Tabitha tried to make her mind go blank. She pulled her sweater and her tee shirt together over her head. She wasn’t wearing a bra. She kicked off her shoes. She pulled off her trousers.
‘Everything,’ said the stringy warder.
She pulled down her knickers and added them to the pile.
‘I said, everything.’
Tabitha looked down. ‘You mean my socks? Oh for fuck’s sake.’
She teetered on her left foot and pulled off her right sock, then teetered on her right foot and pulled off her left sock. She tossed them on the floor.
‘You should shave more,’ said Mary Guy. There was a snickering sound from behind Tabitha.
‘Fuck you,’ said Tabitha.
‘I’ll remember you said that.’
Mary Guy walked forward until she was almost touching Tabitha. Then she walked behind her.
‘Squat,’ she said.
‘I know what you’re doing,’ said Tabitha. ‘You’re not looking for anything. You’re just doing this as some kind of punishment.’
‘Squat.’
‘No.’
‘Would you like a week in solitary?’
Tabitha thought of her visitor. Of her visitors. The visitors she desperately needed.
She squatted.
‘Lower.’
She forced herself down. Her back was hurting.
‘Stay like that.’
She sensed the woman behind her. ‘You’re not allowed to touch me.’
‘I’m not going to touch you.’
Tabitha heard a click. She looked down and saw that the other warder had placed a small pocket mirror between her feet.
‘This is how we check whether they’re hiding anything inside. I want you to come one by one and look.’
One by one the other warders came over. One of them squatted in front of Tabitha, looked down at the mirror and then smiled at her. It was almost a grin. Tabitha imagined her going home in the evening, being with her family. Imagined her at Christmas dinner. It was a way of not screaming.
* * *
An hour later, or it may have been two or three hours later, Tabitha was lying on the bed in her cell, facing away from the door. She heard a sound and turned round. The tattooed woman and the shaved woman had come into the cell. The shaved woman had pulled the door almost closed and was standing with her back to it. The tattooed woman took a stop closer.
So this was it, Tabitha thought. This was where it all ended. She stood up. If they were going to do it, they would really have to do it. She wasn’t going down passively.
The shaved woman extended her hand – it was empty.
‘You did good,’ she said. ‘You didn’t rat us out. I’m Jasmine. This is Orla.’
Warily, Tabitha shook Jasmine’s hand and then Orla’s.
‘Leave Vera alone,’ she said.
TWELVE
As Tabitha approached the table, she wasn’t even sure if she knew who her visitor was. The woman stood up to greet her and then Tabitha recognised her. She was the vicar of St Peter’s church in the village. For an alarming moment, she couldn’t remember her name. She felt like she was searching for something in a dark room and then suddenly the light came on.
‘Melanie,’ she said and held her hand out. ‘Do I call you vicar?’
Melanie Coglan took her hand and shook it with a firm grip.
‘Call me Mel,’ she said.
‘I’m sorry about your visit a couple of days ago.’
‘That’s fine. Is your lip all right?’
Tabitha put her hand to her lip and flinched slightly. She knew it was still swollen.
‘It’s nothing,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry to take you away from your church.’
Tabitha had never seen Mel in the church. She had never been in the church, except to look around the old Norman interior on a weekday when nobody else was there. She had only seen the vicar striding around the village and she had the look of someone who walked a lot in the open air. She was square jawed, freckled even in the winter. She had grey-blond hair, tied back in a ponytail, and wore a grey sweater, dark slacks and solid leather shoes. And she wore a dog collar. A bulky jacket was draped over the back of her chair, the one Tabitha had seen her in so often, walking with large and energetic strides around the village to call on parishioners. She glanced around the room with obvious fascination, then contemplated Tabitha with a look of concern that also had a touch of fascination. Tabitha felt like a strange exotic animal, crouched at the back of a cage being stared at through bars.
‘You’re looking at my dog collar,’ Mel said.
‘I wasn’t really.’
‘I know, it looks funny. I’m not really that sort of a vicar. I don’t want to ram the God thing down people’s throats. But when I come somewhere like this, I think it shows a certain, I don’t know…’
‘That you’re not trying to smuggle drugs and a mobile phone in?’
Mel suddenly looked alarmed. ‘They wouldn’t think that, would they?’
‘That’s what people do.’
‘I did bring you some magazines,’ she said.
‘Thank you.’
Tabitha never read magazines. She had passed the ones Michael had left for her straight to Michaela.
There was a pause. Mel looked awkward but Tabitha felt no inclination to speak. She waited.
‘You’re probably surprised to see me here. I know you’re not a churchgoer.’
‘I’m sorry. Well, I’m not sorry. I just don’t believe in God.’
Mel smiled. ‘It’s not compulsory,’ she said. ‘Actually a lot of people come to church without really specifically believing in a God who’s up there in the sky. It’s more about comfort and meeting others.’
‘Just now I’ve got another problem with going to church.’
‘I know, I know, and if my job is about anything, it’s about coming to see people in the parish when they’re in distress. It’s not about judging you. It’s about trying to give you solace.’
‘It is about judging me,’ said Tabitha. ‘And realising I didn’t do it.’
‘You don’t need to say that to me. You don’t need to say anything.’
‘Have you been to offer comfort to Laura Rees as well?’
There was a momentary pause before Mel replied. ‘Yes. Yes, I have.’
‘How is she?’
‘She’s in mourning.’
‘Sorry. I guess it’s inappropriate for you to talk to me about her. Does she mind that you’re coming to see the woman who’s been charged with murdering her husband?’
‘She knows that I look after all my parishioners.’
‘You mean the goats as well as the sheep?’
‘I don’t really see it like that.’
‘And Stuart was a parishioner of yours as well.’
‘Yes.’
‘He was a churchgoer, wasn’t he?’
‘He was a regular churchgoer.’
Tabitha started to say something else and then stopped, struck by what she had just heard.
‘That sounds not completely enthusiastic.’
‘I didn’t mean anything like that,’ said Mel. ‘One of the challenges of my job, maybe I should say one of the joys of my job, is that people have their own personal views of religion. And how it should be practised.’