Sharyn McCrumb - Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Other Stories

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.