Part fifty-two
The space all around her was pitch black, impenetrable and seemed to stretch far away from her on all sides. She strained her eyes in vain to pick out the slightest sign of her whereabouts but it gave nothing away. She couldn't remember how she got to this place. The sheer mystery sent that chill feeling of fear up and down her skin as a prelude of worse to come. Angrily, she fought that down, as falling to pieces wasn't her choice of lifestyle. Everything that she had ever achieved in her life, she had struggled and fought for and everything she had lost had been because of the men she had fallen for. At heart, she relied on nothing and no-one else than herself. She could hear the sounds of footsteps shuffling past her but the sounds were opaque and muffled. She pressed a forefinger against her skin near to her ears to clear her hearing. The only sense she had to rely on was her hearing, and she desperately wanted to gauge how far her enemies were away from her. She knew nothing of them except that they were enemies.
"Why don't you show yourselves for who you are?" she shouted out into the impenetrable blackness with her almost reckless brand of courage. She could have kept quiet and hoped that she was ignored but that was not her way.
"Is that you, Miss Betts?" asked the very humble, respectful tones of Ken. Karen laughed quietly to herself. She had felt lost in this senseless dream and Ken was about as prosaic and ordinary as the pints of bitter he drank in that smoke ridden Prison Officers Social Club, complete with horrible seventies type swirly wallpaper.
"Who else but? It's nice to hear a friendly voice to kindly tell me what the hell is going on in this place." "Why, it's the special feature film on in a minute……." Karen looked sideways in her seat and could see the faint light of the disembodied torch held by what must be the usher, escorting latecomers to their seats. Clearly, the usher's torch wasn't working earlier on. The sinister threatening shadowy people shuffling their way in the darkness were reduced to ordinary cinemagoers who were a bit disorganised and late. That was why she was there first. "….and the local paper said that you're starring in it." Karen couldn't believe her ears. Surely the familiar adverts of forthcoming films were rolling up on the wide screen. Surely, Ken was talking gibberish but then again, he was never the sort of Prison Officer who could be accused of an over active imagination. That was what was starting to worry her.
"He's been playing you since day one, Karen. He's a misogynist bastard and I'm sick to the bloody back teeth trying to get you to see it. He's all yours." That well remembered Scottish voice echoed round the auditorium and Helen's angry face could be seen in more of a close up than could ever be seen in real life. She was only on row three and this film, like any other film in the local Meteor Cinema complex thrust itself into her face.
All the other viewers cheered at Helen as she turned on her heel and stalked out.
"You can see right through me, can't you." That well remembered face was blown up in cinemascope and his voice sounded edgy, uncertain to her but the scene switched to her smug, complacent expression. "I hope I can." She was sickened with disgust at this foolish stupid woman as she smiled lazily, lapping up the utterly fake compliment. God, how in hell can this woman fall for such an obvious line from this slimy bastard? She looked as if she did not have a care in the world.
"Well, you're right. I am after something. I want to marry you." At this point, Fenner fumbled in his pocket and produced a ring box and, nestling inside, was a delicately wrought whitegold ring with a large blue sapphire tightly gripped in its clasp.
"It looks very expensive." This appalling woman simpered watching herself about to be as tightly clasped as the jewel was by the ring.
"Nothing's too expensive." "It's a good job I like sapphires." "Don't say it for God's sake, you stupid woman. Helen was right," Karen yelled out into the auditorium. Her skin felt clammy at this horror show. She was oblivious at the gasps of astonishment that ran round the auditorium. She was fighting for that other woman's future.
"Is that a yes?" Fenner murmured.
"Yes, that's a yes." "That's fantastic, Karen. I've got some champagne. You stay right here." Karen's horror and disgust was ratcheted up another notch as she saw this woman take a look at the red grid envelope on the table. She could sense what this woman was thinking as she instantly recognised Helen's angular script and with a horrifically casual gesture, toss the envelope into her waste paper basket.
"For God's sake, Karen, open the bloody envelope. It could change your life. I know." "Excuse me, madam. We came here to watch a good drama. Your shouting and jumping around is spoiling the film for us." Karen turned round and glared venomously into the eyes of this irritating woman. All this was to her was some soap she could watch, be smugly glad she was all right and talk about it at the office tomorrow. Some people have no sympathy or imagination but she didn't really want to get thrown out by the ushers. To all the others, this was just an evening at the pictures. To her, she was trying to save her soul. She had nowhere else to go.
"Do you want me to move or do you want to? I'm not in the mood to argue but if I stay here, I'll try and be quieter." With enormous satisfaction, she pegged this woman as the kind who didn't want to be seen to get involved in a public row. What would all the others think, she could read her thoughts, they might be neighbours.
"All right but mind you keep quiet." "Look here, they're getting married," A man four rows back exclaimed.
This is becoming nightmarish, Karen thought. There she stood her father behind her oblivious to all apart from the fact that his daughter was settling down at last. There Jim Fenner stood, resplendent in his dark suit and red cravat and smiling proudly and possessively on her. The ghastly organ chords blared out into the auditorium as the view panned backwards to a distant shot. She could take in all the regulars at Larkhall, Sylvia resplendent in her smartest pink suit.
"She looks beautiful, all in white, it's so romantic. She'll make Jim a good wife and look after him." She sniffed into her lace handkerchief, remembering the years that her poor departed Bobby was with her.
All the old guard were there, looking unfamiliar outside their prison uniforms, watching the leading lights of G Wing get hitched. What most horrified Karen was to see that simpering, insipid woman, dressed in flowing white wedding dress who looked a lot like her. She was handing over her independence and her pride in herself, not with a fierce struggle but with a stupid smile.
The two women lay together in the luxuriously large bed in the comfort of a sleeping peaceful room. The smaller woman woke up and turned over in bed to hear the words spoken near to her. Instinct told her that they were articulated in a voice subtly different from her normal voice.
"No no, this can't be happening."
"You can't see it, Karen. You're too close." A familiar softly articulated Scottish voice answered her. It was laden with all the care and concern in her warm hearted personality, even in a moment like this.
"There's a perfectly good explanation for everything I did. Not that a bastard like you would know it. You, Jim Fenner, who'll screw around with any woman with a short enough skirt," Karen's memory fired back at Fenner with all that knowledge of the darker, more real side of his twisted personality that she had bitterly acquired the hard way.
"…..Marriage according to the laws of this country is a joining together of one man and one woman, voluntarily entered into for life to the exclusion of all others…" droned the vicar in his relentless, bloodless fashion as he had done, hundreds of times beforehand.
"For God's sake, that bastard strolled up the aisle with his first wife Marilyn and look what happened to that marriage," Karen yelled scornfully.
The dread procession marched relentlessly onwards and Karen couldn't stand the film anymore. Her head was in her hands again as she crouched down, her hair falling round her face like a curtain. She felt sweaty and frozen with horror at the same time. She wished that she couldn't hear what was going on around her. Being doubled up in this uncomfortable posture cramped her breath but anything was better than the nightmare that was taking place on the screen.
The taller woman with long blond hair had stopped twisting and turning and only indecipherable murmuring sounds came from her slightly parted lips. She sounded safer in her own mind and drifting off into a deep sleep. The anxious watcher started to relax. She lay back in the bed and snuggled up close to her to protect her.
Karen could hardly sit through a film like this but she was stuck there on the third row with an audience who would hardly thank her for yet another of her interruptions. They were out to watch a good drama and would complain as she was putting them off. It seemed like ages that Karen was wedged in that highly uncomfortable posture which became more and more painful. At least all the bloody party music had shut up and the film might be safer to watch. She felt faint as she lay back in her seat and sucked in huge lungfuls of air. She stretched herself in her seat as far as she could to ease the crick in her neck and the pain in the small of her back. The light was dim on the cinema screen as the long shot was set out in front of her. A faint glow illustrated lines in the darkness, making the merest suggestion of a deep pile, luxurious carpet, square shapes of darkness on the walls that must be paintings, the lines denoting rich velvet draped curtains hanging from the huge four poster bed.
"Nothing but the best," hung on the air like the faintest whisper in its most beguiling tone.
"Just watch him, Karen. He's a sly bastard," Came that infinitely wise voice of a friend who was very dear to her but was out of sight in the camera film. A tearing regret that the woman to whom that disembodied voice should have been joined to, wasn't there for her.
Gradually the camera crept forward and the horizontal camera angle changed so that it increasingly slanted downwards at the bed, the focus of attention, whether the audience wanted it or not. The folds in the curtains became more defined and the dark space between the curtains started to give up its secrets. To her horror, Karen saw the nude back and legs of a man who could only be Jim Fenner, as he thrust downwards in between the legs of the woman which were wrapped round him.
"Jim, Jim," The hoarse voice of the woman called out in a tone of voice, which was utterly ambiguous. The horror of it was that it was up to the listener to interpret what was going on.
"You know you have wanted this for weeks. You do, you do." the unmistakable voice of Fenner urged the woman while the unseen audience watched on, silently, giving no indication of approval or disapproval. The film isn't telling everything, Karen shouted soundlessly to herself. I know what that woman is feeling better than she does, let alone any filmmaker. I know everything there is to know about Jim bloody Fenner.
Karen's anger was at boiling point as it swelled up inside her, spreading like fire invading throughout her as she lunged her way through the undergrowth in the darkness. She brushed aside stems, some with spiny shoots and she could sense that her long, loping stride cut down remorselessly, the lead that the man had over her. Her highly acute hearing pinpointed as if in an interior map inside her mind the relative movements of her and her quarry. She could hear the rustling sounds that the man ahead of her made as he trod through the grass and betrayed his every move. She drove herself faster through the forest faster than she knew that she could move as she closed in on him as she passed by each black gnarled ancient tree. The shadowy darkness of the film reminded Karen of the classic horror film, the sense of being miles off the beaten track with no sense of direction of where she was heading and how she could get herself out of the forest. Ordinarily, she should see herself as the innocent victim being stalked and that she should be afraid but the situation was reversed because she had the power to decide it her way. She was on fire for vengeance. Intuition told her that, at last, she had closed in on him and he was within her sight. Suddenly a clearing opened out and there was Fenner in front of her. Earth was piled in untidy heaps all around him and the bottom half of him appeared to be chopped off at thigh level. That made it hard for her to distinguish what was going on. Well to one side of him, the dark shape of the trunk of an ancient oak tree spread its twisted branches wide open above them and the level grass under Karen's feet stretched all the way to Fenner as if rolled out in front of her like a red carpet.
"For God's sake, Karen, don't shoot," Fenner screamed at her, a look of sheer panic widening his eyes and his mouth open in an expression of horror.
She did not know how the weapon had appeared in her hand, but it gave her a huge feeling of satisfaction that in a wild deserted place like this, a gun was a great equaliser.
"Why shouldn't I shoot you, Fenner?" her words taunted him. She was asking herself that very same question as her forefinger rested gently against the trigger but he was not to know that. "We'll forget about this, pretend that it never happened and we can go back to just the way it was," Babbled Fenner.
Your words are very badly chosen, Jim Fenner, she thought as she came up close to him and pointed the gun at him. She could see the deep pit that he stood at the bottom of which he had dug for himself with his own hands, every last shovelful of earth.
"That will never happen, Fenner." Her hard implacable voice echoed in the empty space a second before she gently squeezed the trigger and two shots cracked the air, straight through Fenner's heart. As Fenner dropped down in a heap, she reflected on how easy it was to shoot someone and at last understood what led some of the prisoners to end up in her care. Still holding the smoking gun, she turned abruptly away and moved off the screen, stage left.
She saw herself in the second most frightening impossible place in the world that she could imagine, in the dock and the helpless subject of the machinery and full majesty of law as, cog by cog, it was set to roll over her. She dared not deal with the possibility of living the most frightening nightmare of her life, becoming a prisoner in the very prison that she had run as Wing Governor. She placed her hands on the metal rail of the dock as it fenced her in and felt as if it trapped her. She glanced around her and she felt uncomfortably exposed as if she were the focus of the court, as indeed she was. She glanced up at the judge but his throne was far above and away from her and she could not pick him out.
"This man, whom everyone believes raped you, was, until he was killed, haunting your every waking, or should I say working moment. I put it to you, Miss Betts that you were obsessed with James Fenner and something twisted in you to destroy what you had lost. You killed the deceased man so that no other woman would have him." "You bastard!" Karen's softly spoken voice concealed the cold rage. "What I am trying to ascertain is whether or not there is any actual proof that this crime, supposedly committed by James Fenner, ever took place. I believe the jury may find it interesting that after reporting this crime to the police, you then retracted your statement, just days before the CPS were to inform you that they weren't taking up the case. What I shall endeavour to prove," the man continued, now really getting in to his stride. "Is that this crime had never taken place, and that on the contrary, your relationship with James Fenner, your sexual relationship that is, was one of immense enjoyment to you both." "That bastard raped me," Shouted Karen. "I'll show you what happened so that you can see it through your own eyes if that is what it takes for you all to believe me."
The other woman in the bed blinked her eyes half open as the desperate shout resounded through the stillness of the night. She had worked hard all the last two weeks and normally it was impossible to rouse her. This time she knew that she was not dreaming.
Karen saw again the inside of the bed and breakfast with the clutter of bottles of wine on the table. She had talked to him as the man 'who needed to get as many colleagues on side as possible', as the broken beaten man who needed her nursing. "I don't know how much longer I can hang in there. I curse myself for losing you." His broken tones came dejectedly from the man who appealed to her as the man who needed her. It was a side of him that had appealed to her when he cried on her shoulder when his wife and children left him. "I'm with you, aren't I?" These had been the fatal words that he had got the wrong end of the stick about and when she was lying in bed next to him, the feel of the man whom she had lived with and whom she thought she knew. "Why fight it? You know you want me. You can't fake this." There was something creepy, insistent in his tone that frightened her that Jim had changed into this man who was blind to everything but his own sexual pleasure. She was no longer Karen Betts, onetime lover, workmate who had come to comfort but only an anonymous passive piece of female flesh for him to dominate. He rolled on top of her and pinned one of her wrists down to the bed with his superior strength, with the other hand he feverishly groped about with her clothes with the blind singleminded drive to penetrate her no matter how she felt about it. There was nothing about him that remotely suggested that she was a woman and another human being. That frightening nightmare was upon her that she was trapped. She was living the worst nightmare that female folklore had passed down to her from generation to generation. The crazy thought flashed upon her that second that they say that many women know the man who raped them.
"I don't want to do this," Karen yelled with all her fear and all the force of protest within her. "There's your evidence for you, where it feels. That's what he did to me and that's why I shot him."
Karen's eyes opened wide at the distant ceiling above her and, wonder of wonders, George's deeply concerned face suspended above her.
The space all around her was pitch black, impenetrable and seemed to stretch far away from her on all sides. She strained her eyes in vain to pick out the slightest sign of her whereabouts but it gave nothing away. She couldn't remember how she got to this place. The sheer mystery sent that chill feeling of fear up and down her skin as a prelude of worse to come. Angrily, she fought that down, as falling to pieces wasn't her choice of lifestyle. Everything that she had ever achieved in her life, she had struggled and fought for and everything she had lost had been because of the men she had fallen for. At heart, she relied on nothing and no-one else than herself. She could hear the sounds of footsteps shuffling past her but the sounds were opaque and muffled. She pressed a forefinger against her skin near to her ears to clear her hearing. The only sense she had to rely on was her hearing, and she desperately wanted to gauge how far her enemies were away from her. She knew nothing of them except that they were enemies.
"Why don't you show yourselves for who you are?" she shouted out into the impenetrable blackness with her almost reckless brand of courage. She could have kept quiet and hoped that she was ignored but that was not her way.
"Is that you, Miss Betts?" asked the very humble, respectful tones of Ken. Karen laughed quietly to herself. She had felt lost in this senseless dream and Ken was about as prosaic and ordinary as the pints of bitter he drank in that smoke ridden Prison Officers Social Club, complete with horrible seventies type swirly wallpaper.
"Who else but? It's nice to hear a friendly voice to kindly tell me what the hell is going on in this place." "Why, it's the special feature film on in a minute……." Karen looked sideways in her seat and could see the faint light of the disembodied torch held by what must be the usher, escorting latecomers to their seats. Clearly, the usher's torch wasn't working earlier on. The sinister threatening shadowy people shuffling their way in the darkness were reduced to ordinary cinemagoers who were a bit disorganised and late. That was why she was there first. "….and the local paper said that you're starring in it." Karen couldn't believe her ears. Surely the familiar adverts of forthcoming films were rolling up on the wide screen. Surely, Ken was talking gibberish but then again, he was never the sort of Prison Officer who could be accused of an over active imagination. That was what was starting to worry her.
"He's been playing you since day one, Karen. He's a misogynist bastard and I'm sick to the bloody back teeth trying to get you to see it. He's all yours." That well remembered Scottish voice echoed round the auditorium and Helen's angry face could be seen in more of a close up than could ever be seen in real life. She was only on row three and this film, like any other film in the local Meteor Cinema complex thrust itself into her face.
All the other viewers cheered at Helen as she turned on her heel and stalked out.
"You can see right through me, can't you." That well remembered face was blown up in cinemascope and his voice sounded edgy, uncertain to her but the scene switched to her smug, complacent expression. "I hope I can." She was sickened with disgust at this foolish stupid woman as she smiled lazily, lapping up the utterly fake compliment. God, how in hell can this woman fall for such an obvious line from this slimy bastard? She looked as if she did not have a care in the world.
"Well, you're right. I am after something. I want to marry you." At this point, Fenner fumbled in his pocket and produced a ring box and, nestling inside, was a delicately wrought whitegold ring with a large blue sapphire tightly gripped in its clasp.
"It looks very expensive." This appalling woman simpered watching herself about to be as tightly clasped as the jewel was by the ring.
"Nothing's too expensive." "It's a good job I like sapphires." "Don't say it for God's sake, you stupid woman. Helen was right," Karen yelled out into the auditorium. Her skin felt clammy at this horror show. She was oblivious at the gasps of astonishment that ran round the auditorium. She was fighting for that other woman's future.
"Is that a yes?" Fenner murmured.
"Yes, that's a yes." "That's fantastic, Karen. I've got some champagne. You stay right here." Karen's horror and disgust was ratcheted up another notch as she saw this woman take a look at the red grid envelope on the table. She could sense what this woman was thinking as she instantly recognised Helen's angular script and with a horrifically casual gesture, toss the envelope into her waste paper basket.
"For God's sake, Karen, open the bloody envelope. It could change your life. I know." "Excuse me, madam. We came here to watch a good drama. Your shouting and jumping around is spoiling the film for us." Karen turned round and glared venomously into the eyes of this irritating woman. All this was to her was some soap she could watch, be smugly glad she was all right and talk about it at the office tomorrow. Some people have no sympathy or imagination but she didn't really want to get thrown out by the ushers. To all the others, this was just an evening at the pictures. To her, she was trying to save her soul. She had nowhere else to go.
"Do you want me to move or do you want to? I'm not in the mood to argue but if I stay here, I'll try and be quieter." With enormous satisfaction, she pegged this woman as the kind who didn't want to be seen to get involved in a public row. What would all the others think, she could read her thoughts, they might be neighbours.
"All right but mind you keep quiet." "Look here, they're getting married," A man four rows back exclaimed.
This is becoming nightmarish, Karen thought. There she stood her father behind her oblivious to all apart from the fact that his daughter was settling down at last. There Jim Fenner stood, resplendent in his dark suit and red cravat and smiling proudly and possessively on her. The ghastly organ chords blared out into the auditorium as the view panned backwards to a distant shot. She could take in all the regulars at Larkhall, Sylvia resplendent in her smartest pink suit.
"She looks beautiful, all in white, it's so romantic. She'll make Jim a good wife and look after him." She sniffed into her lace handkerchief, remembering the years that her poor departed Bobby was with her.
All the old guard were there, looking unfamiliar outside their prison uniforms, watching the leading lights of G Wing get hitched. What most horrified Karen was to see that simpering, insipid woman, dressed in flowing white wedding dress who looked a lot like her. She was handing over her independence and her pride in herself, not with a fierce struggle but with a stupid smile.
The two women lay together in the luxuriously large bed in the comfort of a sleeping peaceful room. The smaller woman woke up and turned over in bed to hear the words spoken near to her. Instinct told her that they were articulated in a voice subtly different from her normal voice.
"No no, this can't be happening."
"You can't see it, Karen. You're too close." A familiar softly articulated Scottish voice answered her. It was laden with all the care and concern in her warm hearted personality, even in a moment like this.
"There's a perfectly good explanation for everything I did. Not that a bastard like you would know it. You, Jim Fenner, who'll screw around with any woman with a short enough skirt," Karen's memory fired back at Fenner with all that knowledge of the darker, more real side of his twisted personality that she had bitterly acquired the hard way.
"…..Marriage according to the laws of this country is a joining together of one man and one woman, voluntarily entered into for life to the exclusion of all others…" droned the vicar in his relentless, bloodless fashion as he had done, hundreds of times beforehand.
"For God's sake, that bastard strolled up the aisle with his first wife Marilyn and look what happened to that marriage," Karen yelled scornfully.
The dread procession marched relentlessly onwards and Karen couldn't stand the film anymore. Her head was in her hands again as she crouched down, her hair falling round her face like a curtain. She felt sweaty and frozen with horror at the same time. She wished that she couldn't hear what was going on around her. Being doubled up in this uncomfortable posture cramped her breath but anything was better than the nightmare that was taking place on the screen.
The taller woman with long blond hair had stopped twisting and turning and only indecipherable murmuring sounds came from her slightly parted lips. She sounded safer in her own mind and drifting off into a deep sleep. The anxious watcher started to relax. She lay back in the bed and snuggled up close to her to protect her.
Karen could hardly sit through a film like this but she was stuck there on the third row with an audience who would hardly thank her for yet another of her interruptions. They were out to watch a good drama and would complain as she was putting them off. It seemed like ages that Karen was wedged in that highly uncomfortable posture which became more and more painful. At least all the bloody party music had shut up and the film might be safer to watch. She felt faint as she lay back in her seat and sucked in huge lungfuls of air. She stretched herself in her seat as far as she could to ease the crick in her neck and the pain in the small of her back. The light was dim on the cinema screen as the long shot was set out in front of her. A faint glow illustrated lines in the darkness, making the merest suggestion of a deep pile, luxurious carpet, square shapes of darkness on the walls that must be paintings, the lines denoting rich velvet draped curtains hanging from the huge four poster bed.
"Nothing but the best," hung on the air like the faintest whisper in its most beguiling tone.
"Just watch him, Karen. He's a sly bastard," Came that infinitely wise voice of a friend who was very dear to her but was out of sight in the camera film. A tearing regret that the woman to whom that disembodied voice should have been joined to, wasn't there for her.
Gradually the camera crept forward and the horizontal camera angle changed so that it increasingly slanted downwards at the bed, the focus of attention, whether the audience wanted it or not. The folds in the curtains became more defined and the dark space between the curtains started to give up its secrets. To her horror, Karen saw the nude back and legs of a man who could only be Jim Fenner, as he thrust downwards in between the legs of the woman which were wrapped round him.
"Jim, Jim," The hoarse voice of the woman called out in a tone of voice, which was utterly ambiguous. The horror of it was that it was up to the listener to interpret what was going on.
"You know you have wanted this for weeks. You do, you do." the unmistakable voice of Fenner urged the woman while the unseen audience watched on, silently, giving no indication of approval or disapproval. The film isn't telling everything, Karen shouted soundlessly to herself. I know what that woman is feeling better than she does, let alone any filmmaker. I know everything there is to know about Jim bloody Fenner.
Karen's anger was at boiling point as it swelled up inside her, spreading like fire invading throughout her as she lunged her way through the undergrowth in the darkness. She brushed aside stems, some with spiny shoots and she could sense that her long, loping stride cut down remorselessly, the lead that the man had over her. Her highly acute hearing pinpointed as if in an interior map inside her mind the relative movements of her and her quarry. She could hear the rustling sounds that the man ahead of her made as he trod through the grass and betrayed his every move. She drove herself faster through the forest faster than she knew that she could move as she closed in on him as she passed by each black gnarled ancient tree. The shadowy darkness of the film reminded Karen of the classic horror film, the sense of being miles off the beaten track with no sense of direction of where she was heading and how she could get herself out of the forest. Ordinarily, she should see herself as the innocent victim being stalked and that she should be afraid but the situation was reversed because she had the power to decide it her way. She was on fire for vengeance. Intuition told her that, at last, she had closed in on him and he was within her sight. Suddenly a clearing opened out and there was Fenner in front of her. Earth was piled in untidy heaps all around him and the bottom half of him appeared to be chopped off at thigh level. That made it hard for her to distinguish what was going on. Well to one side of him, the dark shape of the trunk of an ancient oak tree spread its twisted branches wide open above them and the level grass under Karen's feet stretched all the way to Fenner as if rolled out in front of her like a red carpet.
"For God's sake, Karen, don't shoot," Fenner screamed at her, a look of sheer panic widening his eyes and his mouth open in an expression of horror.
She did not know how the weapon had appeared in her hand, but it gave her a huge feeling of satisfaction that in a wild deserted place like this, a gun was a great equaliser.
"Why shouldn't I shoot you, Fenner?" her words taunted him. She was asking herself that very same question as her forefinger rested gently against the trigger but he was not to know that. "We'll forget about this, pretend that it never happened and we can go back to just the way it was," Babbled Fenner.
Your words are very badly chosen, Jim Fenner, she thought as she came up close to him and pointed the gun at him. She could see the deep pit that he stood at the bottom of which he had dug for himself with his own hands, every last shovelful of earth.
"That will never happen, Fenner." Her hard implacable voice echoed in the empty space a second before she gently squeezed the trigger and two shots cracked the air, straight through Fenner's heart. As Fenner dropped down in a heap, she reflected on how easy it was to shoot someone and at last understood what led some of the prisoners to end up in her care. Still holding the smoking gun, she turned abruptly away and moved off the screen, stage left.
She saw herself in the second most frightening impossible place in the world that she could imagine, in the dock and the helpless subject of the machinery and full majesty of law as, cog by cog, it was set to roll over her. She dared not deal with the possibility of living the most frightening nightmare of her life, becoming a prisoner in the very prison that she had run as Wing Governor. She placed her hands on the metal rail of the dock as it fenced her in and felt as if it trapped her. She glanced around her and she felt uncomfortably exposed as if she were the focus of the court, as indeed she was. She glanced up at the judge but his throne was far above and away from her and she could not pick him out.
"This man, whom everyone believes raped you, was, until he was killed, haunting your every waking, or should I say working moment. I put it to you, Miss Betts that you were obsessed with James Fenner and something twisted in you to destroy what you had lost. You killed the deceased man so that no other woman would have him." "You bastard!" Karen's softly spoken voice concealed the cold rage. "What I am trying to ascertain is whether or not there is any actual proof that this crime, supposedly committed by James Fenner, ever took place. I believe the jury may find it interesting that after reporting this crime to the police, you then retracted your statement, just days before the CPS were to inform you that they weren't taking up the case. What I shall endeavour to prove," the man continued, now really getting in to his stride. "Is that this crime had never taken place, and that on the contrary, your relationship with James Fenner, your sexual relationship that is, was one of immense enjoyment to you both." "That bastard raped me," Shouted Karen. "I'll show you what happened so that you can see it through your own eyes if that is what it takes for you all to believe me."
The other woman in the bed blinked her eyes half open as the desperate shout resounded through the stillness of the night. She had worked hard all the last two weeks and normally it was impossible to rouse her. This time she knew that she was not dreaming.
Karen saw again the inside of the bed and breakfast with the clutter of bottles of wine on the table. She had talked to him as the man 'who needed to get as many colleagues on side as possible', as the broken beaten man who needed her nursing. "I don't know how much longer I can hang in there. I curse myself for losing you." His broken tones came dejectedly from the man who appealed to her as the man who needed her. It was a side of him that had appealed to her when he cried on her shoulder when his wife and children left him. "I'm with you, aren't I?" These had been the fatal words that he had got the wrong end of the stick about and when she was lying in bed next to him, the feel of the man whom she had lived with and whom she thought she knew. "Why fight it? You know you want me. You can't fake this." There was something creepy, insistent in his tone that frightened her that Jim had changed into this man who was blind to everything but his own sexual pleasure. She was no longer Karen Betts, onetime lover, workmate who had come to comfort but only an anonymous passive piece of female flesh for him to dominate. He rolled on top of her and pinned one of her wrists down to the bed with his superior strength, with the other hand he feverishly groped about with her clothes with the blind singleminded drive to penetrate her no matter how she felt about it. There was nothing about him that remotely suggested that she was a woman and another human being. That frightening nightmare was upon her that she was trapped. She was living the worst nightmare that female folklore had passed down to her from generation to generation. The crazy thought flashed upon her that second that they say that many women know the man who raped them.
"I don't want to do this," Karen yelled with all her fear and all the force of protest within her. "There's your evidence for you, where it feels. That's what he did to me and that's why I shot him."
Karen's eyes opened wide at the distant ceiling above her and, wonder of wonders, George's deeply concerned face suspended above her.