Jackie Duncan looked up at the gracefully ornamented stone building, carved into apartments for working-class people. The builders in that gentler age had worked leaf designs into the stonework framing the windows, and they had set gargoyles at a corner of each roof. Jackie made a mental note of this useful detail; yet another monster has been added to the building.
In the worn but genteel hallway, Jackie checked the names on mailboxes to make sure that her information was correct. There it was: E. Kay. She hurried up the stairs with only a moment’s thought to the change in herself these past few weeks. When Ernie first gave her the assignment, she might have been fearful of confronting a murderess, or she might have gone upstairs with the camera poised to take the shot just as Erma Bradley opened her door, and then she would have fled. But now she was as anxious to meet the woman as she could be to interview a famous film star. More so, because this celebrity was hers alone. She had not even told Ernie that she had found Erma. This was her show, not Stellar’s. Without another thought about what she would say, Jackie knocked at the lair of the beast.
After a few moments, the door opened partway, and a small dark-haired woman peered nervously out at her. The woman was thin, and dressed in a simple green jumper and skirt. She was no longer the brassy blonde of the sixties. But the eyes were the same. The face was still Erma Bradley’s.
Jackie was brisk. “May I come in, Miss Kay? You wouldn’t want me to pound on your door calling out your real name, would you?”
The woman fell back and let her enter. “I suppose it wouldn’t help to tell you that you’re mistaken?” No trace remained of her Midlands accent. She spoke in quiet, cultured tones.
“Not a hope. I swotted for weeks to find you, dear.”
“Couldn’t you just leave me alone?”
Jackie sat down on the threadbare brown sofa and smiled up at her hostess. “I suppose I could arrange it. I could, for instance, not tell the BBC, the tabloids, and the rest of the world what you look like, and where you are.”
The woman looked down at her ringless hands. “I haven’t any money,” she said.
“Oh, but you’re worth a packet all the same, aren’t you? In all the years you’ve been locked up, you never said anything except, I didn’t do it, which is rubbish, because the world knows you did. You taped the Doyle boy’s killing on a bloody tape recorder!”
The woman hung her head for a moment, turning away. “What do you want?” she said at last, sitting in the chair by the sofa.
Jackie Duncan touched the other woman’s arm. “I want you to tell me about it.”
“No. I can’t. I’ve forgotten.”
“No, you haven’t. Nobody could. And that’s the book the world wants to read. Not this mealymouthed rubbish the others have written about you. I want you to tell me every single detail, all the way through. That’s the book I want to write.” She took a deep breath, and forced a smile. “And in exchange, I’ll keep your identity and whereabouts a secret, the way Ursula Bloom did when she interviewed Crippen’s mistress in the fifties.”
Erma Bradley shrugged. “I don’t read crime stories,” she said.
The light had faded from the big window facing the moors. On the scarred pine table a tape recorder was running, and in the deepening shadows, Erma Bradley’s voice rose and fell with weary resignation, punctuated by Jackie’s eager questions.
“I don’t know,” she said again.
“Come on. Think about it. Have a biscuit while you think. Sean didn’t have sex with the Allen girl, but did he make love to you afterwards? Do you think he got an erection while he was doing the strangling?”
A pause. “I didn’t look.”
“But you made love after he killed her?”
“Yes.”
“On the same bed?”
“But later. A few hours later. After we had taken away the body.
It was Sean’s bedroom, you see. It’s where we always slept.”
“Did you picture the child’s ghost watching you do it?”
“I was twenty-two. He said — He used to get me drunk — and I—”
“Oh, come on, Erma. There’s no bloody jury here. Just tell me if it turned you on to watch Sean throttling kids. When he did it, were both of you naked or just him?”
“Please, I — Please!”
“All right, Erma. I can have the BBC here in time for the wake-up news.”
“Just him.”
An hour later. “Do stop snivelling, Erma. You lived through it once, didn’t you? What’s the harm in talking about it? They can’t try you again. Now come on, dear, answer the question.”
“Yes. The little boy — Brian Doyle — he was quite brave, really.
Kept saying he had to take care of his mum, because she was divorced now, and asking us to let him go. He was only eight, and quite small. He even offered to fight us if we’d untie him. When Sean was getting the masking tape out of the cupboard, I went up to him, and I whispered to him to let the boy go, but he…”
“There you go again, Erma. Now, I’ve got to shut the machine off again while you get hold of yourself.”
She was alone now. At last, the reporter woman was gone. Just before eleven, she had scooped up her notes and her tape recorder, and the photos of the dead children she had brought from the photo archives, and she’d gone away, promising to return in a few days to “put the finishing touches on the interview.” The dates and places and forensic details she could get from the other sources, she’d said.
The reporter had gone, and the room was empty, but Miss Emily Kay wasn’t alone anymore. Now Erma Bradley had got in as well.
She knew, though, that no other journalists would come. This one, Jackie, would keep her secret well enough, but only to ensure the exclusivity of her own book. Other than that, Miss Emily Kay would be allowed to enjoy her freedom in the shabby little room overlooking the moors. But it wasn’t a pleasant retreat any longer, now that she wasn’t alone. Erma had brought the ghosts back with her.
Somehow the events of twenty-five years ago had become more real when she told them than when she lived them. It had been so confused back then. Sean drank a lot, and he liked her to keep him company in that. And it happened so quickly the first time, and then there was no turning back. But she never let herself think about it.
It was Sean’s doing, she would tell herself, and then part of her mind would close right down, and she would turn her attention to something else. At the trial, she had thought about the hatred that she could almost touch, flaring at her from nearly everyone in the courtroom. She couldn’t think then, for if she broke down, they would win. They never put her on the stand. She answered no questions, except to say when a microphone was thrust in her face, I didn’t do it. And then later in prison there were adjustments to make, and bad times with the other inmates to be faced. She didn’t need a lot of sentiment dragging her down as well. I didn’t do it came to have a truth for her: it meant, I am no longer the somebody who did that. I am small, and thin, and well-spoken. The ugly, ungainly monster is gone.
But now she had testified. Her own voice had conjured up the images of Sarah Allen calling out for her mother, and of Brian Doyle, offering to sell his bike to ransom himself, for his mum’s sake. The hatchet-faced blonde, who had told them to shut up, who had held them down…she was here. And she was going to live here, too, with the sounds of weeping, and the screams. And every tread on the stair would be Sean, bringing home another little lad for a wee visit.
I didn’t do it, she whispered. And it had come to have another meaning. I didn’t do it. Stop Sean Hardie from hurting them. Go to the police. Apologize to the parents during the years in prison. Kill myself from the shame of it. I didn’t do it, she whispered again. But I should have.