My Last Confession by Helen Fitzgerald Read Free Book Online Page A

that had been provided for me – the indictment:
    JEREMY ANDREW BAGSHAW, Prisoner of Sandhill, Glasgow, you are indicted at the instance of the right honourable THE LORD JOHNSTONE OF LOCHABER, Her Majesty’s Advocate, and the charge against you is that on Sunday 6 April, at The Lock House, by Crinan, Arygll, you did assault Bridget McGivern and did sever her breasts with a knife or similar instrument and did stab her on the body and repeatedly on the neck with a knife or similar instrument and you did murder her.

    It hit me. As I waited for him to arrive, I realised that Jeremy Bagshaw might well be good-looking and middle-class , he might well be in love and have a tear-jerking childhood story, but he’d also been accused of chopping off a woman’s breasts and stabbing that woman in the body and in the neck. And the blood was probably spurting all over the wall of the cottage in Crinan while he looked on with bloodstained teeth …
    ‘Hello.’
    It was my murderer. He had a black eye, and he didn’t look like someone who could stab a woman and cut off her breasts. I wanted to ask him about the victim. Who was she? What was the connection? But I wasn’t allowed to discuss the offence, and Jeremy looked frightened. He’d been seriously beaten.
    ‘What happened?’
    ‘Nothing,’ he answered, looking over my shoulder nervously.
    ‘You can tell me,’ I whispered.
    ‘Nothing,’ he whispered back.
    I spent a while trying to coax it out of him, pointing out the anti-bullying poster on the wall and so on. But he was scared. He kept checking to see who was in the other interview rooms. I was savvy enough to know that being beaten is bad, but being a grass is worse, so I didn’t push him.
    ‘Don’t tell anyone. Especially Amanda. I don’t want to worry her,’ he said.
    ‘I don’t need to speak to Amanda for this type of report,’ I said.
    ‘You’d like her,’ he said, recalling how he’d fallen head over heels in love with her the first time he saw her. She’dhad such a captivating smile, he said, and she laughed a lot. He loved that about her, the way she laughed.
    ‘Please don’t tell her I’m having a hard time, promise? Please don’t talk to her,’ he pleaded.

11
    Amanda took Jeremy to Glasgow a week after the wedding . They drove fast from London but slowed a little somewhere after Penrith when Amanda gave Jeremy a blowjob.
    After five hours on the road, Scotland appeared by way of an insignificant white sign. Amanda shuddered. Ten whole years away, not far away for most of it, but far enough to be a whole other world.
    Jeremy might have shuddered too if he’d known he was about to meet Amanda all over again. No longer just Amanda, wild and whacky. No longer Amanda, role-less and un-referenced. She would be a daughter and a school friend and an ex-colleague. She would have an old primary school and photo albums and a favourite café. And Jeremy would be checked out by Amanda’s significant others outside his zone.
    Jeremy had never been to Glasgow, but as they drove in it was everything he’d imagined. Heavy impenetrable cloud hovered somewhere just above his windscreen, grey high-rises lined the road, sometimes painted at the front to try and give a good impression, but mostly not. Large blue signs pointed left to Glasgow, straight ahead to Glasgow, right to Glasgow. Glasgow was all around, the ‘dear green place’ with no dearness in sight and no green, just a confusion of signs pointing in every directionthat seemed to say: ‘If you don’t know where you are, then what the fuck are you doing here?’
    They drove past the dense West End and along the Great Western Road, with huge trees, flowers in the middle and beautiful Victorian town houses on either side. Jeremy felt uplifted. This was better. But then the houses got littler and the flowers more shrivelled, and then Amanda pointed and he turned into a dowdy street filled with badly maintained boxes.
    ‘This is us!’ she said,