Life Sentence

The first time, Kaye assumes it's a prank. She's new to the station, still green in a way the older hands can't help making fun of. They like the tentative way she leans into the mic. Call her baby and don't mean it in the usual way men mean when they say it to a woman. Mean it like infant, still wet behind the ears.

She's on air. The station is dark around her, electronics thrumming. Everybody who can get away has left. Her producer Flick is supposed to be watching from the booth behind the glass, but she sidled off twenty minutes ago for a quick pee and hasn't come back. 

The phone, at least, she has the hang of after months doing this for other DJs, even if it's only the third call her dog-hour shift has ever received. Honestly, she doesn't enjoy this job that much. But it is what it is. She flips the requisite buttons, does the patter about welcoming a caller. Picks up.

'Hello, you're on––'

'Is this Kaye Willett?'

'Yes, that's me. Welcome to––'

'Will you accept a call from prisoner William Andrews from Her Majesty's Leyhill Prison?'

'I – who?'

The voice on the other end of the phone is brisk and businesslike. 'Andrews, William. Says you'd be happy to talk to him.'

Flick's voice might sound like this, if she put it really low. Kaye deliberates as fast as she can. Hang up, and she looks unprofessional. Take the call, maybe she can shame Flick a little. She was fun, once. Hasn't been since she was fourteen, but perhaps she can find her way back to it.

'Of course,' she says, as bright as she can, 'I'd be happy to.'

The line bleeps and clicks, and then like that she's connected. She picks up a pen, taps it idly against a pad of paper.

'Am I speaking to – ahem, William Andrews?'

The voice that greets her is gravelly, hoarse. Not a voice she's ever heard before. And, she thinks, with a touch of apprehension, not a voice Flick could put on. 

'That's me. Jesus. Didn't think you'd accept.'

'Mmhm.' Kaye presses the pen into her top lip, keeps her tone aloof. 'What are you ringing about, Mr Andrews?'

'I don't really know. Got some money for the phone yesterday. Didn't have anyone else to call.'

'Right. Because you're in prison.'

'Yeah.' Beat. 'I've been listening to your show since you started. You ask people to call but nobody ever does so – I'm calling, I guess.'

'Yeah? Anything in particular on your mind?'

The distant sound of scraping, like a chair being dragged up. 'Not really. Didn't think I'd get this far.'

'Alright. What are you in prison for?' Kaye throws it down, ready to catch him out in a lie. She's got her phone out, ready to Google him and whatever crime he gives her. 

He hesitates for a moment. And then he says, with a touch of defiance, 'Murder.'

Kaye doesn't even flinch. Of course they'd go big. Her fingers fly, William Andrews murder hammered into the search bar, even as she keeps talking. 'Right, murder, of course. You want to talk about that?'

'Not really.'

'Okay then.' The signal in here is shit. Kaye stares down at the loading circle, biting at her thumbnail. 'What do you want to talk about, then?'

'You do your show from Exeter, is that right?' 

'Shoot. Did the name give us away?' 

Silence, and then the brief and unexpected sound of a laugh. 'It did, that. ExeterFM. Not the most subtle.'

'I didn't pick it.' The results are loading. News articles, even a Wikipedia page. Kaye's stomach is sinking, but she's trained too well to let the conversation die. 'You know Exeter well?'

'Went there a few times as a kid. Always loved the cathedral.'

'It's beautiful.' Kaye's only half paying attention, speed-reading a piece from the Mirror. The title is VICIOUS MURDER OF YOUNG WOMAN ROCKS RURAL COMMUNITY. Distantly, she realises her hands have started to shake.

'Mr Andrews,' she says, and then stops, presses her fingers to her temples. 'Are you for real? You're not someone trying to mess with me?'

'I really am.' He sighs. It's the strangest and most intimate thing, that sigh into both her ears, closer than he'd sound if they were wrapped up in bed together. 'Sorry. I shouldn't have called. We're not supposed to call journalists.'

'I'm not a journalist. Why did you call?'

'I like your voice. Wanted to know what it would be like talking to me, not just coming out of a radio.'

Unease ripples down her spine, the hairs on the back of her neck tingling. It goes to anger, then veers away again just as quick. God. She hasn't been like this since––

She blinks. Demands, 'What, are you stalking me?'

'From prison? That'd be a good trick.'

Her breathing is starting to heave. 'Then why––'

'I didn't mean to scare you. It's nothing like that. For some reason your station is the only one my damned radio picks up, so it's all I've got to listen to. I just thought you sounded nice. Thought maybe you'd talk to me. Christ knows nobody else will.'

'What do you want to talk about?'

'God, I don't know. Nothing. Everything.'

'Okay then.' Kaye's been told a lot of times she's too nice for her own good. Going to get herself hurt, some day. Maybe she is. She doesn't see that as an excuse not to keep on being nice, especially after everything. She picks up her pen again, starts to tap it, lightly, against her cheek. 'Tell me what it's like in there.'

And so he does. Tells her about his day, his routine, the exercise yard, the guard that'll take any excuse to hit him and the one who smiles at him a little kinder than the others. His voice is soothing, almost. Slow and steady. You could drown in a voice like that.

When the line beeps to warn him he's only got thirty seconds left, Kaye finds herself almost disappointed.

'Well,' he says, 'better go. Thanks for listening.'

'Yeah.' She sits up straight, uncrosses her legs. 'Thanks for calling.' 

He laughs again, sudden and low, and just like that he's gone. It takes Kaye twenty seconds to kick her brain back into gear and carry on with the show. She puts on a song she hates, sits back in her chair, stares hard at the mic. It doesn't have any answers for her.

* *

He phones every other night she's on air. It's an alarmingly easy routine to fall into. She starts looking forward to it, his call. She tells herself it's all professional. Nothing else exciting about her show, after all. But the truth is a little darker, a little unhealthier. So she buries the truth, thinks about it only side-on, never faces it down.

On the eighth call, she tells him she's Googled him. He goes very quiet. She's spent plenty of time the past two weeks staring at the fuzzy pictures of him, the rawboned youth transformed pixel by pixel to the bearded monster of the news pictures outside the courtroom. She imagines him now, early forties, meaty hand clamped around a white plastic telephone. Skin creped by time, new scars on his arms.

'I'm sorry,' she says, feeling uncomfortably ashamed of herself, 'but I have to ask––'

'Why I did it?'

'Naw.' She actually waves her fingers through the air, thrusting the question away. 'That's in the articles. No, I wanted to ask why you pled not guilty.'

He thinks about that. She's got used to it, these thinking silences of his. She sits back, waiting. There's a dull rap on the window of her booth and she looks up to find Flick making bug-eyes at her through the glass. Flick's started actually staying for the whole show now William calls, hands tense over her controls, ready to cut him off anytime he gives her an excuse to. Flick hates William on principle, and it irritates her that Kaye is willing to entertain him. 

This silence is stretching too long. Listener figures have ticked up since William started calling, and Kaye glances at the stats now. A few hundred people waiting on his answer, more than her late show has ever attracted.

'Will?'

'I'm here.'

'I asked because you knew people saw. Knew there'd be DNA evidence. You must have known––'

'I knew. I'd rather you didn't ask about it.'

'Why?'

'I pled not guilty. I never said I did it.'

'Right, but––'

'If I had,' he says, low and slow, 'say, hypothetically, I did kill her. I would have done it for a good reason. I wouldn't have just, you know, randomly selected her. Hypothetically.'

'Alright.' Kaye eases the headphones off on one side to push her hair back behind her ears. Gives herself a second to process that, then locks it up and moves on. 'So there's this new show on Netflix. Endless. You have Netflix in there?'

He laughs. 'No.'

'Oh. Want to hear about it?'

'Why not.'

And so she tells him. Makes him laugh with an impression of the lead. In return, he tells her about the shows he loved growing up. It's – easy. Too easy. She glances to the right again. 957 listeners. Nearly 1,000 people, listening her talk to a man who took a life. The craziness of that. 

* *

'You need to stop.' Flick's not fucking around. She's got Kaye cornered in the break room. Her eyeliner's winged today, bright blue. Kaye can't stop staring at it. 'I'm fucking serious, Kaye. It's creepy as fuck. The dude murdered someone.'

'And he's in prison for it.' Kaye ducks around her, reaches for the coffee to give her hands something to do. 'What, you think he's going to break out and come slice me up because I talk to him on the radio?'

'They're not supposed to talk to journalists.'

'I'm not a journalist.'

'You're on the radio. It counts. You could get, shit, arrested or something. I don't fucking know.'

'Psh. For what?' Kaye's stirring hot water into instant coffee, the smell of it acrid and artificial. She hates the coffee here. Better than it is in prison, though, probably. Do they get coffee in prison? She'll have to ask Will.

'Jesus. You turning into one of those psychos who falls in love with serial killers? You gonna write him love letters? Go have conjugal visits with him?'

'Oh, fuck off, Flick.' Kaye tosses her hair back. 'It's not like that. He just needs somebody to talk to.'

Flick follows her out of the break room, dogs her up the stairs. 'And you're nominating yourself to be that somebody because...?'

'Drop it.'

'You can't undo a crime like just by being nice, you do know that? Like, it takes more than a bit of understanding. He fucking killed someone, Kaye.'

'Yeah? No shit.'

'Jesus Christ.' Flick stops dead, one foot wedged into the door. 'Well, I'm not coming to visit when they section you.'

'Great,' says Kaye, and takes a too-big sip of coffee. 'Wouldn't want you to.'

* *

Her mum's the next one to start in on her. She heard from a friend of a friend about the calls, started listening into the show. She comes to visit Kaye in her poky little flat in the city centre, drives four hours each way to do it, and manages to hold herself in for about ten minutes before she brings it up.

'Mum, please,' says Kaye after fifteen minutes without a break for air, 'it's fine. It's just conversation.'

'It's weird.' Her mum says it bluntly, puts her hands on Kaye's kitchen counter to emphasise it. 'Look at the state of you. You haven't called in weeks. This place is a tip. It's like the man has taken over your life. Is it all you care about, these chats the two of you have?'

'It's not like that.' Kaye eels away from her gaze, opens the fridge to give herself something to do. She stares into its bare depths, unseeing. 

'Then what is it like? Tell me, honey, because I'm freaking out over here.'

Kaye closes the fridge. Takes two long, deep breaths.

'He's forty-four.'

'So?'

'So that's how old Dad would be. Maybe is.'

That stops her mum cold. She mouths for a moment. Kaye's reminded of those goldfish she used to have in her room, beautiful stupid things, all flash and colour. She watched Finding Nemo when she was ten and flushed them down the loo. Found out two days later all that did was kill them. Cried for a week straight.

Her mum recovers fast. That's Lydia Willett, first to go down but first to bounce back up, resilient as a weed.

'So this is about your father. I should have known.'

'Probably.' Kaye wraps her arms around herself. She's lost weight. Her chest feels newly narrow, fragile. 'Isn't everything?'

Her mum takes her by the shoulders. When she leans in, Kaye can smell the sweat underneath her perfume. 

'Don't let him do this, Kaye. Don't let him ruin you like he ruined himself.'

'Ruined? Jesus, Mum, you can say it. He killed three people. Bit more than ruined.'

Her mum flinches back. 'Don't––'

'What, call it what it is? That's what the second therapist said I should do. Or maybe the third.'

'Right, so this is somehow my fault? For sending you to therapists? God forbid I try to help my daughter after she...'

'Yeah, yeah.' Kaye clenches her hands into fists. The bite of her nails grounds her. 'Had to fix me, didn't you, after I found those girls in the garage? Make me normal so I could live a perfect normal life. Couldn't have me falling apart. If I'd gone crazy, they'd just have believed even harder that we helped him get away.' She pauses, then launches the rocket. 'Do you know where he is?'

Her mum takes a full step backwards. 'Dead, I hope.'

Kaye's white-knuckled, simmering just beneath her skin. 'Yeah?'

'Yes. For both our sakes, I hope he's rotting in the ground somewhere. It's better than he deserves.'

'Whatever. I have to go, I have work.'

Her mum grabs for her suddenly, transformed, a drowning man thrashing for the surface.

'Kaye, I'm begging you, stop talking to this man. It's going to take you to dark places, honey, it's going to be so bad. Please, just stop taking the call.'

Kaye shakes her off. 'I'll do whatever I want to do.'

'It's self-destructive, you know it is. Worse than anything else you've ever done to hurt yourself.'

'Well, you'd know all about hurting, wouldn't you?'

She takes the stairs as loudly as she can, wrenches the front door open, lets it slam behind her. By the time she uncurls her fists, she has four perfect crescent moons on either palm, the blood dripping down her fingers. 

* *

'If you had a daughter,' starts Kaye, wrapping a wire around her wrist absently, 'would you have done it?'

William's on the line again, breathing slow and steady. Kaye lets him think it over, her gaze wandering. Flick's staring hard at her through the window, studying her dishevelled hair, the bags under her eyes. She's lurched from pissed off to genuinely worried the last few days, and Kaye doesn't have the bandwidth to enjoy it. A few of the guys from downstairs are in the booth today too, all of them drawn by whatever freakshow they think Kaye's slot is turning into.

'Honestly?' says William, drawing her attention back to the conversation, 'I can't say. Having a kid, that mighta changed me completely. How could I ever know?'

'Imagine.'

'I'm not a very imaginative person.'

'Imaginative enough to kill.'

'Killing takes no imagination at all.'

She takes a minute to turn that one over in her head. She's done a lot of thinking about murderers over the years. Never told any of the therapists how much time she spent trying to get inside their heads.

'Okay,' she says, taking a different tack, 'you had a wife. Did you think about what it would mean for her before you did it?'

That ponderous silence again. Kaye waits, one toe tapping against the floor. And then at last he says, 'Not before. But during.'

Flick sits up straighter in the booth. The guys with her are leaning in, expressions hungry. Kaye wants to let it go just to disappoint them, but she finds that she can't.

'During?'

'Yeah. It was the strangest thing. I hadn't thought about Maggie at all while I was planning it. But then, you know, I had my hands around Tara's throat, and for twenty seconds, all I could think about was her. My wife. We got married when we were eighteen, did you know that? As soon as we ever could. She was good. A good wife to me.'

Kaye frowns down at the chipped grey expanse of her desk. 'But you kept going.'

'Yeah. Couldn't stop then.'

'Even though––'

'Yeah. Even though. It was like a, I don't know, a compulsion. No matter what I thought about, I couldn't have not.'

Kaye presses her thumbs into the corners of her eyes. They come away wet.

'You think maybe a man could do it even if he had a daughter he loved?'

William pauses. And then he says, with shocking tenderness, 'Yeah. He could. I know he could, Kaye. He told me he did.'

'You – what?' Kaye sits bolt upright. She's trembling down to her toes.

'Your old man. I knew him, the prison before this one. He was in for something else, but he told me what he really did. And told me all about you. He had this picture of you, kept it on the wall above his head.'

'Is that why,” Kaye says, then has to stop, swallow around the thickness in her throat. Flick and the guys are all but plastered to the window, eyes wider than she's ever seen. 'Is that why you rang?'

'No. Well, your name, it was a coincidence. I thought it was just a little nothing, you know, first time I heard you on the radio. I didn't figure it out 'til after I started calling.'

'Well did he,' Kaye's full-blown crying now, snotty, messy, 'did he say anything? Like, a message, or something, for you to give me?' 

He sighs, long and slow. 'No. Sorry. It wasn't like that. He only talked about you in the past tense, I guess. His little girl, Kaye, the one who found him with the girls in the garage. He wondered what you were doing. Knew he'd be getting out the country the second he went free, but still wished he could see you one last time. But he never told me anything to tell you. How could he have thought I'd give you message, hey? I'm here for life. How would I ever find you?'

'Well then,' Kaye heaves, not even caring that 4,837 people are listening to this, have heard her darkest secret, 'well then what's the point of you? What's the point of this?'

'I told you. I wanted someone to talk to.'

Kaye's had it. All that, all this, and she gets nothing. Nothing. She doesn't even hang up the call. She rips her headphones off, staggers away from the desk. Pushes her way through and ignores the steadying arms reached out to her. Flick catches her around the waist, tries to guide her to a chair. Kaye pushes her off like she's nothing.

In the lobby, scrambling for fresh air, someone grabs her by the arm. She turns around already snarling and the police officer recoils, hands immediately up, placating.

'I'm sorry, Ms Willett, I'm sorry. We didn't mean to startle you.'

There's three of them, all suited, hair so neat it could have come off a factory line. Kaye drags her cuff across her cheeks. It comes away black with mascara.

'What do you want?'

'We thought you'd want to know – what you just heard, what William Andrews just told you, that's a confession we've been trying to get for twenty years.'

'What?' Kaye can't cope with this. She needs air, and she needs it now.

'He pled not guilty. That left him a window. But now he's never getting out of prison – not ever. You just made sure of that. We thought you might like to know. Your work there, making him feel comfortable, connecting with him, that was some really great journalism.'

'Yeah, great,' says Kaye, thick and resentful, 'thanks. May I go?'

'Oh, yes, of course. Do you, um,' says the officer, her eyes dragging up and down Kaye, 'can we maybe help you get somewhere?'

'I'm fine.' Kaye peels away from them, ricochets off a garishly orange sofa. One of them steps forwards, hands out, and Kaye scrambles out of range as fast as she can. By the time she makes it to the door, they've all stopped to watch her go, frowns dug deep. 

The air hits her like a punch. It's freezing, February cold, heavy with the threat of rain. Kaye's layers are too thin. She hugs herself, rubbing at her arms. Staggers over to one of the squat stone benches and drops down onto it. Her lungs are heaving. Tight. Painful. She tilts her head back, forces herself to take a deep breath in. Feels her chest ease open just a little.

For the first time in ten years, she lets herself think of it. The night she woke up, her knees aching with growth, joints stretching away from each other. Then a bizarre sensation, like the jolt at the top of a rollercoaster when you realise you're about to plummet. A muffled thud from outside.

She'd slipped out of bed, padded to the window and seen a torch bobbing through the garage window. Her father's domain, forbidden to everyone. He kept the key on a chain around his neck. She went downstairs in half a dream. Slid across the kitchen, let herself out into the garden. Reached for the handle on the garage door. Eased it open. What she saw in the strobing light of her father's torch is etched into her forever, like a tattoo on the back of her eyelids. A horror straight out of a film. The first girl on the floor, the blood pooling out of her. Her eyes staring, vacant, her terror still etched into her face. 

When she screamed, lights came on all around faster than she could ever have imagined. The last thing she remembers is her father coming towards her, heavy torch raised, face twisted. She came to in the back of an ambulance, her mother hovering over her, her expression as cold and desperate as the dead girl on the concrete floor. Kaye screamed herself into a numbness so severe it took a month for her to be able to speak again.

An echo of that scream is scrabbling at the inside of her throat, desperate for a way out. 

'Fuck you,' she spits instead, teeth clenched, 'fuck you, Dad, fuck you.'

They called it a three-victim crime, afterwards. Splashed the girls' faces all over the newspapers, screens, social media. Kaye doesn't resent them for it; those girls deserved it. Deserved to be memorialised, held aloft. But what he did, there weren't three victims of that crime. There were five. He might as well have killed her in that garage, she sometimes thinks. It's not like she ever had a chance of getting her life back after that.

She lets her head fall back, eyes trained on the low, thick clouds. She has a choice, right now. Two paths diverging in front of her. Forgiveness or poison. Growth or decay. She reaches into her pocket. Her hands won't stop shaking. 

When she pulls her phone out, she hovers her thumb over it for seconds that bleed into minutes. She has to choose. A map to a nearby bridge, or a phone call to the only other person who could ever understand. Someone who might just be able to pull her from the quicksand.

Life or death. The idea of choosing paralyses her. She unlocks the phone, swipes left and then right. Hesitates. 

And then, ten years later than she should have done, she calls her mother to ask for her help.