My Last Confession

by Helen FitzGerald

  The thing that immediately stood out about Jeremy Bagshaw was that he was extremely good-looking. Of the 956 prisoners in Sandhill, I would have put money on him being the only one with a healthy weight – not eaten away by heroin or stuffed by the fried carbs that had replaced it. And he was rare in having hair that wasn’t oily from the forsaking of a twice-weekly shower; nails that were clean; eyes that were bright and free of sand. All in hall, he was a bit of a Russell Crowe hunk, actually.

  Compared to sitting next to the lying-creepo-lewd-and-libber, it felt much more comfortable talking to Jeremy. No sticky aura. No sickly stare that made me feel exposed. I shook his hand without thinking about the alphabets of hepatitis on offer at Sandhill. And as I looked him in the eye, I saw something vulnerable and scared.

  Jeremy had been on remand for two weeks. That meant he’d spent two weeks in a grotty cell with different ‘co-pilots’, one after another, locked up twenty-three hours a day. The only perk for remand prisoners is the possibility of a daily visit, instead of three a month like convicted prisoners. But this perk was irrelevant in Jeremy’s case because no one had visited him. He hadn’t even spoken to anyone on the phone in all that time.

  He told me he was fine, that it was his choice not to have contact with Amanda. He didn’t feel up to it, he said, which wasn’t unusual for men in his situation, diving into his time and hiding in it. He’d thrown out Amanda’s daily letters because it was too hard to read them, he told me, his blue eyes heavy with tears that he was about to let go.

  I didn’t want him to start crying. A crying client would be problematic. I’d have two choices: to be a heartless bastard, ignore his tears, and move the conversation on by saying: ‘Would you like me to come another time?’; or to give him a hug, thereby relinquishing all authority and professionalism and rendering myself a soft touch.

  So I did everything I could to stop the tears, defaulting into my particular brand of cheery empathy, telling him a bit about my own despairing moments and turning the page on them. I didn’t tell him an unprofessional amount about myself, mind, just this and that, to put him at ease, open him up. And it clearly worked because he talked for two hours. I’d been warned by my colleagues that they regularly did two-hour-long interviews and I’d wondered how they could possibly manage it, sitting there on a chair in a smelly room asking open questions, reflecting things back, maintaining a non-threatening, non-judgemental posture that also exuded professional distance and authority. But with Jeremy I found myself so interested in everything he said that the minutes flew by.

  His work as a property developer fascinated me for a start. I’m an uncashed-up and unfulfilled real estate junkie, who wastes far too much of my time watching crap housing renovation shows, one after the other, and dreaming of that place in Spain with the veranda and one of those pools that merge into the horizon so it looks like you can swim in the sky. That said, I hadn’t even managed to re-do the bathroom of my flat in all the years I’d lived there. Hence I was very impressed with Jeremy, who owned seven flats around London, and had two renovation projects on the go and three full-time employees.

  ‘How do you manage getting workmen to turn up?’ I asked him, drawing on my sofa-based knowledge.

  ‘There are ways,’ he said. ‘Chocolate digestives work a treat.’

  His relationship with Amanda had clearly been passionate, although he didn’t speak about her much, except to say she was wonderful and he’d do anything to protect her. This was why he’d refused visits – to protect her from this place.

  His hobbies included cycling, running, Thai cooking, reading (he could never get through a James Joyce, like me), watching movies (his favourite, like mine, was The Shawshank Redemption).

  And his childhood had been heart-wrenchingly terrible.

  When I asked him about growing up, his head dropped down and swayed from left to right a little. After a moment, he attempted to say something.

  ‘What was that?’ I hadn’t deciphered his mumble.

  ‘I, um …’ he whimpered, head still down and shaking.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I asked.

  He dragged his head upwards, lips quivering, let out a deep breath, then looked at me.

  ‘When I was four, I did something really terrible. It’s why I’m in here, it’s what they have on me, a history of violence, because I tried to stop my sister from crying and I … I accidentally killed her, when I was four.’

  I was used to people telling me private stuff – stuff they’d never told anyone and were surprised to be telling me. I think I have the right kind of face, or ask the right questions anyway. I’m always being told things out of the blue – I stole my mum’s television, or I punched my husband, or I slept with Giuseppe from the gym, or I have a terrible itchy genital disease – but this topped anything I’d ever been told before and I didn’t quite know how to react. What did you say to someone who’d killed his baby sister? ‘Tell me, how did it feel to murder your sister?’

  My mind was reeling. I was aware I’d relinquished my blank, non-judgemental social-work face and instead had a horror-stricken open-mouthed one that screamed JESUS CHRIST, YOU DID WHAT?

  He broke down and cried onto the cold desk between us, and I felt like crying too. It was too awful, what he’d done. His little sister was gone. And he’d paid for it ever since.

  Before I could decide on how to respond to his tears, he managed to compose himself, thank me, ask me to please come and see him again, and then leave the room. If he hadn’t done this, I think I’d have sat there for ever not knowing what to say, looking at his head rocking in his hands. The man I was visiting had accidentally killed a baby, destroying the lives of everyone he loved, and his own life too, when he was four years old – only a tiny bit older than my little Robbie.

  Gathering my notes after he left the room, I realised I’d only written a few lines:

  Name: Jeremy Bagshaw

  Date of birth: 21/7/1976

  Address: 67 Station Street, Islington, London

  Currently on remand in HMP Sandhill, Glasgow

  Charge: Murder

  10

  Chas assured me everything was hunky-dory at home, so I left work with my colleagues and we went off to a West End pub to celebrate my first day in the job.

  I’d been marvelling at Danny all day, watching his every move. He dressed immaculately, seemed more confident and at ease than anyone I knew, and was the funniest bastard I’d ever met.

  In the taxi, he told me he’d written a social enquiry report for a stalker. In the section about the offender’s use of time, the report had read: ‘Mr Jones enjoys surfing the net and wanking his dog in the park.’

  ‘Sheriff Ross hates social workers. So he hauls me into the court,’ Danny said, ‘and threatens me with contempt.’

  ‘It was obviously a typo,’ Danny had explained to the Sheriff. ‘The report should read “walking”.’

  ‘Stop here,’ said Danny to the taxi driver, somehow knowing that we’d reached our destination. ‘Just drop us at the corner, that’ll be fine.’

  As Danny got out of the cab, extended his stick and retrieved money from his wallet, the taxi driver noticed he was blind.

  ‘So do you just listen to music, then?’ the driver asked Danny as he counted out the change.

  ‘Aye, I just listen to music and that, you know,’ Danny replied, entering into a conversation about Glasgow bands to make the driver feel at ease.

  Later he told me about a catalogue of similar incidents involving people’s bizarre reactions to his disability.

  One evening, he’d been walking home from the Sheriff Court, where he’d given evidence about a drug dealer he’d supervised. He said he could smell the shit-caked clothes of the two drunks a mile away. They were lying under the bridge, clutching their quarter bottles of fortified wine with all their might, when Danny passed by with his stick.

  ‘And we think we’ve got it bad,’ said Jakey 1.

  ‘There but for
the grace of God,’ said his friend.

  I was no better. In the pub that night, I was wondering how much the general opinion of me depended on my looks, which were, I had to admit, rather good.

  ‘Do you want to touch my face?’ I asked Danny when Robert went to the bathroom.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You can touch my face if you like,’ I said.

  If he touched my face, I supposed, he would understand that my wit and intelligence were accompanied by the kind of symmetrical features that babies and jurors like.

  ‘Do I have to?’ he asked, and then, when Robert returned to the bar:

  ‘You’ll never guess what … she wants me to touch her face!’

  ‘Can I?’ asked Robert, doing it anyway, and all was raucous for several Krissie-is-a-dick-filled minutes.

  Idiot.

  Changing the subject, I told them all about my triumphant detective work with the sex offender, and then about Jeremy. ‘He seems sad … and nice,’ I said.

  ‘That’s the murder one, yeah?’ said Danny. ‘Doesn’t seem too nice to me.’

  ‘He’s not guilty yet,’ I asserted. ‘Anyway, I think it’s important to get to know a client before looking at what other people say about them, or accuse them of.’

  ‘Noble,’ said Robert.

  ‘Impossible,’ added Danny.

  They didn’t seem overly interested in Jeremy’s childhood story. ‘But have you ever heard anything as sad as that?’ I asked.

  ‘Aye!’ Robert said, and went on to top my story with one involving an old bloke with dementia and his three-legged terrier. He and Danny then played sad-story poker, bidding one tale of woe after the other.

  Danny had supervised the shoplifting daughter of a notorious serial killer. She’d blamed herself for years for failing to alert the authorities to her father’s activities, before turning to heroin.

  Robert was supervising a guy who got into an argument with the neighbours, lashed out with a hammer, and accidentally killed a young girl who just happened to be walking up the close.

  One of Danny’s lifers was a prostitute who had failed in her plan to kill herself, but had managed to take out her kids.

  And so it went on. I realised that Jeremy’s was just one of many, many sad stories of prisoners’ lives.

  ‘After a week or so you’ll stop talking about your cases,’ said Danny. ‘You’ll get home and be like – yeah, yeah, work was fine. You’ll get used to it.’

  ‘If you don’t, you’ll get constant migraines, like Hilary,’ added Robert.

  ‘Or be on long-term sick, like a third of us,’ said Danny.

  ‘Divorced like two thirds of us,’ Robert nodded, obviously divorced.

  ‘Alcohol-dependent like three quarters …’ Danny raised his glass to mine.

  ‘Welcome to the job!’ I said, clinking glasses with two fragments of social-work wreckage.

  *

  When I arrived home that night I’d have sworn burglars had ransacked the place. Clothes were all over the floor of the hall, the bath was filled with scum-topped grot, the toilet was un-flushed, dishes were piled on the kitchen table and on the sink, and all the cushions from my new Habitat sofa were piled up in the spare bedroom. I was about to scream in anger – How could the place be so messy after just one day? – when Chas and Robbie pounced out at me from behind the bedroom curtain. Despite being up way past his bedtime, Robbie looked so happy and chortled so hard that I forgave Chas for his housekeeping skills this time. As my job got harder and my hours longer, it became an issue that I was far less reasonable about.

  The painting had gone well, Chas told me. They’d managed an elaborate multicoloured train track covering half the floor of the studio, and spent the rest of the day singing nursery rhymes with the sculptors (Robbie was a big hit with the sculptors).

  ‘Did you get any work done?’ I asked Chas.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ he said. ‘We’re both going to paint the sea.’

  Chas had made pizzas, hence the crap everywhere and the dishes in the sink, because unlike most sensible first-worlders, who either have pizzas delivered or buy supermarket ones, Chas made his from scratch. What this meant was two hours shopping, one hour kneading, another hour tossing and rolling, another chopping toppings, and another carefully placing ingredients on top. What this also meant was that every surface in the kitchen was covered in flour, every dish and every piece of cutlery was dirty and not in the dishwasher, radios were on all over the flat (he liked to cook while listening to the radio), and I didn’t eat till 10.30 p.m. As I tried to sleep through the indigestion, I wondered when the right time would be to tell Chas that I hated pizza.

  Later that night, after Robbie had fallen asleep, I gazed at him and tried to imagine a little boy the same age as him – someone who couldn’t even put on his own shoes – killing someone. If Robbie had killed a three-week-old baby, could he possibly know what he was doing? Would he have it in him to make that kind of decision? Could you even call it killing? How would I cope if my own baby died in that way?

  *

  The next day I posted the home background report for James Marney. As I walked back into my office, Robert was blue with laughter, having just received a medical certificate from his GP. He was six foot six, and his desk had been causing him back and leg pain for months. Robert had spoken to Hilary about getting a larger desk, who had spoken to the criminal justice admin officer, who had spoken to her admin senior, who’d filled out a form and given it to her team leader, who’d attached the form and written an accompanying letter to the man in charge of the disability fund, who’d read over the rules and regulations regarding special office equipment, photocopied the correspondence thus far, set up a meeting with his boss, and phoned Robert with the outcome: ‘Yes, you may have a large desk under the disability budget, but we require a medical certificate from your GP.’

  So Robert had spoken to his GP, a pleasant and witty woman in her late twenties. The medical certificate had just arrived in the post and this was the reason for Robert’s crippling laughter. Robert handed me the piece of paper. It read: ‘This is to certify that Mr Robert Brown is tall.’

  But enough of the hilarity. I had to go to Sandhill.

  *

  While I was waiting for Jeremy to arrive, I realised that Danny and Robert were right. It was daft and impossible to resist reading about the offence. So I pored over the only piece of paper that had been provided for me – the indictment:

  JEREMY ANDREW BAGSHAW, Prisoner of Sandhill, Glasgow, you are indicted at the instance of the right honourable THE LORD JOHNSTONE OF LOCHABER, Her Majesty’s Advocate, and the charge against you is that on Sunday 6 April, at The Lock House, by Crinan, Arygll, you did assault Bridget McGivern and did sever her breasts with a knife or similar instrument and did stab her on the body and repeatedly on the neck with a knife or similar instrument and you did murder her.

  It hit me. As I waited for him to arrive, I realised that Jeremy Bagshaw might well be good-looking and middle-class, he might well be in love and have a tear-jerking childhood story, but he’d also been accused of chopping off a woman’s breasts and stabbing that woman in the body and in the neck. And the blood was probably spurting all over the wall of the cottage in Crinan while he looked on with bloodstained teeth …

  ‘Hello.’

  It was my murderer. He had a black eye, and he didn’t look like someone who could stab a woman and cut off her breasts. I wanted to ask him about the victim. Who was she? What was the connection? But I wasn’t allowed to discuss the offence, and Jeremy looked frightened. He’d been seriously beaten.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he answered, looking over my shoulder nervously.

  ‘You can tell me,’ I whispered.

  ‘Nothing,’ he whispered back.

  I spent a while trying to coax it out of him, pointing out the anti-bullying poster on the wall and so on. But he was scared. He kept checking to see who was in the other interview r
ooms. I was savvy enough to know that being beaten is bad, but being a grass is worse, so I didn’t push him.

  ‘Don’t tell anyone. Especially Amanda. I don’t want to worry her,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t need to speak to Amanda for this type of report,’ I said.

  ‘You’d like her,’ he said, recalling how he’d fallen head over heels in love with her the first time he saw her. She’d had such a captivating smile, he said, and she laughed a lot. He loved that about her, the way she laughed.

  ‘Please don’t tell her I’m having a hard time, promise? Please don’t talk to her,’ he pleaded.

  11

  Amanda took Jeremy to Glasgow a week after the wedding. They drove fast from London but slowed a little somewhere after Penrith when Amanda gave Jeremy a blowjob.

  After five hours on the road, Scotland appeared by way of an insignificant white sign. Amanda shuddered. Ten whole years away, not far away for most of it, but far enough to be a whole other world.

  Jeremy might have shuddered too if he’d known he was about to meet Amanda all over again. No longer just Amanda, wild and whacky. No longer Amanda, role-less and un-referenced. She would be a daughter and a school friend and an ex-colleague. She would have an old primary school and photo albums and a favourite café. And Jeremy would be checked out by Amanda’s significant others outside his zone.

  Jeremy had never been to Glasgow, but as they drove in it was everything he’d imagined. Heavy impenetrable cloud hovered somewhere just above his windscreen, grey high-rises lined the road, sometimes painted at the front to try and give a good impression, but mostly not. Large blue signs pointed left to Glasgow, straight ahead to Glasgow, right to Glasgow. Glasgow was all around, the ‘dear green place’ with no dearness in sight and no green, just a confusion of signs pointing in every direction that seemed to say: ‘If you don’t know where you are, then what the fuck are you doing here?’