Oh, I should go back a little bit. Time is strange in jail. It goes so slowly that I really thought I would go mad at the beginning, and then the appeal gained traction and suddenly I’m whizzing over things in my haste to finish this story off and start living a new life, one not dominated by nasty but necessary things like murder.
The moment my conviction was quashed, Jimmy got in touch. Well actually, the CPS had been in touch with him a week before the final decision to inform him of the new evidence. He’d written a letter for Thorpe to give to me almost immediately. I won’t relay the entire thing, going on as it did for three full pages. Jimmy is not a natural writer. His continued, and I think wilful, misuse of grammar has always made it hard for me to read his emails and texts. I guess the Guardian is more relaxed about grammatical errors than some publications. A deluge of small mistakes littered a letter that otherwise might have been quite moving. As it was, I winced at every line. Suffice to say, he was full of remorse. He had let me down in the most monumental of ways, which was true, and he had barely slept since I was convicted, which I knew was bollocks. The man has a special gift for falling asleep in the most trying of times, but I appreciated the sentiment. After endless apologies, he told me that he had moved back in with the Latimers and had taken two months off work to grieve Caro. There was no mention of Angelica, who I assume had been cast off when it became obvious that she was a grifting snake trying to get into his pants. I assume she did, in fact, make it into that particular area before being unmasked, but then they do say that grief does funny things to people. And besides, Jim was channelling his sadness in a different direction. An upholstery course, as unlikely as it sounded. I suspect that means that we’ll all be getting slightly wonky armchairs for Christmas. Caro’s death wasn’t for nothing then. Even without the free furniture, her death wasn’t for nothing. It meant no Caro. That was a blessing in itself.
He ended the letter with a clichéd passage about how he didn’t expect me to forgive him （why do people say this when just the mere fact that they’ve got in touch with you to say it means they clearly expect forgiveness?）， but he would spend the rest of his life trying to make it up to me and would be at the prison come the day of my release. Love you, Gray, I’ll help you sleep again soon, he signed off. I wondered if Sophie would insist on coming along, desperate to make my story her own for currency, just as she did when I was younger. Perhaps we’d all go to the local bakery for a celebratory breakfast. Jimmy would inevitably forget his wallet and Sophie would pay for us, shaking her head in exasperation and telling the long-suffering café owner that her kids were, to use her favourite phrase ‘total rotters’。 I’d been in jail too long, because even as I thought about it, I felt a tiny zap of warmth. It was a facsimile of a family, but it was what I had.
Since the letter, we have slotted back into our old relationship with a strange ease. I phoned him two days after I read it, letting him panic a little bit. We have talked at every opportunity since. I have been magnanimous. He has been wracked with guilt, and had come up with a plan to move me into his flat and nurse me back to life, as though I had been marooned on a leper colony for months and not in jail because he accused me of murdering his ghastly fiancée. I firmly shut that down. I wanted to be in my familiar place as I planned for my next move, and having Jimmy bringing me cups of tea would hamper that somewhat. There would be time for cohabitation later, when we could live in a house big enough to spend a pleasurable amount of time away from each other.
Thorpe was also fielding calls from the media, especially from the tabloids, who had done a 180-degree turn on my case with such speed that reporters must have sprained muscles. The narrative of ‘The Morton murderer’ was about to be replaced by something equally terrible, at least in my mind. I idly speculated about my new moniker. If I’d had access to a betting shop I’d have put money on ‘Full of Grace’ being at least one headline used upon my release, complete with an image of me reading out a statement. Composed, long-suffering, dignified. The playbook was too easy. I wouldn’t speak to any of them immediately, of course. I wasn’t some desperate novice who didn’t understand how this stuff worked and took the first cheque she could. My narrative would be my own. Besides, press attention would wait until I revealed myself to be not only an innocent victim, but also a grieving daughter. That’s high-class human interest, the kind that guarantees your name will be known for decades to come.