The police had been interested when they learned of this. There were too many strange conflicts swirling together over these two properties like a mini tornado. Dead men. Snatched children. Suicides and large bank payments, because, oh yes, they knew about that.
But there was no real evidence that Melissa had taken part in any crime. And there were only so many resources available to Dorset Police. The high-profile murder of a young mother in Dorchester a few weeks later was deemed a higher priority. So, after a handful of interviews that started next to her hospital bed, the case was left unsolved.
Melissa no longer wants to confess. She has done enough to her family, she knows that. Mark is like a ghost these days, and Tilly seems to have shrunk into herself. She constantly sneaks looks at her mother as though she is a stranger. Melissa knows how she feels. She is like a stranger even to herself.
She picks up the pile of post from the kitchen surface now and goes to the table, catching a flash of red from her hair reflected in the side of the microwave. She isn’t used to it yet. She has kept her hair short and let her natural colour grow through.
Mark hasn’t said whether he likes it and she supposes she shouldn’t care. But she does. It’s so exhausting, tiptoeing around his anger and grief. Throwing all their money away as she did is unforgivable. Inexplicable. But she doesn’t regret it for a second.
She has told him the same story so often she half believes it now: Jamie stirred up bad emotions from her past; she feels guilty that he was murdered and that Hester became involved. She only wanted to help.
Kerry wrote to her, not long after. She was moving to Manchester to be with her mother. She said if Melissa thought she was forgiven for not helping Jamie when he needed it, she had ‘another thing coming’. Then she had awkwardly included something about Amber sending her love to the dog.
No, she doesn’t regret it.
But she’s sick of them looking at her like she is a stranger.
Last week at Couples Counselling, she had told Mark all about her childhood for the first time. He’d been shocked enough to cry a little but she remained dry-eyed. Afterwards, he had moved to hold her, but she had stepped to one side. She didn’t know how to be forgiven. It seemed like a coat that was too big or too small to wear.
As Melissa stares down at the pile of junk mail on the table, a thought seems to gain weight and form until it is a thing that slithers and twists inside her.
I could just leave, she thinks. Let them get on with their lives without me.
What is to stop her? None of them would really miss her. She’s nothing but trouble.
Melissa stands still for a few moments and then she is hurrying up the stairs and into her bedroom. She goes into her walk-in wardrobe and begins pulling out clothes and throwing them into a pile on the floor. She doesn’t need much. Just a few tops and some jeans. One decent jacket. She can’t seem to care about that stuff anymore. Scooping it all up in her arms she flings it onto the bed and goes to get her wheelie case from its place on top of the extra wardrobe in her bedroom. She tries to remember how this felt before, the specific dimensions of those moments, but they’re like a half-remembered dream and she can’t seem to grasp them.
As she stuffs clothes messily into the case, downstairs, her phone chimes with a text. Distractedly she goes to the bottom of the stairs and reaches for her bag, which she dropped in the hallway when she got home.
Melissa frowns when she sees it’s from Mark. This is such a rare occurrence now that she briefly wonders if something is wrong.
The message says:
Let’s me, you, and Tils go out for dinner together at the weekend. Somewhere nice as a family. She needs you and so do I. I miss you. Mx
Melissa slumps down onto the bottom stair, gazing at the screen. She begins to cry.
She cries for Jamie and she cries for Tilly. She cries for Mark. He isn’t the only cheat and she has done far worse things in the grand scheme of things. Then she cries for young Melanie with her hard, pretty little face and her broken heart.
Lastly she cries for the here and now and what has gone.
When she finishes she sits for a few moments longer and then begins to climb back up the stairs to unpack her case.
HESTER
I do miss Bertie. I will say that.
But I know Melissa will be taking good care of him. Apart from that, I miss oddly little about my old life.
I suppose I just wanted someone to need me. The irony of it all is that now I have no shortage of young women who need my care. Oh yes, I was frightened at first of all these girls with their hard hollowed-out eyes and their sallow complexions. I kept myself to myself and barely looked at anyone for the first few months.
It was Charly who first brought me out of my shell.
She is twenty-nine years old and here because of drugs and prostitution, like so many of them. She can’t help having a silly name. I tried to call her Charlotte, as she was christened, but she wasn’t having it!
The fact is that prison has been the making of her, although she misses her little boy, Tyler. We got talking one day while we were working in the laundry room and she poured out some of her worries. I was able to give her advice based on my considerable experience with small children and she was so grateful it brought tears to my eyes.
Soon she would share news with me: how he had been praised for a picture he had done at school; how he wanted to start karate lessons. He lives with Charly’s mum in South London for now but she is full of plans about what she will do when she leaves here.
I will miss her.
But there are others now who ask my advice. I think I have become a bit of a mother figure to these young women.
And then there is Sandra.
She’s older than the rest, although still a good few years younger than me. She murdered her husband. He was a drunk who hit her sometimes but her lawyer was not able to argue self-defence. It was because she killed him in his sleep, you see. Stabbed him with a bread knife while he lay drunkenly on the sofa.
I have no doubt that he deserved it.
Sandra is an educated woman, unlike almost everyone else here in Holloway. She has a Bachelor of Arts from Birmingham University, in English, grade 2:1. She is always reading books from the (admittedly meagre) library and has encouraged me to do the same. I never felt that I had time for reading in the past. But I am getting a great deal of pleasure from the quiet companionship we enjoy on an evening in my room or hers.
I try not to call it a cell. Living with a toilet in the room is something I never thought I would be able to tolerate but I simply cover it with a throw I stitched in one of the needlecraft sessions and you would never be the wiser about it. I have made some samplers that I have hung up around the place just to make it a little more homely. I never had time to do that before either but I find it very relaxing.
One of my creations says, ‘Home is where the heart is’ and, yes, you could argue that I am stuck in a terrible place, filled with murderers, drug addicts, and worse, and will probably be here for a good ten years.
But what is the point in complaining?
I had nothing to live for out there. Bertie, maybe. But no one loved me or wanted me to be in their life. No one needed me.
Well. Plenty of people need me here.
It’s funny, the things you find out about yourself, isn’t it, in extreme situations? Sandra won’t be going anywhere for many years either and this thought fills me with a quiet pleasure.
She won’t be able to leave me, like others have done.
We can be together for ever, if I want it.
And sometimes, late at night, if I feel frightened or lonely, I picture myself telling the police everything about Jamie. Why not? I have nothing to lose. It wouldn’t take long for them to look in Melissa’s kitchen and find what they were looking for. But what would be the point? I think it is best that we put all that behind us. Anyway, she has Bertie.
I hear a sharp rap on my door and look up.