Death of a Murderer

35

His eyes still closed, he saw the woman not in lilac or maroon, not in a suit at all, in fact, but in a kind of gown. Shapeless it was, and hooded. Brown or black.

“They’ll never forgive me, will they,” she said, “not even now I’m dead?”

“No,” he said. “I don’t think they will.” He paused, and then decided that he might as well tell the truth. “It’s strange, but I think people hate you even more now. It’s like what you did has got worse with the passing of time — or maybe it’s taken this long for the full horror of it all to sink in.”

She fell silent, as if the idea hadn’t occurred to her before. At times, he wasn’t sure whether she was still there, but then he would hear a swift, sharp intake of breath as she inhaled, or the faint scrape of a shoe against the floor as she altered the position of her legs. Though he was in danger of falling asleep, he resisted the temptation to open his eyes. He didn’t want to see her again. He had already seen enough of her, he felt, to last a lifetime.

“Sometimes I dream I’m standing in a crowd,” she said at last, “or else I’m walking along, surrounded by hundreds of people. I don’t know any of them. They’re all strangers. But it feels like — like luxury.” There was another silence. He imagined a cigarette butt falling in slow-motion through the air and vanishing between two bars of the drain’s dark metal grille.

“To be part of a crowd,” she said. “You don’t know how I long for that.”

“They’d probably tear you to pieces,” he said.

“In my dream, no one recognises me. They’ve never heard of me. They don’t notice me at all.”

“You did something people couldn’t bring themselves to think about. You forced them to imagine it. You rubbed their noses in it.”

That was what they meant, he realised, when they called her a monster. She had shown them what a human being was capable of. She had given them a glimpse of the horrific and terrifying acts that lay within their grasp. She had reminded them of a truth that they had overlooked, or hidden from, or lied to themselves about.

“That’s why they can’t forgive you,” he said. “I mean, maybe if you’d broken down in court—”

She let out a short, sardonic laugh. “I’m not a bloody actress.”

“They needed something.”

“They wouldn’t have believed me.”

He thought about that. Over the years, there had been a number of people who had taken her side. They saw her continuing imprisonment as political, driven not by the rule of law but by popular opinion. Other murderers were freed when they had served their sentences — why not her? Clearly, she was no danger to society. In fact, the opposite was true: were she to be released, society would be a danger to her. And here was the savage irony: taxpayers’ money would have to be used to protect the woman from what the taxpayers themselves would try and do to her. No government would willingly put itself in the position of having to defend such a policy. Instead, the responsibility for her fate was handed swiftly from one Home Secretary to another, like a particularly hazardous game of pass-the-parcel.

“You’re probably right,” he said. “I don’t think there was any way back from what you did. They’d never have let you out, not in a million years.”

“It already feels like a million years.” He heard her light another cigarette. “I smoked myself to death,” she said. “What else was I going to do?”

“You did make it worse for yourself, though,” he said. “You made mistakes.”

“Mistakes? What mistakes?”

“Afterwards, I mean. You said things you shouldn’t have. To journalists.”

He thought she might bridle at that, but she kept quiet.

“And that picture they took of you when you got your degree,” he said, “the one that appeared in the papers.”

“What about it?”

“You shouldn’t have smiled.”

“So now I’m not allowed to smile…” She sounded crestfallen, even defeated, but when she spoke again, a few moments later, her voice had all its old bluntness. “And you,” she said, “are you so innocent?”