***
Mark was onlythirty-three: just over ten years ago his life had seemed to bemapped out, and in retrospect in a far from unpleasant manner. He’dgot a lecturing position in the Sociology Department at SussexUniversity after completing his Masters’ degree at Kent and withina year or so was beginning to be seen as something of a rising starin the discipline. He’d published a few papers in respected,subject-specialist journals and even been paid a reasonablepublisher’s advance for editing a collection of classic socialtheory extracts deemed suitable for undergraduate students. He hadbeen well liked in the department and popular with the studentstoo; he’d always had a sort of naturally outgoing streak whichenabled him to mix with the older members of the Sociologydepartment as well as the more trendy, newer staff andpost-graduates. Looking back he couldn’t believe how he’d letJustine, one of his first post-graduate students, have such aneffect on him and his future. Sure enough, she was gorgeous, but hewasn’t too bad either and had always managed to do pretty well forhimself; and Fiona, his ex and only wife, had her good points too.He had taken his eye off things. In what eventually had become arather desperate attempt to impress Justine, he’d given up on hismarriage and then tried to get his hands on Fiona’s family’s moneyby removing his in-laws.
Even though hehad certainly had plenty of time to think and plan while servinghis prison sentence, Mark had tried to avoid any detailedover-analysis or examination of just what had happened. The truthof the matter was that it certainly didn’t reflect well on him andhe’d never been one for too much self-criticism. It undermined hissense of who he was to imagine that he must have been obsessed withJustine, and that he had let his paranoia that she would wantsomething more take over his life for those few years. Perhaps themost depressing aspect of it was that when he had tried to workthrough it in his head, it was evident that she couldn’t havereally meant that much to him. In the end, however much he tried torationalise things, there was no getting away from the fact that amixture of egotism and greed had been a pretty keymotivation.
He had neverreally managed to work out just why he’d been so greedy or whetherthat was merely masking something else. Why hadn’t he beensatisfied with what he had, like his now ex-colleagues at theuniversity, who were all no doubt living very comfortably inexpensive, gentrified properties in his favourite town, Brighton?He had always felt that he had more about him than most of them, sowhy had he wanted more? It was painful for Mark to accept that itmust have been down to his self-centredness, mixed with arroganceand greed – perhaps not surprisingly he had found it easier to putthe ‘might-have-beens’ aside.
Nevertheless,and for whatever reasons, at the time he had allowed his concernsand distrust about Justine and his best friend, Tom, to cloudeverything. While in retrospect those concerns might have provedjustified, that hadn’t warranted his risking and then losingeverything he had worked for, even though that had come quiteeasily. Irrespective of any explanations for what might have beengoing on in his head, he had devised and carried through themurdering of two people whom he had, in point of fact, grownreasonably fond of. In terms of any conventional attempt at alabel, he had become some kind of psychopath; he had, albeitunwittingly, taken on the persona and career of a serial poisoner,and in a cock-eyed way with some degree of success. And it had allbeen for nothing. That bitch, Justine, hadn’t understood orsupported him. When it came to it she had abandoned him like a shotand played the part of the innocent dupe, and Tom, supposedly hisbest friend, even blood brother, had taken advantage of thefall-out. Mark still reckoned that if it hadn’t been for Justine’slack of imagination and nerve everything would have worked outfine. It was all water under the bridge now, though.
***
Mark opened acan of Foster’s lager. It had been over eight months since hisrelease, after serving just under six years of his life sentencefor murder. On the face of it that had been quite a result. He wasfortunate that there had been a general shift towards emphasisingthe rehabilitation of prisoners in the early 1970s and he had madesure that he played the part of the model prisoner – not overlysycophantic but not too arrogant or difficult to manage either. Hehad succeeded in convincing everyone, including most critically theParole Board, that he was a reformed character and certainly nodanger to the wider public. It hadn’t taken him long to realisethat the key indicators needed to get an early parole date were todemonstrate genuine remorse and to satisfy the experts that thecrimes themselves were clearly
