picture, Jackie. The old cow hasn’t let herself be photographed in twenty years. Wants her privacy, does our Erma. I think
“So they don’t hire her as the nanny.” Jackie let him finish laughing before she turned the conversation round to money.
The cell was beginning to look the way it had when she first arrived. Newly swept and curtainless, it was a ten-by-six-foot rectangle containing a bed, a cupboard, a table and chair, a wooden washbasin, a plastic bowl and jug, and a bucket. Gone were the posters and the photos of home. Her books were stowed away in a Marks & Spencer shopping bag.
Ruthie, whose small, sharp features earned her the nickname Minx, was sitting on the edge of the bed, watching her pack. “Taking the lot, are you?” she asked cheerfully.
The thin dark woman stared at the array of items on the table. “I suppose not,” she said, scowling. She held up a tin of green tooth powder. “Here. D’you want this, then?”
The Minx shrugged and reached for it. “Why not? After all, you’re getting out, and I’ve a few years to go. Will you write to me when you’re on the outside?”
“You know that isn’t permitted.”
The younger woman giggled. “As if that ever stopped you!” She reached for another of the items on the bed. “How about your Christmas soap? You can get more on the outside, you know.”
She handed it over. “I shan’t want freesia soap ever again.”
“Taking your posters, love? Anyone would think you’d be sick of them by now.”
“I am. I’ve promised them to Senga.” She set the rolled-up posters on the bed beside Ruthie, and picked up a small framed photograph. “Do you want this, then, Minx?”
The little blonde’s eyes widened at the sight of the grainy snapshot of a scowling man. “Christ! It’s Sean, isn’t it? Put it away. I’ll be glad when you’ve taken that out of here.”
Erma Bradley smiled and tucked the photograph in among her clothes. “I shall keep this.”
Jackie Duncan seldom wore her best silk suit when she conducted interviews, but this time she felt that it would help to look both glamorous and prosperous. Her blond hair, shingled into a stylish bob, revealed shell-shaped earrings of real gold, and her calf leather handbag and shoes were an expensive matched set. It wasn’t at all the way a working
She looked around the shabby conference room, wondering if Erma Bradley had ever been there, and, if so, where she had sat. In preparation for the new assignment, Jackie had read everything she could find on the Bradley case: the melodramatic book by the BBC journalist, the measured prose of the prosecuting attorney, and a host of articles from newspapers more reliable than
Her Sloane Ranger outfit had charmed the old cats in the prison office into letting her in to pursue the story in the first place. The story they thought she was after. Jackie glanced at herself in the mirror. Very useful for impressing old sahibs, this posh outfit. Besides, she thought, why not give the prison birds a bit of a fashion show?
The six inmates, dressed in shapeless outfits of polyester, sprawled in their chairs and stared at her with no apparent interest. One of them was reading a Barbara Cartland novel.
“Hello, girls!” said Jackie in her best nursing home voice. She was used to jollying up old ladies for feature stories, and she decided that this couldn’t be much different. “Did they tell you what I’m here for?”
More blank stares, until a heavy-set redhead asked, “You ever do it with a woman?”
Jackie ignored her. “I’m here to do a story about what it’s like in prison. Here’s your chance to complain, if there are things you want changed.”
Grudgingly then, they began to talk about the food, and the illogical, unbending rules that governed every part of their lives. The tension eased as they talked, and she could tell that they were becoming more willing to confide in her. Jackie scribbled a few cursory notes to keep them talking. Finally one of them said that she missed her children: Jackie’s cue.
As if on impulse, she put down her notepad. “Children!” she said breathlessly. “That reminds me! Wasn’t Erma Bradley a prisoner here?”
They glanced at each other. “So?” said a dull-eyed woman with unwashed hair.
A ferrety blonde, who seemed more taken by Jackie’s glamour than the older ones, answered eagerly, “I knew her! We were best friends!”
“To say the least, Minx,” said the frowsy embezzler from Croyden.
Jackie didn’t have to feign interest anymore. “Really?” she said to the one called Minx. “I’d be terrified! What was she like?”
They all began to talk about Erma now.
“A bit reserved,” said one. “She never knew who she could trust, because of her rep, you know. A lot of us here have kids of our own, so there was feeling against her. In the kitchen, they used to spit in her food before they took it to her. And sometimes, new girls would go at her to prove they were tough.”
“That must have taken nerve!” cried Jackie. “I’ve seen her pictures!”
“Oh, she didn’t look like that anymore!” said Minx. “She’d let her hair go back to its natural dark color, and she was much smaller. Not bad, really. She must have lost fifty pounds since the trial days!”
“Do you have a snapshot of her?” asked Jackie, still doing her best impression of breathless and impressed.
The redhead laid a meaty hand on Minx’s shoulder. “Just a minute. What are you really here for?”
Jackie took a deep breath. “I need to find Erma Bradley. Can you help me? I’ll pay you.”
A few minutes later, Jackie was bidding a simpering farewell to the warden, telling her that she’d have to come back in a few days for a follow-up. She had until then to come up with a way to smuggle in two bottles of Glenlivet: the price on Erma Bradley’s head. Ernie would probably make her pay for the liquor out of her own pocket. It would serve him right if she got a book deal out of it on the side.
The flat could have used a coat of paint, and some better quality furniture, but that could wait. She was used to shabbiness. What she liked best about it was its high ceiling and the big casement window overlooking the moors. From that window you could see nothing but hills and heather and sky. No roads, no houses, no people. After twenty-five years in the beehive of a women’s prison, the solitude was blissful. She spent hours each day just staring out that window, knowing that she could walk on the moors whenever she liked, without guards or passes or physical restraints.
Erma Bradley tried to remember if she had ever been alone before. She had lived in a tiny flat with her mother until she finished O-levels, and then when she’d taken the secretarial job at Hadlands, there had been Sean. She had gone into prison at the age of twenty-two, an end to even the right to privacy. She could remember no time when she could have had solitude, to get to know her own likes and dislikes. She had gone from Mum’s shadow to Sean’s. She kept his picture, and her mother’s, not out of love, but as a reminder of the prisons she had endured before Holloway.
Now she was learning that she liked plants, and the music of Sibelius. She liked things to be clean, too. She wondered if she could paint the flat by herself. It would never look clean until she covered those dingy green walls.
She reminded herself that she could have had a house,
