Page 31 of The Stranger in Room Six
‘Shut up, for Christ’s sake,’ my cellmate complains when I wake screaming from a dream where my husband is bleeding to death on the pavement after slashing his wrists with a toothbrush. ‘How am I meant to get any sleep?’
Rather surprisingly, I learn that she has a daughter, younger than Elspeth, who is expecting a child. ‘I need to be with them,’ she says. ‘They’ll need my help and protection.’
‘Protection against what?’ I ask.
She looks at me as if I’ve asked a daft question. ‘From gangs or the authorities. You can’t trust anyone in this life, Lady Belinda.’
What kind of world have I entered? Karen has ruined my life. She’s ruined all our lives. And now she’s disappeared off the face of the earth.
I feel so angry that, if she was here, I’d kill her.
‘Stop it,’ I say to myself. ‘You’re not like that.’
But the more I think about it, the more the idea takes hold. Karen needs to pay for destroying our family.
Imran has applied to visit several times now, and each time I tick the ‘NO’ box, with a heavy heart.
Then a letter arrives:
Please allow me to visit you. I expect you’re ashamed of what you did but I am also certain – because I do still know you Belinda, even after all these years – that you didn’t mean to hurt your husband.
How can he say that he knows me? It’s been so long, and yet I suppose there was a time when he knew me better than anyone in the world. I think back to walks, hand in hand along the river in Oxford, his arm around me. I am leaning into his jacket, sheltering from the wind. I feel safe. Loved.
But I know now how dangerous a letter can be. If I hadn’t been stupid enough to keep his first one, Gillian might not hate me as much as she does. I tear up the page, angry at myself.
Then I receive another visitor request. It comes through internal mail. This is different from post delivered from the outside, which is handed out every morning. You can tellwho hasn’t received anything from their dropped faces and the way they slink back down the corridor, in contrast to the ones who open their envelopes with a mixture of ‘Bloody hell’ and ‘Yes!’ at the news inside.
I look at the name on theRequest to Visit Prisonerform. It says P. Black. I don’t know anyone of that name. Supposing it’s someone from the press who wants to berate me for what I’ve done? But then again, what if it’s genuinely important? Against my instinct, I tick the ‘YES’ box.
For the next week, I shake and shiver, unsure if I’m ill or whether it’s nerves.
When I go into the visitors’ room, my mouth is dry with apprehension. Then I take in the petite woman with the smart, pointed lime-green shoes.
A shock of recognition shoots through me. This is the receptionist from Gerald’s office, Penny. The woman I met minutes before pushing my husband to his death.
My visitor is visibly trembling. ‘I’ve never been in a prison before,’ she wobbles, looking around as though someone is going to attack her. ‘But I had to come. I felt you should know the truth about your husband and Karen. Did you know they had a child?’
21
Mabel
1941
In Devon, each day seemed to blur into the next. Mabel would wake with a sense of peace, the sunlight streaming in through the tall diamond-shaped windowpanes.
Then the truth would gradually dawn. Mama and Annabel were missing. If she was honest with herself, they were probably dead. Papa was away fighting, and any minute now Mr Hitler might march up the beach towards the Old Rectory and they’d be murdered in their beds.
Or at least that’s what the women talked about when they gathered at the village hall for camouflage netting afternoons or tended the allotments so they could ‘dig for victory’.
Mabel had this vision of digging and digging until she found a Jerry underground whom she could knock on the head with her shovel. She’d never hurt anyone before in her life, but when she thought of Mama and her baby sister, she felt she could quite easily kill a German without any regret at all.
Throughout all this, Aunt Clarissa and the Colonel would hold long meetings late at night in the library, working out how they could ‘get England back on its feet’.
Mabel knew this because, each night, she’d try listening at the door, thinking that if only she could help them too, then perhaps Aunt Clarissa wouldn’t dislike her so much.
One evening, the door flew open. Aunt Clarissa was on the other side wearing a pale blue evening gown as if dressed up for a party. She was with a group of people that Mabel had never seen before – certainly no one she recognized from the village. They eyed her coldly, as if she shouldn’t be there. ‘What do you want, child?’
‘I’d like to know if I can help you beat Mr Hitler,’ said Mabel staunchly.
