‘Sorry about the mess.’ She sighed, sinking into a battered armchair and reaching for her cigarettes. ‘Do you mind?’ she asked, holding up the pack. Before anyone could answer, she put it aside. ‘Of course you do, everyone does. Clove said you don’t pay anything for interviews.’ She shrugged dejectedly. ‘Shame. I could do with a bit extra, so if you can see a way to changing your rules … ?’ Her eyes came to Cristy’s, and for a brief moment, Cristy felt the dejection coming off her in waves.
‘Thanks for seeing us,’ Cristy said, ‘and I’m sorry about not paying. It’s just that it could be viewed as a bribe, and we can’t allow ourselves to be in that position.’
‘Sure, I get it. Credibility and all that. Makes sense. So,anyway, you want to talk about Nicole? There was a time when everyone did – seems we’re there again. I guess it’s true she’s out?’
‘She is,’ Cristy confirmed, ‘but at this stage there will probably be certain conditions attached to her parole.’
Becky nodded absently. ‘So free, but not free,’ she stated. ‘Kind of like me, though I guess her situation has to have been a whole lot worse than the one I’ve been struggling through all this time. God, who knew having kids could be so hard?’ She gave a mirthless laugh. ‘Maybe Nicole had the right idea back when she got rid of hers.’ Her eyes darted to Cristy’s. ‘I don’t mean that, obvs. Stupid thing to say. It’s not their fault they’re pains in the backside and their mother has a lousy taste in men, is it? I’m talking about myself now, not Nicole, although her taste was no better, was it? He never stood by her, whoever the fuck he was – left her to cope on her own. Sure, she had her parents, and mine are pretty good, but it’s not the same as having someone hands-on all the time, is it? Do you have kids?’
Cristy nodded, and realizing Becky wanted her to expand, she said, ‘Mine are grown now. Still a handful, but …’
‘Don’t tell me – they’ve got a great dad and more advantages than he’s got cash in the bank. What about you?’ she said to Connor, resentfully. ‘Any little chips off your old block?’
‘A daughter,’ he replied. ‘She’s just turned one.’
Becky pulled an upside-down smile. ‘So about the same age as Nicole’s twins when they … left the party, I suppose you could say.’
‘Do you mind if we start recording?’ Cristy asked.
Becky waved for them to continue. ‘Thought you already were,’ she said, staring at the mic although probably not really seeing it.
CRISTY: ‘Unless I misunderstood, you don’t sound convinced that Nicole really did harm her children?’
BECKY: ‘I’ve got no idea what she did or didn’t do. All I can tell you is what I said in court: that she blew hot and cold about being a mother – loved them to bits one day, wanted her life back the next. Much like all of us, I guess. Anyway, they found her guilty, didn’t they? And now she’s admitted it, so I don’t understand why you’re asking.’
CRISTY: ‘As far as we know, she still hasn’t said where the bodies are.’
BECKY: ‘No, that’s weird, isn’t it? But don’t look at me – I’ve got no idea where they might be. Anyway, I wasn’t really seeing much of her by the time she had them. None of us were. I mean, now and again, but she’d kind of moved on. She had other friends she was really into who didn’t live around here.’
CRISTY: ‘Did you ever meet any of them?’
BECKY: ‘No. They were student types: brainy, monied backgrounds, that sort of thing – I don’t know any of that for sure. It’s just the impression we got. I think some of them were foreigners – not that I’ve got anything against foreigners – just saying is all. They hung out in Redland or Clifton, that sort of area – up by the university, anyway. She told me once that she was getting into all the intellectual stuff, learning things she couldn’t explain to us, but it was opening her mind … I remember her saying that. It was opening her mind to a whole other world and way of living.
‘Hah! She was full of it, like you are at that age, I suppose. We’re all guilty of it one way or another, saying shit to try and impress. She just had more of it about her than most, and I guess some of us were kind of in awe of her. She was clever, you know, daring, and in a class of her own when it came to looks. Plus, her parents weren’t short of a few …’
She sat quietly with that for a moment, clearly gathering up old memories and impressions as they came back to her.
BECKY: ‘She had all these airy-fairy ideas of being some kind of dancer at the Moulin Rouge in Paris or an artist on the French Riviera. Like I said, she was full of it, although I think she might have tried it out, eventually, if she hadn’t had the twins and … Well, we know how things turned out from there. God, who’d ever have thought she’d end up the way she did?’
She reached for her cigarettes, shook one out of the pack and put it back again.
BECKY: ‘I’ll tell you what I think might have happened – it’s just me who thinks it, right? Or maybe others do too … I don’t know. Anyway, that set I mentioned – there was this bloke, he was part of it … I never met him, or saw him, but I remember her telling me once that he wasn’t like anyone she’d ever met before. She used to say that the rest of us wouldn’t understand someone like him, that no one did, apart from those he allowed to get close to him. She was kind of besotted – do you know what I mean? But it went deeper than that, like she … I don’t know the right words for it, but she was seriously into him.’
CRISTY: ‘Did she ever tell you his name?’
BECKY: ‘If she did, I don’t remember it, but I can check with some of the other girls if you like and get back to you if one of them knows.
‘You’re going to ask next if he was the twins’ father, aren’t you? So here’s what she told me when I asked … She said, “They are in a world of many fathers and are loved by them all.” Now if that’s not weird, I don’t know what is.’
As her mind drifted again, Cristy let the silence run, knowing better than to interrupt when Becky was clearly and quietly on a roll.
BECKY: ‘You’ll have heard about the cult?’
Cristy nodded.
BECKY: ‘I honestly don’t know if there was one, but when she said stuff like that, it made you think there might have been. How could it not? But then she’d say all sorts of stuff to make herself seem more interesting, more sophisticated than the rest of us, and we never knew how much of it was true.’
CRISTY: ‘Did you ever hear of her being raped?’
