Free My Last Confession by Helen Fitzgerald Page A

action followed.
    Ever.

15
    Ah fuck, I should’ve listened to Chas. Not only had I decided to make a completely unnecessary visit to Amanda, but I’d also forgotten to conjure up an imaginary glass cone to protect me from getting emotionally involved. I was welling up. I could hardly see the Ayr Road as I headed back to work from the salon.
    Poor Jeremy , I thought.
    Wee Bella. I shook my head, a tear falling.
    And Jeremy’s parents … Imagine.
    I stopped the car to compose myself, knowing I needed to get my head together for a meeting with the police.
    *
    ‘Well done,’ said Hilary as I came into the office. ‘I hear you did well at the pre-release. I’m going to allocate you as Marney’s supervising officer.’
    ‘Can I talk to you about that?’ I started. I wanted to ask her if I had to supervise paedophiles. I wanted to convince her to give me murderers, drug dealers, car thieves, anyone, rather than child sex offenders.
    ‘Sure,’ Hilary said. ‘We’ll put it on the agenda next supervision. But I’m afraid I have to head home now. Migraine.’
    I should probably have given this more thought before applying for the job. These guys were the big yins in criminal justice: high profile, high risk. And very few escapedsocial work supervision since the new Sex Offenders Act, which meant that our teams were bulging at the seams with rapists, flashers, stalkers, lewd and libbers, etcetera, etcetera. There’d probably be no way of avoiding them, even if I told Hilary why I felt so uncomfortable. Or did everyone feel this way? Not just those who’d been touched by one in the past? I’d tell her, I decided, at our next supervision session – and ask for her advice.
    Looking in the mirror of the grotty office toilet a few minutes later, I was thinking to myself that I looked a bit like Jodie Foster, when someone farted unashamedly in the cubicle, the force of it bringing me back down to earth – Glasgow earth and not Hollywood. Soon after, Penny walked out and said hello and I wondered how she could just smile and wash her hands like that, as if nothing had happened. Not even a slight blush or an apology (I’d have done both if a fart of mine had managed such longevity and volume). I guess her upper-middle-class self felt there was no need, that if one was to fart then one should let rip in the communal toilet. I didn’t like Penny.
    ‘How you doing?’ I asked her.
    ‘Fine,’ she replied. ‘Busy busy!’
    FARTY! FARTY! I thought as she left, before returning to my pre-gusset-burp line of thinking which was that I looked and indeed was a little bit like Jodie Foster as Clarice Starling – tough and sexy and embedded in a shocking murder case.
    I took my place at a risk management meeting that afternoon. It was about James Marney again, the ‘lewd and libber’ (i.e. a kid-toucher-upper). As I was now his supervising officer – although I would do everything in my power to get Hilary to change her mind – I needed toliaise with other agencies to help find him somewhere to live quick smart.
    We spent about half an hour sharing soft intelligence. God, even the words used in my job were sexy – soft intelligence, and even better than that, hard intelligence! It was practically as good as my bunny.
    ‘Krissie?’ said the police officer, Bond, clicking his fingers at me and stilling my wandering mind. Without even thinking about it, I had placed a cone of silence over my head. All I’d caught was something about needing to check with the housing officer in the prison. ‘Can you get onto it and let me know as soon as they have something for us to check out?’
    ‘Of course,’ I said, and we exchanged direct telephone numbers.
    *
    While my colleagues were tear-arsing around town with a flurry of court reports, absconding sex offenders and homeless drug users, I still only had the one report and one case, so I decided to be thorough.
    I rang Jeremy’s lawyer, a young man with a lovely English accent. He