Naked Truths (47 page)

Two minutes later she flew back into the main house, making Freddie spill his nightcap all over his chest.

‘Good Lord, what on earth's the matter?'

Angie looked at her husband, lower lip wobbling.

‘Oh, darling, I think Ash has gone!'

AS SHE SANK
to the floor in the hall, Catherine's past washed over her like a waking nightmare.

She had never known her father. He was a travelling salesman who'd been passing through the area, and once he'd met sweet, pretty twenty-two-year-old Annie Fincham, decided to stay a little bit longer. It was love at first sight for the impressionable Annie, but then she unexpectedly fell pregnant. Her lover, who had neglected to tell her that he already had a family in another part of the country, couldn't get out of there quick enough.

Annie's mother, a hard-faced woman with a nature to match, declared her daughter had brought shame on the family and promptly threw her out. Devastated, Annie was forced to live in an unmarried mothers' home, but from the moment Cathy entered the world, she fell head over heels with her smiling, chubby-cheeked bundle of joy.

Eventually Annie found them a council flat, and she and her infant daughter had their first home. It wasn't easy for them, but Annie took a job as a low-paid secretary, leaving her daughter with her kindly next-door neighbour, who was like the grandmother Cathy never had. When Cathy was nine, old Mrs Ainsworth died, and when she wasn't at school Cathy started to take care of the day-to-day running of their home. She didn't mind: by then her mother had worked her way up in the firm she had started in and was earning good money.

‘I'm doing this for us, Cathy,' she used to say. ‘I want to give you the life I never had.'

But their happy existence quickly came to an end once Ray entered their lives. Annie met him in a bar on a rare night out, and fell in love all over again. Cathy was fourteen when he came to live with them, and it didn't take long for his true colours to come out.

Ray was a control freak, a lazy manipulative slob who lay around the house all day dictating how Annie's money should be spent. Cathy grew to hate him and the way his eyes lingered on her legs when she came home from school. Often, she would walk into the kitchen to find her mother quietly crying after yet another one of their rows.

‘Kick him out, Mam!' Cathy would urge. She hated to see her mum like this, but Annie, who had been alone since Cathy's dad had left her, kept giving Ray more chances.

‘Ray's just had a bad day, Cathy,' she'd plead, taking her daughter's hands in hers. ‘He's a good man, really.'

Then the beatings started. The first time Annie got a black eye she tried to tell Cathy she'd walked into something, but as the rows got louder and more physical, it was impossible to ignore. Cathy begged her mum to go to the police, but her mum wouldn't hear of it. This was a tough estate in Newcastle where men still ruled, and domestic violence was a hidden, dirty secret. In some misguided way, Annie thought it was all her fault.

‘I need to try harder,' she'd say. ‘Ray's told me he'll never marry someone like me unless I sort myself out. No wonder he gets so angry.'

The house became a war zone, and night after night Cathy would lie awake in her narrow bed, pillow wrapped around her head, trying to drown out the rowing. She got used to blocking it out. Until one night.

Cathy had just started to doze off to sleep when a fearsome row erupted downstairs in the kitchen, before spilling out into the hallway. Cathy sat up alert, for once it sounded like her mother was giving as good as she got.

‘I've had enough, Ray! All this fighting – it's not fair on Cathy.'

An angry bellow, then Annie shouted again. Her voice was shaking.

‘I mean it! I want you out of here tomorrow. This is no good for any of us.'

Cathy heard her mother's softer footsteps on the stairs, and breathed a sigh of relief. But suddenly they were followed by louder, heavier ones. There was a thump, as if someone had fallen to the floor, and Annie gave a loud scream. It was so terror-struck it sent a chill down the teenager's spine.

‘No Ray! Get off me!
I can't breathe!
'

Cathy jumped out of bed and pulled open the door. Just a few feet away on the landing at the top of the stairs, Ray was lying on top of her mother. With a sickening jolt, Cathy saw his hands round her throat.

‘Don't you fucking tell me you're kicking me out, woman! I make the decisions round here. You got that?' He was almost incoherent with anger.

Annie couldn't speak. Her face had gone violently red, eyes popping out from their sockets as Ray slowly squeezed the life out of her. Somehow her gaze fixed on to Cathy's, struck dumb with terror in the doorway.

Annie's gaze was pleading.
Help me
, she was saying,
I'm dying.

Something went off in Cathy's head. Leaping forward, she frantically tried to pull Ray off her mother. But he was a burly man, and his grip held.

‘Get off her, get off her!' Cathy screamed hysterically, trying to claw at him, but Ray threw her against the wall, pain searing across her back.

‘Stay out of it, you little bitch! I'll deal with you in a minute.'

Annie's face was turning purple and she had stopped thrashing about. Cathy knew she had to do something; she just needed Ray to stop. In a blind panic she scrabbled around, her fingers chancing across the ornamental vase that stood on the top of the landing. As if in a dream, she picked it up, and brought the vase down on Ray's head, smashing it into pieces.

He dropped her mother like a bag of rubbish, and tried to get up, rubbing his head. He looked at Cathy in disbelief, eyes black with fury.

‘Now you're for it.' He lunged towards her groggily.

‘Get away from me!' Cathy screamed, and with all her strength, pushed him away. Ray stumbled back, losing his footing as he fell backwards. Eyes wide with shock, he looked at Cathy, grabbing out for the banister. But it was too late. As if in slow motion, he started to tumble backwards down the stairs, his head descending in a terrible arc. There was a loud
crack
as it hit a stair halfway down.

Cathy's hands flew over her eyes, but it still didn't stop the sound of Ray's body slithering heavily downwards. After what seemed an eternity an eerie silence settled on the house, punctuated only by Annie's gasping breaths and crying.

‘Mam! Are you OK?' Cathy knelt down beside her. Annie nodded and grabbed on to her, struggling to sit up.

‘Ray? What's happened?' she croaked.

Cathy forced herself to look down the stairs at that dreadful lifeless heap. Ray's eyes were open and staring, his neck bent at an impossible angle.

‘He's dead, Mum,' Cathy moaned again and again. ‘I pushed him and now he's dead. It's my fault, I killed him.'

The police arrived quickly, alerted by the neighbours. Annie told her daughter not to say it was she that had pushed Ray, sending him to his death down the stairs.

‘I'll say I did it in self-defence, Cathy,' Annie said, her face a swollen mass of tears and bruises. ‘They'll believe me, of course they will, with a face like this.'

Unfortunately, they didn't. Annie's own mother, still bitter over her daughter's ‘betrayal', denounced her and publicly announced to anyone who would listen that she had always known Annie was a bad egg. Rumours started circulating wildly on the estate that Annie, who had always been thought of as ‘stuck up' by others, just because she didn't socialize at the pub or bingo, had murdered Ray in cold blood and sworn her daughter to secrecy.

Weeks later in court, Annie told the packed room she'd never meant to kill him and had only hit him once in self-defence. But the victim's lawyer had already painted her as a loose, morally corrupt woman who had snared a man once by falling pregnant, and would stop at nothing to get what she wanted again. Once it turned out that Ray had had substantial life savings, mainly due to the different women he'd lived off, Annie stood no chance. Certain parts of the press jumped on the story, crassly labelling her the ‘Crimson Killer', a name that stuck after her pink lipstick was found on the dead man's face.

After a two-week trial, the jury of eight men and four women found Annie guilty of manslaughter. She was given an eight-year jail sentence and sent to a tough women's prison far away in Norfolk.

The day Cathy had gone to see her mother in prison had been the worst day of her life. Gone was the vivacious, warm woman she had known. All that was left was an empty shell.

For Cathy, who had already been carrying round the unimaginable burden of their secret pact, it was too much.

‘I should be in here, Mam!' she sobbed. ‘I can't let you do this.'

It was the one time Annie showed any of her former strength.

‘No, Cathy!' Her voice was urgent. ‘You must never tell anyone.' She reached across the table in the visiting room and took Cathy's hands in hers.

‘You were only protecting me, the way I should have protected you. I let you down, Cathy. I jeopardized your happiness for my own. I should have listened to you from the start, seen Ray for what he really was.'

Cathy looked down at the table, not knowing what to say. Annie laughed to herself bitterly. ‘What a mother I've turned out to be! I know what people are saying about me, maybe they're right after all . . .'

‘No, Mam, don't think like that!' Cathy was close to tears.

‘Pet, you're better off without me, now. As far as the world's concerned, I'm the Crimson Killer.' Her voice caught. ‘How can I carry on being any sort of mother to you?'

Cathy didn't like the way her mum was talking. ‘Don't say that, you're scaring me.'

Annie gripped her daughter's hand. ‘I may have ruined my life, but don't let it ruin yours, Cathy.' She smiled through her tears. ‘I've always known you're going to make something of yourself.'

‘Time's up.' The prison warden was standing over them. Annie gave Cathy's hand one final squeeze.

‘Promise me, Cathy!' Her voice was insistent again. ‘You've got potential, don't waste it!'

Cathy couldn't answer for a moment, then she squeezed her mum's hands in return. ‘I promise. You'll be out of here one day, and I'll have a nice big house by then, you wait and see. Just you and me, away from everything.' She gulped away the tears, trying so hard to stay strong. ‘I love you, Mam.'

Annie Fincham smiled back sadly. ‘I love you too, sweetheart.'

Cathy watched her mother being led off, like a butterfly that had been trapped and had its wings broken. It was the last time she ever saw her alive.

Desolate with grief and shame, Annie Fincham lasted exactly two weeks and three days before she hung herself in her cell with a bed sheet, a tragedy that further convinced the public of her guilt.

Aside from the prison chaplain and a prison officer, Cathy was the only one at her mother's funeral. Annie Fincham's ashes were buried in an unmarked grave at an unmarked location.

Cathy, now sixteen, was taken in by her reluctant grandmother, and she never let Cathy forget the scandal her mother had brought upon them. Cathy, who was devastated, guilt-stricken and betrayed by her mother's death, was left to deal with her grief alone.

But the nightmare was by no means over. A bent copper who'd worked on the case and needed money to clear his debts had sold a story to one of the most salacious tabloids, asserting his conviction that Annie and Cathy had plotted to kill Ray Barnard for months. Claiming that something about Annie's story hadn't added up, the policeman was convinced she was lying to protect the real perpetrator of the crime, Cathy. An injunction was brought out, but by then the damage was done. The whispers didn't take long to start, and before long they had degenerated into downright finger-pointing. At school and at home, Cathy was shunned and taunted. ‘Killer!' the kids would shout at her in the street as their mothers ushered them away from her. ‘There goes the murderer, walking free!' It seemed as if the whole world had turned against her.

During that dreadful time, when Cathy didn't know how she got out of bed in the mornings to face yet another day of hatred and hostility, the only person who wanted to know her was John Milton. Cathy wouldn't, couldn't talk about what had happened, and amazingly John hadn't pried. She brought it up just once, when her head felt like it would explode if she didn't let out some of the emotion trapped in there.

‘What if I had done it?' They were sitting on the playing fields at the rec, sharing the spoils of John's trip to the newsagents.

John shrugged. ‘Done what?'

‘Killed my mam's boyfriend.' Cathy pulled at the grass, trying to sound nonchalant.

John propped his head on one elbow and looked at her perceptively.

‘I'd say you did whatever you had to do, Cathy. It wouldn't make you a murderer.'

The meaning had been implicit, and it had taken all her self-control to not break down and tell John everything. But she couldn't; it was the only thing left that she could do for her mother. She made the decision there and then never to get close to anyone again.

Soon after that conversation, Cathy stopped taking John's calls and started avoiding him at school. And then she'd had the defining moment that changed her life for ever.

As she passed the doctor's surgery on her way home one day, Cathy noticed copies of
Tatler
and
Soirée
dumped outside the dustbin. Looking around to see if anyone was watching, she quickly crammed as many into her bag as possible. Back in the tiny second bedroom at her grandmother's, she was entranced by the vibrant, intoxicating pages full of glamorous, exciting people and fabulous locations. They soon became her only escape, and Cathy would spend ages in the newsagents reading each one from cover to cover until she was ordered out by irate shopkeepers.