He grinned. "I bet it made your husband sit up and take notice."
I wondered if he'd known about Sam and Libby, or if his intelligence was even more acute now than when I'd known him in school. "It helped," I agreed, scrutinizing him in return. "You haven't changed a bit, although Mrs. Stanhope, the vicar's wife, claims not to have recognized you from the photograph in the newspaper. She's still hoping it was a different Michael Percy who robbed the post office."
He ran the flat of a hand across his closely cropped hair. "Did you tell her?"
"I didn't need to. I'm sure she knows."
He sighed. "She was pretty decent to me when I was a kid. I bet she was wrecked to find out I got done for pistol-whipping a lady."
"I doubt it. She has no illusions about you."
"She offered to adopt me one time, you know, and I said, 'You've gotta be joking.' It'd be like going from the ridiculous to the gorblimey. On the one hand there was Mum who couldn't give a shit if I never came home ... on the other there was the vicar who kept giving me lectures about how Jesus could change my life. The only one who was halfway sensible was Mrs. S ... but she kept wanting to hug me, and I didn't much fancy that." He leaned forward to create an enclosed space for us among the intrusive hubbub of conversation around us. "I wouldn't have minded you giving me a hug," he said with an amused up-from-under look, "but you never showed much inclination."
"I'd have been sacked on the spot."
"You weren't sacked when you gave Alan Slater a hug."
"When did I give Alan a hug?"
"When he bawled his eyes out because the nurse found lice in his hair again. You put your arm 'round his shoulder and said you'd give him some shampoo to get rid of them. You never did that for me."
I had no recollection of it-as far as I knew I'd only put my arm 'round Alan once-and I wondered if Michael was confusing me with another teacher. "Did you ever have lice? You always looked so spick and span while, most days, poor Alan smelled as if he'd emerged from a sewer."
"He was a slob," said Michael dismissively. "I used to nick Prioderm out the chemist for him but he never bothered to use it until the nurse spotted eggs in his hair." He favored me with a crooked smile. "It bugged me that everyone thought I was a neat little kid with clean clothes and felt sorry for Alan because he came from a shit background. I started washing my own stuff myself when I was six years old, but it was only ever Mum who got credit for it."
I wondered fleetingly if the hug I gave Alan, and the hug I hadn't given Michael, had resulted in one settling down and the other doing fifteen years. "Most people thought she was a better mother than Maureen," I told him, "but it wasn't much of an endorsement. On a scale of one to ten, Maureen scored nought."
"At least she wasn't a prostitute," he said bitterly. "It does your head in to have a slag for a mother. Did you know that's what she was at the time?"
"I didn't know anything, Michael. I was very naive and very stupid, and if I had my life over again I'd do things differently." I watched him for a moment. "You were too sexually aware," I said gently. "I never felt threatened by Alan in the way I felt threatened by you. I didn't think you'd be content with a hug."
His smile became even more crooked. "Maybe not, but I'd have been too scared to do anything about it."
"That's not how I saw you," I said with a small laugh. "You had a knack of singling out women who were vulnerable ... like Wendy Stanhope. She becomes very wistful when she talks about you, so I doubt her feelings were entirely maternal."
"What about yours?"
"I don't know. I never tested them."
"But you did like me?"
I wondered why that was important. "Oh yes."
"What about Alan? Did you like him?"
"No," I said flatly, wondering how much he knew.
"He had a crush on you," he said. "Used to talk about how you couldn't keep your hands off him and how the only reason you refused to get the police involved when you caught him nicking from your handbag was because you were afraid he'd spill the beans about the sex he'd had with you." He examined my face closely and seemed to find the reassurance he wanted. "I knew it was a load of crap but it used to bug me the way you put yourself out to be nice to him."
I didn't say anything.
"And you're wrong about him not being sexually aware," he went on. "He was so damn big he had tackle the size of an elephant's by the time he was ten. Sex was the only thing he thought about. He used to nick porno mags and wank himself stupid over the pictures. It was pretty funny till he started doing it for real. He got hold of Rosie, Bridget's sister, and said he wanted to do it with her, and when she told him to fuck off he pushed her to the ground and said he was going to do it anyway. Poor little kid, she was only twelve and she didn't stop bleeding for weeks." His mouth thinned angrily at the memory. "But she was too frightened to tell anyone except me. Her Mum was ill and her dad was never around. So it was down to me to do the business. I beat the shit out of Alan and said if he ever did something like that again, I'd rip his head off."
"How old were you?"
"Fifteen. It wasn't long after you left."
"Did he do it again?"
Michael shrugged. "If he did, I never got to hear about it. He turned on his dad with a baseball bat a week or so later ... almost as if his brain caught up with his size and a bubble came out of his head saying, 'I'm big enough to take on guys.' After that, he didn't seem so interested in sex."
I tried to get a grip of the timing. "His wife told me you and he came to blows over Bridget."
He shook his head. "We only fought the once, and that was over Rosie."
"She told me Alan was besotted with Bridget until he found her in bed with you ... then he beat you half to death and spent time in juvenile prison for it."
"In his dreams maybe." He pulled a puzzled frown. "Bridget never gave him a second look after what he did to her sister, so why pretend otherwise? Who's he trying to con?"
"Beth?" I suggested. "His wife."
"Why?"
It was my turn to shrug.
"Stupid bugger. It's always better to be honest"-he smiled as he listened to himself-"after you've been caught anyway. Nothing remains secret very long in this kind of environment."
I looked around the room, which was packed with prisoners and their families-all talking, all listening, all under observation from prison officers-and I thought I could easily believe it. There was no privacy in a goldfish bowl. And I wondered what sort of control Maureen Slater exercised over her family that no hint of Alan's viciousness had ever leaked out.
Letter from John Howlett-RSPCA inspector who entered
Ann Butts's house on the morning after her death-
now resident in Lancashire-dated 1999
WHITE COTTAGE, LITTLEHAMPTON, NR
PRESTON, LANCASHIRE
Ms. M. Ranelagh
Leavenham Farm
Leavenham Nr
Dorchester
Dorset DT2 XXY
August 11, 1999
Dear Ms. Ranelagh,
May I say first how heartened I am by what you wrote. I have always been troubled by what we found in Miss Butts's house, and I feel so much happier to be asked to view it from a different perspective. As you so rightly suggest, I never had any reason to believe Annie was cruel until after she was dead.
Dr. Arnold was of the opinion that Annie had been robbed in the days before her death and suggested this was the cause of the rapid decline in her circumstances which we found on 15.11.78. While I had some sympathy with that view, I never felt it adequately explained the number and/or condition of the cats. The police "take" on the matter was that Annie was a difficult and disturbed woman who was clearly unable to look after herself and whose behavior had given rise to numerous complaints. What we found in her house, therefore, merely confirmed this belief. It's worth mentioning here that PS Drury told me an hour in advance of entering the house that there were in excess of twenty cats on the premises in order to ensure I brought enough cages to accommodate them. When I questioned this figure, saying that in my experience there had never been more than seven, he said it was based on information received from neighbors.