Chapter 29

Everyone, especially the BBC and the Guardian, said there was had to be a deep sickness in the prison system for something like this to happen, and certainly someone in authority must have played his or her part. The government closed ranks. Nobody put their hand up. Nobody was ever likely to. Despite vociferous protests, despite Sarah's parents very reluctantly joining forces with me, briefly, in an effort to get to the truth, murder was excused as an 'incident, ' a dreadful but accidental coincidence, and the conservative press implied that only sick lesbians would do such a thing to each other anyway.

I set my investigators onto it, but even before they could report anything, a friendly female mole from the Home Office came forwards, nervously and secretly, and actually offered look into the tragedy from within the beast. It would take awhile to get anywhere near the truth beneath the facts, and even then there was little hope of usable evidence. As Preston predicted, Sarah was sent to Durham, Category A, as soon as she was fit to travel. What little information I could elicit from my remaining friends in Holloway suggested that she really had gone over the edge into full-blown psychosis, and was under a Largactil cosh twenty-four hours a day.

I soon gave up the idea of ending my own part in the struggle, but was so numb with grief and guilt I could barely function. I was told repeatedly that I was far more valuable to my chosen people alive than dead, and that WOOP would be a fitting memorial to Steve. So for a while I survived one day at a time. My true friends were my rock. Jodie and Mel, Felicity, and the women from the office flanked me at Steve's funeral and kept the press from harassing me too much. I was blind with grief for days, but never without a friend to hand.

As I recovered, the one thing that I couldn't escape was that Sarah and Steve had fought over me. I'd been used yet again, my lovers has been set up, I had been used as bait, and it was even worse than the rape. I was so disgusted I had to find someone to whom I could attach blame. Someone deserved retribution, though I couldn't think of a punishment dire enough for the sick fuck responsible.

In my scapegoat-seeking paranoia, I became fretful and impatient. A report came to me one day with the kind of evidence I had been half-expecting, and wholly dreading. Cheryl, my Home Office mole found that a certain Lady Margaret Hunter Phd. Cantab, had attended Parole Boards at Galloway Prison for several years as a consultant in criminal psychology, principally from late 1973 until very recently, just after the quaintly termed 'incident' in question. It was too much of a coincidence; too likely the kind of sophisticated vindictiveness of which I could easily imagine Margaret capable. She'd been the doyenne of clever retribution for wrongs real or imagined, she had deceived me for years while she protected every personal detail of her own life. As Sarah had revealed when we were on the run, she'd had simultaneous sexual relationships with both of us, maybe others too, and yet we knew nothing. She was amoral and yet totally judgemental.

I became more and more convinced that Margaret had arranged the fatal mismatch as some kind of final revenge on us for daring to defy and reject her. She'd waited to take her vengeance, until I'd put her out of my mind behind more important issues, and then she'd struck, as viciously as she used to with the tawse, choosing the moment and the place when it hurt most.

Suspicion bored into my mind like a flesh-eating bug, consumed me more and more, keeping me from my work. I desperately needed someone to blame - apart from myself - I couldn't, wouldn't let it go despite Felicity's increasingly desperate urging. So, in early January 1979, after the most miserable Christmas of my life, I decided that the only thing to do was to kill or cure my theory. I knew revenge wasn't the answer, but the truth was essential to calm my troubled soul.

I drove to the house in the woods again. The emotions that raged through me on that drive nearly caused several accidental deaths to add to Steve's murder. The familiar landmarks, the towns and villages I passed through, Royston, where I had bought Sarah's disguise, and beyond Cambridge, to the Elvestone crossroads, the lane, the woods, trees bare of leaves, branched like skeletal fingers beckoning me to a place where evil dwelled ... And there it was, the gated track leading to the House in the Woods, Keepers, where I had voluntarily lost so much of my innocence. I parked my car on the verge, climbed the locked gate, and walked down the track. Shivering in the cold air, my resolve inevitably weakened the closer I came, but held as I pictured Sarah jumping into my Mini Cooper on that far off summer's day ... There was the Landrover. No, it was different - older more dents, dark blue instead of green. The dark wooden walls of the punishment shed needed a new coat of creosote, the house looked smaller and much shabbier than the picture in my memory.

I lifted the latch on the gate to the inner enclosure, and pushed. It was surprisingly stiff, sunken on its hinges, and I had to lift it a little to open it without scraping the leaf-strewn ground. By the time I reached the front door, I was even more uncertain of my decision, but I persevered, and watched my hand lift and drop the knocker three times as in times of old, while my heart bumped up into my throat. Instead of the heat of arousal I used to experience at this door, I felt the toxic fire of hatred.

At first I had hated Margaret for her treachery alone, but her most recent act of malice had sent my feelings way beyond that. Now I knew how it felt to want to kill another human being. I could see clearly how it might happen, imagine it happening ... my hands closing around her throat ... tightening. It would have to be that personal. Yes, it could happen ... it might even happen in the next few minutes. Prison had hardened me, but surely not that much?