Clear My Name

by Paula Daly

  She climbs out of the bath. Her whole body hurts. Her skin is milky white, her breasts covered with a map of blue veins. She hears the cries begin and her right breast leaks milk. The milk runs over her belly and all the way down the inside of her leg. Tess is filled to the brim with nothing her baby needs. She tells herself not to cry. She is braver than this. Her mother raised her to face her problems head on; she raised her to be strong.

  She misses her mother.

  Tess pulls out the plug. The yells are not yet at full volume as she dries off her legs, as she pulls on her dressing gown and wraps her head in a towel. When she gets to the crib she sees Angeline has been sick. There is not a lot. Just a small circle next to her ear and a patch on her babygro. It’s beginning to dry. She must have made herself sick through crying earlier before passing out. ‘Hi, poppet,’ Tess says and, on hearing her voice, Angeline’s arms start to flail. Her head turns from side to side and she kicks her feet. Tess leans over and picks up her baby. She is tightly packaged. She is a neat little bundle of ripped muscle. At two weeks old she could flip herself over from back to front and now at seven weeks she can push herself up on to her hands. She has worked every muscle in her small body to the extreme. The constant crying has made her staggeringly strong. Tess wonders if she’s possessed.

  She makes soothing noises as she changes Angeline’s nappy on the bed. ‘I know, sweetheart, I know,’ she says as she dresses her in a fresh babygro. It’s the nicest one she has. It’s from Marks & Spencer and is pure white with silk piping around the collar. Angeline fights with her. She draws her little fists into her body and Tess has to unhook them as her daughter screams furiously at her. ‘Let me dress you,’ Tess hisses between her teeth and she pulls at Angeline’s arm, knowing she’s hurting her, but something has snapped inside Tess.

  Her baby cries even more as she becomes rougher, pulling at her daughter’s limbs, her expression stern and unsympathetic. Tess has been overtaken by something, she doesn’t know what, but it feels primitive. It feels like a release. Angeline cries harder as Tess brings each press stud together. ‘Stop crying,’ she says flatly, and Angeline is now coughing between sobs. She might be sick again. But Tess doesn’t care.

  When she’s finished and her baby is clean, as good as new, Tess lifts her up high, so she’s face to face, and she pauses for a moment. Then she throws her baby down hard on to the bed, as hard as she dares.

  The room goes silent.

  And Tess’s mouth drops open.

  Has she killed her?

  Tess leans over. Angeline is still breathing. It’s the shock of the fall that’s silenced her. Angeline takes a couple of big breaths before flinging her arms out wide and inhaling deeply, ready to let out a fresh yell, and Tess sinks to her knees. She covers her ears with her hands. She has nothing left.

  Packing the nappy bag with everything she can find, Tess is on autopilot. She can no longer hear Angeline’s cries. She pushes her daughter into her snowsuit and fixes her bonnet on her head. Then she walks out into the street in her dressing gown and flags down the only passing vehicle. It’s a Ford Transit and in the front seat are three men in paint-covered overalls. ‘What’s the matter, love?’ the driver asks, and Tess hands him her baby.

  ‘Take her,’ she says. ‘Please. Just take her.’

  It’s only when she gets back inside the flat that she realizes she forgot to kiss her goodbye.

  Afterwards, she will call 999 and admit what she has done. And there will be social workers, doctors, a community psychiatric nurse – all kind people who tend to Tess, who tell her that they understand how she got to this point. These people really do seem to care. They try to persuade her to take Angeline back. They ask her to try again, just once more, ‘With support, this time,’ but Tess knows, ultimately, she’ll be on her own. She tells them she can’t. It’s too big. Too much. And so there is the adoption process, during which she will opt never to see Angeline again. She will never completely cut ties with Angeline’s family’s solicitor – Bill Menzies – for reasons she still doesn’t fully understand. But she will never see her baby.

  Tess looks at the young woman sitting in front of her now and she doesn’t know what to say.

  ‘I was eighteen,’ Tess stammers, ‘I really wasn’t equipped to—’

  ‘I’m not mad about it, by the way,’ Steph says. ‘I have a great life. You totally made the right decision. I just want to know why.’

  Why.

  This is the thing Tess can’t say out loud: Because I couldn’t trust myself around you any longer. Because the thought of going to prison for killing you sounded like relief.

  ‘What about my father?’ asks Steph and Tess is suddenly thrown.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘My dad. Who was he?’

  ‘Oh,’ answers Tess, ‘he was no one.’

  ‘No one,’ Steph mirrors back, flatly.

  ‘Well, not no one, but you know what I mean.’

  ‘No. I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘He was …’ Tess tries to cast her mind back. She casts her mind back to that night and there is nothing. Nothing at all.

  ‘You don’t have to tell me. Not if you don’t want to. I understand if you don’t want to tell me.’

  ‘It’s not that,’ says Tess.

  ‘Do you even know his name?’

  Tess shakes her head and Steph tries to be brave here, really she does, but tears have unexpectedly sprung, and she has to look up to blink them away. Steph came here looking for answers but … ‘I tried to find you, you know,’ she says. ‘I tried so many times to find you.’

  Tess can’t look at her. ‘I know. Bill Menzies tried to pass on your messages; he really went out of his way to track me down and let me know that you were looking.’

  ‘So you just didn’t want to meet me?’ she cries. ‘You didn’t even want to see what I looked like? You didn’t want to check I was OK?’

  ‘I did but—’

  ‘Why wouldn’t you see me?’

  ‘I couldn’t.’

  ‘I wanted to see you. I wanted to tell you it was OK—’

  ‘I’m sorry, I just couldn’t.’

  ‘I wanted you to see who I was. I wanted to tell you about my life. Who I am. What I’m planning to do. I wanted you to know about me! I wanted you to look at me!’ Steph stares at her mother, waiting for an explanation, and Tess can only hang her head. Why did she run? Why did she run from this beautiful girl? She had no real reason to and yet she did. She’s been running from her for her whole life.

  Steph tries to gather herself. ‘All right,’ she says, defeat evident in her voice. ‘OK. I don’t know why I needed to come here but I did. And I’m going to leave now.’

  Steph stands and she waits. She’s waiting for Tess to persuade her to stay. Hug her. Something. Anything. But Tess cannot move.

  Steph looks at her mother before heading to the door. When she’s there, she turns around. ‘What was it?’ she asks quietly. ‘What was it about my father that made you choose him? There must have been other boys around.’

  And again, Tess’s face falls. What she has to say is not what Steph wants to hear. Frantically, Tess searches her mind for a story. A story that will work. That’s what her daughter has come here for – to hear the story of her life. Something that will make sense of things, something to tell her who she is and help her find her place in the world. But Tess doesn’t have a story to give.

  ‘There was nothing about him,’ Tess begins. ‘I wanted a baby. I was young and immature and lonely and I thought a baby would be the answer. He was next to me by the dance floor, and I was midway through my menstrual cycle, and I knew if I was going to get pregnant, I had to have sex right then. I had to have sex that night.’ Tess looks at her daughter apologetically. ‘There was nothing special about him. Nothing at all. I’m so sorry. If it had been a different night, he would’ve been a different guy.’

  Later, in her dressing gown, after Steph has left, Tess is chopping
carrots into strips in the kitchen. It’s dark now and when she gazes outside it’s her own reflection she’s faced with. She finds it hard to look at herself so she looks away.

  When she’s finished prepping the meal, she puts the knife down and heads upstairs to the bathroom. Sitting down to urinate, she sees her underwear is stained with blood. ‘Great,’ she says.

  She stands, grabs a fresh pair of knickers from the clean pile of laundry on the landing, and returns to the bathroom to search for a sanitary towel.

  Fixing the pad in place, she frowns. And it’s then that an alarm goes off inside her head.

  What if …?

  No.

  No, that would be impossible.

  Would it?

  Maybe not impossible.

  Maybe it could be done.

  In fact, it could be done if—

  Suddenly, Tess is running. She’s running downstairs, frantically searching for her phone.

  TESS FINDS THE phone next to the sofa and begins scrolling through, looking for the right contact. She presses ‘call’; it rings three times, and goes to voicemail. ‘Shit.’ She redials and this time she leaves a message. ‘Mia, it’s Tess Gilroy. Call me when you get this. It doesn’t matter what time. Call me. It’s urgent.’ Then she’s scrolling again, looking for the next contact, cursing herself, for in her state of anxiety she keeps overshooting. Did she list Fran under D or F? She can’t remember. She finds her under F.

  The call connects. ‘Dr Fran Adler speaking.’

  ‘Fran, it’s Tess—’

  ‘Oh, Tess, hi. I don’t have my glasses on so I couldn’t see who’s calling.’

  ‘Listen, we need to retest Carrie Kamara’s blood.’

  ‘The blood. Why the blood? And why now?’

  ‘Tell me, is it possible?’

  ‘Well, yes, it’s certainly possible,’ Fran says. ‘I requested a sample when we requested the forensic records, so I have it at the lab. What exactly are we looking for?’

  ‘Menstrual blood.’

  Seven a.m. the following morning and Tess finds Fran Adler hunched over her workbench inside the forensics lab. Fran wears a white lab coat, protective goggles, navy woollen tights and lime-green Crocs. It’s a combination Tess has not seen before. Tess hovers impatiently nearby.

  ‘Do you know we only began testing for D-dimer recently?’ Fran says absently as she works.

  ‘You say that as if I’m supposed to know what D-dimer is.’

  Fran stops and looks up. ‘It’s a protein. It’s the protein which differentiates menstrual blood from peripheral blood. It’s now a necessary and routine test performed in rape cases.’ Fran has a pipette in her right hand and is transferring fluid from one test tube to another. ‘The presence of blood after a rape signifies trauma, but of course, in the past, defendants argued that the victims were merely menstruating when there was blood present, and that the sex was consensual. We needed a way to tell the difference between the two, between menstruation and trauma.’

  ‘When did the test become routine?’ asks Tess.

  ‘Two years ago.’

  ‘So, after Carrie was incarcerated.’

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘But,’ Tess says, feeling a little sick at what she’s about to say next, ‘if we at Innocence UK had tested the blood back at the start, when we took the case on, wouldn’t we have found the presence of menstrual blood?’

  Fran shakes her head. ‘As I said, we only test for it in rape cases. As far as we knew, this was a blood smear from the suspect who killed Ella Muir. No rape involved.’ Fran puts a stopper in the test tube. ‘So this test would never have been performed, but my question is this, Tess: what do you plan to do with this information? If indeed the sample is found to contain menstrual blood?’

  Tess moves closer. ‘The way I see it, there are only two people who could’ve planted Carrie’s blood in Ella’s house. Her daughter, Mia – which is highly unlikely because she loves her mother deeply and would not want her imprisoned – and the other is—’

  ‘Carrie’s husband.’

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Pete Kamara.’

  Fran jiggles the test tube before feeding it into the haematology analyser. Tess asks her how long it will take. ‘Couple of minutes,’ replies Fran. They wait. Tess paces the lab. It feels like the longest two minutes of her life. Driving here today she told herself she was losing it. Only a crazy person would come up with this. Pete Kamara would not have actually gone through with the act of killing Ella Muir before planting his wife’s blood at the scene, would he?

  Tess is not sure which way is up any more.

  The machine starts to beep repeatedly and Fran wanders over to it. It spits out what looks like a till receipt and Fran takes this to her workbench where there is an anglepoise lamp. Fran takes her reading glasses from their case and puts them on. Tess watches as she runs her finger down the slip of paper. Tess can’t tell from Fran’s posture what’s written there.

  Fran straightens. She removes her glasses and returns them to the case. She turns around. ‘Well, clever old you, Tess.’

  Twenty minutes later and Tess is switching lanes again. Someone is sitting in the middle lane of the M6 doing eighty so Tess undertakes on the inside. She has become that driver. The one she hates. The impatient, aggressive driver who could cause a crash. But she doesn’t care. ‘Oh, come on,’ she yells at the windscreen as her phone begins to ring. It goes to her car’s Bluetooth. It’s Avril. The morning traffic is thick and heavy but no one seems in a particular hurry to get where they need to go. She switches lanes again.

  She picks up the call. ‘Avril, you need to get hold of Mia and Carrie right now,’ she says, bypassing the niceties. ‘I’ve tried and tried but there’s no answer.’

  ‘Let me get this straight, you think Pete Kamara planted her menstrual blood? So it looked like Carrie killed Ella? That’s so gross. What sort of sick human being do you need to be to—’

  ‘Call them. Call them now.’

  ‘I have called them. It went straight to voicemail. How did Pete Kamara even plant the blood anyway?’

  ‘Fran Adler reckons the blood smear documented in the report could easily have come from a used sanitary towel.’

  ‘Eww. So he took it with him on purpose? Like he put it in his pocket on the way to kill Ella? Jesus. That’s so gross. Who even does that?’

  ‘Call them again. Keep calling until you get an answer. And contact the police. Tell them to get around to Mia’s. They need to warn Carrie that she’s still in danger. Let them know what’s going on.’

  ‘Why? Do you think he’s going to do something stupid?’

  ‘I think,’ Tess says, ‘I think he really, really hates his wife.’

  Tess is sure Pete Kamara is capable of doing something stupid. In fact, she’s kicking herself now for underestimating him. He came across as a buffoon and so she treated him as such. She can hear her own words of warning inside her head. Words she spoke to Avril: Here’s something you need to know about people who commit premeditated murder … They’re cold-blooded individuals who do not operate like the rest of us. Do you think those individuals are capable of elaborate lies to cover up their crimes? Do you think they’re able to hoodwink well-meaning individuals such as yourself?

  She pulls on to Mia’s street. Carrie has been staying here with her daughter. She’s one of the lucky ones. She has somewhere to go. Most women leaving prison have nothing and they end up walking straight back into the abusive relationships that landed them in prison in the first place.

  She gets out and crosses the road. The curtains to Mia’s flat are pulled closed. A black bin bag has been torn apart by the gulls and its rubbish is strewn around the door and down the steps. Tess presses Mia’s doorbell and as she waits she glances behind her. There is no sign of Mia’s car. She recently bought a small, battered Citroën but it’s not here. She presses the bell again and raps on the door with her knuckles. Where are they?

  There are no signs o
f movement from within and it occurs to Tess that she might be too late. Tess is now pretty sure Pete Kamara butchered one woman. A woman he loved. What is to stop him from doing the same to his ex-wife and daughter? His granddaughter?

  Tess knocks again and this time she hears footsteps. Someone is coming down the stairs. Tess squats and opens the letterbox. ‘Mia?’ she calls out. ‘Mia, it’s Tess. Can you open the door?’

  A neighbour emerges from the house next door. She’s wearing pyjama bottoms and a pink hoodie. Her hair is newly washed, the ends dripping; it’s leaving damp patches above her breasts. She scowls at Tess. ‘I’ve a husband asleep in here after a night shift.’

  Tess straightens, realizing the footsteps she heard were coming from the wrong property. ‘Sorry. Do you know where they are?’ she asks, motioning to Mia’s flat.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Mia and her mother.’

  ‘I’ve not seen Mia for a couple of days. The police were round here as well ten minutes ago banging hell out of that door. My husband’s trying to sleep.’

  ‘Do you know where they could be?’

  The woman is less than impressed: ‘We’re not exactly close,’ and Tess hears a baby howling from inside. The woman glances behind her. ‘Gotta go,’ she says and retreats, slamming the door.

  Tess calls Mia’s mobile again and, as it rings, she puts her ear to the glass to determine if Mia is in fact inside.

  There is nothing.

  Four Years Ago

  I HATE MY WIFE.

  I hate my wife.

  I hate my wife.

  Pete Kamara sits on the edge of the marital bed, the chanting inside his head getting louder. He gets up and paces. He can’t believe what she’s done. He can’t believe Carrie has done this.

  She has shit all over his life.

  He has just spoken with Ella and she told him it’s over. And no, she won’t change her mind. She’s done with married men. She’s done with him.

  The reason? There was no reason. None that he can make sense of anyway.