Page 30 of The Stranger in Room Six
Tears are rolling down both our cheeks now. ‘I know you are, Mum. I’ll come again as soon as I can.’
A guard leads me away. I walk with my head turned so I can see Elspeth’s face for as long as possible. I keep staring until her brown hair turns into a speck in the sea of visitors and she disappears altogether.
When I get back to my cell, I find people coming in and out. ‘Get her away from here,’ snaps a guard to the officer beside me.
‘What’s happened?’
‘Your cellmate’s only gone and topped herself.’
An ice-cold shiver goes through me.
I’m ushered away, but not before I spot the pool of blood on the floor.
They take me to the guards’ office at the end of the wing, where I’m told to sit down. The door is shut.
‘Did your cellmate seem suicidal to you?’ says the woman opposite me.
‘No,’ I whisper.
‘What about the toothbrush?’
‘The one she kept chewing?’
‘So, you knew about it. Did you never think to tell anyone?’
‘Why would I?’
‘Because she chewed it down to a sharp point and then stabbed her own artery.’
I’m stunned into silence. How had I not known? ‘It helps to calm my nerves,’ she’d told me. And, naive as I was, I’d believed her.
‘Couldn’t cope with the shame of embezzling funds from her boss,’ the officer continued. ‘One of the big papers was about to run a piece on her.’
‘But she said she’d murdered her husband because he’d tried to throttle her.’
‘Rubbish. Our Shirley was a big-time fraudster. Thousands, she got away with.’
‘Perhaps,’ I say, finding my voice becoming stronger, ‘she killed herself because she couldn’t live without her three-year-old.’
‘Told you that one too, did she? There was no three-year-old. She just had a random photograph to get sympathy. A bit of a fantasist, you could say.’
I gasp. ‘So she lied?’
‘Takes one to know one,’ says the officer chillingly. ‘Come on. All that stuff about you pushing your old man by accident. Youwantedhim dead didn’t you, Lady Belinda?’
20
It doesn’t take long for ‘Lady Belinda’ to catch on. One of the guards clearly took against my ‘posh accent’, and now everyone uses it.
I try to ignore it but it rankles. My mother had always taught me to speak the ‘Queen’s English’. There had been no preparation at all for a life of crime. I count my blessings that she isn’t here to see this.
As the days pass, I begin to wish I’d pleaded not guilty.
‘You got bad advice,’ says my new cellmate when I am naive enough to share this with her. ‘Your lawyer should have said there were extenuating circumstances.’
She says the phrase with such fluidity and certainty that it’s clear she’s familiar with it. Word has it that this woman, with her steely eyes, is part of a much-feared family gang. This is her third time – or is it the fourth? – in jail. Opinion differs. People tiptoe around her. No one wants to get on the wrong side.
I might not have known my previous cellmate very well, but the horror of her death haunts my every waking hour. At night, she adds to my nightmares about Gerald.
