‘Oh. How is she?’
‘You mean, apart from the incurable disease and the suicide of her husband?’ Dudley chipped in. ‘She’s not doing too badly.’
May flushed. ‘What do you want, Mr Hawthorne?’
‘We were just on our way back to Riverview Close and we were passing the shop, so we thought we might have a word, if that’s all right.’
‘And it would be nice if – this time – you told us the truth,’ Dudley added.
‘I think you’re a very rude young man.’
‘I’m not that young.’
‘We know your real names,’ Hawthorne said.
Phyllis looked shocked. May tried not to show any emotion.
Hawthorne continued. ‘Two old ladies move into a house in Richmond. They’ve come from nowhere. Nobody knows anything about them. Nobody visits them. They don’t get any letters or parcels. I try to find out more about them, but nothing turns up and I ask myself if they’re even using their own names. Or maybe they’ve changed them.
‘It’s quite easy to do it without anyone noticing. If your name is More, for example, spelled like Sir Thomas, you just add a second o. Or you can go back to your maiden name. May Winslow, for example, instead of May Brenner. In this country it’s also dead easy to use the deed poll system. Criminals do it all the time. And if you’re not applying for a passport or a driving licence, who’s even going to notice?’
May had gone white. She was breathing heavily, little gasps that made her shoulders rise and fall.
‘You gave yourselves away a few times, love,’ Hawthorne went on. ‘You want to know how?’
May nodded.
‘Well, to start with, you said you were at the convent for almost thirty years, but your friend Phyllis here seems to think that the last service before bed is vespers, when she really ought to have worked out that it’s compline or night prayer, which is followed by the great silence, when nobody is meant to talk. Also, she said that you and she were “cellies” and you were quick to explain this meant you shared a room, but quite apart from the fact that I’m not sure nuns ever have to share, it’s prisoners who call themselves cellies, women prisoners in particular.
‘Let’s work this out. St Clare was supposedly in Osmondthorpe, near Leeds. By an amazing coincidence, that’s just half an hour away from HMP New Hall in Wakefield, which is where Sarah Baines did her time, and you recommended Sarah for a job here. “You have to give young people a chance”. That’s what you said. It’s a lovely thought and I suppose it’s doubly true if she’s threatening to expose who you really are. It’s also why you couldn’t fire her, even though she’s a useless gardener and she may have killed your dog. She had you by the short and curlies.’
‘Do nuns have short and curlies?’ Dudley asked.
May glared at Phyllis. ‘I was always warning you,’ she said. ‘But you never could keep your mouth shut.’
‘I didn’t mean to . . .’ Phyllis began miserably.
May looked across the table at Hawthorne, the half-eaten cake and the cold tea between them. ‘I’ve done my time,’ she said. ‘I’ve done nothing wrong. All I wanted was to get on with the rest of my life in peace. Sarah knew that. And you’re right, the little cow blackmailed us. She knew who we were and she was going to tell everyone.’
‘What was she going to say?’ Hawthorne asked.
‘That we’d been in prison.’
‘Rather more than that, I think.’
‘You murdered your husband,’ Dudley said. ‘His name was David Brenner.’
‘He deserved it.’
‘Well, you certainly made your point. You hit him thirty times with a meat cleaver. There was so much blood in the house that even the police dogs threw up. You piled up the pieces in the bath and put his head in a dustbin for the Thursday-morning collection.’
‘I told you the truth about him. David was a monster. I was seventeen when I met him. I didn’t know anything about the world. I was just a child. And once I was in his hands . . . you have no idea. The things he did to me! He beat me and he brutalised me and he destroyed any confidence I had in myself until the day I finally snapped.’ She paused. ‘I’ll have one of your snouts, Phyllis, if you don’t mind.’
‘Snouts,’ Dudley muttered. ‘More prison slang.’
‘You can never get it completely out of your system.’ May had got rid of the fear and anger when the accusations had been made. Now she was regaining her composure. Phyllis handed her a pouch of tobacco and she rolled a cigarette for herself with expert fingers and lit it. ‘The judge agreed with me,’ she said. ‘He said I had a submissive personality and that David had tormented me. Those were his exact words. He said it was because of David’s appalling behaviour throughout our entire married life that I’d been driven to such extremes and that I wasn’t entirely responsible for what I did.’
‘He still sent you to prison.’
‘That was because I’d planned the crime.’ Despite herself, she half smiled. ‘I planned it for ten years. The judge had no choice. But he felt sorry for me and he let me keep the money.’
‘You mean, your husband’s money.’
‘Yes.’
‘The Forfeiture Act of 1982,’ Dudley said.
‘You know your law! In normal circumstances, you’re not allowed to keep your partner’s cash if you kill them. You lose everything. But judges can make exceptions – and he did that for me.’
‘I never did believe your story about the rich aunt,’ Hawthorne said. ‘That sort of thing might happen in one of the books you sell here but never in real life.’
‘And let’s not forget Phyllis More with one o . . .’ Dudley said.
Phyllis squirmed. ‘Do we have to?’ she asked, feebly.
‘It’s best to have it all on the table, love.’ Dudley sighed. ‘You didn’t much like your husband either, did you! You smashed a whisky bottle over his head, doused him in petrol and set fire to him. They heard his screams a mile away.’ He shook his head. ‘If either of you two ever write your autobiographies, I rather doubt you’d be able to stock them here.’
‘I lost my temper,’ Phyllis said. Her eyes were downcast. ‘But you’d have done the same if you’d been married to him. He was a dreadful man.’
‘How did Sarah Baines find you?’ Hawthorne asked.
‘It was just bad luck. She saw us on the street in Richmond and followed us home.’ May glared at Hawthorne. ‘I’m not proud of what I did, but I’m not ashamed either,’ she declared. ‘Nobody understands murder . . . not real murder.’ She waved a dismissive hand, drawing in the entire bookshop. ‘All of this is entertainment. It doesn’t mean anything. But Phyllis and me, we’ve been to a terrible place.’
‘New Hall,’ Phyllis said.
‘No, dear. Not prison. Before that.’ May drew on her cigarette. ‘You have no idea what it’s like to commit murder, the darkness that destroys everything inside you and consumes you. To take a human life. Not in a battlefield or a place of war but in your kitchen, your living room, in the home where you felt safe. In that single moment, it’s two lives, not one, that are finished.
‘You sit there and you feel euphoria. It’s over! All the anger and the rage has finally burst out of you. But then comes the recognition of what you’ve done, the knowledge that there’s no going back, the terrible fear of being found out, and, of course, regret. How you wish . . . how you wish it hadn’t happened. Have you read Thérèse Raquin? We have a copy here somewhere. You should take it with you.’ She paused. ‘All murderers regret their deeds . . . unless they’re completely insane. When I was in New Hall, and in Holloway before that, I never met a single woman who still celebrated what she’d done. There were some who pretended, but you could see it eating at them, day after day. I spent twenty-four years behind bars for what I did. Look at me now! I’m a shadow. Everything has gone. I have a son who won’t even speak to me, who lives in California and who probably regrets he ever came out of my womb. I have grandchildren I’ve never seen.’