Page 54

As you write your list, vocalise a ‘thank you’ to each item.
I am grateful for
***
Chris Gislingham has been looking at predators too. In his case, the national Violent and Sex Offender Register, where Barry Mason’s name should be, only it isn’t. There is such a thing as a computer glitch, he knows that as well as anyone, but the chances of that here are pretty low. He double-checks he has the right name – that Barry wasn’t short for something else – but no. After a moment he sits forward and tries another tack. The case file on Mason’s original prosecution in 2017. He scans down the page and finds a note at the end of the file, saying ‘Conviction overturned’. There’s a date in 2018, but no further details. He notes down the CPS prosecutor in charge of the case. The name vaguely rings a bell.
***
Adam Fawley
25 July 2024
18.44
I would never have recognized her.
I’m not naive, I know what prison can do to you. I remember struggling, the last time I was here, to see the privileged golden girl Camilla Rowan had once been in the hard-bitten woman she became after seventeen years behind bars. But this is different. Sharon Mason was never a golden girl. She was the lumpy, overlooked sister of a doted-on younger sibling; a girl and then a woman who’d had to fight for every scrap of status and attention she ever got and ended up feeling she had to compete with her own daughter. She was forty when she came in here, and as she shuffles stiffly in I have to remind myself she’s only forty-seven now; she looks like an old woman. But after what Diana Buchanan told us, I’m not surprised. Sharon Mason has Stage 3 ovarian cancer.
There would no doubt be some people who followed the original case who’d see a ferocious irony in that. An apt punishment, on top of what the law condemned her to. The woman who’d betrayed all our most precious notions of motherhood, betrayed herself by the very thing that made her a mother in the first place.
But they don’t know what I know.
She’s painfully thin, her hair shaved close to her skull. That’s not by choice. The prison officer helps her to a chair and she eases herself slowly down. Our eyes meet. There is no light in hers, just a dull acceptance: this is her life now. The lawyer introduces herself, but the firm clearly assumed this would be a routine meeting and she looks raw and unnerved, too junior for the heft of all this.
I clear my throat, which even I find irritating. ‘Mrs Mason, you may remember us? DCI Fawley, DI Quinn?’
A slight nod. ‘How could I forget. You put me in here.’
Which is true and not true. But true enough not to argue.
‘Come to gloat, have you? I mean, look at me, you must be bloody thrilled.’
A trace of the old Sharon. It’s still there. Like a watermark through thick paper.
‘That’s not why we’re here, Mrs Mason –’
‘It’s Wiley now.MsWiley. I’ve gone back to my old name.’
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know you’d got a divorce.’
‘I haven’t. I just don’t want to be associated with that pervert any more.’
An awkward silence. She shifts in her chair as if the contact with it is painful, and I see a flicker of concern from the guard standing by the door.
‘The Governor told us about your diagnosis. I’m very sorry. I’d never wish that on anyone, whatever they’d done.’
She gives me a vicious look. ‘Well,Ihaven’tdoneanything. Regardless of what you bastards believe.’
The bitterness is understandable, I get it. But the force of it, from her gaunt frame, is still shocking.
I sense Quinn turn to look at me and I know what he’s thinking. Now is the moment. Now is when we come clean.
‘Ms Wiley, the reason we’re here is because we have something to tell you. Something that’s come up in the course of another case – one completely unrelated to yours.’
Her eyes narrow. ‘Oh yes? What’s that, then?’
‘The crime scene in question yielded some biological material which has been submitted for forensic analysis –’