Dead Like You

119

Friday 23 January

‘You’re unbelievable! You know that? You are un-fucking-believable! You know how much evidence there is against you? It’s un-fucking-believable! You filthy pervert! You – you monster!’

‘Keep your voice down,’ he replied, in a subdued tone.

Denise Starling stared at her husband, in his shapeless blue prison tracksuit, with the black patch over his right eye, sitting opposite her in the large, garishly furnished, open-plan visiting room. A camera watched them from the ceiling and a microphone was silently recording them. A blue plastic table separated them.

Either side of them, other prisoners talked with their loved ones and their relatives.

‘Have you read the papers?’ she demanded. ‘They’re linking you with the Shoe Man rapes back in 1997. You did those too, didn’t you?’

‘Keep your bloody voice down.’

‘Why? Are you afraid of what they might do to you in the remand wing? They don’t like perverts, do they? Do they bugger you with ladies’ shoes in the showers? You’d probably enjoy that.’

‘Be quiet, woman. We’ve got things to discuss.’

‘I’ve got nothing to discuss with you, Garry Starling. You’ve destroyed us. I always knew you were a sodding pervert. But I didn’t know you were a rapist and a murderer. Had a good time on the ghost train with her, did you? You took me on the ghost train on one of our first dates and jammed your finger up my fanny. Remember? Get your rocks off on the ghost train, do you?’

‘I didn’t go on any ghost train. It wasn’t me. Believe me!’

‘Yeah, right, believe you. Ha! Ha fucking ha!’

‘It wasn’t me. I didn’t do that.’

‘Sure, right, and it wasn’t you at the cement works, was it? Just someone who looked like you.’

He said nothing.

‘All that tying me up shit. Making me do things with shoes while you watched and played with yourself.’

‘Denise!’

‘I don’t care. Let them all hear! You’ve ruined my life. Taken my best years. All that not wanting to have children because you had such an unhappy childhood shit. You’re a monster and you’re where you deserve to be. I hope you rot in hell. And you’d better get yourself a good solicitor, because I’m not standing by you. I’m going to take you for every penny I can.’

Then she began to sob.

He sat in silence. He had nothing to say. If it had been possible, he would have liked to lean over the table and strangle this bitch with his bare hands.

‘I thought you loved me,’ she sobbed. ‘I thought we could make a life together. I knew you were damaged, but I thought that if I loved you enough maybe I could change you. That I could offer you something that you never had.’

‘Give over!’

‘It’s true. You were honest with me once. Twelve years ago, when we married, you told me I was the only person who had given you peace in your life. Who understood you. You told me your mother made you screw her, because your father was impotent. That after that you were disgusted by women’s private parts, even my own. We went through all that psychology shit together.’

‘Denise, shut it!’

‘No, I won’t shut it. When we got to together I understood that shoes were the only things that turned you on. I accepted that because I loved you.’

‘Denise! Bitch! Shut it!’

‘We had so many good years. I didn’t realize I was marrying a monster.’

‘We had good times,’ he said suddenly. ‘Good times until recently. Then you changed.’

‘Changed? What do you mean changed? You mean I got fed up fucking myself with shoes? Is that what you mean by changed?’

He was silent again.

‘What’s my future?’ she said. ‘I’m now Mrs Shoe Man. Are you proud of that? That you’ve destroyed my life? You know our good friends, Maurice and Ulla? The ones we have dinner with every Saturday night at the China Garden? They’re not returning my calls.’

‘Maybe they never liked you,’ he replied. ‘Maybe it was me they liked and they just put up with you as my whingeing hag wife.’

Sobbing again, she said, ‘Do you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to go home and kill myself. Will you care?’

‘Just do it properly,’ he said.