The Dream Solution: The Murder of Alison Shaughnessy - and the Fight to Name Her Killer by Bernard O'Mahoney & Mick McGovern

Author:Bernard O'Mahoney & Mick McGovern [O'Mahoney, Bernard & McGovern, Mick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Criminal Law, True Crime, General, Biography & Autobiography, Law, Criminology
ISBN: 9781840184679
Google: brdPxl9oSMkC
Amazon: 1840184671
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2001-09-01T23:00:00+00:00

ELEVEN

Prisoner: Cell Block H

I thought Michelle’s clinging neediness might have been just a temporary reaction to the trauma she’d experienced. I hoped that as she readjusted herself to life on the outside she’d come to realise that I was not the man she needed. I was wrong. She became more and more possessive. In the early days after her release she’d often said how she’d never again allow herself to fall for someone in the way she’d fallen for John Shaughnessy. But she was lying to herself, because as soon as we’d slept together she’d returned herself to that same emotional landscape of unrequited devotion. And it wasn’t a passive state of pining. It was an active state of aggression: I’d done the deed and now I was going to pay the price. With hindsight I can see why she must have felt I was giving her mixed signals, but at the time I felt I was giving her a consistent message, namely, that our relationship could only ever be temporary. I didn’t attach the unifying importance to sex that Michelle did. I had a casual attitude towards it, which Michelle certainly didn’t share. Each time I slept with her I regretted it, because I knew by her behaviour afterwards that she felt something important had taken place. It was as if my sleeping with her gave her proprietorial rights over me. I kept telling her we should slow down a bit and just be more relaxed about things. But she wouldn’t have it.

When I was leaving for work she’d ask me to telephone her when I got there. I’d say ‘Yeah, OK’, but I hardly ever bothered. I couldn’t see the point in ringing someone I’d spoken to only 30 minutes earlier. If I did ring, Michelle would ask, ‘Who’s that talking in the background?’, and if she could hear no one in the background she’d say, ‘You aren’t at work, are you?’ It used to fuck my head right up. So in the end I never called. Then when I got home I’d find her pacing up and down the flat, slamming doors and stamping her feet. Before long she’d start shouting: ‘You said you’d call. Why didn’t you? Who have you been with?’ The ranting would go on until I shouted back. Then matters would deteriorate until we were just trading insults.

Sometimes I’d come home in the early hours to a dark and quiet flat. I’d assume she was in the bedroom asleep, but as I tiptoed into the front room a voice would hiss from the darkness: ‘Where the fuck have you been?’ She certainly knew how to make me jump. Then she’d start: ‘You told me you would ring. I’ve been sitting up all night waiting for your call.’ I couldn’t understand how anyone could lose a night’s sleep waiting for a call about nothing. But there was much about Michelle’s behaviour I was coming to find hard to understand.

When she’d been in prison our relationship had developed at arm’s length.

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