When She Was Bad(53)

The words gushed out of her as if she’d been swilling them around her mouth just waiting for a chance to release them. She glanced up and caught my eye and I got the impression she was checking to see how they’d gone down. We’d already heard that Noelle’s legal team was going to claim she was mentally unfit to stand trial, that her upbringing and early experiences had left her too damaged to be accountable. Maybe I should have felt sorry for her. There was no doubt life had dealt her a cruddy hand, but I couldn’t get past the idea that she was practising for her eventual appearance in front of a jury. There was a throbbing in my temple when I thought of that cage in the basement and the possibility of Noelle avoiding jail, but I reminded myself she wasn’t my concern. It wasn’t her we were charged with assessing.

‘Peter saved me from all that. I met him at a bar. I was out of it. I’d taken something – pills or I don’t know what. He sat next to me and started talking to me and I thought he was just one more guy hitting on me, but he wasn’t. He was from Missouri. He worked for a huge firm of accountants there who had clients in lots of different states, so he was in town doing a huge audit.’

‘We get it. He was a big shot. You fell for him.’ I wanted to hear her say it. I wanted her to take responsibility for this at least, for allowing Peter Egan into her life.

‘I was overwhelmed by him.’ When Noelle turned her empty eyes to mine, I had to repress a shudder. It was like looking into a void.

‘He was the first and only man to tell me I was beautiful – or he said I could be beautiful if I took more pride in myself. He bought me nice clothes, make-up, gave me money to get my hair done. No one had ever paid that kind of attention to me before. I was totally under his spell. He loved that I was so vulnerable. So alone.’

Now Noelle turned her flat gaze to Ed and it occurred to me that she wanted him to feel sorry for her, for what she’d been through. The woman had so little self-awareness, it was textbook narcissism. And of course as soon as that thought occurred to me I wondered if that was exactly what this was, an off-the-peg personality disorder she’d researched and adopted to help her case.

‘And you were in love with him?’ asked Ed.

‘I was besotted with him. I thought he would save me from the hell my life had become. Isn’t that a psychological condition? Don’t you call that “rescue fantasy”?’

You had to hand it to her, she’d done her research.

‘So you moved to Missouri with him. Got married. Tell me about Laurie’s birth,’ I asked, wanting to move the conversation on.

‘Oh my. Never has there been a child more wanted or loved. I doted on her. We both did. Right from the first scan where I knew she was a girl I bought her clothes – the cutest, tiniest little pink dresses – and we both talked to her. Through my belly, ya know? Pete used to call us his two princesses – “how’ve my two princesses been today?” he’d ask when he came home. And for a few weeks after she was born, he was just euphoric. He couldn’t do enough for me. Back then.’

She looked up. To make sure we’d registered that past tense.

‘So what changed?’ asked Ed, conscious of the time, the disapproving guard, the allotted visiting hour ticking away.

‘He changed. Pete. He started getting jealous. I’d never made a secret of my past, but suddenly it was like he was obsessed by it. He kept thinking men were hitting on me, or I was hitting on them. Asking me, again and again. How many men did I sleep with? What did I do with them? You know, sex stuff. Now I know he was sick. All the time I knew him, he’d been on meds. I didn’t know it then but it turns out it’s seriously heavy shit. Then, around the time Laurie was born, he stopped taking them.’

‘Allegedly,’ I said, at the exact same moment that Ed said, ‘That’s all for his defence team to prove.’

Noelle’s expression didn’t change.

‘How old was Laurie when you became pregnant again?’

‘Around seven months. I was so happy when I got the positive test. I thought it would make Pete forget about all that other stuff, but instead it made him worse. He was convinced the baby wasn’t his. Kept asking me again and again who I’d slept with, whose baby it was. He said the dates didn’t match up. But they did!’

‘So the baby was his?’ I asked.

For the first time there was a flicker of something in Noelle’s black eyes when she looked at me. The little hairs on the back of my neck stood up.

‘Of course. But he wouldn’t believe it. He kept on and on about the baby. He said everything about it was different to Laurie – from the shape of my bump to the way I was so sick every morning. When we had the first scan, he didn’t say a word. On the way home he told me the baby was clearly deformed. He said it was obvious from the screen but the radiographer just didn’t want to tell me. That’s how he was for the whole pregnancy, telling me the baby wasn’t his, that it was mutant, that it was bad.’