Connie reaches her arm around the U-bend of Heather Garbutt’s toilet. Nothing.
Connie can fool anyone and everyone. She is very, very good at it, and it has served her well for many years. When her dad left, Connie kept smiling, just so someone in the house was. When her mum died, Connie ploughed on, building the business. No one was any the wiser about Connie’s pain.
The bed frame is made from tubes of cheap metal. Hollow tubes.
Of course, even while she’s thinking it through, Connie knows what Ibrahim is doing. The mirror he’s providing. He’s letting Connie speak to herself. To see herself. And he’s helping her understand that if you’re fooling everyone, you’re really only fooling one person, and that’s yourself. Ibrahim had said to her, ‘Our great strengths are also our great weaknesses,’ and Connie had rolled her eyes. But, for some reason, that thought is with her all the time now.
Connie upends the bunk beds and pulls a loose rubber stopper out from one of the metal legs. Nothing but an empty space. Keep looking.
What if she wasn’t just plain bad? What if that’s a lie she has told herself all these years? That would be too much to take. She could just stop seeing Ibrahim, but it feels like he has opened a door that can never be shut again.
She pulls the stopper from the second leg of the bed. Nothing.
Plenty of people have dealt with an awful lot worse than Connie Johnson, she knows that. What she does for a living is despicable: how she makes her money, how she treats people, how she shuts off her brain to the pain that she has caused. It has always felt inevitable to her, though. As if she were born this way, and as if different rules applied to her.
She pulls out the third stopper. Still nothing.
But what if none of that is true? Does she really want to be confronted with everything she has done?
Connie pulls the stopper from the final leg.
On balance, no, she doesn’t want to find that out – it is probably best to just keep on lying to herself. Best to remain the Connie Johnson that the little girl invented when her dad left her all those years ago. She will let Ibrahim know she doesn’t want any more sessions with him. Thank you, but no thank you.
Connie hooks a finger into the hollow bed leg and feels the paper immediately. Rolled up tight. There are five or six pages perhaps, all tied with a rubber band, and she slides them out. Connie slips off the rubber band and flattens the pages as best she can. They are covered in neat handwriting. Blue ink. She reads the first line:
Through the bars I hear the birds
In the bare cell, with the thick walls, Connie has surely found something that will interest Ibrahim. Ibrahim had set her a task, and she has achieved it. She quickly scans what Heather Garbutt has written, but it seems to be, of all things, a poem. She was hoping for a nice, simple confession, or the naming of a co-conspirator, something to help solve the murder of Bethany Waites, but no such luck yet. Connie knows it could still be helpful though, feels it in her bones.
And, even if she can’t make sense of it right now, she knows someone who will. She should probably do one more session with Ibrahim. Show him the poem. Just until they’ve worked out what’s going on here.
38
Joyce
Where to begin?
Sitting on my sofa, watching a programme about trains, is a man called Viktor Illyich. He’s a former KGB agent. He’s Ukrainian.
I told him I wanted to write my diary and he laughed and said I had plenty to write about today. I have left him with a glass of sherry and a slice of cherry-and-dark-chocolate cake. I saw it on Instagram and thought it had Ron’s name all over it. But, as it turns out, Viktor is getting the first slice, which goes to show how plans can change. The rest is in Tupperware for Ron though.
Hold on one second.