Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Other Stories

A PREDATORY WOMAN

“SHE LOOKS A proper murderess, doesn’t she?” said Ernie Sleaford, tapping the photo of a bleached blonde. His face bore that derisive grin he reserved for the “puir doggies,” his term for unattractive women.

With a self-conscious pat at her own more professionally lightened hair, Jackie Duncan nodded. Because she was twenty-nine and petite, she had never been the object of Ernie’s derision. When he shouted at her, it was for more professional reasons-a missed photo opportunity or a bit of careless reporting. She picked up the unappealing photograph. “She looks quite tough. One wonders that children would have trusted her in the first place.”

“What did they know, poor lambs? We never had a woman like our Erma before, had we?”

Jackie studied the picture, wondering if the face were truly evil, or if their knowledge of its possessor had colored the likeness. Whether or not it was a cruel face, it was certainly a plain one. Erma Bradley had dumpling features with gooseberry eyes, and that look of sullen defensiveness that plain women often have in anticipation of slights to come.

Ernie had marked the photo Page One. It was not the sort of female face that usually appeared in the pages of Stellar, a tabloid known for its daily photo of Princess Diana, and for its bosomy beauties on page three. A beefy woman with a thatch of badly bleached hair had to earn her way into the tabloids, which Erma Bradley certainly had. Convicted of four child murders in 1966, she was serving a life sentence in Holloway Prison in north London.

Gone, but not forgotten. Because she was Britain’s only female serial killer, the tabloids kept her memory green with frequent stories about her, all accompanied by that menacing 1965 photo of the scowling, just-arrested Erma. Most of the recent articles about her didn’t even attempt to be plausible: “Erma Bradley: Hitler’s Illegitimate Daughter,” “Children’s Ghosts Seen Outside Erma’s Cell,” and, the October favorite, “Is Erma Bradley a Vampire?” That last one was perhaps the most apt, because it acknowledged the fact that the public hardly thought of her as a real person anymore; she was just another addition to the pantheon of monsters, taking her place alongside Frankenstein, Dracula, and another overrated criminal, Guy Fawkes. Thinking up new excuses to use the old Erma picture was Ernie Sleaford’s specialty. Erma’s face was always good for a sales boost.

Jackie Duncan had never done an Erma story. She had been four years old at the time of the infamous trial, and later, with the crimes solved and the killers locked away, the case had never particularly interested her. “I thought it was her boyfriend, Sean Hardie, who actually did the killing,” she said, frowning to remember the details of the case.

Stellar’s editor sneered at her question. “Hardie? I never thought he had a patch on Erma for toughness. Look at him now. He’s completely mental, in a prison hospital, making no more sense than a vegetable marrow. That’s how you ought to be with the lives of four kids on your conscience. But not our Erma! Got her university degree by telly, didn’t she? Learned to talk posh in the cage? And now a bunch of bloody do-gooders have got her out!”

Jackie, who had almost tuned out this tirade as she contemplated her new shade of nail varnish, stared at him with renewed interest. “I hadn’t heard that, Sleaford! Are you sure it isn’t another of your fairy tales?” She grinned. “ ‘Erma Bradley, Bride of Prince Edward’? That was my favorite.”

Ernie had the grace to blush at the reminder of his last Erma headline, but he remained solemn. “ ’S’truth, Jackie. I had it on the quiet from a screw in Holloway. She’s getting out next week.”

“Go on! It would have been on every news show in Britain by now! Banner headlines in The Guardian. Questions asked in the House.”

“The prison officials are keeping it dark. They don’t want Erma to be pestered by the likes of us upon her release. She wants to be let alone.” He smirked. “I had to pay dear for this bit of information, I can tell you.”

Jackie smiled. “Poor mean Ernie! Where do I come into it, then?”

“Can’t you guess?”

“I think so. You want Erma’s own story, no matter what.”

“Well, we can write that ourselves in any case. I have Paul working on that already. What I really need is a new picture, Jackie. The old cow hasn’t let herself be photographed in twenty years. Wants her privacy, does our Erma. I think Stellar’s readers would like to take a butcher’s at what Erma Bradley looks like today, don’t you?”

“So they don’t hire her as the nanny.” Jackie let him finish laughing before she turned the conversation round to money.

The cell was beginning to look the way it had when she first arrived. Newly swept and curtainless, it was a ten-by-six-foot rectangle containing a bed, a cupboard, a table and chair, a wooden washbasin, a plastic bowl and jug, and a bucket. Gone were the posters and the photos of home. Her books were stowed away in a Marks & Spencer shopping bag.

Ruthie, whose small, sharp features earned her the nickname Minx, was sitting on the edge of the bed, watching her pack. “Taking the lot, are you?” she asked cheerfully.

The thin dark woman stared at the array of items on the table. “I suppose not,” she said, scowling. She held up a tin of green tooth powder. “Here. D’you want this, then?”

The Minx shrugged and reached for it. “Why not? After all, you’re getting out, and I’ve a few years to go. Will you write to me when you’re on the outside?”

“You know that isn’t permitted.”

The younger woman giggled. “As if that ever stopped you!” She reached for another of the items on the bed. “How about your Christmas soap? You can get more on the outside, you know.”

She handed it over. “I shan’t want freesia soap ever again.”

“Taking your posters, love? Anyone would think you’d be sick of them by now.”

“I am. I’ve promised them to Senga.” She set the rolled-up posters on the bed beside Ruthie, and picked up a small framed photograph. “Do you want this, then, Minx?”

The little blonde’s eyes widened at the sight of the grainy snapshot of a scowling man. “Christ! It’s Sean, isn’t it? Put it away. I’ll be glad when you’ve taken that out of here.”

Erma Bradley smiled and tucked the photograph in among her clothes. “I shall keep this.”

Jackie Duncan seldom wore her best silk suit when she conducted interviews, but this time she felt that it would help to look both glamorous and prosperous. Her blond hair, shingled into a stylish bob, revealed shell-shaped earrings of real gold, and her calf leather handbag and shoes were an expensive matched set. It wasn’t at all the way a working Stellar reporter usually dressed, but it lent Jackie an air of authority and professionalism that she needed to profit from this interview.

She looked around the shabby conference room, wondering if Erma Bradley had ever been there, and, if so, where she had sat. In preparation for the new assignment, Jackie had read everything she could find on the Bradley case: the melodramatic book by the BBC journalist, the measured prose of the prosecuting attorney, and a host of articles from newspapers more reliable than Stellar. She had begun to be interested in Erma Bradley and her deadly lover, Sean Hardie: the couple that slays together stays together? The analyses of the case had made much of the evidence and horror at the thought of child murder, but they had been at a loss to provide motive, and they had been reticent about details of the killings themselves. There was a book in that, and it would earn a fortune for whoever could get the material to write it. Jackie intended to find out more than she had uncovered, but first she had to find Erma Bradley.

Her Sloane Ranger outfit had charmed the old cats in the prison office into letting her in to pursue the story in the first place. The story they thought she was after. Jackie glanced at herself in the mirror. Very useful for impressing old sahibs, this posh outfit. Besides, she thought, why not give the prison birds a bit of a fashion show?

The six inmates, dressed in shapeless outfits of polyester, sprawled in their chairs and stared at her with no apparent interest. One of them was reading a Barbara Cartland novel.

“Hello, girls!” said Jackie in her best nursing home voice. She was used to jollying up old ladies for feature stories, and she decided that this couldn’t be much different. “Did they tell you what I’m here for?”

More blank stares, until a heavy-set redhead asked, “You ever do it with a woman?”

Jackie ignored her. “I’m here to do a story about what it’s like in prison. Here’s your chance to complain, if there are things you want changed.”

Grudgingly then, they began to talk about the food, and the illogical, unbending rules that governed every part of their lives. The tension eased as they talked, and she could tell that they were becoming more willing to confide in her. Jackie scribbled a few cursory notes to keep them talking. Finally one of them said that she missed her children: Jackie’s cue.

As if on impulse, she put down her notepad. “Children!” she said breathlessly. “That reminds me! Wasn’t Erma Bradley a prisoner here?”

They glanced at each other. “So?” said a dull-eyed woman with unwashed hair.

A ferrety blonde, who seemed more taken by Jackie’s glamour than the older ones, answered eagerly, “I knew her! We were best friends!”

“To say the least, Minx,” said the frowsy embezzler from Croyden.

Jackie didn’t have to feign interest anymore. “Really?” she said to the one called Minx. “I’d be terrified! What was she like?”

They all began to talk about Erma now.

“A bit reserved,” said one. “She never knew who she could trust, because of her rep, you know. A lot of us here have kids of our own, so there was feeling against her. In the kitchen, they used to spit in her food before they took it to her. And sometimes, new girls would go at her to prove they were tough.”

“That must have taken nerve!” cried Jackie. “I’ve seen her pictures!”

“Oh, she didn’t look like that anymore!” said Minx. “She’d let her hair go back to its natural dark color, and she was much smaller. Not bad, really. She must have lost fifty pounds since the trial days!”

“Do you have a snapshot of her?” asked Jackie, still doing her best impression of breathless and impressed.

The redhead laid a meaty hand on Minx’s shoulder. “Just a minute. What are you really here for?”

Jackie took a deep breath. “I need to find Erma Bradley. Can you help me? I’ll pay you.”

A few minutes later, Jackie was bidding a simpering farewell to the warden, telling her that she’d have to come back in a few days for a follow-up. She had until then to come up with a way to smuggle in two bottles of Glenlivet: the price on Erma Bradley’s head. Ernie would probably make her pay for the liquor out of her own pocket. It would serve him right if she got a book deal out of it on the side.

The flat could have used a coat of paint, and some better quality furniture, but that could wait. She was used to shabbiness. What she liked best about it was its high ceiling and the big casement window overlooking the moors. From that window you could see nothing but hills and heather and sky. No roads, no houses, no people. After twenty-five years in the beehive of a women’s prison, the solitude was blissful. She spent hours each day just staring out that window, knowing that she could walk on the moors whenever she liked, without guards or passes or physical restraints.

Erma Bradley tried to remember if she had ever been alone before. She had lived in a tiny flat with her mother until she finished O-levels, and then when she’d taken the secretarial job at Hadlands, there had been Sean. She had gone into prison at the age of twenty-two, an end to even the right to privacy. She could remember no time when she could have had solitude, to get to know her own likes and dislikes. She had gone from Mum’s shadow to Sean’s. She kept his picture, and her mother’s, not out of love, but as a reminder of the prisons she had endured before Holloway.

Now she was learning that she liked plants, and the music of Sibelius. She liked things to be clean, too. She wondered if she could paint the flat by herself. It would never look clean until she covered those dingy green walls.

She reminded herself that she could have had a house, if. If she had given up some of that solitude. Sell your story to a book publisher; sell the film rights to this movie company. Keith, her long-suffering attorney, dutifully passed along all the offers for her consideration. The world seemed willing to throw money at her, but all she wanted was for it to go away. The dowdy but slender Miss Emily Kay, newborn at forty-seven, would manage on her own, with tinned food and secondhand furniture, while the pack of journalists went baying after Erma Bradley, who didn’t exist anymore. She wanted solitude. She never thought about those terrible months with Sean, the things they did together. For twenty-five years she had not let herself remember any of it.

Jackie Duncan looked up at the gracefully ornamented stone building, carved into apartments for working-class people. The builders in that gentler age had worked leaf designs into the stonework framing the windows, and they had set gargoyles at a corner of each roof. Jackie made a mental note of this useful detail: yet another monster has been added to the building.

In the worn but genteel hallway, Jackie checked the names on mailboxes to make sure that her information was correct. There it was: E. KAY. She hurried up the stairs with only a moment’s thought to the change in herself these past few weeks. When Ernie first gave her the assignment, she might have been fearful of confronting a murderess, or she might have gone upstairs with the camera poised to take the shot just as Erma Bradley opened the door, and then she would have fled. But now she was as anxious to meet the woman as she would be to interview a famous film star. More so, because this celebrity was hers alone. She had not even told Ernie that she had found Erma. This was her show, not Stellar’s. Without another moment’s thought about what she would say, Jackie knocked at the lair of the beast.

After a few moments, the door opened part way, and a small dark-haired woman peered nervously out at her. The woman was thin, and dressed in a simple green jumper and skirt. She was no longer the brassy blonde of the Sixties. But the eyes were the same. The face was still Erma Bradley’s.

Jackie was brisk. “May I come in, Miss Kay? You wouldn’t want me to pound on your door calling out your real name, would you?”

The woman fell back and let her enter. “I suppose it wouldn’t help to tell you that you’re mistaken?” No trace remained of her Midlands accent. She spoke in quiet, cultured tones.

“Not a hope. I swotted for weeks to find you, dear.”

“Couldn’t you just leave me alone?”

Jackie sat down on the threadbare brown sofa and smiled up at her hostess. “I suppose I could arrange it. I could, for instance, not tell the BBC, the tabloids, and the rest of the world what you look like, and where you are.”

The woman looked down at her ringless hands. “I haven’t any money,” she said.

“Oh, but you’re worth a packet all the same, aren’t you? In all the years you’ve been locked up, you never said anything except I didn’t do it, which is rubbish, because the world knows you did. You taped the Doyle boy’s killing on a bloody tape recorder!”

The woman hung her head for a moment, turning away. “What do you want?” she said at last, sitting in the chair by the sofa.

Jackie Duncan touched the other woman’s arm. “I want you to tell me about it.”

“No. I can’t. I’ve forgotten.”

“No, you haven’t. Nobody could. And that’s the book the world wants to read. Not this mealymouthed rubbish the others have written about you. I want you to tell me every single detail, all the way through. That’s the book I want to write.” She took a deep breath, and forced a smile. “And in exchange, I’ll keep your identity and whereabouts a secret, the way Ursula Bloom did when she interviewed Crippen’s mistress in the Fifties.”

Erma Bradley shrugged. “I don’t read crime stories,” she said.

The light had faded from the big window facing the moors. On the scarred pine table a tape recorder was running, and in the deepening shadows, Erma Bradley’s voice rose and fell with weary resignation, punctuated by Jackie’s eager questions.

“I don’t know,” she said again.

“Come on. Think about it. Have a biscuit while you think. Sean didn’t have sex with the Allen girl, but did he make love to you afterwards? Do you think he got an erection while he was doing the strangling?”

A pause. “I didn’t look.”

“But you made love after he killed her?”

“Yes.”

“On the same bed?”

“But later. A few hours later. After we had taken away the body. It was Sean’s bedroom, you see. It’s where we always slept.”

“Did you picture the child’s ghost watching you do it?”

“I was twenty-two. He said-he used to get me drunk-and I-”

“Oh, come on, Erma. There’s no bloody jury here. Just tell me if it turned you on to watch Sean throttling kids. When he did it, were both of you naked, or just him?”

“Please, I-Please.”

“All right, Erma. I can have the BBC here in time for the wake-up news.”

“Just him.”

An hour later. “Do stop sniveling, Erma. You lived through it once, didn’t you? What’s the harm in talking about it? They can’t try you again. Now come on, dear, answer the question.”

“Yes. The little boy-Brian Doyle-he was quite brave, really. Kept saying he had to take care of his mum, because she was divorced now, and asking us to let him go. He was only eight, and quite small. He even offered to fight us if we’d untie him. When Sean was getting the masking tape out of the cupboard, I went up to him, and I whispered to him to let the boy go, but he…”

“There you go again, Erma. Now I’ve got to shut the machine off again while you get hold of yourself.”

She was alone now. At least, the reporter woman was gone. Just before eleven, she had scooped up her notes and her tape recorder, and the photos of the dead children she had brought from the photo archives, and she’d gone away, promising to return in a few days, to “put the finishing touches on the interview.” The dates and places, and forensic details, she could get from other sources, she’d said.

The reporter had gone, and the room was empty, but Miss Emily Kay wasn’t alone anymore. Now Erma Bradley had got in as well.

She knew, though, that no other journalists would come. This one, Jackie, would keep her secret well enough, but only to ensure the exclusivity of her own book. Other than that, Miss Emily Kay would be allowed to enjoy her freedom in the shabby little room overlooking the moors. But it wasn’t a pleasant retreat any longer, now that she wasn’t alone. Erma had brought the ghosts back with her.

Somehow the events of twenty-five years ago had become more real when she told them than when she lived them. It had been so confused back then. Sean drank a lot, and he liked her to keep him company in that. And it happened so quickly that first time, and then there was no turning back. But she never let herself think about it. It was Sean’s doing, she would tell herself, and then that part of her mind would close right down, and she would turn her attention to something else. At the trial, she had thought about the hatred that she could almost touch, flaring at her from nearly everyone in the courtroom. She couldn’t think then, for if she broke down, they would win. They never put her on the stand. She answered no questions, except to say, when a microphone was thrust in her face, “I didn’t do it.” And then later in prison there were adjustments to make, and bad times with the other inmates to be faced. She didn’t need a lot of sentiment dragging her down as well. I didn’t do it came to have a truth for her: it meant, I am no longer the somebody who did that. I am small, and thin, and well-spoken. The ugly, ungainly monster is gone.

But now she had testified. Her own voice had conjured up the images of Sarah Allen calling out for her mother, and of Brian Doyle, offering to sell his bike to ransom himself, for his mum’s sake. The hatchet-faced blonde, who had told them to shut up, who had held them down… she was here. And she was going to live here, too, with the sounds of weeping, and the screams. And every tread on the stair would be Sean, bringing home another little lad for a wee visit.

“I didn’t do it,” she whispered. And it had come to have another meaning. I didn’t do it. Stop Sean Hardie from hurting them. Go to the police. Apologize to the parents during the years in prison. Kill myself from the shame of it. “I didn’t do it,” she whispered again. But I should have.

Ernie Sleaford was more deferential to her now. When he heard about the new book, and the size of her advance, he realized that she was a player, and he began to treat her with a new respect. He had even offered her a raise, in case she was thinking of quitting. But she wasn’t going to quit. She quite enjoyed her work. Besides, it was so amusing now to see him stand up for her when she came into his grubby little office.

“We’ll need a picture of you for the front page, love,” he said in his most civil tones. “Would you mind if Denny took your picture, or is there one you’d rather use?”

Jackie shrugged. “Let him take one. I just had my hair done. So I make the front page as well?”

“Oh, yes. We’re devoting the whole page to Erma Bradley’s suicide, and we want a sidebar of your piece: ‘I Was the Last to See the Monster Alive.’ It will make a nice contrast. Your picture beside pudding-faced Erma.”

“I thought she looked all right for forty-seven. Didn’t the picture I got turn out all right?”

Ernie looked shocked. “We’re not using that one, Jackie. We want to remember her the way she was. A vicious ugly beastie in contrast to a pure young thing like yourself. Sort of a moral statement, like.”