pubic hair. Her touch—hesitant at first—grew more urgent, and she heard Marta whisper her name with a longing that both moved and frightened her. For a moment, she tried to deny the emotional impact of what was happening, but, as Marta cried out and pressed against her, Josephine knew it was useless to pretend that the joy she found in their bond was simply a physical attraction.
The strength of her feelings took her completely by surprise. Struggling to make sense of them, she ran her fingers back across Marta’s stomach and traced the contours of her breasts, noticing that her skin was flushed with desire. Marta kissed her fingertips one by one, then turned and took Josephine in her arms; her hand moved lovingly down Josephine’s body, and Josephine felt a combination of exhilaration and safety which she had never thought possible. Her instinct was to close her eyes and submit all her other senses to the joy of Marta’s touch, but it was impossible: Marta’s gaze held her as steadily as the arm around her shoulders, and she couldn’t have looked away even if she had wanted to. She lifted her hand to Marta’s cheek, a silent apology for having doubted her, and Marta drew her closer as she came, softly kissing tears from her face and neck. In the peace of the moments that followed, Josephine wondered how she could ever have believed Marta to be dangerous.
For a long time, they lay together without speaking. ‘What are you thinking?’ Marta asked eventually.
Josephine glanced away, reluctant to answer. ‘You don’t want to talk about the past.’
‘I’ll make an exception. You look so sad.’ She tried to keep her tone light, but it sounded forced and unconvincing. ‘Is it someone you’ve loved and lost?’
‘No, of course not.’ Josephine kissed her. ‘What more could I possibly want than this? No, it’s not my past I was thinking about—it’s yours, and what you had to go through when you were married. I can’t bear what he did to your body, how he must have hurt you.’
‘It’s my mind he fucked with, not my body. That’s where the real scars are.’ She smiled sadly, and ran her fingers through Josephine’s hair. ‘And even they’re fading. Every time you look at me like that, he takes another step back.’
Josephine found it hard to believe her, but she didn’t argue; if Marta wanted to convince herself that her past could recede so easily, she wasn’t about to disillusion her, but she doubted that the memory of her husband—and in particular the things he had driven her to do by separating her from her children—would ever allow Marta to live her life entirely without shadows. ‘Even so, I can’t imagine that Holloway is the best place to lay your ghosts,’ she said.
‘I don’t know; at least I had plenty of time to think about what happened. I remember wondering if that was why I loved you—because you understood, and you gave me the only connection I had with the daughter I’d never known.’ She smiled, ‘It didn’t take me long to realise there was more to it than that, but you met Elspeth before she was killed and that made you precious to me, regardless of anything else. I tried to get in touch with Elspeth’s adoptive mother,’ she added hesitantly. ‘I wrote to her from prison, but the letters came back unopened. Then when I got out, I went up to Berwick to see her.’
‘What happened?’ Josephine asked softly.
‘Nothing. I couldn’t do it. There was a little park at the end of their street, and I sat for hours trying to find the courage, but I couldn’t even go to the door. In the end, I just caught the train back again.’ She rubbed her hand angrily across her face. ‘If I’d given up so easily on other parts of my life, things might have been very different.’
Josephine caught Marta’s hand and wiped the tears away more gently. ‘What did you want from her?’
‘I told myself I wanted to know about Elspeth’s life,’ she said. ‘I had some bizarre notion that sharing the loss of a child might bring us together, that we could help each other, but really that was nonsense. I wanted forgiveness, Josephine. Actually, more than that: I wanted someone who mattered to hold me and tell me that what happened to Elspeth wasn’t my fault. I must have been insane. Why would that poor woman lift a finger to comfort her daughter’s killer?’
‘You didn’t kill Elspeth, Marta.’ She said nothing, but Josephine felt her body stiffen in an effort to control her tears. ‘And she was
‘I’m sorry,’ Marta said at last, following her thoughts. ‘You must wonder what the hell you’ve got yourself into.’
‘I know what I’m doing, Marta. And you have nothing to be sorry for. You’ve apologised enough.’ As the night went on, they made love again, and this time the intensity was replaced by a tender assurance which seemed to Josephine to hold its own excitement, if only because it hinted at a past and a future. Afterwards, she lay awake for a long time, her body pleasurably tired, her mind weary with guilt at having unlocked in Marta a grief which would be with her long after Josephine had returned to Inverness.
Chapter Fourteen
Celia Bannerman opened the leather carrying-case carefully, and took out its contents one by one: a tape measure and a two-foot rule first, followed by a roll of twine and some copper wire, a pair of pliers, two leather straps, a white cap and, of course, the rope. She was surprised to see a bundle in the corner of the bag, wrapped in what looked like a baby’s shawl. It wasn’t something she remembered packing, but she took it out anyway and laid it on the table. Satisfied that everything was in order, she turned to fetch the prisoner but her exit from the cell was blocked by two men in suits who stepped quickly towards her. Before she realised what was happening, her hands were clasped behind her back with one of the straps and she was swung round and led from the cell. The rope which she had laid on the table only seconds before was somehow now hanging from the ceiling in a chamber at the end of the corridor, and she felt herself pushed inevitably towards it. She tried to speak, to explain that she was the warder and not the prisoner, but it was no good: a white hood was pulled over her face and she began to suffocate, choking on the cloth which moved in and out of her mouth as she tried to gasp for air. Someone shoved a bundle hard into her hands, then, when she could bear the suspense no longer, she heard the sound of a lever being pulled and felt herself falling.
She sat up in bed, trying to breathe calmly until the panic of the dream subsided. It was hard to say which was worse: the long hours spent lying awake, or the short snatches of sleep, when thirty years of denial and suppressed fear came back to haunt her with twisted versions of her past. Someone had once told her that to dream of the gallows was a prophecy of good fortune, but nothing felt further from the truth; whenever she dropped her guard, the images took advantage of an exhausted mind to play themselves out like disjointed scenes from a film which should never have been made, and she fumbled for the lamp on her bedside table, praying that the night was almost over. It was only 3 a.m.
Damned either way if she stayed in bed, she put on her dressing gown and went through to the telephone in the sitting room. The nurse who answered sounded surprised to be disturbed at such an early hour, but she gave Celia the information she asked for: no, there was no change in Lucy’s condition, but, with every night that passed, there were more reasons to be positive; she was obviously stronger than she looked. That was something Celia didn’t need to be told: every time she thought back to those moments on the stairs, she remembered Lucy’s scorched and blistered body struggling beneath her hands. It was the first time in her life that she had underestimated someone, and it would be the last.
She walked over to the window and stared out into the darkness. Cavendish Square lay somewhere beneath her, invisible at this time of night, but Celia needed neither daylight nor streetlamps to be able to plot each individual feature because the familiarity of a view was perhaps the greatest luxury in a life which she had only recently allowed herself to take for granted. She thought she had finally put it all behind her, this need to be continually moving on, but she had begun to look over her shoulder again, and her nerve was not what it used to be.
