Bloody Women Read online

  ‘It has good girth, doesn’t it?’ Rory said to my furrowed brow.

  ‘Yes, girth is important,’ I played along.

  I’ve already explained about Mani’s. Large slit. Not good.

  As for Stewart’s, well let’s just say that his hands were equally as crooked. A veiny, gruesome, skinless banana, it was, and usually just as squidgy. I’d arranged to see Stewart last, two nights before my wedding, but his flight from London was cancelled. A stroke of luck for his banana, as it turned out.

  When I thought of my exes I inevitably thought about Joe. I thought I had finally got it right with him. Finally, after twenty years, four intense, long-term relationships, one pregnancy scare and one abortion, I had met the man who would take care of me, light a fire in our safe cave and hold me close.

  ‘I’ll hurt you,’ I told him when we both realised it was more than a fling.

  ‘You’ll never hurt me,’ he said. ‘I’m going to make sure of it.’

  I would have married him, had I not been arrested at the hairdressers’ a few hours before the service. I still dreamt of picking up the suitcases I’d packed the day before the police came. I imagined putting the cases in a taxi and getting on the Ryanair flight to Pisa to live with him forever as we’d planned.

  I won’t tell you about Joe’s penis.

  Janet Edgely was about fifty years old. She had a posh accent, long, straight dyed-brown hair and twenty-eight unnecessary pounds, many of which had settled around her breasts. She wore trousers and blouses and black court shoes and glasses which she fiddled with as she talked non-stop about her own life, over-using adverbs and over-emphasising certain syllables: ‘An overwhelmingly humid day!’ She was ‘desperately in love’ with a woman whose name never escaped her lips, no doubt in case I should escape to kill her. She lived in a one-bedroom flat in Edinburgh’s exclusive Morningside, with its large stone houses and neat tenements. She had gone to ‘the disastrously posh’ Mary Erskine’s School (hence the English–Edinburgh accent). She ate fifteen almond biscuits for breakfast and always had several crumbs clinging for life at the corners of her lipsticked mouth. Before happening upon the most wonderful woman in the world she had resigned herself to being single for the rest of her life and was more than satisfied with being aunty to her younger brother’s three, all under five, all ‘totally hilarious!’ She had devised a master plan that involved sunbathing, growing olives and eating tomatoes in Italy. I liked her plan. I liked the way she placed her papers in three neat piles on the desk and then patted each three times. I liked her. I decided to co-operate fully so she could expose how ‘preposterously’ I had been portrayed.

  The night after my first meeting with Janet, I asked the Freak for some paper and a pen. The following morning, I asked again.

  ‘But how would I kill myself with pencil and paper? I asked Mousey Nursey at our daily meeting.

  ‘Cut into your wrists with the paper a bit at a time, deeper and deeper, up the way . . . or scrunch the paper up . . .’ She was acting out her ideas. ‘Shove it in your mouth and nose, down your throat . . . or . . . stab the pencil into your eye, temple, heart . . .’

  ‘Okay, okay,’ I said. ‘I get it. Thanks for the tips!’

  ‘What do you mean, Thanks for the tips, Catriona?’ she asked.

  Ten days, ten suicide meetings and one move to a non-sui’ cell later, a piece of paper and a blunt pencil finally arrived. I wrote notes to give to Janet, putting, in chronological order, places, names, thoughts and feelings. At last, I thought, people will see the real me. Perhaps, I also thought, I will see the real me.

  While the proposed title and cover-rough warned me that Janet’s manuscript might not paint a sympathetic picture of me, I remained optimistic as I moved past her acknowledgements page. The ‘authorised biography’ was dedicated to people I’d never heard of: a dear and loyal friend called Margaret, ‘who hears me when I need to be heard’, a ‘tireless, enthusiastic’ agent, an editor, and Davina, ‘the love of my life.’ (So that was her name.) Finally, it was dedicated to my mother, ‘Mrs Irene Marsden, without whose wholehearted co-operation this book would never have happened.’

  Then came the:

  FOREWORD

  This book is based on a series of in-depth interviews with Catriona Marsden during her remand period awaiting trial in HMP Cambusvale, and with her mother, extended family, colleagues, friends, and the friends and families of the three victims: Johnny Marshall, Rory MacManus and Mani Sharma. I have also spoken with her fourth ex-lover, Stewart Gillies, and with her fiancé at the time of the murders, Giuseppe/ Joe Rossi. I have had access to diaries, letters and medical records as well as psychological, psychiatric, social work and prison-based reports. Where conversations at which I was not present are reported, I have on occasion used poetic licence, though this is always based on my thorough and detailed research of the people and events involved.

  Terrified of what was to come, I turned the page and began the first chapter.

  3

  CONGRATULATIONS: IT’S A SERIAL KILLER

  Cat Marsden is alluring, even in her prison uniform of green polo-shirt, grey sweatshirt and black trousers. She smiles sweetly, even though she has repeatedly attempted suicide by smashing her forehead against the edge of her cell’s metal mirror. She talks gently of her mother’s selfless mothering. She talks of falling in love. She has incredible eyes that hold a person’s gaze. She asks for order, chronology, to start at the beginning. She mumbles nervously, and cries.

  She’s so alluring that many good men have fallen at her feet.

  Johnny Marshall fell at her feet when she was fifteen and stayed there for four years.

  Rory MacManus took over until she was twenty-three.

  Mani Sharma – from twenty-four to thirty.

  And Stewart Gillies: he loved her for six months, until an ‘overlap’, when she seduced Joe/Giuseppe Rossi in the bathroom of her friend’s flat.

  But Cat Marsden is not nice. The week before her wedding to Joe, she arranged to meet her ex-boyfriends at separate haunts which had particular sentimental associations. Three of them showed. She got them drunk, seduced them, drugged them, mutilated their genitalia, killed them, and disposed of their bodies.

  She’s not nice at all. In fact – she’s pure evil.

  There are no other suspects in this case. Joe Rossi, the only other person with possible motive, was in Italy at the time of the murders. Anyway, there can be no doubt that the crime was a female one. What man would sever another man’s penis?

  It may be true that Cat Marsden can’t remember what she did, but it is glaringly obvious that she did do it. This book will attempt to explain why. It will offer some insight into the mind of an obsessive, man-hating, violent, crazed killer.

  It will start at the beginning . . .

  On a cold November day, Irene Marsden arrived at the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh. She’d phoned her husband half an hour earlier.

  ‘This is it! Not like the last times. This is really it, Jamie!’

  She was three weeks early, and James Marsden wasn’t due leave for a fortnight, but his boss arranged for him to get the next supplies helicopter to Aberdeen.

  ‘I’ll be there before you know it!’ he said.

  He took twelve hours. When he arrived in the ward his wife was sleeping. His daughter was screaming in the plastic cot beside the bed.

  ‘She was silent when she came out,’ Irene told her husband after waking to his kiss. ‘I’m sure the doctor slapped her, to get her going, you know, but she didn’t cry.’

  ‘Well, she’s making up for it now!’ the proud father said, lifting his child to his chest. ‘And where did that bright red hair come from?’

  The baby’s hair rose from her head in thick ginger tufts. While James Marsden had been married to Irene for several years, and had gone out with her for two beforehand, he still had no idea that a fire of red – or strawberry blonde, as Irene had retorted to her playground bullies – raged under
neath two dyed-brunette areas.

  ‘Serious, deadly serious,’ said the mother, stroking her daughter’s cheek. ‘Why so serious, little girl?’

  She had a face even a mother couldn’t look at for very long.

  I flicked through the rest of the chapter angrily. Nothing was recognisable: not the words I’d spoken, the memories I’d recounted, nor the people I’d known. Dad had apparently been a relaxed man who made pottery in his spare time. He’d had an open relationship with my mother, who he believed to be ‘out to get’ him.

  ‘My wife is evil,’ Dad had apparently told one of his friends. ‘She means me harm.’

  The offshore alcoholics were sociable hard workers, who all agreed I was a creepy child.

  The ‘family’ doctor, whose name I didn’t recognise, said he knew me well, and shuddered when he looked at my file.

  Mum’s diary expressed the ‘torture and exhaustion’ she’d endured in those early weeks at the hands of a child ‘who sometimes stared a little too intensely’. Carefully selected segments of the notes I’d written about my childhood were included.

  ‘I often wondered how my mother ever loved me.’

  ‘It’s hard not to hate my father for what he did.’

  ‘If only I’d been normal.’

  All of which demonstrated my psychopathic fucked-up-ness.

  I had abandonment issues, apparently. After many years of infidelity, frittering away the family’s grocery budget on alcohol, and descending into despair, my father had killed himself. I was ten. I had never liked to talk about it. I hadn’t told Janet anything to inform her conclusion that his death caused

  a bubbling anger at him and all men, so intense that she has never visited his grave, so immense that it eventually erupted.

  I slammed the book shut then punched my hideous printed face. If the Freak hadn’t stormed in, keys jangling, to say, ‘There’s an Anna Jones here to see you,’ I might have ripped the pages into teeny pieces with my teeth, or else taken Mousey Nursey’s advice and started to use them to make paper cuts to my arms.

  ‘There’s an Anna Jones here to see you,’ the Freak repeated, because I hadn’t responded. I was sore, after the punch, and I was still shocked about the book. But Anna was here.

  Anna was here.

  4

  ‘Did you read it?’ Anna asked from the opposite side of the table. She looked worried, but then Anna always looked worried.

  ‘A few pages,’ I said. ‘How’d you get it?’

  ‘Last time she interviewed me I pocketed her memory stick.’

  She reached across to touch my hand. I resisted, not only because I wasn’t allowed to have body contact with my visitors, but because Anna had reached across to touch me once before, and it had almost ruined my teens.

  ‘A lot of it’s about us,’ she said. ‘You’re a man-hating lesbian.’

  It wasn’t so ridiculous. Since being arrested for three murders, nothing seemed outlandish.

  ‘Do you think there’s any truth in that?’ Anna ventured.

  ‘Which bit?’

  ‘Why have you always chosen complete bastards?’

  ‘It would be a neat story, I suppose . . . Like Heavenly Creatures.’

  ‘And that one with Sharon Stone.’

  Anna stared at me, then sighed. ‘Oh God, look at you,’ she said. ‘I should never have sent it. You shouldn’t read any more, Cat. Okay? I want you to try and relax. It’s just nonsense. You need rest, that’s what. No more stress. Promise?’

  ‘I promise.’

  It was exercise time – that time of the day when they rounded us up, scanned us with walk-through detectors, and ushered us into a concrete, barbed-wired yard to walk in the rain. I liked exercise, always had, and even though this was the most depressing way to get it, it was still the best part of my day.

  Anna hadn’t changed much over the years, I thought, as I upped the pace for the fourth quarter of the twenty-four circuits I always had just enough time to do. She was slim, tall and sporty, with deep hazel eyes and short dark brown hair that was deliberately messy. She always wore the same sort of clothes – jeans, T-shirt, the latest kind of trainer – and always looked happy, even if she wasn’t.

  She was always interested in what people had to say: ‘Really? Tell me more!’

  In what the world had to offer: ‘Let’s do that! I’ll book it now.’

  In speaking her mind: ‘Are you a misogynist, Joe? Do you like to control your women?’ She’d only just met him, but didn’t like the way he’d ordered his cousin Diana to fetch a beer from the fridge.

  Anna was also loyal and trustworthy.

  ‘I’m not in this for the short-haul, Cat. You’re stuck with me for the duration.’

  I recalled our first meeting – at the Scottish Schools Netball Cup. We’d eyed each other before the game, running with our teams from end to end, stretching, taking off our intimidatingly bright opposing tracksuits to reveal trim netball legs and the bibs of our respective positions – I was goal defence, she was goal attack. I realised immediately that I’d met my match. Within seconds she dived into the ring, stopped still with the ball high in her hands, an intense look of concentration gleaming in her eyes, and scored. After that, I upped my effort, blocking and bounding and hovering and covering her so intensely that she was immobilised for much of the game, my close-jiggling body an impenetrable shield.

  It was because of me that we won, the captain said. My defending, and also the incident – I’d accidentally caught Anna’s leg mid leap. She had to go to hospital. Portobello ended up playing with one down. We scored thirteen goals in the last ten minutes, and won by twelve.

  Mum took me to the hospital afterwards. Anna was lying in bed.

  ‘It’s my fault!

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ she answered. ‘It was an accident. I’m fine, ya daftie.’

  Not long after, we both joined the same netball club in Edinburgh, and ended up in the same team.

  I finished my twenty-fourth circuit just in time, reaching the gate near the hall door as the sadistic Freak yelled, ‘That’s it!’ I walked to my cell silently, but with my head up, looking as many people in the eye as I could along the way.

  ‘Establish eye contact,’ a social worker had said early in my remand. He was trying to persuade me to get out of my cell for an anger management class. ‘Don’t show them you’re scared.’

  It worked, I think. No one ever bothered me. Unless it was because I was the most dangerous woman in Scotland.

  Once inside my cell, I tried hard not to look at the book. I had promised Anna I wouldn’t read any more, but then I’d never been very good at promises, didn’t really believe in them, to be honest. I’d promised Mum I’d work hard at school and I hadn’t. I’d promised Johnny I’d love him forever, and I hadn’t. I’d promised Joe I’d marry him, and I hadn’t. Promise was just a word like lying is.

  ‘I promise to love you in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health, till death do us part,’ my dad had said to my mum. Promises were like miracles. Promises were bullshit. But I understood Anna wanting me to promise.

  ‘Don’t read the book. It’s not you she’s writing about. I don’t know who it is.’

  There were two hours to fill till the next daily event – dinner. All I had to do was not look at the book.

  I looked at the painted bricks and counted them again – there were still 3,198. I looked at my feet at the end of my bed, at the photograph of Joe in the cemetery in Vagli di Sotto, smiling with love in his brown eyes, with the shelf-like granite gravestone of a twelve-year-old girl called Lucia Bellini visible in the background.

  I looked at the ten-inch grate that let whispers of real air in, I looked at the television. I tried to sleep. I looked at the insides of my eyelids, at the black and blue people that sometimes flew across the redness there. I stood up, looked at the impossible-to-kill-yourself-with mirror. The basin. The clock. The desk. Ah shit, the book was on the desk.

  One
hundred and two minutes had passed. Eighteen minutes to go before dinner.

  I brushed my teeth, had a drink of water, checked the clock – two more minutes had passed – headed for the desk to turn on the television, and grabbed the book.

  5

  EVIL IN THE PLAYGROUND

  Catriona’s primary school years were littered with incidents that could have warned the world.

  At five, she dug her teeth into Matthew Bain’s arm.

  ‘She wouldn’t say sorry,’ thirty-three-year-old Matthew recalls. ‘She zipped her mouth shut and threw away the key. I remember it, clear as day. In fact, I can show you the scar. Would you like to see it?’

  By the age of seven, her mother was at the head teacher’s office every month, pleading for forgiveness.

  ‘Please keep her. I’ll work harder, do anything!’

  It was impossible for anyone to fathom how this loving and committed mother could have such a troublesome child. They could find nothing medically wrong, despite numerous tests in her infanthood, and educational psychologists saw no need for intervention.

  ‘Yes, she knew how to talk to them,’ Irene says. ‘She was always very clever.’

  There were ongoing incidents in the naughty book.

  ‘Catriona Marsden poured black ink into Jack Munro’s school bag this morning . . .’

  ‘During lunch at home with Catriona Marsden, Brett Dalgetty’s navy blue fleece was chopped to pieces with a pair of scissors.’

  And so it went on. A bully in P1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7, and while her mother worked very hard with the professionals to direct her daughter, Catriona did not learn. She festered.

  But there are bullies in every class in every school. Very few of them become murderers.