by Paula Daly
Carrie stands stock-still. Her first thought of course is Mia. Because there are two people standing at the side of the pool who, even though in plain clothes, look very much like police officers. She racks her brain, trying to think of Mia’s movements. Where should she be? Has Carrie heard an ambulance this morning?
She raises her hand. ‘If you wouldn’t mind making your way to the side of the pool please, my love,’ Gavin says, a faux smile slapped on his face, and as she wades across, doing a kind of half-walk, half-swim, she can see by the expression on the faces of the officers that this has nothing to do with Mia.
She stands at the base of the ladder steps, ready to haul herself out, and watches as the woman officer takes a set of handcuffs from her jacket pocket. ‘You are under arrest on suspicion of the murder of Ella Muir …’ the officer is saying very quietly, aware, Carrie presumes, of the many eyes upon them.
The urge to flee is overwhelming. She looks over her shoulder. Thirty sets of eyes are upon her. The faces are a blur. All except for those of Helen Carter and Nicki Entwistle, which have come into clear, sharp focus. She turns around. Pulls her swimsuit out from between her buttocks and mounts the steps. ‘I didn’t do anything.’
And the woman officer tells her, ‘This will all go smoothly if you don’t make a fuss.’ So Carrie holds out her hands numbly, ready to receive the cuffs, but the woman officer says, ‘We’ll let you get dried off first,’ and Carrie is led silently towards the changing rooms.
Four Years Ago
THE OFFICER’S VOICE seems to come from far away. ‘How are you getting on in there?’ Carrie murmurs something in reply but she’s not exactly sure what comes out. She sits on the wooden bench inside the cubicle with her towel wrapped around her shoulders. Her swimsuit clings to her body and her skin is cold and clammy beneath. She needs to take it off, but she’s not sure she can move.
Carrie closes her eyes. She pinches the bridge of her nose and tries to bring her mind into focus. Outside, she becomes aware of the officer sending a text message, clearing her throat.
What just happened?
Has she been arrested? She isn’t sure.
Carrie’s mind feels as if it’s operating via a third party. She pictures the Wizard of Oz, frantically pulling his levers from behind the closed curtain, and this is the nearest she can get to making sense of what she’s feeling. Someone has invaded her body and she’s no longer in charge of her faculties.
‘Carrie, you need to get a move on.’
The officer’s name is Gillian Frain. Carrie remembers that now. As she was being led away from the pool, she said, ‘My name is Gillian Frain and I’m the senior investigating officer on this case.’
Bewildered by what she was hearing, Carrie had replied, ‘Case?’ But whatever Gillian had said after that had been lost for now.
‘Do you need some help?’ Gillian asks.
And Carrie looks down at her hands, sees they’re trembling, and she hears herself say, weakly, ‘I think so.’ She leans forward and manages to reach the latch. She slides it across and the door drops open outwards.
Gillian Frain stands with her arms crossed, an expression on her face that Carrie can’t read. ‘You’re sitting on your dry clothes.’
Carrie looks at the bench and realizes she’s right. So she lifts the left cheek of her bottom and pushes her T-shirt and leggings away. She keeps pushing until they’re lodged in the corner of the cubicle. ‘I don’t know where my shoes are.’
‘Did you put them in a locker?’
‘I can’t remember.’
‘We can deal with the shoes later,’ Gillian says, and it’s only now that the fog starts to lift and Carrie becomes aware of her surroundings. ‘You need to get dry,’ Gillian tells her impatiently. ‘You need to get dry now before …’ She lets the sentence hang and Carrie thinks, Before what?
Carrie tries to pull the strap away from her left shoulder but her fingers can’t seem to get beneath it. She tries again and still she can’t get the thing off. She looks at Gillian Frain helplessly and the detective seems undecided as to what to do. Does she step in and get this sorted out? Get the woman into some dry clothes? Carrie can feel her mulling it over.
Carrie takes a few steadying breaths. She is now lucid enough to think through the repercussions of remaining like this: she’ll be stuck inside this cubicle while they wait for someone with the right authority to witness her nakedness. And she’ll be forced to listen to the aqua-aerobics ladies, re-dressing, speculating quietly on what this is all about. Except they know what this is about: Ella Muir. Carrie imagines Nicki Entwistle’s pugnacious face looming over the top of the cubicle door. She visualizes her offering Carrie her first smile in years, satisfied that justice is finally being done, and Carrie knows she couldn’t stand that. Frantically, she tries the strap again, but it’s as if her fingers are made of putty; they’ve become useless to her and she can’t see a way out. She starts to panic. Terror fills her. She’s never felt like this so she has no idea what to do. She feels her chest tightening. She’s going to vomit. She looks at Gillian Frain, stricken. ‘I need you to help me.’
The detective steps forward. ‘How about you hold the towel loosely around yourself and I’ll ease the costume down? My daughter has me do it that way at the beach. I’m kind of an expert.’
And Carrie says, ‘I’d really appreciate that,’ and then she starts to cry.
Now
TESS IS FERRETING around in her fridge for something to chuck in the NutriBullet. She eyes some week-old Brussels sprouts and half a yellow pepper and wonders if she’s up for such a level of self-punishment at this hour. Regardless of what she puts in the blender, it all comes out an unappetizing grey-brown, but, she concedes, she’s not getting any younger, and she’s unlikely to eat a single vegetable for the rest of the day, so she sets to work.
Sipping her smoothie, which is not as bad as she feared, she leans her weight against the kitchen work surface and watches the bird station though the kitchen window. The fat balls she purchased yesterday were a mistake. Her back yard is now a frenzy of jackdaws, all shouting at one another, all crapping on her rotary washing line as they compete for a turn at the feeder. Her little birds – the bullfinches, greenfinches, goldfinches, chaffinches; the blue tits, great tits, coal tits, long-tailed tits; the nuthatches; the sparrows – have all left the yard in fear of their lives. Even the blackbirds, who can be monstrous bullies at times, have taken cover in next door’s sycamore, and are watching over the proceedings, quietly vexed.
Tess bought forty fat balls from Home Bargains in Accrington and is now regretting her impulse purchase. She’ll have to bin them, which is a terrible waste, but with the jackdaws taking over, her little songbirds will go hungry unless she does something radical. For some reason the jackdaws were never interested in the sunflower-seed hearts or the millet and mealworms she puts out daily, and she’s just deciding whether to go out now in her pyjamas and remove the fat balls altogether, when the office phone goes.
She checks her watch: 8.52 a.m. The caller is early.
Tess mounts the stairs and picks up. ‘Tess Gilroy,’ she says, but no one responds. Instead, she hears a series of clicks, before an automated voice announces, ‘You have a call from Her Majesty’s Prison Styal. Prisoner number 46453. Press hash to receive.’
As she waits for the call to connect, Tess examines the noticeboard. She looks at the picture of Ella Muir covered in stab wounds, and then at the new photograph she printed out last night. It’s of Carrie arriving at court. Carrie as she was then, though, not the Carrie she knows now. Tess lets her eyes move between the two pictures and quietens her mind. She tries to survey the prints with an uncritical eye. Let whatever thoughts you have come to the surface and simply observe them. Tess has a mindfulness app that she uses sometimes to help her drop her preconceived ideas about a case. She’s pretty sure the authors of the app did not intend for it to be used for this purpose: they talk about looking at a bottle of wat
er, other inanimate objects, as if seeing the objects for the first time. Tess substitutes crime scene photos for such objects. And since she believes in using every tool she can get her hands on to achieve a result, she’s not above a bit of meditation (even though in her everyday life she’s come to the assumption that living in the moment is really not for her. She’s far happier dreaming about the future and has come to accept that this is OK, regardless of what Eckhart Tolle and his disciples have to say on the subject).
‘Hello?’
‘Hi, Carrie. You got my message.’
‘Yeah, they told me last night that you wanted to speak to me.’
‘Excellent. How are you?’
‘Pretty good,’ Carrie replies, but it’s evident that she’s not. Carrie’s voice is reedy and weak. ‘I don’t have long, we have cell inspections this morning.’
‘OK, I’ll be brief. I just wanted to update you really. Let you know how it’s all progressing …’ Tess is careful not to sound too upbeat during these conversations. It’s all very well for her to feel heartened and cheered by her findings so far, but this is a long road for the prisoner. An astonishingly long road, with no guarantees. Tess has had cases reach the Court of Appeal only to be dismissed without any real reason and the only option available to the prisoner is to start the very lengthy process all over again. ‘I want to talk about the CCTV if that’s OK,’ she says. ‘We have the images of your car – well, what the prosecution claims was your car, and when we revisited the route they said you took on the evening of Ella’s murder, we found the time frame they’d allowed was not enough. Meaning there was not enough time for you to murder Ella.’
Carrie is silent.
‘Are you still there?’ Tess asks.
‘Just a bit overcome.’
‘That’s understandable. There’s more, if you’re OK for me to go on …?’
‘I’m OK.’
‘There was a witness – Mr Hurst – I’m sure you remember him, he’s an elderly gentleman who—’
‘I remember him.’
‘Well, me and Avril spoke with Mr Hurst yesterday evening. We did what you might call a reconstruction, and it was immediately evident that Mr Hurst’s sight is severely compromised. He had trouble making out what was happening outside Ella’s house and I feel certain that if we were to call him for an eye test, his witness statement would be classed as unreliable. We’re going to get hold of his medical records and see what state his vision was in at the time of the murder but we’re assuming for now it wasn’t good.’
‘He was really adamant in court it was me he saw.’
She’s right. Tess has reread the transcript and Hurst really wouldn’t be budged. He staked his life on Carrie being in the street that night.
‘People can get things wrong for all sorts of reasons, Carrie,’ Tess says. ‘The problem is they have no idea that they’re wrong.’
‘Oh, he knew he was wrong,’ replies Carrie angrily. ‘He knew it and he said it anyway. The fucker.’
‘That’s the spirit,’ replies Tess. She decides Carrie could do with a bit of anger. Anger is sometimes what’s needed to sustain you through the appeal process. Resignation to your fate is not always helpful.
She tells Carrie the next thing on the list is to get the CCTV images of her car checked by an independent forensic photography analyst. ‘He’s a good guy. He’s done some excellent work for us in the past. He can see things other experts can’t seem to see.’
‘Well, I really need a miracle right now,’ says Carrie.
‘I’ll see what I can do.’
Four Years Ago
CARRIE MUST WAIT whilst a drunken man is booked in first. He’s gone a bit mental – his words – and smashed up the front of his ex-girlfriend’s house. His ex called the police and the arresting officer caught the man trying to get through the front window, which he’d shattered, to steal his own dog, and the man got away with only a minor laceration to his palm. He is sitting on the floor of the station, his head in his hands, saying, ‘I’ve really fucked it up.’ By the weary look on the custody sergeant’s face, Carrie gets the impression that they’ve all been here before.
‘Come on, Craig, stand up.’
‘I need a doctor!’
‘You’ve seen a doctor. Stand up so I can get you booked in.’
Gillian Frain leans over to Carrie and whispers in her ear, ‘Shouldn’t be too much longer,’ and Carrie nods as if all this is very normal. In fairness to the officers, they’re trying to make it all feel very normal. No one has yet looked at her and pointed. No one has said, ‘You’re being arrested for what?’ If anything, they’ve gone out of their way to avoid the subject, save for Gillian who, during the journey over here, gave Carrie tidbits of what she might expect. ‘You’ll get something to eat … it’s not great, but it’s edible. Are you a vegetarian?’ And Carrie told her she wasn’t, even though in truth she rarely eats meat these days. She isn’t sure it agrees with her. Her bowels tend to complain.
She looks down at the red depressions on her wrist from where the cuffs were and rubs at them with her thumb. They’ve left the skin itchy rather than sore. Pete wanted to cuff her to the bed back when they were first married, when he was still interested. She refused, of course. Because Pete is the kind of stupid bastard who would get sidetracked by a full bladder, or a ringing telephone, and forget all about her.
She wonders if Ella Muir liked being tied up. She wonders: Is that one of the things that made Pete so crazy about her? Is that what made him lose his head and act like a lovestruck teenager, made him fawn over her in public, have sex with her in his car on the promenade, made him make her the centre of his entire world?
‘Carrie Kamara?’
She feels Gillian rise to her left. ‘Ready?’ she asks Carrie.
They walk towards the desk and the custody sergeant says to Gillian, ‘OK, what have we got?’
‘Carrie has been arrested on suspicion of the murder of Ella Muir.’
The custody sergeant nods, doing his best to keep his expression neutral, before beginning to type at the desktop computer in front of him. He wears a short-sleeved black shirt, with black epaulettes on the shoulders, which display his sergeant’s chevrons. His white hair is cropped neatly to his head. He glances at Carrie. ‘Do you understand why you’re here?’
‘Yes,’ she replies.
He then asks her for some basic information: full name, address, date of birth, and as she answers she feels as if she’s watching all this play out from a vantage point at the top corner of the room. She’s out of her body, observing herself dispassionately, standing there, supported at the elbow by Detective Frain – which she assumes is to prevent her from falling over rather than running away. Carrie wears a T-shirt, leggings and trainers with the laces removed, and her hair, stiff with chlorine, has dried in clumps which are sticking up from her head at wild angles. Her face is make-up-free and her features are being pulled downwards. She looks sad, scared, tired and old.
‘Are you taking any medication?’ the custody sergeant asks.
‘Just birth control.’
‘And you feel all right at the moment, in full control of your faculties?’
‘Yes,’ she hears herself say, even though she isn’t sure she could use the toilet independently right now.
The custody sergeant hits a key with his right index finger and the printer next to him springs into life. He pulls a sheet of paper from the machine and places it in front of Carrie. ‘You need to have a quick read of this and then sign here, and here.’
‘I don’t have my glasses.’
‘What strength do you use?’
‘Two point five.’
He reaches beneath the desk and hands her a pair with tortoiseshell frames. ‘These are two point two five,’ he says. ‘My spare set.’ Even with the glasses, though, the words swim around on the page. She manages to make out her name and that’s about it, so she signs where he indicated and slides the form back toward
s him. ‘Lovely,’ he says, before addressing Gillian: ‘Pop her in number six.’ And then he looks at Carrie. ‘We’ll keep you nice and far away from Craig. He gets quite weepy when the alcohol starts to wear off.’
‘Thank you.’
Gillian now links her elbow and shepherds her towards the cells. The woodwork is newly painted in a bright cerulean blue, and the walls are an off-white. The floor is spotlessly clean. ‘Eat your dinner off it,’ her mother would say. Funny the things you think, Carrie marvels as she passes cells one to five. She can hear Craig in number one booting the base of the door in a half-hearted way.
They arrive at number six and Carrie’s breathing stutters. She stares at the open door and imagines it closed. She can’t go in there, she realizes. If she enters she’ll never get out.
She stops in her tracks and instantly she feels Gillian’s body react next to her. Gillian goes from gently guiding Carrie to gripping hold of her tightly.
‘This is a mistake,’ Carrie whispers.
‘Carrie, you—’
‘No, you don’t understand, I didn’t do it. I didn’t do what you’re accusing me of. I can’t go in there.’
‘It’s going to be OK. I promise it’s going to be OK. I know this is scary but—’
‘I can’t go in there!’
Carrie starts to breathe heavily and her eyes bulge.
‘I need help down here!’ Gillian calls out.
‘I can’t go in there! I didn’t do it! Get off me. I need to get out. My chest is burning. I don’t think I can breathe.’
She shakes herself loose of Gillian’s grip and backs away. Her trainers are loose on her feet and she trips a little, the right one coming completely off.
‘I didn’t kill her. I didn’t do it.’
Gillian is holding her hands up in front of her protectively. ‘Carrie, just calm down. You have nothing to be frightened of. Nothing bad will happen to you.’ She turns her head in the direction they have come from. ‘Terry! Terry, I need you down here!’
