But I don’t cringe from him any more. Not even from his shouts, his curses. I hear the spin and click of handcuffs. Logan’s grunts of effort as he tries to drag Ross back towards the Shank.
‘It wasn’t me! I didn’t kill her! I loved her. Tell them, Cat. Tell them, you lying bitch! It wasn’t me. I didn’t do anything! I loved her! I loved you!’ His eyes trap mine one last time. ‘I let go!’
My fingers press hard against my throat, so that the pain is all I can feel or see or hear. And when I open my eyes again, Ross is gone.
‘It’ll be okay,’ Rafiq says, and her voice is kind. She pulls my fingers from my throat. The arm she puts around me is still and sure and comforting.
‘I know,’ I whisper. Because in Mirrorland, anything – everything – is possible. In Mirrorland, you are safe. Fear is never to be feared, horror is only make-believe, and escape is inside every bone and vein and breath and brick. And all it asks for in return is one thing. Only ever one thing. That you have to be brave.
And so, for the first time in a long time, I am.
CHAPTER 30
I arrive early. Sit behind the wheel of Vik’s beat-up Golf, watch the car park fill up through a windscreen obscured by rain. My eyes are gritty, sore through lack of sleep and a new kind of merciless grief that sits heavy and strange on my chest. I can’t get rid of it. I can’t pretend it’s not there. It’s taken everything that was sustaining me, keeping me alive throughout the trial and the two months since – my anger, my pain, my need for revenge and justice and closure. And it’s eroded all of it down to nothing. A once-towering cliff ground into powder and washed out to sea.
The prison looks modern, sleek, not at all what I’d been imagining. The slit-windows and dark guard towers of Shawshank maybe. Instead, it’s smooth and curved and no more than two storeys high, matte-beige sandstone and big windows, HMP SHOTTS in grey glossy relief over the revolving entrance door.
I feel nervous, scared, sick to my stomach, but more clear-headed than I have in a long time. It’s been two weeks since I last had a drink. Every morning throughout September, I used vodka to fortify myself for another day of HM Advocate vs. MacAuley in Court 9 of the High Court of Justiciary. Invariably, I’d end up drinking behind closed curtains instead, but some days my resolve would win. And every one of those days – reporters, cameras, stares, whispers, intimate details, Ross – would be followed by long, numb spaces of nothing. Familiar fantasies kept me company in the darkness, and I would become convinced that the trial was just another dream, another place inside the cold stone walls of Mirrorland.
I was drunk on the day the jury of seven women and eight men finally came back with a verdict. The sticky-hot Court 9 hummed and thrummed; my stomach squeezed, my hands shook. I hid close to the back of the court, but, just like all the journalists and rubberneckers on Parliament Square, Ross saw me straightaway. He looked tired, so thin. And I loathed the ache in me, the echo of longing.
I barely heard the jury find him guilty by majority verdict of the common-law murder of El. But I did hear him cry out – once, long and loud; the back of his voice broke on it – before the courtroom erupted into chaos and Rafiq appeared to pull me away from gawking faces and shouted questions.
I close my eyes. I don’t know if I can face this. If I can face him. I think of that terrible cry again. Try to use it to make me feel brave, strong, better. But I’m no good at lying to myself any more. I’ve lost the ability.
I take the letter out of my pocket again. Battered and crumpled because I can’t leave it alone. ‘CAT’ printed in El’s handwriting across its envelope. It came two months after Ross’s conviction. Two days after Vik texted me asking for my new address. I’d used my dwindling savings to pay the deposit and first month’s rent on a cheap bedsit on the edge of Leith, because every new day of square lawns and apple trees, of grey ashlar bricks and Georgian bar windows, copper bells, red doors, and gold light, had become a torture – one that I’d started to crave, to need, to look forward to. Like a toxic love affair. Or a fantasy world of monsters and ghosts. When I first closed the bedsit’s door and sat down on its sagging bed, I cried with relief.
I take the letter out of the envelope, pick up the smaller piece of paper inside before it can fall onto my lap, look down at the Dear Cat and All my love, El, and all the dreadful words in-between. When I first opened it, there was a scrawled note too. She told me not to read it. So I don’t know if it will help or make things a hundred times worse. Vik.
April 3rd
Dear Cat,
This is the last letter I’m going to write to you. I should have written it before now, but I didn’t know how. And now I can’t put it off any longer.
I’ve lied to you. More times than I can count. More times than I should have. But you need to know that it was for you: everything I kept from you, every lie I told you, every time I said trust me, this is the truth now – and it never was.
Trust me. This is the truth now.
I look out at the cars, the people, the blurred beige and grey, open the glove box and push the letter inside. This new grief might be heavy and cruel, but this new sense of responsibility is worse, heavier; a dread no longer silvery but black and thick like cooling tar. I used to think that people whose lives were stuck in limbo carried on only because it was easier. Easier than giving up. Easier than stopping. But now I know it’s because there’s no alternative, no escape. That the tide will come, and all you can do is stay afloat. And wait for it to turn.
I fold up the smaller piece of paper and push it into my jeans pocket. Open the car door and get out. Face those smooth stone walls and high windows.
Because I can’t put it off any longer either.
I try not to look at the receptionist who checks my ID, or at my unsteady hands as I put my phone and bag inside a locker, or at the guard as I walk through the metal detector and consent to a rub-down search. The secure waiting area is upstairs, and I sit down, keep my eyes trained on the neutral carpet. Maybe no one knows who I am anyway, or who I’m here to see.
Ross’s sentencing was big news. It was televised. I watched it alone, in the dark, while reporters banged on my door. The judge’s voice reminded me of Mum’s: high and hectoring, inviting neither opinion nor dissent.
Mr Ross Iain MacAuley, a jury has found you guilty by majority verdict of the callous murder of your wife, Ellice MacAuley. After subjecting her to months, perhaps years, of physical and mental abuse, you decided and then planned, motivated in part perhaps by the realisation that she was intending to leave you, to murder her and pass it off as an accident at sea. I find that showed significant premeditation and cold-headedness. I also find that you believed you would profit financially from her death. You pled not guilty. You have shown no remorse. Against these aggravating factors, I find little in the way of mitigation. Therefore, I feel I must pass a sentence of life imprisonment, with a punishment part of fifteen years for the murder of Ellice MacAuley, and three years for attempting to defeat the ends of justice.
The reporters have stopped hounding me now. The trial, the conviction, have already been all but forgotten. And Rafiq was wrong. No one has made any connection between us and the two twelve-year-old girls found at Granton Harbour in 1998. And no one has mentioned the murder–suicide at 36 Westeryk Road, except as macabre coincidence.