Sharyn McCrumb - Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Other Stories

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.”