of course. And Kathryn was determined to prove that she was anything but.
Roland took a deep breath and prepared to repeat his questions.
Seven years ago
Marlham prison was never, ever silent. If it wasn’t the droning TV with its endless cycle of mind-numbing soap operas, then it was the screams of derangement, shrieks of laughter and shouted expletives which apparently could not be delivered without the volume turned right up. Kate, as she was now known, knew from experience that the vilest prose was far more menacing when spoken quietly, slowly and in close proximity, forcing you to really listen and absorb the meaning. Shouting was for amateurs.
There was no peace even at night, when the cells were haunted by the inescapably noisy sobbing of the young and uninitiated. Kate found it heartbreaking. She could not stop herself superimposing the image of her daughter, Lydia, onto their weeping faces and she longed to make them feel better with a hug and a kind word. Their howls were punctuated by the bangs of desperate, angry hands as shoes and hairbrushes hit metal bars and bed frames, tapping out a rhythm that was Morse code for ‘Get me out of here, I want to go home. Please let me go home.’
In the wee hours, unsympathetic warders and tired inmates barked instructions to ‘Quieten down, shut up and turn out the bloody light!’ When the inmates finally fell silent and the warders had taken refuge in their office, the building itself came alive. The Victorian plumbing creaked and groaned, radiators cracked and popped, light bulbs fizzed in their sockets and wind whistled through the gaps between pane and frame.
For Kate, the relentless noise was one of the biggest challenges of prison life, something she had not anticipated. She had steeled herself for the loss of freedom and the tedium, but it was the small things that had the biggest, most unexpected impact. Kate’s yearnings and frustrations grew from the tiniest of privations. Having to squeeze her toes into over-dried, stiffened socks was a daily sufferance. But not being able to make herself a cup of tea dampened her spirits to the point of depression. The cool, milky brew that she was served three times a day was the exact opposite of how she liked it and even after three years she still hadn’t got used to it. Not that she ever longed to be back in the head’s kitchen at Mountbriers – not once, never.
When she first arrived, it was quite exhausting learning the timetable, rules and lingo of the strange environment. Most of her education came from watching the other inmates and imitating their responses to bell rings and indecipherable shouts.
She noticed that new residents fell into two categories: those who raged against the system that had unjustly removed them from a life they loved, taking any opportunity to holler, protest or lash out; and those, like herself, who conducted themselves with a level of serenity that suggested prison might in fact be a refuge from whatever had harmed them on the outside.
In the early weeks of her incarceration, Kate had to remind herself of where she was and why she was there. It was just as someone had once suggested to her: a kind of madness, temporary or otherwise. She had become single, widow and killer in a matter of hours. She was separated from her children and Mark was dead.
The kids were with her sister in Hallton, North Yorkshire. At various times of the day and night, Kate would have sudden panics about their welfare. Had she ever told Francesca that Dominic was allergic to cashew nuts? Supposing she inadvertently fed him some, did he have his EpiPen? Fear of the potentially fatal consequences pawed at her for days; she could think of nothing else. A logical mind would have reassured Kate that her son was a teenager and perfectly able to remind his aunt about his allergy, but this was not a logical mind; this was the mind of someone trying to cope with the enormity of being separated from her children.
When sleep was slow to arrive, Kate would ask herself some pertinent questions. Do you regret it? Do you ever think that maybe it would have been better to have kept quiet, to have kept your hand out of the apron, left the knife in your pocket? Wouldn’t it have been better for everybody, Kate, to have continued living your life the way you always had? At least you