They Stole My Innocence by Madeleine Vibert

Author:Madeleine Vibert [Vibert, Madeleine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House UK
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

She was there when I was shown into the common room. Those pale, cold eyes met mine and for a second I froze. She knew who I was.

She had been Morag Kidd when I’d first met her. With her dark blonde hair, plain features and trim figure, she was, I had thought then, ordinary. But I quickly learnt that that was one thing Morag Kidd was not. At first her mundane appearance had made us think she was no great threat. After all, she was not a big woman.

Forty years later I have words to describe her. They are not the ones we used in our early teens – ‘fucking bitch’, ‘fucking cow’, ‘fucking evil monster’ – which showed little imagination but expressed our feelings. My adult self has learnt to use different words, like ‘sociopath’.

Her antisocial behaviour took the form of enjoying others’ pain. She used her intelligence to devise different ways of inflicting it. And the tiny part of her that needed someone to grow old with found her soulmate when she met the thick-set, brutal Anthony Jordan.

Was their pillow talk about whom they had beaten, humiliated and, in his case, touched? When they lay together in bed did they make sleepy plans of new horrors they could inflict on us? Did they whisper words that drew pictures of bruised and broken children? And when they crept out of bed at night, to shine circles of light on frightened children in bed, was the smell of fear a powerful aphrodisiac?

I have sometimes wondered if it was she who thought of changing some of those so-called voids into cells. Cells she introduced me to within weeks of her arrival. It certainly took a warped imagination to design them so artfully.

Now, as I hovered in the doorway, I heard the guard whisper, ‘Don’t worry about her – she has no friends among us.’ Those words sent a warm glow through me. I took a deep breath and willed the fear, which had been instilled in me as a child when even the sound of her footsteps caused me to quake, to disappear. What was important, I suddenly realised, was not that she knew who I was but that I knew who and what she was. I was no longer the frightened child she had done her best to destroy. I was now a person in my own right. One who had overcome so much. Hadn’t I managed to put the past behind me, married a man who loved me and brought up two bright, well-adjusted children? Children who, until the police interviews had begun, had felt safe and secure.

I might be in prison for unruly, drink-induced behaviour, but it was not my name that was linked to the word ‘monster’ in the minds of Haut de la Garenne’s former inmates. Her name, unlike mine, was splashed across the internet, where her sentence, its leniency, was considered an outrage. The comments in various chatrooms made no bones about the fury the public felt towards her and her husband.

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