My Last Confession Page 9

  It hadn’t been a success, Bob said, because the uniforms in the health centre corridor had put their booklets down and turned around for a Code Blue.

  *

  Bob finished a game of mini-basketball (he had a net set up on his office door) and then escorted me to the chaplaincy.

  Father Moscardini was a good-looking Scots-Italian man of about forty. His clothes were well ironed and he was trim and smiley. His wee room contained loads of cookery books and biographies. The radio was on. Father Moscardini was nothing like Father O’Hair or any of the other unhappy-looking priests I’d met as a child. He loved his job, and found giving comfort to men who were often at their lowest very rewarding. He’d just come back from performing a wedding for one of the inmates.

  ‘They seemed very much in love,’ the priest said. ‘It was very moving.’

  ‘I want to talk to you about Jeremy Bagshaw,’ I said, explaining his situation and his tragic past. ‘He’s worried about opening up.’

  ‘He needn’t be worried,’ Father Moscardini said. ‘I’ll go over and see him this afternoon.’

  21

  Something weird was happening to me. It started innocently enough, as an interview disguised as a manicure, but it was snowballing into other girly pursuits such as buying perfume and browsing in wedding-dress boutiques that I’d accidentally parked in front of.

  ‘When’s the big day?’ the assistant at Giuseppina Botti asked me.

  I replied that I hadn’t set a date yet. Even if I had, I would probably buy a reasonably priced trouser suit that I could wear again to various occasions and was I still talking out loud? If I was, the assistant wasn’t listening; she was checking my sizes.

  I had only ever worn a dress once, and it hadn’t been pleasant. I’d spent the whole evening with a scowl on my face hoping to God I didn’t have to run for a fire exit. Dresses were nonsensical, and yet the white gloriousness I was trying on was making me flush. Touching the raw silk of one in particular seemed to bring on the swelling sensation I had recently come to understand.

  I tried on several, but in the end it was the V-neck mermaid sheath with vertical passimentarie detail and floral-embroidered bust that spoke to me so loudly I paid £1,320 for it, on Visa. I’d return it, no doubt, but I couldn’t resist taking it home with me, even if just for a few days.

  Why did I do that? Something very strange was happening to me. Maybe it was the chaplain who’d reminded me of the world of ritual I’d forsaken, or the tragic newly-weds, or moving in with Chas, or maybe it was Robbie, who was sleeping much better, and life was getting easy again, and I wouldn’t want that, would I?

  I snuck in the front door, got changed into my dress, crept into the spotless living room and went ‘Boo!’ Chas and Robbie were hugging on the sofa watching the Tweenies. Robbie lunged at me with his Nutella on toast and covered the whole of the vertical passimentarie detail in chocolate spread.

  ‘Shite!’ I said.

  ‘Shite!’ Robbie said.

  Chas stood nervously at the bathroom door as I banged at the bodice with a wet flannel. It would have been very helpful for Chas at this point if there’d been a little guy at the bottom right-hand side of me ‘interpreting for the male’:

  CHAS: Are we getting married?

  ME: No, I’m just going a bit mad and this dress spoke to me and now it’s ruined and I can’t take it back!

  LITTLE GUY INTERPRETING FOR THE MALE: No, because you haven’t asked me, bastard.

  CHAS: I thought we didn’t believe in marriage.

  ME: We don’t.

  LITTLE GUY INTERPRETING FOR THE MALE: What’s not to believe in, prick?

  CHAS: Robbie made a shop at nursery today!

  ME: Really?

  LITTLE GUY INTERPRETING FOR THE MALE: Really? You’ve changed the subject already? That’s it? That’s all you have to say when I’m standing here in a stunning wedding dress that’s covered in Nutella and my hair’s all frizzy and my mascara has smudged and I’m a mad spinster lady. I’m Miss Havish-(snort)-sham!

  *

  Chas grabbed my hand and escorted me into the living room.

  ‘Tell Mummy how much money you made, little one!’ Chas said to Robbie.

  ‘I made Miss Watson fall over!’ Robbie said.

  ‘You didn’t check what he packed,’ said Chas, relaying what happened after I’d dropped Robbie at nursery that morning.

  Robbie had waved me goodbye, touched the window as he always did, then run to the yellow room. His friends Mark Campbell and Evie Brock were setting up shop at the large plastic counter. The children bought, sold, pinged the till and filled their trolleys with glee until Miss Watson came in to make the play more structured and noticed that the only thing left to buy was an Anal Probe.

  Little Evie had bought the Twelve Inch Black Dildo, the Nipple Stimulator with Chilli Sex Gel, the Turbo Tongue, and the Slide and Ride. Mark Campbell had bought the Cone, the Three Way Rabbit, the Lusty Licker and the Small Thai Beads. He was laughing like mad because the crotchless edible underwear was vibrating on top of the eggs that had turned themselves on at the bottom of his blue plastic trolley.

  ‘Buzzy things!’ Robbie said, smiling widely as I gazed inside his sex-toy-crammed Thomas the Tank Engine suitcase.

  ‘Oh God,’ I said to Chas. ‘I am the worst mother in the world.’

  22

  Jeremy had never been a religious man. His mother hadn’t encouraged any kind of faith. She’d sent him off to a nondenominational boarding school as soon as she could, leaving him to seek comfort in success, rather than in God. But after Krissie spoke to him about forgiveness, Jeremy realised he wanted and needed the non-judgemental confidence of another.

  So Father Moscardini visited Jeremy every day after the terrible low that had caused him to try and squeeze the air from his own lungs. He sat in the interview room in the hall and listened as Jeremy talked about seemingly irrelevant things, like his work, music and cookery. The priest was a sensible, kind man, and he didn’t freak Jeremy out with Bible talk.

  Neither did he rush him.

  ‘When you’re ready, we can talk about the harder things,’ Father Moscardini said. ‘There’s no hurry.’

  At the same time each day, Jeremy spent an hour talking about ‘easier things’, like falling in love with Amanda, feeling safer and calmer each time. After a while, Jeremy began to realise he wasn’t alone, he wasn’t evil, and he wasn’t unworthy. He was a man, and a man could be forgiven.

  A few hours after the seventh daily visit from Father Moscardini, Jeremy rang the buzzer beside the door of his cell and asked to be escorted to the chapel.

  It took a while, but eventually an officer came and let Jeremy out of his cell.

  ‘You have as long as you need,’ the officer said. ‘Father Moscardini’s okayed it with the hall supervisor.’

  The officer led him past B hall and opened a bare metal door beside the segregation unit. Inside, a long concrete hallway led to another nondescript metal door. The officer opened it.

  Jeremy was shocked when he saw the chapel. The huge cavernous space had been so well camouflaged and was completely at odds with every other building in the prison compound. A feeling of welcome overcame him as he took in the vast and beautiful place of communal worship.

  Seeing the small confessional booth in the corner of the church, Jeremy walked towards it, took a deep breath and opened the door.

  ‘Are you there?’ Father Moscardini said from the darkness. ‘There’s nothing to be afraid of. It’s safe in here. Nothing you say will ever be repeated.’

  ‘Father, is it bad to love someone with everything you have?’ began Jeremy.

  ‘It’s wonderful. Love is the most wonderful gift we have. It’s bottomless.’

  ‘But it hurts.’

  ‘Would you like to talk about your sister, Jeremy?’

  Silence.

  ‘Jeremy? Are you there?’

  He wasn’t. It was too hard. He thought he could, but h
e couldn’t. The very word ‘sister’ had made him want to vomit.

  ‘Take me back,’ Jeremy said to the officer after stepping out of the confessional booth. ‘Just get me back to my cell.’

  23

  The period after moving back to the flat and getting myself a full-time job had been hard.

  For the previous two years, Mum and Dad had done all of the work of making sure sleep was had, food was eaten, and clothes were cleaned and ironed. Of course, Chas and I had helped with housework and contributed to bills, but during that time I hadn’t needed to get a job, and could devote all my energy to Robbie, Chas – and me. Meanwhile, Chas had been able to procrastinate with his painting. All in all, we’d been cocooned from the hard reality of day-to-day life.

  But now there seemed to be no time to relax and enjoy each other. Mornings were a frantic race to make breakfast, get clothes on everyone and pack lunches. The evenings often felt as if a whole other day of work needed to be squeezed in – cooking, bathing, washing, tidying, getting Robbie to sleep.

  We often slept badly, too. I seemed to have inherited Mum’s fidgety feet. Chas snored. And Robbie invariably crawled in between us in the early hours, wriggling and pushing at us till Chas and I were perched at the edges of the bed.

  Then we finally woke to the alarm and the whole process began all over again.

  Weekends didn’t seem to be much better. Most of Saturday was spent recovering from work, while Sunday involved a fair bit of dreading the week ahead.

  No matter how hard we tried, neither of us was able to leave our work in our respective workplaces. Jeremy was on my mind constantly, as were several other distressing cases I’d been allocated. And Chas was always off in a dwam, his face blank and distant as he thought about what stroke, what colour, what frame he might use for a painting. His opening wasn’t far away, and I could tell he was terrified.

  Sometimes I wondered if it would have been different for me and Chas if we’d been together before I had the baby. At least then we’d have had some ‘us’ time. As it was, Chas and I got together when Robbie was nine months old. Chas loved him with all his heart, but Robbie wasn’t his baby, and our relationship had been plunged into a very domestic routine, with little time for us to get to know each other as people, and not just as parents.

  But the thing about us, the thing that separated us from so many of my other friends who’d had affairs, or withheld sex and affection, or split up, or just whined on and on about each other, was that we talked.

  The Nutella rinsing out in the bath, Chas and I went over our mistakes, which included:

  Me expecting a tidy house when a tidy house was indicative of nothing more than tidiness.

  Chas working all night every night towards his exhibition, being preoccupied and nervous about it, and worrying all the time about whether he would ever be able to provide for us.

  Me getting too close to a client and needing advice at work but not getting it.

  Chas feeling left out of the whole orgasm thing and wondering if there was something wrong with him.

  Me thinking I was a bad mother because I didn’t look after Robbie 24/7.

  Once again, we made some plans:

  Nine to five was a rule, for both Chas and me. No late nights, no excuses. Family time was sacrosanct.

  I had to talk to my colleagues more if my bosses were never there.

  Chas had to stop beating himself up re my orgasms being machine-induced.

  I had to stop beating myself up about Robbie, who loved the nursery in the mornings, and spent the rest of the time with people who adored him.

  Chas had to switch off worrying about his painting when he wasn’t at the studio.

  I had to find a bloody cleaner!

  I had to leave off about marriage for a while. We’d only just moved in together and we needed to take one step at a time.

  Spooning in bed, we felt confident that work and domestic difficulties would never get the better of us again.

  24

  There were ten cases and three court reports in my pigeonhole the next morning. My boss – newly returned to work – had also left a note saying she would be out of the office attending a training course. I had to laugh when I saw the course was called, of all things ‘Absentee Management: everything you need to know about dealing with and reducing staff absences’. ‘Any questions, ask Eileen,’ the note concluded.

  I had no idea who Eileen was but could be fairly certain she would either be off sick, in a meeting or doing a training course, or have a queue of hyperventilating child protection workers waiting at her door.

  I had the usual fag and gossip, listened to Robert sing a song he’d written about a famous glamour model, and leafed through my new cases.

  The first was a fifty-year-old lifer. Back when he was twenty, he’d shaken his baby to death, his defence being that his girlfriend should never have left him to look after the screaming wean all the time. He’d done ten years, and then been recalled to prison three times since his initial release for drink-related offences – drink-driving, assault and breach of the peace.

  ‘Ah, that one used to be mine,’ said Danny. ‘I asked Hilary not to give it to me again ’cause his couch is so sticky.’

  ‘Cheers, Dan,’ I said, skimming two other cases: an elderly Asian woman who’d bought £13,000 worth of marble for her kitchen, hall, bathroom, en-suite and living room using other people’s credit cards; and a seventeen-year-old girl who’d deliberately set her house on fire (‘’cause she was in a bad mood’), leaving her cousin chronically ill and seriously disfigured.

  I’d just finished the sending out of a batch of letters introducing myself and asking people to come into the office when the phone rang. It was Jeremy’s mother, Mrs Bagshaw. And she was in Glasgow.

  *

  I arrived at the Clyde View Self-Catering Apartments half an hour later. Mrs Bagshaw was in number 12, a modern flat in a glass building overlooking the murky Clyde.

  ‘What a view!’ I said, in an attempt to endear myself to her.

  It took a cup of tea and several minutes before our conversation turned to the more pressing topics of murder and suicide.

  Anne Bagshaw was a cold, intense woman with a tight, unlovable face. She was over-ironed, smelt of gin, and asked about her son in what felt to me like a very odd way, wanting to know about the details of the offence he’d been imprisoned for and the nature of his injuries. ‘Was he hit on the forehead?’ she asked when I told her he’d been beaten.

  I could understand that Anne Bagshaw had difficulty talking about her son. Her life had been torn apart by Bella’s death, and its circumstances must have haunted her constantly.

  But shouldn’t she feel for her son as well? I’d been wondering how I’d feel about Robbie if he did something dreadful as a toddler, and believed that I would feel terrible for him, love him more and do everything I could to protect him from the guilt and pain of what had happened. But then it hadn’t happened to me.

  The past aside, Anne Bagshaw’s lack of concern for Jeremy’s current situation surprised me. Why was she asking such bizarre questions? What did it matter? Her son, her little boy, whom she had loved with all her heart when he was wee, whom she’d breastfed and pushed on a swing, was on remand for murder. He hadn’t been found guilty yet. He’d been beaten and perhaps raped. And he wanted to kill himself.

  ‘You must love him very much,’ I said, accusing her of the very opposite with my tone.

  ‘No,’ she said flatly. ‘And it’s very hard when you don’t love your child. It’s hard because you feel guilty. Hard because the child will never go away. Hard, in my case, because I have a very good reason to not love him. Bella never got to have a birthday because of him, my little Bella … I have it in mind to surprise him,’ she said, snapping-to suddenly.

  That was another odd thing. She wanted to surprise him. She’d come all the way from London – I assumed she was intending to corroborate his alibi – but she couldn’t quit
e face seeing him yet and made me promise not to tell him.

  By the time I left I was thoroughly bamboozled by everything about her, from the way she looked into my eyes intensely as if she was trying to read my soul, to her inability to forgive her son, to her refusal to see him. I hated that she hadn’t got a taxi straight to Sandhill and run to him saying, ‘It’s okay, it’s okay, I’m here!’

  *

  When I got back to work I looked at Jeremy’s report. I’d practically finished it. As required, I hadn’t discussed the offence or meshed my assessment of Jeremy with the crime he was accused of. But as I sat there thinking about Jeremy, his wife and his mother, I became overwhelmed with curiosity about Bridget McGivern, the woman Jeremy was accused of killing. I googled her name: Bridget McGivern.

  Several snippets caught my eye:

  1. Obituary, Glasgow Herald:

  Aged 45, beloved mother of Rachel, 18, husband of Hamish, sorely missed, etc., etc.

  2. Article, Daily Record:

  DERMATOLOGIST SLAIN BY

  PSYCHO SON-IN-LAW

  A man was arrested today for the murder of his mother-in-law. The evil Londoner has been charged with the brutal murder of BRIDGET McGIVERN in Crinan, Argyll. The victim, a dermatologist in Stirling, had just reunited with the daughter she gave up for adoption when she was 17. Sources reveal that the accused had a history of violence.

  3. Article, The Scotsman:

  FAMILIES FOR CHILDREN REVIEW

  A review into the procedures for reuniting adopted children with their biological parents is under way following the murder of Bridget McGivern. The 45-year-old was killed just two weeks after being reunited with the daughter she gave up for adoption when she was 17. The incident has raised questions about whether our adoption agencies are offering sufficient counselling and support for what is a momentous and life-changing decision. In this case, counselling and support might have averted a terrible tragedy.