She tore strips from the wardrobe cloth; didn’t he know this kind of material was easier to tear than to cut? She could tie his feet with that. Her own feet and her own limbs were icy cold. She wanted to stitch his mouth shut with linen thread, but the needles she carried were wrong. No, it was bad enough to touch him at all. Scissors would have been usefuclass="underline" she could have snipped off his fingers, one by one.
Rick Boyd opened his eyes and looked at her, the way he had stared in court with all the old arrogance of injured innocence. He winked, slowly.
‘Hello, Angel,’ he said. ‘It was always you I wanted.’
She wanted a knife, then. She sprayed the perfume into his mouth and eyes and watched him choke. He screamed and tried to lift his hands to rub it away, hitting the injured hand against his chin, clumsily putting a finger into his mouth, biting down and screaming again. His body contorted, still powerful, and then as awareness dawned, he was quieter. He opened his inflamed eyes, blinked and stared as if realising for the first time that what he saw was not what he expected to see. He twisted and saw the padlock anchoring him to the door and began to groan, softly. She was not smiling at him. Only Angel had smiled.
She was not smiling or responding at all, except for staring back at him, her face a study of disgust.
‘Where’s Frank? Where’s my friend?’
‘Friend? You have no friends. There’s only me. Stay still while I touch you. Don’t look.’
She tied his ankles with strips of canvas. There were spasms of movement rather than resistance. He closed his eyes: she did not trust him. Hen went back to the first of the units he had tried en route to this one to fetch whatever she could find. A real rubbish unit with old household stuff awaiting further use, soft objects padding out the hard. Ironic, really, that she should find black bin liners labelled ‘Curtains/blankets’. They promised warmth and suffocation and she staggered beneath the weight. The whole contents of this packed unit shifted ominously as she pulled them out, disobeying all the rules. We never, ever touch anyone’s things, unless they’ve absolutely stopped paying for the space. She laid a weighty set of mismatched curtains across his torso, pinning him down with cloth. His eyes were blue and also inflamed; they mirrored his terror. There. He was immobilised for a while. There didn’t seem too much hurry about anything any more. Hen would have liked him not to be there. He got in the way.
‘Please,’ he murmured. ‘Please.’
There was no satisfaction in his pleading. It was not what she wanted.
‘What did you say to the last woman who said “Please?”’ she asked him.
His body shook. Warmth flooded him from the suffocating material. He bared his teeth in the effort not to scream. Sweat rolled from his thick hair down the side of his face. He whispered, ‘I’m sorry.’ She shook her head.
‘No you aren’t. I just wanted you to know what it was like.’
She told him she had the scissors from Frank’s pocket. Told him she was considering doing to him what he had done to Angel. Or would he prefer her to cover him with something else? There was plenty of polythene in here, dangerous to children. No hurry. She thought of asking him, Why? but it seemed pointless. There was no Why to Rick Boyd.
She was sitting on the trunk watching him watching her, not enjoying the raw fear of him, the passive distress, simply noting the fact that yes, he did know how it felt now. The colour seemed to leach from his mesmerising blue eyes, like blue flowers losing lustre and intensity.
Footsteps sounded down the corridor, coming towards them. At last, she was thinking, will someone come and save me from myself? The footsteps were plural and hurried, not recognisable, although she thought she could decipher the click of female hooves and the more ponderous ones of a male. Hide and seek taught footstep recognition, as well as how to hold your breath.
Rick Boyd heard, too. He began to scream for help in a high, piercing girlish sound that was peculiarly pitiful. Hen’s last, irrelevant thought was that the scream did justice to his size. It worked very well on an audience.
There were gasps of horror from the doorway behind her. Then her father’s sad, angry voice.
‘Oh God, Hen. Why can’t you leave things alone? What have you done now?’
CHAPTER TWENTY
Continuation of cross-examination of Marianne Shearer, QC, by herself
Q. Can you clarify, please? Make it clear, please, why you’re so ashamed of yourself that you really want to die?
A. I’ve told you. I conspired to kill my own daughter. Death’s the proper penalty.
Q. Oh, come on. Was there malice aforethought? Recklessness? An intention to do her serious harm? Any of the ingredients that would make this homicide rather than misadventure?
A. Are you trying to help my conscience?
Q. Too late for that, since you never had one. I’m only trying to understand it for posterity. You won the case by use of your forensic talent, so what? That’s what you do, isn’t it? Conscience never bothered you before. You’re a professional left-wing liberal; you don’t believe in hanging.
A. There was recklessness and there was malice. I humiliated the witness. I made sure she was marooned and isolated. I took away all the supports that could bolster her. I undermined her sister and made the jury laugh at her. Then I set about her until she lost control and came across as a spoiled child. I drove her to desperation and she killed herself.
Q. Why so cruel? You could have won without that.
A. I hated her. She reminded me of myself as a girl. She made it so easy. And I wanted to win. I had to destroy her, so that Boyd wouldn’t have to take the stand. The case had to be demolished before that. I didn’t want to call him. He would have been a dreadful witness, such an obvious liar.
Q. You knew he lied?
A. Oh yes. I couldn’t take the risk of him lying in public, it would be obvious as soon as he spoke. They had to be diminished first.
Q. Ms Shearer, your career has been made by bullying and undermining witnesses. You’ve made a fortune out of dirty tricks. What made this exceptional?
A. Because I did it to someone who might have loved me. The only one. Whom I might have loved. Mine. She reminded me of me when I was powerless. She was so easily had. She began to haunt me, even before I’d finished with her. I’d forgotten my daughter’s date of birth, forgotten it, or put it out of mind, until I remembered it on the last day. When Rick Boyd shook my hand, and shouted after me, did I know she was adopted? I remembered it. I thought he knew. It was as if I had conjured her up, and then, well, there she was. Not what I would have wanted her to be. There she was. Crucified. I put in the nails.
Q. Such sentimental shit. A woman like you, being haunted by a baby you’d never given a damn about?