My Last Confession (7 page)

Ah fuck, I should’ve listened to Chas. Not only had I decided to make a completely unnecessary visit to Amanda, but I’d also forgotten to conjure up an
imaginary
glass cone to protect me from getting emotionally involved. I was welling up. I could hardly see the Ayr Road as I headed back to work from the salon.

Poor Jeremy
, I thought.

Wee Bella.
I shook my head, a tear falling.

And Jeremy’s parents … Imagine.

I stopped the car to compose myself, knowing I needed to get my head together for a meeting with the police.

‘Well done,’ said Hilary as I came into the office. ‘I hear you did well at the pre-release. I’m going to allocate you as Marney’s supervising officer.’

‘Can I talk to you about that?’ I started. I wanted to ask her if I had to supervise paedophiles. I wanted to convince her to give me murderers, drug dealers, car thieves, anyone, rather than child sex offenders.

‘Sure,’ Hilary said. ‘We’ll put it on the agenda next supervision. But I’m afraid I have to head home now. Migraine.’

I should probably have given this more thought before applying for the job. These guys were the big yins in
criminal
justice: high profile, high risk. And very few escaped
social work supervision since the new Sex Offenders Act, which meant that our teams were bulging at the seams with rapists, flashers, stalkers, lewd and libbers, etcetera, etcetera. There’d probably be no way of avoiding them, even if I told Hilary why I felt so uncomfortable. Or did everyone feel this way? Not just those who’d been touched by one in the past? I’d tell her, I decided, at our next supervision session – and ask for her advice.

Looking in the mirror of the grotty office toilet a few minutes later, I was thinking to myself that I looked a bit like Jodie Foster, when someone farted unashamedly in the cubicle, the force of it bringing me back down to earth – Glasgow earth and not Hollywood. Soon after, Penny walked out and said hello and I wondered how she could just smile and wash her hands like that, as if
nothing
had happened. Not even a slight blush or an apology (I’d have done both if a fart of mine had managed such longevity and volume). I guess her upper-middle-class self felt there was no need, that if one was to fart then one should let rip in the communal toilet. I didn’t like Penny.

‘How you doing?’ I asked her.

‘Fine,’ she replied. ‘Busy busy!’

FARTY! FARTY! I thought as she left, before returning to my pre-gusset-burp line of thinking which was that I looked and indeed was a little bit like Jodie Foster as Clarice Starling – tough and sexy and embedded in a shocking murder case.

I took my place at a risk management meeting that afternoon. It was about James Marney again, the ‘lewd and libber’ (i.e. a kid-toucher-upper). As I was now his supervising officer – although I would do everything in my power to get Hilary to change her mind – I needed to
liaise with other agencies to help find him somewhere to live quick smart.

We spent about half an hour sharing soft intelligence. God, even the words used in my job were sexy – soft intelligence, and even better than that, hard intelligence! It was practically as good as my bunny.

‘Krissie?’ said the police officer, Bond, clicking his
fingers
at me and stilling my wandering mind. Without even thinking about it, I had placed a cone of silence over my head. All I’d caught was something about needing to check with the housing officer in the prison. ‘Can you get onto it and let me know as soon as they have something for us to check out?’

‘Of course,’ I said, and we exchanged direct telephone numbers.

While my colleagues were tear-arsing around town with a flurry of court reports, absconding sex offenders and homeless drug users, I still only had the one report and one case, so I decided to be thorough.

I rang Jeremy’s lawyer, a young man with a lovely English accent. He told me he felt the attacker was
probably
a known sex offender. There had been several rapes in the Highlands over the last two years, he said, and one sexual assault and murder. The case against Jeremy was weak, he believed, and rested on two things: Jeremy’s mother’s alibi, and the DNA.

In relation to the alibi, Jeremy’s mother was not
corroborating
her son’s story. After being discharged from hospital, she had consistently maintained that she’d gone home alone, without seeing her son. Jeremy, on the other hand, insisted he had driven his mother to her house in
Haringey and stayed with her all night on the night of the murder. The lawyer agreed wholeheartedly with Amanda’s assertion that Mrs Bagshaw was lying. Her hatred for her son, and her desire to make him disappear, were more important to her than the truth.

As for the DNA, the lawyer explained, traces of
Jeremy’s
genetic material were found under the victim’s fingernails.

‘Shit,’ I said out loud after I hung up. Danny looked at me, having heard the entire conversation.

‘Be careful with defence lawyers,’ Danny warned. ‘You don’t want to be used as a plea in mitigation.’

‘I know, of course. I just find it really interesting.’

And boy, did I!

I was on a roll. First, I phoned the Scottish Criminal Records Office and asked if the list of previous convictions had arrived from England. It had, and when I received the fax I wasn’t surprised to find that Jeremy had none.

Next I contacted social services in Oxford and asked if there had been any previous contact. No.

Jeremy had given me authority to talk to his childhood GP, so I phoned Dr Charles McQuillan of John Street in Oxford who said he’d had little contact since Bella died, just the odd ear infection, but psychological and psychiatric reports at the time drew a blank. A bit of
bedwetting
, but nothing much else. ‘Looked like a terrible accident,’ Dr McQuillan said.

Then I rang Mrs Anne Bagshaw, Jeremy’s mum. The alibi stories were so different. Someone was lying. I
wondered
if she would talk to me.

‘Hello?’ I said, and introduced myself, explaining who
I was, where I worked, the report I was writing for court, and that the judge wanted to know all about Jeremy’s background and any psychological issues that might affect his response to custody. I went on about how I knew it was very difficult for her, but that I’d seen Jeremy and he was coping all right in prison and that he’d said he didn’t mind if I called and spoke about –

It was about then I realised she’d put the phone down.

I felt irritated. Why would she put the phone down? No matter what her son did in the past, or had done now, he was still her son, and should surely –

‘I think we got cut off,’ I said after she picked up the second time, and the phone immediately went dead again.

I was annoyed.

‘Don’t hang up!’

But she did, and my anger grew each time the phone rang out after that. What was going on? She seemed to have completely cut Jeremy out of her life. What kind of mother would desert her son like that?

Over the next two days, I gained five cases and two reports, which Danny had been entrusted to allocate as Hilary was still off sick.

Danny’s allocations meetings consisted of the four of us sitting around Danny’s desk with a pile of report requests and orange files in the middle, playing paper, scissors, stone.

I did a bomb (thumb up, beats everything) each time a sex offender appeared, and while Robert and Danny maintained that bombs are not part of the game, Penny told them to let it be.

‘Just leave it,’ she said. ‘I’ll take them.’

After the game was completed, we spent a half-hour swapping anyway, using arguments like:

He lives near my house, so I don’t want him ’cause I’ll keep bumping into him.

He lives near my house, so I do want him so I can do home visits 3.30 each Friday.

I had her last time. Your turn, Mrs.

Give me that. I love thugs.

Give me him, the little bastard.

So I gained five cases and two reports, none of them sex offenders.

I also gained a smoking habit.

How could I resist smoking at work? Smokers had the naughty gene. They were the fun guys who sought out danger, and were undeterred by rain or wheezing. The smokers in my office were rowdy, usually hung-over, and knew all the office gossip. During my six or so fag breaks in those first two days as a reformed-reformed smoker, I discovered the following:

Smokers! Ah! What would work be without them? They laughed. They moaned the glorious moan of the social worker. They knew how to get the most out of mileage and overtime claims. And most of all, they had cigarettes. I was at the pre-contemplative stage of smoking, which meant I hadn’t yet stood up in a crowd and admitted my addiction. Which also meant I never bought my own.

So my first week came and went, and by the end of it I was a shit-hot parole officer – if a little over-empathetic – a smoker, and almost as neglectful of my son as Mrs Bagshaw had been of hers.

It seemed as if Robbie had grown about ten feet and learnt about a hundred new words when I finished up on the Friday, and when I came in he didn’t run to me and hug me and never want to let me go. He looked up at me and then went back to making his magic fairy potion with Chas. So far, they’d put in self-raising flour, water, Nesquik (chocolate
and
banana), oats and honey, and they were now considering what to add next.

‘Loganberries!’ said Robbie.

He had never said this word before. Indeed, few people I knew had.

‘Where did you find out about loganberries?’ I asked him, but he couldn’t be bothered answering me because he and Chas had decided that the fairies in the drying green would probably prefer bubble bath.

I had no role in Robbie’s life any more, I thought,
sighing
.
I was away every day, and he was with other people, learning from them, hanging out with them, changing. As I bathed him later on I realised that there was no such
thing as quality time, only quantity time, and he wasn’t getting that with me. Just like Jeremy’s mother, I’d removed myself from his life.

‘Oh shut up!’ said Chas after the story and our family cuddle. ‘Every mother feels this. It’s natural. You’re a wonderful mum and Robbie adores you. You’re just
shattered
. It’s Friday, so you have two whole days of quantity time ahead of you.’

Chas took off to the studio the next morning and Robbie and I made pancakes and a huge mess. He sat up at the kitchen bench with a tea towel tucked into his ‘I’m easily distracted’ T-shirt, and broke three eggs against a glass bowl. The first two landed on the floor, but Robbie cracked the last one like a TV chef – a neat bang to the middle with a firm right hand, the left hand moving in for the separation, a quick wrist-flick upwards, and there we had it! A perfect shell-less egg in a bowl. We sang a song to celebrate – something about Donald egg-crackers being the best damn egg-crackers in the world. It was wonderful.

Afterwards, we walked to the park and tossed burnt pancakes to the ducks. After that we went to the transport museum and I watched the Rob-mobile run from tram to bus to bike to car to ye-oldy-streety-with-ye-oldy-undergroundy-stationy. It was a fabulous day with a lot of laughing. At bedtime when I asked Robbie what he’d liked about the day he said ‘Everything, Mummy’ and hugged me so hard I wanted to weep with joy.

Back when he’d had his first interview with Krissie Donald, Jeremy had returned to his cell and been
surprised
to find that the officer who’d escorted him back didn’t lock the door to his cell.

He took to his bunk to think over what he’d spoken to Krissie about – his love for Amanda, how much he missed her, how he could never see her again. The social worker had offered to supervise a visit, if it would make things easier, but he’d refused. He couldn’t see Amanda full stop. It was too hard.

While he’d been musing about things, a prisoner had appeared at his cell door, unsupervised. He was scarred, scary and built like a brick shithouse. Jeremy had seen him before – in the quadrangle, and also in Agents. He’d been in the interview room across the way, and he’d stared at Jeremy for a frightening amount of time with Alpha Dog eyes and a small smile on his face.

Jeremy had sat up, his brain throbbing with what might be about to happen. Was the brick shithouse going to rape him? Would Billy hold him down while the brick shithouse pushed his filthy cock into his bottom? Or maybe the other way around, or maybe both?

Looking over the shoulder of the large prisoner, he saw an officer on the landing, but the officer just winked. Oh God, both, plus the guard, all three. Shit, oh shit.

‘Billy here knows your little friend,’ said the brick
shithouse
, psychopath grin still there.

‘Sorry?’ Jeremy said, trying to control his panic.

‘Your social worker friend, Krissie Donald.’

‘Uh-huh?’ Jeremy didn’t know what else to say. As it turned out, he hadn’t needed to because the script had been written for him.

‘Billy worked with her boyfriend in the cook’s room a few years back, didn’t you Billy?’

Billy didn’t answer.

‘Billy says there were photos of her all over the guy’s cell. He was in love, wasn’t he, Billy? Billy’s friends with him still, aren’t you, Billy?’

Billy still hadn’t said anything.

‘Oy, Billy, you’re mates with her man, aren’t you?’

‘Aye,’ came a mousey response.

‘Knows all about him, where he lives, which is where she lives. I think their friendship’s about to come in handy.’

Billy watched from his top bunk as the brick shithouse kicked into Jeremy’s stomach, head, legs, arms. He didn’t move.

Jeremy remembered the feeling of fists pounding into his face, knees, groin. He’d thought he was going to die, and he probably would have if he hadn’t said yes.

Yes, he understood that she wouldn’t be searched as vigilantly.

Yes, Billy was sure to get out shortly.

Yes, he would get her to bring the stuff in.

Yes, if she didn’t, then the next visit wouldn’t be so pleasant.

Jeremy looked at Krissie during that second interview and thought about her home situation. She’d already told him she had a son. She’d told him she was in love too, and so she understood how hard it must be for him. It was clear she was kind and naïve, that she was someone with love and hope in her life.

And he couldn’t do it, so he left the room.

But afterwards it wasn’t only a beating. It was as bad as he could have possibly imagined.

The worst thing wasn’t how sore it was being held down, or having the small tub of Flora Light margarine from someone’s lunch spread over his white loaf while his mouth was gagged with an old sock; the worst, most awful thing was that halfway through, Jeremy got an erection. When he thought over the twenty-minute ordeal, often waking in a sweat with the memory of it, it was this that made him most angry of all. While being brutally raped by an ugly stinking dangerous man, with a junkie ned looking down from his top bunk, he had somehow gotten himself a hard-on.