Faith - Lesley Pearse [2]
Jenny had taken her father’s part, refusing to acknowledge the humiliation and brutality he’d put Maureen through over the years. She had even refused to allow her younger siblings to see their mother.
‘I expect your husband has shown his true colours to her too,’ Laura said thoughtfully. ‘And your younger children will probably have told Jenny things they saw and heard him doing to you in the past. She’ll have weighed it all up and realized you were at your wits’ end. Girls need their mothers and I’m sure she’s missed you terribly.’
‘You’re a good woman,’ Maureen said unexpectedly. ‘I didnae believe you was innocent at first, but I do now. You haven’t got it in youse to kill anyone, specially an auld pal like Jackie.’
Laura smiled ruefully. Two years ago such a remark would have filled her with hope; she would have believed the lawyers, police and jury would all see her that way too. But the jury had found her guilty and her lawyer had said they had no grounds for an appeal.
She knew now that everyone involved in the case was totally convinced of her guilt, and that was the hardest thing of all to bear. ‘It means a lot that you believe in me,’ she sighed. ‘But don’t let’s talk about that today. You must be so excited about your visit.’
‘That I am.’ Maureen beamed. ‘Just to look at her pretty wee face again will be enough. She’s thirty now, with a second wean on the way, and I didnae even know I had a grandson.’
‘Try not to mention her father,’ Laura suggested gently. ‘Ask her about your grandson, her pregnancy, home and stuff like that. She’ll be feeling awkward because of how she was with you, but she must want to build bridges or she wouldn’t be coming.’
Maureen looked at Laura speculatively. ‘Why don’t you get visitors, Law?’ she asked. ‘A good woman like you must have had loads of pals.’
‘I wasn’t a good woman,’ Laura said ruefully. ‘I treated people badly and used them. Jackie was the only person whose opinion of me ever counted for anything and I loved her. But now I’ve been convicted of her murder, the few people I liked to think of as friends vanished, and there’s no one left that gives a jot about me.’
When Laura got back to her cell after dinner, she lay down on her bed and closed her eyes. Her fellow prisoners had decorated their cells with pictures and photographs, but apart from a picture of a white rose which she’d cut from a glossy magazine, the walls of her cell were as bare as they were when she was first given it a year ago after she received her sentence.
Back then she’d felt too outraged to consider the idea of making it more homely, for that would have seemed like acceptance of what had happened to her. In her darkest moments she would stare at the grille over the window and contemplate hanging herself from it. Yet suicide seemed more like an apology than a declaration of her innocence.
Leaving the cell bleak and depersonalized was a form of protest. She didn’t mind its small size – she had lived in equally small rooms in the past. She could escape to a certain extent by listening to her radio and by looking at the view of hills from her window. But the constant noise in this place often made her feel she was going mad.
Banging, singing, crying, shouting, talking and raucous laughter were incessant in Bravo Block. She could shut the other women out with her door, she could even avoid the smoke and stink of their cigarettes, but the noise was there all the time, and sometimes she wanted to scream out for silence.
She could remember how much she had loved the Scottish accent when she first came to live in Scotland, but now it grated; even the gentler burr of those from places like Inverness irritated her. She thought she’d give anything to hear a London accent, a Brummie or a Geordie, but even her own voice, after twenty-three years