This Little Dark Place

by A. S. Hatch

  The pictures made it real. They were displayed on a screen in the courtroom. Wide shots of the exterior of the cottage, the clearing, the lane, the driveway, the shale courtyard. Shots of the inside of the workshop, scattered with little yellow evidence markers and arrows indicating the direction in which I’d hauled the trunk across the ground, of the tools hanging in their slots on the back wall. Shots of the laptop (which, later, they analysed, finding all of the Inbox Inmate correspondence). They held up the copies of the true-crime books in my collection – In Cold Blood, The Executioner’s Song, Helter-Skelter – and said they demonstrated an ‘obsession with violence’. They ignored the others. They also passed around the claw hammer, which was still in my bedside drawer, as further evidence of my ‘violent nature’. It was the close-up shots of the trunk – of Ruby’s body, of her red hair mingling with the sawdust on the floor of the van, of the blood marks inside the trunk where she had clawed her fingernails off – which had the greatest impact. She had died of panic, essentially, had suffered a massive heart attack.

  Though I confessed everything to him, Mr Bainbridge – whom I had appointed as my solicitor advocate because I could think of no one else – felt he had a duty to ‘save my life’ and persuaded me to accept the lesser charge of perverting the course of justice but to let him try to get the murder charge dropped. He would argue that Ruby’s death was in fact an accident, that her being locked inside the trunk was some sort of horseplay which had then gone tragically wrong. Yes, granted I had been caught attempting to dispose of the evidence – and for that we were offering no defence – but I had not intended to harm Ruby and we were in fact in love. The wigged and gowned prosecution barrister had an easy time swatting that argument away: the defendant had left Miss Holland to freeze in his workshop while he made love to his former partner had he not? What kind of love is that? Bainbridge had no riposte.

  The trial passed mostly in a blur. I paid very little attention to what the lawyers were saying most of the time; I knew I would be convicted, and I knew that I deserved to be. I wanted to be. Nothing the justice system could do to me was strong enough, I thought. I cursed the fact that our society no longer permitted public floggings, stonings, humiliations. I wanted to hurt. I wanted to die.

  My mind faltered. One day I thought I saw Ruby’s ghost in the public gallery. She looked murderously down at me. Her hair wasn’t red any more, it was black with a streak of white. Did death rob a person of their colour? An urge to get up and call out to her, to tell her I loved her and I was sorry came over me. My legs began to move involuntarily and the chain between my cuffed ankles jangled softly. Bat-eared Bainbridge, seated beside me, heard this and as I went to stand he put his hand on my thigh to stop me. He followed my gaze upwards to the gallery and he whispered, in the same tone of voice the nurses at Jerusalem adopted when they spoke to my mother: ‘That’s Ruby’s sister, Daniel.’

  I wish he had let me keep that particular delusion.

  Ruby’s little dark book turned out to be, of course, her diary. She had maintained it until the very end. The prosecution read aloud from it. It confirmed what I had known to be true ever since Jade turned up at Lanes End. She wasn’t behind the vandalised shed, the break-in, Alfred’s murder, the power cut, or any of that stuff. She was genuinely fearful for her safety, for her life. She really did believe Lee had tracked her down to Wilder, just as she had told me, a belief which proved well founded when Lee himself took the stand to describe how he’d been staking out Lanes End for weeks, how he’d taken a room in a B&B in Wilder-on-Sea, how he’d written Ruby a short drunken letter one night and hand-delivered it and how he’d followed me to Bowland in his car and called the police on the way and how he’d pointed out where I’d gone off-road in the forest and how he watched as I was cuffed and put in the back of the patrol car and driven away.

  Ruby’s journal also explained why she didn’t want the police involved after the break-in. She had been driving Jade’s Mini illegally, using her twin’s driving licence in case she was ever pulled over. Having just been released from prison she herself was without a valid licence or insurance and she feared the misdemeanour might have landed her back inside. She felt she couldn’t tell me this at the time. She wanted to seem ‘normal’ and hated the fact that her conviction had erected a ‘wall of misgiving’ around her. A wall which, so the journal narrated, she had resolved to dismantle stone by stone. The journal revealed other things too. She was never in cahoots with Jade. There was never any plot to hurt me, or avenge the psychic hurt I’d inflicted upon her. The journal made no mention of the two helmeted men. Hearing Ruby’s words spoken out loud filled me with rage. This was a violation. These private thoughts were never intended to be heard. But there was a point to the readings: to cast me as jealous, possessive, controlling. ‘I will have to be patient,’ Ruby wrote. ‘He questioned me at the pub last night when some young guy bought me a drink. He still doesn’t trust me.’ The prosecution used the journal to insinuate that Ruby was afraid of me. They implied for example that the steak knife, which she had lifted from her sister’s house and kept with her as protection from Lee, was intended as protection from me. ‘I see him watching me sometimes when I’m on the phone to Jade,’ she had written. ‘I wish I felt safe enough to tell him every thought that’s in my head but I don’t. Not yet. There are moments when I’m not sure I really know him at all. He goes all quiet and stares into space and I feel like it’s better just to leave him be. I suppose we’ve both got a lot of dark stuff to work through. For now I’m afraid Jade will have to continue bearing the brunt of my craziness. Sorry sis! But what are twins for?’

  Two witnesses were called to give evidence relating to my character. Max Gray and his eldest son. Gray told the court that I was a strange individual, that I was a loner, that I didn’t associate with others. He implied my isolation went further than a desire for privacy and that people were suspicious of me. Gray said that I was only ever seen once in the local pub, with the victim, and on said occasion I had behaved strangely, keeping the victim barricaded in a corner all night by the fruit machine. He wasn’t there that night, Gray admitted, but his son was and he had told Gray how he’d watched me all night from the other side of the bar. His son had bought the victim a shot to see how I’d react. And how did he react, the prosecuting lawyer asked Gray. By all accounts not well, Gray said.

  Gray’s son’s main beef with me was that I had been accepting his father’s meagre deliveries of eggs and milk for months without paying. This was a shock to me. I had assumed they were merely surplus and being delivered to me gratis as payment was never discussed and they just kept on coming without my ever requesting them in the first place. I would have gladly paid had he asked. But Gray’s son took my ‘refusal to pay’ as a major affront to the honour of his father who was too meek and drunk to defend it himself. So he and his younger brother had ‘played a few tricks’ on me with the intention first of inciting an attack of conscience and thereafter, when it seemed my conscience was either misplaced or nonexistent, simply ‘to get our own back’. Bainbridge said the Gray boys’ acts – which, let’s face it, he said, were a bit more than mere tricks and they should be thankful his client wasn’t bringing charges of his own against them – had brought an air of terror to Lanes End, which should surely, to some extent, provide at least a little mitigation for his client’s actions in the lead-up to Miss Holland’s accidental death? The prosecuting lawyer had nothing to say to this, not because Bainbridge had dumbfounded or outmanoeuvred him in any way, but simply because the writing was already on the wall: I was guilty and his work was done.

  I spent the last days of the trial thinking about suicide. At night I tried to devise a way of doing it there in my cell before the verdict, which I didn’t care about. But I could never find a way: I would have to wait until prison. Once there I would network; there must be loads of guys, I thought, who knew how to get things like that done.

  On the morning of the closing speech
es and the summing-up, Victoria came to court. The verdict was to be delivered in the afternoon. She shuffled along the front row of the public gallery in a white summer dress with pink flowers, holding her swollen belly with both hands. The people already seated stood one by one in a Mexican wave to make way for her, displaying that special, fevered kind of reverence reserved only for heavily pregnant women. She took her seat and fixed my gaze. I looked at her and through the closing speeches I tried to decode the silent message she was sending. A short while later, as Mr Justice A. Wills launched into his grandiloquent summing-up speech – written so floridly no doubt for the benefit of the national journalists present – I felt an odd kind of peace. Nothing could ever take away the hate I now reserved for myself or fill the hole left by Ruby’s death, but seeing the new life Victoria carried on her front gave me hope.

  ‘… each man kills the thing he loves …’ The judge recited part of the famous verse, and as he condemned me I could not stop a smile. All had come to an end and yet here I was at the beginning of something. I felt a renewed desire to go on living.

  ***

  Gordon told me Robbie’s been transferred to another prison. Nice guy, but he’d fallen in with some real lowlifes, he said, stroking his white stubble. Serious guys Danny. Organised. Not men you mix with if you want to do your time quietly. We found a mobile phone in his mattress. We think he’s been moving contraband for months, possibly over a year, we don’t know yet. I don’t know what got into him. I probably shouldn’t be telling you this. He loitered awkwardly at my door for a while. The wife loved the mirror frame by the way. Loved it. Did she know half the furniture in her house was hand-crafted by a convicted murderer, I joked. He laughed. Not long now is it? he said, referring to my release next month. November. What’ll you do?

  Most screws are vindictive thugs. But Gordon’s all right. Not saying I’ll miss him, but he’s not bad for a screw.

  I’ve been thinking about Lanes End. All along I was certain I’d never set foot there again but now I’m not so sure. I once had a premonition the place would end up as a tomb, destined to lie forever uninhabited, home to ghosts and the echoes of love from a time long past. At the time I thought of Vic. But of course – of course! – it is Ruby’s tomb. Perhaps it’s right that I should go back and wait for a glimpse of my demon bride in her polyester wedding dress.

  Lucy, your whole life I’ve been behind bars. Locked away in this room that I refuse to call a cell. I’ve sometimes wallowed in self-pity and I’ve sometimes cried – sixteen years is a long time – but mostly I’ve lived with my bow pointed not at the rocks but at the horizon, towards the future. Because of you.

  I’ve thought of you every day. When you turned four I imagined you in a little grey pinafore ready for school. When you turned eleven the pinafore was replaced by a blouse and tie. And now that you’ve turned sixteen and have exercised your right to contact me without your mother’s permission (I can’t blame her keeping us apart all these years, not after what she saw, not after everything I’ve put her through), I picture you as an angel. My guardian angel. You saved my life (do you think that was your mother’s intention in court?) and I don’t know how to thank you. I don’t know how to adequately show you how much I love you. I’ve made you this little gift but it doesn’t come close to saying what I want to say. I hope you’ll let me do that in person one day.

  I’ve decided. Just now. I’m going back to Lanes End. I’m going to gut the cottage, start again from scratch. I’m going to rebuild. I’m going to make a space there just for you.

  That’s where you’ll find me.

  I’ll write again soon.

  Affectionately yours

  Dad

  Acknowledgements

  Firstly, I’d like to thank my agent – the great Eve White. My association with Eve goes back to the summer of 2012 and it is testament not only to her patience with a young author finding his voice, but to her guiding wisdom and loyalty that we are now – seven years later – finally publishing our first novel together. Eve’s enduring faith in my talent has been and continues to be a source of immense pride and motivation, and I look forward to sharing much more success with her in the future.

  I must also mention and thank Eve’s assistant, Ludo Cinelli. A smarter, more affable and astute operator you are unlikely to find. (Thanks also to Ludo’s predecessor Kitty Walker, from whom I learned so much.)

  ‘Gratitude’ does a lousy job of describing my feelings towards my editor, Cecily Gayford. Simply put, without Cecily this book wouldn’t exist. Cecily had a clear vision for This Little Dark Place and the courage to take a chance on me. I hope I executed her plan well and that she is as proud of the finished product as I am. The biggest compliment I can pay Cecily is that working with her has made me a far better writer. I’m forever grateful, to her, and to everyone at Serpent’s Tail.

  Thanks to my friend Charlotte Marriage for agreeing to meet me on a cold December evening in South Kensington to talk about prison life (note to potential employers: Charlotte had previously worked with offenders and has never – to my knowledge – been incarcerated herself  ).

  Thanks to my dad for showing me his carpentry tools in his freezing garage on Christmas Day while I took pictures and notes on my phone.

  Thanks, and love, to my mum and my sister who came to London and picked me up when the world had dished out a serious drubbing. From the ashes of that dreadful winter came this novel.

  Special thanks also to my dear friend and fellow bibliophile Carol Quearney, from whose brilliant mind I steal liberally and shamelessly.

  Above all, thank you Tarryn, for your patience, your love, and your constancy. I hope you’re proud of me.

  Thanks for reading!

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