The silence stretched and grew uneasy. At last Lorraine set her coffee mug on a slate coaster on the table. ‘Aren’t you a bit nervous? About Lizzie offending again? I mean, when she’s living with you.’
Annie remembered then that Lorraine had run art classes for people in trouble. Of course she wouldn’t necessarily have a rosy opinion of offenders. All the same, Lorraine seemed so upset that Annie wondered if she’d had a more personal encounter with crime.
‘We’ll get help.’ Annie realized her voice was a bit desperate. ‘She’ll have a probation officer and a woman from Hope North-East, a charity, will be visiting. We won’t have to do it all ourselves.’
‘I’m sure you’ll be fine.’ Lorraine seemed to have recovered her composure. She smiled. ‘With you and Sam to support her, what could possibly go wrong?’
Chapter Twenty-Five
Lizzie Redhead lay in bed. Her head was exploding with the prospect of leaving prison. The space beyond this place seemed to stretch forever. Scary, and dizzying with its possibilities. Plans fizzed and jolted like she was wired to a power supply. She knew she wouldn’t sleep at all. It was because she was so freaked out, and she was frightened of the dreams that seeped into her mind when she was half-awake. Sodding Jason Crow. You won’t leave me alone even here.
She shared her room with three other women. There was one set of bunks and two single beds. All with flowery duvets, as if pretty linen could turn them into civilized people, good wives and mothers. Lizzie had a bed, the one closest to the window, which was an odd shape because it had been cut in half when the grand house had been turned into an institution and extra partition walls had been built. Outside there was a big tree. When Lizzie had first come to Sittingwell it had been bare and when the wind blew the branches creaked, making her think of an old-fashioned ship in a storm. In moonlight the tree threw strange shapes on the ceiling. It was as if outside had come into the prison.
Now the women were all asking her what she’d do when she first got out. Two were recent arrivals and she hadn’t got to know them well, so she ignored their suggestions.
‘You’ll go into toon, man. A night on the lash. That club in the Bigg Market, where they do cocktails. A lass like you will pull a fit bloke in seconds.’ The two were cousins and had been charged together with a series of thefts from stores. After so many convictions the court had described prison as the only option left, even though they both had babies. The kids were being cared for by grandparents. Lizzie had seen them at visiting time.
The cousins went on to throw out a menu of drinks that they’d go for, when they got let out: lethal cocktails that got crazier and crazier. Lizzie thought she’d moved beyond that. There was more to life than getting pissed. Prison had given her a different perspective. Her world was bigger. She lay on her bed and pulled the curtain aside to see the stars. An owl called somewhere in the garden, and immediately Lizzie was back in the place where she’d lived as a child. The valley at Gilswick. Then it had seemed to her a community of old people. A strict social hierarchy, with the major in the Hall at the top. The only other kids had lived at the big house. Lizzie had been at school with them, until they’d been sent off to private prep schools. She hadn’t thought much of Catherine, who’d been dainty and girly, but she’d got on okay with Nicholas. He hadn’t boarded until he was older and she’d still played with him at weekends. They’d built dens in the woods and dammed the burn. It should have been idyllic, but it had never been enough for her. She’d still been bored.
The cousins saw that she wasn’t listening to their plans for a big night out and they shut up. The other room-mate was older. She had school-age kids. She’d worked in a care home and had started nicking things from the old people. Money and jewellery. In one room she’d found a credit card, the PIN jotted down on a scrap of paper in the same drawer. The man she’d stolen from had been dying. ‘He wasn’t going to use it, was he?’ Rose had said. ‘And his relatives never visited, and they only lived south of the river. Why did they have more right to his cash than me? I wiped his bum and washed his face. I made him smile.’
Lizzie hadn’t had an answer to that. She wondered whether she’d visit her parents if they didn’t recognize her any more.
The room fell quiet then, so she supposed the others were sleeping. She started thinking about Shirley Hewarth. When they’d first met, Lizzie had thought Shirley was as tough as her. There was something steely about her, a refusal to be conned. Lizzie had tried to lie about the offence and her relationship with Jason, and Shirley had tilted her head to one side and said, ‘Well, I don’t think that’s entirely true, is it?’ She’d peeled back Lizzie’s pretences until Lizzie felt raw, exposed. She’d found herself confiding in Shirley. Making herself vulnerable. She hadn’t even allowed herself that luxury with Jason.
Now Lizzie wasn’t sure that Shirley was as hard as she seemed. They might share the same secret, but they had different interests. The thought worried her. It was one of the reasons she was scared about leaving prison: that Shirley might land her in the shit, big time.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Friday evening. Friday was party night for the retired hedonists at Valley Farm and usually at this time Annie would be getting ready to be social. She’d be lying in a deep bath and deciding what she was going to wear. She wasn’t usually competitive about how she looked, but Lorraine formed a kind of challenge. Annie had seen the way John O’Kane looked at Lorraine Lucas and wondered if Sam was attracted to the woman too.
This evening, though, she was in the spare room preparing it for Lizzie’s return. Lizzie had never spent very long in the house. She’d stayed a couple of days when they’d first moved in, but she’d made it clear that she was bored out of her skull and soon moved back to the town, to the flat they’d rented for her. And soon after Lizzie had been charged with assault and remanded in custody. Even when she’d got bail she’d preferred to keep away.
Annie opened the window to air the place. It was almost dark, but still unseasonably warm. No wind at all. She heard a car drive up the valley and watched as it pulled up outside the farmhouse. Nigel and Lorraine, obviously already in party mood. They could see the light in the bedroom and the open window, and Nigel shouted up to her.
‘See you soon! We just popped into The Lamb for a quick one, but we’ll be ready in half an hour or so.’
Now the last thing Annie wanted was to go into the big house, to drink too much wine. She knew exactly how it would be: John O’Kane, brooding but somehow predatory. Janet, who became girlish and giggly after a few drinks, so the age seemed to fall away from her and she was an irresponsible student again. Nigel full of good cheer, bad jokes and stories from his past. Lorraine dreamy and distant as if her mind was somewhere else altogether. Annie wondered sometimes if Lorraine had a lover. Not the professor – that would be too obvious – but a younger man outside the valley, to distract her when Nigel became too boring.
‘I’m not sure. We might give it a miss this evening. You know what Sam is like, and we’re not feeling very sociable.’ Annie was thinking of Lorraine’s chilly response to the news that Lizzie would be coming home. She wasn’t sure they’d really be welcome.
‘Come on! Don’t be a spoilsport.’ Lorraine was right under the window now, her eyes glittering like a cat’s in the light that spilled out from the bedroom. ‘Come out to play. It’s Friday night.’
Annie couldn’t say no. She’d never been very good at saying no, and Lorraine’s personality was so fierce and she seemed so used to getting her own way that Annie couldn’t stand up to her. ‘Give us half an hour. I need to jump into the shower, and Sam has been in the garden most of the day.’ It occurred to her that Lorraine was almost as manipulative as Lizzie.