He hesitates. His voice bears the traces of embarrassment, as if speaking this way, in his current position, is a sign of weakness and immaturity.
‘That sounds very comforting,’ Pauline says encouragingly. Hearing her own words played back to her now, they seem mildly inadequate. His emotions were coming through. She could have prompted him more. Encouraged him.
‘She was nothing but love and warmth,’ he continues, and Pauline is drawn back to the moment. He hadn’t needed further prompting; he’d swept himself away. On the cassette his embarrassment is instantly gone. ‘Blonde hair, she had, and big blue eyes. Soft cheeks and a killer laugh. She’d take my hand in hers, wrapping her fingers through mine, and take me on walks. I’d never gone on walks before her, never been interested. But walks with her were like dreams. We’d go out together, sit on a big blanket and have picnics. Can you imagine that? In this strange world, having picnics out in the countryside?’
Pauline’s voice offers a soft, noncommittal chuckle. The kind that broadcasts pleasant encouragement without meaning anything on its own.
‘She would make the most amazing treats for me. Out of nothing. I don’t know how she did it. It’s not like we had cash flowing out our pockets night and day, but somehow she’d fabricate the most perfect foods for those outings. Sweets. Savouries. And there would always be a little card tucked into the picnic basket. Something handmade, brilliantly drawn, with some inside joke written out inside. We would laugh until we were in giggles.’ His voice trails off again. Then, in barely more than a whisper. ‘She was one of a kind. Nobody else like her. I wanted it to be just us. Us and no one else.’
Pauline lets the remembered narrative halt, allows some silence to buffer her next question.
‘Do you ever wonder, Joseph, whether you were too lucky?’
It was the question to which Pauline had known this whole line of discussion would have to lead. His response, however, had been hostile and resistant.
‘There you go again!’ his voice taunts from the recording. ‘I tell you something simple, something straightforward, and you go off toying about with words. Playing your games.’ He’s vocally irritated. ‘What’s that even supposed to mean, “too lucky”?’
‘I mean,’ Pauline’s voice comes back calmly, ‘do you ever sometimes feel that this perfect marriage, this perfect woman, that they’re almost too perfect to be …’ She allows her voice to trail off.
Joseph doesn’t pick it up. Pauline hadn’t wanted to push. Instead, she’d made the decision to shift tack once again.
‘Something must have happened, if everything was once that idyllic.’
The man’s breath picks up pace, and his words are harder when they return.
‘Everyone has another side to them. Everyone, even her.’
Silence. She lets Joseph recollect, uninterrupted, before he speaks again.
‘I got to the point where I knew there must be someone else. I don’t know the exact moment it hit me, but after I’d figured it out it all made perfect sense. She was in love with another man.’
‘You’d had suspicions?’
Joseph’s voice hardens. ‘I had reasons to be suspicious.’ He doesn’t elaborate.
‘And?’ Pauline finally asks.
‘I don’t know when it started. Probably’d been going on for years. But that was it. That’s when I knew.’
‘Knew what, Joseph?’
‘Knew I had to kill her. Knew she couldn’t be allowed to live.’
The statement comes as a definitive finish, and a long silence follows. Pauline’s voice, however, returns with a new, slightly firmer tone.
‘Joseph, I’ve looked at your file. I even did a little research last night, from home, to examine things further.’
She recalls that she’d looked down at her stack of notes as she’d delivered the comment, a strategy to suggest definitiveness. Certainty, even of things unknown. It was a true comment, as far as it went – Pauline had indeed spent at least an hour the night before, just before sleep, with Joseph’s file open on her knees, the comforter of her bed a makeshift reading desk as she tried to ponder a way forward for the next day’s interview.
‘They won’t let me see my file,’ the man’s voice answers.
‘That’s standard procedure.’
‘So … what’s in it?’
‘There are records from the trial. From your previous escape attempts. But mostly it’s notes from conversations like these. From talks you’ve had with other people. Some from talks with me.’
‘Fat lot of good they do, any of them.’ Joseph’s voice is disgusted.
‘There’s also biographical data about your life.’
Four seconds of silence. Joseph’s voice is vaguely confused, vaguely annoyed when it returns. Pauline now leans towards the recorder again, eager to relive every sound from the tensest moment of that interview.
‘It can’t be complete,’ he says. ‘My file, my details. I haven’t told them everything. I thought that’s why we were here. You want to drag the rest out of me.’
‘It is. But some things aren’t buried away inside.’ There is a soothing compassion to her voice, now. The balance between firmness and tenderness at this moment was critical. ‘Some things can be checked on externally.’
The cassette almost manages to capture her slow draw of breath before her next words.
‘Joseph, I know you don’t want to hear this. Especially after all you’ve just recounted, I know it’s going to be hard to hear it again.’
His breathing audibly deepens on the recording, as if he’s steeling himself for something.
‘You didn’t kill your wife,’ Pauline repeats.
‘Screw you! This again! How would you know?’ Pure rage is captured in the magnetic reverberations. ‘I’ve never told anyone what I did! I’ve always passed it off as someone else’s crime. But you told me you wanted me to be honest!’
‘And I do.’
‘Then – dammit. I just opened up to you! It’s you who’s the liar. A liar and a hypocrite.’
The sound of another chair bending under a repositioning of body weight. It comes from the right speaker, the one on the side of Pauline’s voice.
‘I want you to be honest with me, Joseph. Honest enough to admit that you did not kill your wife.’
‘Damn you! I told you yesterday that I di—’
‘I want you to be honest enough’, her voice breaks through his, ‘to admit that you’ve never been married, Joseph. That you never had a wife at all.’
I am racing towards the boy’s spot by the pond as fast as I can run. The pathway is narrow, but I’ve walked it plenty of times – enough to know where the large roots jut out from the ground, where there are protruding stones and dips in the soil. My footing is sure.
It can’t be more than thirty yards, but it’s thirty yards blind, where I can’t see his position through the thick of green overgrowth and artfully planted forestry. To my left the whole time, as I circle anticlockwise around its circumference, is the pond. It glistens and sparkles