The Ice Cream Girls (39 page)

She shrugs her shoulders; they are small compared to adult shoulders but they seem to be carrying a heavy burden right now. ‘I suppose so.’

‘I love your father so much. I would never do anything to intentionally hurt him. And kissing someone else would be doing something to intentionally hurt him.’ Her body relaxes a little at that. Poor kid, she actually thought I’d been cheating. If I had kissed someone else, maybe Evan would have got over it a lot quicker. Maybe I’d be able to know when I could put our family back together again. ‘But, Vee, we have a lot of things to work out, your father and I. It
is
complicated, not the stuff for you or Con to worry about. It might take time, but we’ll get there. And whatever we decide, it’ll be the best for all concerned – especially you and Con. OK?’

She shrugs.

‘Shrug is not an answer,’ I say and launch myself at her, tickling her. She struggles and giggles and kicks, but I feel her relax as we play and that’s what I want – for her to relax.

I stay with her until she is asleep, and think about how I was going to search her room. I didn’t, I couldn’t in the end. I had to trust her, and I had to watch her. The second she started to show any signs of being any different, the moment I felt something shift in her, I would take her room apart looking for clues. Then I would take her school locker apart looking for clues. I would do anything, but first she had to give me a good reason. Until then, I had to trust she wasn’t like me, she wasn’t stupid.

As her eyes slip shut for the final time, I kiss her forehead, stroke my hand over her headscarf, before I leave her to dream the night away.

Downstairs, instead of shrugging on my coat and texting Evan a goodnight – which he never replies to – before I leave, I go into the living room. This surprises him because he jumps up out of his seat and turns towards me for the first time in a week.

‘Yeah?’ he asks, burying his hands in his pockets and planting his feet hip-width apart. ‘What do you want?’

‘We have to talk,’ I say.

He shakes his head. ‘No, we don’t.’

Is this really my husband? The most reasonable man in the world?
Really
? ‘Yeah, we do. The kids think we’re getting divorced.’

‘Right,’ he says.

Mild panic flutters inside my stomach: he didn’t dismiss the idea, but at least he didn’t confirm it.

‘We need to talk about what to tell them. How to reassure them.’

‘OK, we’ll talk about what to tell the kids, but it might not be reassuring to them. I’ll meet you in your car.’

‘Fine,’ I say. For someone so reasonable, who is loved in his profession for his empathy, Evan is very good at quietly torturing me.

‘So, what do we say to them?’ I ask. I have to keep things on topic, anything that deviates from that will obviously antagonise him.

‘I don’t know. Probably not that their mother is a coldhearted killer who kisses girls. Nor that she got herself pregnant so she could con some poor sap,
me
, into marrying her and giving her a new name.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I say quietly, fixing my line of sight on the house, keeping an eye on it in case a light goes on in one of the upstairs bedrooms. ‘I should have told you.’

‘Yeah, you should have.’

I do not know what else he wants. He clearly doesn’t want me to explain, he doesn’t want me to be around him, he does not seem to want my apologies. I do not know what else he wants me to do, how I’m supposed to fix this if he doesn’t want it to be fixed, if he cannot step outside of his hurt and anger and rage for a few moments and give me a clue.

‘What should we tell the kids?’ I repeat. ‘I’ve already said that there are some things we need to work out, but we can’t keep saying that for ever. We need some idea of what to tell them about what is going to happen next.’
I
need to know what is going to happen next.

‘If you’re angling to come back, don’t bother. I’m still too angry to even . . . Just don’t bother.’

‘OK, you decide what to tell them and they can tell me.’

‘Yeah, maybe that’s for the best,’ he says.

‘No, that’s not for the best, but it’s the best that’s going to happen right now.’

A dull click is followed by a rush of air as Evan opens the passenger door.

‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ I tell him, still staring at the house. Still not able to turn around and look at him. The heat of his anger might burn the skin on my face. It’s been a week and he is still angry. It seems to be getting worse, not better. That’s probably because he is fanning the flames by reading old newspaper and news reports rather than talking to me. Rather than getting the truth from the person who was there, he is winding himself up with the half-truths and outright lies. This is what I didn’t want to happen.

‘Right,’ Evan states and shuts the door.

He
would be loving seeing Evan and me in pieces.
He
would laugh and say this is what he meant every time he held a knife up to my throat:
if I can’t have you, no one else will either
.

poppy

‘Poppy, it’s good to see you.’

‘You too,’ I force out through gritted teeth hidden behind a fake, close-lipped smile. It is not good to see Mr Fitch, my parole officer. Although technically I have to have regular meetings with this man if he deems it necessary, since he got me the job with Raymond he hasn’t deemed it necessary. In fact, the last time I sat here in his tiny office – which is so stuffed and lined with files and books and paper, paper, paper, I wonder how he breathes – he said we could ‘play it by ear’.
‘If you have any problems call me. But otherwise, I’m pleased with your progress so we can play it by ear.’

I didn’t think for a moment he would be calling me in for ‘a chat’. Or, as he called it, ‘just a quick catch up, to see where you are with everything’.

I know that parole officers only call you in ‘for a quick catchup’ when there is a problem. And I suspect the ‘problem’ lives in Preston Park. If she reported me to the Old Bill for stalking, I would have been arrested and sent straight back to prison to serve the rest of my sentence, so she must have just found out Fitchy’s name and asked him to warn me off. Which would be a monumentally stupid move on her part. I will ruin her if she has grassed on me. I will ruin her and I will ruin her family. Sod clearing my name slowly and carefully, if I’m going down, I’ll take her down with me.

‘How are you getting on? Raymond tells me you’ve been great for his business. Which is good; it’s nice to hear something so positive about a parolee. Especially an ex-lifer like yourself. It’s usually a struggle for them to adjust to the outside world.’

I nod at him as I’m expected to do. I cannot say anything because it’d be either: ‘It’s a breeze,’ or, ‘Yeah, my life is pretty much ruined since my parents hate having me around, I still haven’t had the guts to call my siblings, I fell in love with a man who wasn’t really my boyfriend and I’m no closer to getting the person who actually committed “my” crime to confess.’ I doubt he’d want to hear either of these things. Better to just nod and find out what he wants.

He sighs suddenly, a dramatic sigh, the signal to something grave being discussed. I am ready, though. I’m fully armed with explanations for turning up at Serena’s, meeting her for coffee twice now, even for knowing so much about her life. I can deflect, divert or lie my way out of anything he throws at me.

‘I’ll get to the point,’ he says. I shuffle in my seat, making my body taller and straighter to show I really have nothing to hide. ‘You were friends with Tina Wynard, weren’t you?’ he says. ‘I believe you shared a cell for a while.’

‘Yes, we were roommates,’ I say. ‘And we’re still friends.’

‘When did you last speak to her?’ Tina has escaped. That’s the only thing it could be – although I’m surprised it’s not the Old Bill questioning me. I can’t believe she’s done it. Or how she’s done it. She is so straight-laced, a totally by-the-rules person.
‘Know de rules an’ stick to dem,’
she told me when she was still hiding behind her ‘Jamaican’ accent.
‘Den, you work out how to divert attention away from de rules you no wanna keep, y’know. But you so good in every udder way, dem not tink it you at-all-at-all-at-all.’

‘I don’t know, a few weeks maybe. She wrote to me just after I got out. I keep meaning to reply. Why all the questions? What’s happened?’

‘Tina had her meeting with the parole board last week.’

‘Oh, yeah. She mentioned it was coming up in her letter. I didn’t know when, though.’ I meant to reply but I was hanging on, hoping I’d be able to tell her that Serena had confessed. That it had finally worked and I could clear my name, that I had finally managed the ultimate rescue and saved myself.

He shifts in his seat, clears his throat, tries to moisten his lips. ‘Her application was unsuccessful.’

‘But why?’ I ask, my voice rising a notch or two in indignation. ‘She was the model prisoner. She was polite, she never got into fights, and she was always looking after new prisoners. I can’t think of a person more suited to parole than she was. She even admitted and showed remorse for her crime, for God’s sake; you don’t get much more suitable than that.’

‘It was felt that although she was a very strong candidate for parole and, as you said, she admitted her crime and showed great remorse, there was a real danger that she would fall back into drugs and prostitution.’

‘She’d knocked all that on the head before she got sent down,’ I say. ‘And she was a grown woman, not the naïve youngster she was when she got into all that.’ If I race ahead, if I skip to nearer the end of this conversation, I can hazard a guess at what is coming, what is waiting for me. But I am not going to race ahead, I am going to see where I am being led, because it is possible I might have it all wrong.

‘Maybe so, but the board felt—’

‘They hadn’t quite got their pound of flesh from her yet?’ I say, then mentally snap the air, trying to bite those words back into my mouth. I have to be careful – this man could make my life not only difficult but impossible. He is one of
them
after all. He is nice, he treats me with respect and kindness, he helped me out with a job and spoke up for me with the board, but he is, at the end of the day, a screw in a suit. His keys are his pen and paper, the tools with which he could get me locked up again. If I am not careful, he could have me sent back.

Mr Fitch bristles, but not overly so. ‘They were just doing what they felt was right for her, Poppy. Not everyone is out to hurt prisoners, you know. We do care about what happens to them. And it was genuinely felt that Tina could become a danger to herself or the public if she were allowed to fall into the habits she had in the past.’

‘If she was going to go back to drugs, don’t you think she would have done so in the last twenty-five years?’

‘She has been in prison for the past twenty-five years.’

‘Exactly. It’s easier to get drugs inside than it is outside and there are more reasons to turn to drugs inside than outside.’

‘I don’t think you’re right there, Poppy.’ The official denial of the drugs problem inside is a beautiful, full and rounded creature. Most people in charge from the Big Luv right down to the everyday screws seem to have the attitude that if they pretend drugs aren’t a huge problem inside then they aren’t. They have their searches and policies, after all – there is no way drugs could get in, is there?

‘Whatever you say, Mr F,’ I say to him. ‘How is Tina doing? It must have been a blow to her.’

His hands move papers around the desk; shuffle, shuffle, go the white sheets in my file, which he has open but has hardly glanced at since I sat down, but he now seems very engrossed in. There is a pale patch of skin showing through the fine covering of his mousey-brown hair on the top of his head. Slowly he raises his head and meets my eye. ‘Were you aware that Tina suffered from depression?’ he says.

I want to clamp my hands over my ears and scream ‘Lalalalalalalalala’ at the top of my voice. If I can’t hear him, this won’t happen.

‘Everyone suffers from depression inside,’ I say. ‘Everyone sane suffers from depression.’ In my head, I am still screaming ‘Lalalalalalaalalalalalala’; my hands are still clamped over my ears. In my head I am protected from what he is about to say.

‘I’m sorry, Poppy,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but Tina took her own life on Saturday night.’

Lalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalala.

‘She became very depressed after the board’s decision.’

Lalalalalalalalalaalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalala.

‘But we believe she might have been thinking about it for a while because she used sleeping pills that she had obviously not swallowed when they were given to her in the infirmary, and she’d been storing up.’

Lalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalala.

He fumbles in his drawer and pulls out one of the clear plastic bags they put prison belongings in. Embossed all over it are the words HMP Colfrane. Wrapped up in the bag is a Good News Bible. ‘In the note she left, she said she wanted you to have this.’ He holds it out to me but I cannot move to take it. I cannot move to breathe. He eventually places it on the area of desk in front of me. ‘She left you a note inside.’

She’d done it again, she’d broken one of the Commandments she held so dear, she had broken the First Commandment: thou shalt not kill, again. But this time she had accomplices. This time she’d been egged on by a whole group of people sitting around a table debating what was best for her life.

‘We don’t think she suffered,’ he says, to be kind because he is kind. He does try. But we both know that is a lie. Of course she suffered. She suffered and suffered and suffered. Tina had paid her debt to society, I don’t care what anyone says. She wasn’t a danger to anyone.

‘I’ll give you a few minutes,’ he says and excuses himself, shutting the glass door behind himself.