*11*
Portland Peninsula was under assault from a blustery southwest wind the following Wednesday when Sam and I drove up from Chesil Beach in search of the sculpture park. Given the choice, I'd rather have gone on my own. There was too much that still needed explaining-my more-than-passing interest in Danny, for example-but I balked at telling Sam his presence would only exacerbate the problem when, like my mother, his way of making up for past indifference was a belated wish to be involved.
I had made a halfhearted attempt the previous day to talk about the three weeks at the end of January and beginning of February '79 that I spent alone on Graham Road, but my habit of silence was so ingrained that I gave it up after a few minutes. I found I couldn't talk about fear without becoming cruel, and I couldn't become cruel without turning on Sam because he had abandoned me when I needed him most. In the end, as so often in my life, I took the fatalistic view that whatever would be would be. Sam was a grown man. If he couldn't learn to live with the truth, irrespective of how it was revealed to him, then nothing I did or said would make a difference.
The Isle of Portland, a tilted slab of limestone four miles long and one mile wide, forms a natural breakwater between Lyme Bay to the west and the sweep of sheltered water between Weymouth and the Isle of Purbeck to the east. Its precipitous cliffs rise out of the sea to a high point of nearly five hundred feet, with only the hardiest of vegetation surviving the mercurial English weather. As Sam and I wound our way up its spine, I thought how bleak it was, and how unsurprising that successive governments had claimed it both as a fortress against foreign invasion and as a colony for prisoners.
In 1847 the Admiralty had employed convict labor awaiting transportation to Australia to construct a mighty harbor on Portland's eastern shores, which remained the preserve of the Ministry of Defense until the government abandoned it in the early 1990s. It seemed fitting somehow, in view of the convicted men who had toiled to create the anchorage, that the most prominent feature in Portland harbor that Wednesday was a gray prison ship that had been imported from America some four years previously to deal with the chronic overcrowding in Her Majesty's inland gaols.
'Is Michael Percy being held there?' Sam asked me.
'No. He's in the adult prison here on the island. It's called the Verne. It's off to our left somewhere.' I pointed to a sprawling Victorian building ahead of us which dominated the skyline. 'That's the young offenders' institution. It was built to house the convicts who worked on the harbor.'
'Good God! How many prisons are there?'
'Three, including the ship.' I laughed at his expression. 'I don't think it means Dorset's a hive of criminal activity,' I said, 'just that desolate lumps of rock make good holding pens for society's rejects. Think of Alcatraz.'
'So what did Michael do?'
I thought back to the press cuttings of his trial which had arrived toward the end of 1993. 'Went into a village post office in leathers and a crash helmet, and pistol-whipped an elderly customer until the postmaster agreed to open his security door and hand over what was in his till.'
Sam whistled. 'A bit of a bastard then?'
'It depends on your viewpoint. Wendy Stanhope would say it was his mother's fault for letting him run out of control. Her name was Sharon Percy. She's the blonde you saw in the pub occasionally.'
He made a wry face. 'The prostitute? She used to haunt the flaming place looking for customers. She tried to hit on me and Jock once so I gave her a piece of my mind. Jock was furious with me afterward. He said Libby was giving him a hard time, and he'd have been up for it like a shot if I hadn't queered his pitch.'
'Mm. Well, at a guess he was double-bluffing you in case you got suspicious about her approach. According to Libby, he was paying out thirty quid a week to Sharon for most of '78. They didn't bother to keep it much of a secret either, except from the people who mattered ... like you and me and his long-suffering wife.' I watched him out of the corner of my eye. 'Paul and Julia Charles worked out what was going on because Paul saw Jock coming out of Sharon's house one evening and put two and two together.'
He threw me a startled glance. 'You're joking!'
'No. She charged twenty for straight sex. thirty for a blow job, and Jock visited her every Tuesday for months.' I was amused. 'You can work out for yourself which service he was getting.'
'Shit!' He sounded so shocked that I wondered if 'Tuesday' had registered as the day Annie died, and if he was now trying to remember the details of the alibi he'd given Jock. 'Who told you?'
'Libby.'
'When?'
