tess will need to speak to Pete Kamara to find out his side of things, see what he’s got to say on the matter, but right now her gut tells her that Carrie Kamara’s claims are genuine.
Tess makes a couple of short notes on this but when she looks up Carrie is staring at her intently. Out of nowhere, it seems, Carrie appears quietly stricken. And Tess wonders if she’s missed a beat. Has a section of time vanished without her being aware?
‘Is there something else, Carrie?’ she asks, and Carrie tells her yes, yes there is.
‘Mia is alone,’ she says urgently.
And Tess nods.
‘Mia’s having this baby and she’s completely alone.’
Carrie’s words are rushed and desperate and Tess is not quite sure what to make of this rapid change of state.
‘Mia has no one at all … and she thinks the child will make things better. She thinks her anger and her grief at my being wrongly accused will get better when the baby arrives. But it won’t. She won’t cope. She has no idea of what’s ahead of her and how hard it’s going to be and I’m scared. I’m scared her anxiety will overcome her and there’s nothing I can do to stop it. I’m scared no one will see how much she’s struggling. She’ll tell them she’s OK. She’ll hide it. She’ll try to hide it until it’s too late.’ Carrie drops her head. Her hands are laced together in her lap. Her knuckles are white. ‘You have to help me,’ she says. ‘You have to try to get me out of here.’
Heading away from the prison, Tess tries to organize her thoughts. She is expected to present her findings to the Innocence UK panel meeting the following morning and she’s still not sure what she’s going to say. Usually, even at this early stage, she’s leaning towards either guilt or innocence; usually it’s easy to make a judgement call, easy to determine whether she will advise the panel if they should pursue or abandon a case.
But this? This is tricky. Carrie is not Tess’s usual type of customer. She’s more intelligent for one thing. More articulate too. But she does seem genuine. Her recollection of events and the love she feels for her daughter certainly seem genuine too. And yet, Tess reflects, Carrie can love her daughter and still be a murderer.
Tess thinks about Mia. So far, there has been no mention of a father, and Tess wonders why Mia is alone with her unborn child. Tess wonders what happened there. Did he not stick around? Did he flee when she was pregnant? Could he have fled when he discovered Mia’s mother is serving life for murder? Or is it something else entirely?
Is it possible that Mia became pregnant on purpose, neglecting to tell whoever was responsible, keeping the entire thing to herself?
Tess is very aware this is not an uncommon occurrence among girls with fractured home lives. Girls wanting to create their own perfect family, a little unit, when their own families have turned out to be a bit of a shit-show, will often have babies young. These girls make the mistake of thinking that their attempts at motherhood will make everything that’s wrong in their lives suddenly right. They have no idea of the emotional cost they will pay for having children when they are still really children themselves. They have no idea of the effect it will have on them for the rest of their—
Avril interrupts Tess’s thoughts from the passenger seat. ‘Carrie didn’t
look too good in there, did she?’ she says.
‘How so?’
‘Well, to start with she looked a lot older than I was expecting.’
Tess agrees that prison life is not exactly doing much for Carrie’s complexion.
‘D’you think they hurt her?’ Avril asks.
Tess frowns. ‘Hurt her? Who?’
‘The other women.’
And Tess shakes her head. ‘They hurt themselves, Avril,’ she replies. ‘Not each other.’
‘Why?’
‘Because’, Tess says wearily, ‘nearly every woman in there is there on account of some idiot man. And they’ll usually end up losing their kids on account of him too. That makes them feel the kind of anguish they don’t know what to do with, anguish they tend to take out on themselves. They self-harm.’
Avril goes quiet, digesting this, just as Tess takes a left and loops around the northern perimeter of Manchester Airport. On Ringway Road, a plane thunders over the top of the car, coming in to land. Avril turns her head to watch as it hits the tarmac, the sound of the reverse thrust deafening them. At the T-junction they take a right and it’s when they’ve travelled a few hundred metres further that Avril declares: ‘Anyway, Carrie is definitely innocent.’
‘You think?’
Tess is tempted, of course, to shut Avril down. She’s tempted to list the many prisoners whom Tess believed in totally and utterly because of their sob stories, their devotion to their families, their broken spirits, only to discover after a painstaking and lengthy investigation that they were lying. Just as they had been all along.
But it’s the faith in the innate goodness of human beings, the faith that the British justice system sometimes gets it spectacularly wrong, that gave Tess staying power in the early days. It gave her the necessary energy to pursue justice when it seemed as though everyone else had given up. And Avril will need this faith if she’s to make a go of the job. So Tess says nothing. She lets Avril believe that it can be that simple. That Carrie Kamara is innocent because she appears innocent. And she drives on to the slip road, ready to join the thick traffic on the M56.
Now
CARRIE KAMARA SITS on her bed and looks at the wall. Her cellmate is in the shower. Carrie has been assessed, reassessed, and is not deemed a risk either to herself or to anyone else, which is kind of amusing when she thinks about it, because she’s in here for stabbing a young woman eleven times in the throat and chest. But Carrie’s considered a benign inmate. Not someone they need to keep an eye on.
Carrie gets up and looks in the mirror. She pulls a comb from her washbag and runs it through her hair. Her hair has been coming out in handfuls since she became perimenopausal and as much as she pretends she doesn’t care about her appearance any more, the hair loss distresses her deeply. ‘Your crowning glory,’ Pete used to say, back in the beginning.
Perhaps magnesium could help, she thinks as she removes the tangles of hair from between the teeth of the comb. Not that she’d be able to source any in here, but it appears to be the current cure-all. An article she read recently claimed that middle-aged women experiencing fatigue, muscle cramps and mental decline could be suffering from reduced magnesium levels, and Carrie thought, well, if that’s the case, every woman she knows must be deficient.
After Tess Gilroy and Avril Hughes left, Carrie returned to her cell, opting to miss lunch, and lay on her bed for a while. Had they believed her? It was hard to say. She finds it difficult to assess her effect on people nowadays. Before this, back when she was living what she now considers her other life, Carrie barely gave other people a second thought. She didn’t go out of her way to be rude to anyone, she had no reason to, so she didn’t lie in bed wondering what the world made of her. For all intents and purposes she was invisible. Now, everything she says is analysed, scrutinized, gone over again and again for hidden meaning, and it has made Carrie become extraordinarily careful in her choice of words. There are no off-the-cuff remarks, she has tempered her personality accordingly, and the Carrie Kamara of old, the essence of her anyway, she keeps locked away in a small box beneath her bunk.
Carrie was described as a high-functioning psychopath by an expert witness, a psychiatrist, called to the witness box by the prosecution. Which she thought at the time was a bit of a stretch. She had to look it up to verify what the difference was between a high-functioning psychopath and a low-functioning one. The distinction wasn’t completely clear but, as Carrie understands it, it’s to do with intelligence. She’s supposed to have superior intelligence and the ability to delay gratification in a way that the low-functioning set can’t do. Which was mildly flattering for a time, considering Carrie only achieved one O level in home economics, and a CSE in art. But when she began her sentence here at Styal, she met a number of women who described themselves as high-functioning psychopaths, and it became immediately clear to Carrie that this label is slapped on willy-nilly. These women were not intelligent. They were actually rather stupid. But they had managed to return to education, schooling themselves to a higher level than the average person, and every time their stories were challenged, every time they were out of their depth, they would declare how intelligent they were, listing degrees and so forth, and they were believed without question. Ridiculous.
Carrie thinks most high-functioning psychopaths in Styal Prison should be rediagnosed simply as liars. Or perhaps as people who believe their own lies. That would be more accurate.
And therein lies the distinction.
Carrie is a liar. But at least she knows she is.
Now
THE ROOM IS in semi-darkness. The panel, not really visible, sits around the conference table as Tess stands by an enlarged illuminated image of a map on the projector screen. A route has been highlighted in pink and Tess directs the laser pointer to the beginning of the route and then to the end. She is talking them through timings, witness statements, CCTV, and the group gathered at the table takes notes, listening to Tess as she interprets the evidence for them, using language each can understand. This is where she shines. Give Tess a thousand pages of courtroom jargon and she can pluck out the necessary, turning idiom into key fact.
Tess hits the lights and the image fades. ‘So, what do we think?’ she asks the panel. ‘Do we continue with the case?’
Clive clears his throat. ‘Ella Muir was stabbed … ten …?’
‘Eleven times,’ says Tess.
‘Eleven times. OK, so how does Carrie get home with no blood on her whatsoever? You say forensics found no weapon? And there were no traces of Ella’s blood on Carrie and no blood inside Carrie’s house?’
‘None at all.’
‘And nothing in her car?’
‘None there either.’
Clive shakes his head. ‘Well, that alone would make me want to pursue this.’
This is how the investigation works: Tess goes out and speaks to those involved – the prisoner, their family – and she gets a general feel for things. She reads the trial notes, considers the evidence, and she then returns to Innocence UK to present her findings and the case is re-evaluated. The panel gets to vote on whether the case has merit, whether they think they’re likely to attain a positive result, and each case may be re-evaluated as many as five or six times throughout the investigative process, because, if they think they’re getting nowhere, it makes more sense to cut their losses and move on.
Tess has a quote printed out and Sellotaped to the inside cover of her diary: ‘Don’t cling to a mistake just because you spent a lot of time making it.’
‘Anyone else?’ Tess asks. ‘Thoughts? Anyone else got anything jumping out at them?’
‘The fact that she continues to protest her innocence is interesting,’ Tom says. ‘I mean, it’s really drummed into them when they begin their sentences, very early on in the rehabilitation process, that if they own up to their crimes, show sufficient remorse, et cetera, then they’ll serve a lot less time. The fact that she’s still sticking to her story, when she kn
ows it’ll result in her serving the full life sentence, is rather telling, don’t you think? Not everyone does that.’
Tess is nodding. She hadn’t considered this, and Tom is right. It is unusual. Even prisoners who Tess was certain were victims of a wrongful conviction, and who were later released after a trial at the Court of Appeal, agreed to confess their guilt in return for lighter sentences. How this is supposed to help people, God only knows. You’re guilty? Confess your sins and you get to go home early. You’re innocent? Protest your innocence and you get to stay in jail … for years. Who came up with such a farcical system?
‘OK,’ says Tess, ‘so that leaves us with the blood smear. Carrie’s blood found on the inside handle of Ella’s front door. What are we thinking?’ Tom tells her that this is what the entire prosecution’s case was built on and Tess agrees. ‘I do wonder if we’re going to be able to get past this,’ she says. ‘The presence of the blood said to every single jury member that Carrie was there in that house and I’m not sure the appellate court will ever be able to overlook it.’
‘Even after all the cross-contamination fuck-ups in the labs?’ suggests Clive.
‘It’s a big ask.’
Tess looks around the table. The face of each member is unreadable. She knows there is reasonable doubt in this case. Things are not clear-cut; they do not add up neatly. But is there enough doubt to warrant all the time and resources they are about to plough into getting Carrie Kamara’s case overturned? Tess isn’t sure. ‘Let’s vote,’ she says decidedly. ‘Do we proceed? Show of hands please.’
And all hands are raised.
‘Then thank you very much for your time.’
