Free My Last Confession by Helen Fitzgerald Page B

told me he felt the attacker was probably a known sex offender. There had been several rapes in the Highlands over the last two years, he said, and one sexual assault and murder. The case against Jeremy was weak, he believed, and rested on two things: Jeremy’s mother’s alibi, and the DNA.
    In relation to the alibi, Jeremy’s mother was not corroborating her son’s story. After being discharged from hospital, she had consistently maintained that she’d gone home alone, without seeing her son. Jeremy, on the other hand, insisted he had driven his mother to her house inHaringey and stayed with her all night on the night of the murder. The lawyer agreed wholeheartedly with Amanda’s assertion that Mrs Bagshaw was lying. Her hatred for her son, and her desire to make him disappear, were more important to her than the truth.
    As for the DNA, the lawyer explained, traces of Jeremy’s genetic material were found under the victim’s fingernails.
    ‘Shit,’ I said out loud after I hung up. Danny looked at me, having heard the entire conversation.
    ‘Be careful with defence lawyers,’ Danny warned. ‘You don’t want to be used as a plea in mitigation.’
    ‘I know, of course. I just find it really interesting.’
    And boy, did I!
    I was on a roll. First, I phoned the Scottish Criminal Records Office and asked if the list of previous convictions had arrived from England. It had, and when I received the fax I wasn’t surprised to find that Jeremy had none.
    Next I contacted social services in Oxford and asked if there had been any previous contact. No.
    Jeremy had given me authority to talk to his childhood GP, so I phoned Dr Charles McQuillan of John Street in Oxford who said he’d had little contact since Bella died, just the odd ear infection, but psychological and psychiatric reports at the time drew a blank. A bit of bedwetting , but nothing much else. ‘Looked like a terrible accident,’ Dr McQuillan said.
    Then I rang Mrs Anne Bagshaw, Jeremy’s mum. The alibi stories were so different. Someone was lying. I wondered if she would talk to me.
    ‘Hello?’ I said, and introduced myself, explaining whoI was, where I worked, the report I was writing for court, and that the judge wanted to know all about Jeremy’s background and any psychological issues that might affect his response to custody. I went on about how I knew it was very difficult for her, but that I’d seen Jeremy and he was coping all right in prison and that he’d said he didn’t mind if I called and spoke about –
    It was about then I realised she’d put the phone down.
    I felt irritated. Why would she put the phone down? No matter what her son did in the past, or had done now, he was still her son, and should surely –
    ‘I think we got cut off,’ I said after she picked up the second time, and the phone immediately went dead again.
    I was annoyed.
    ‘Don’t hang up!’
    But she did, and my anger grew each time the phone rang out after that. What was going on? She seemed to have completely cut Jeremy out of her life. What kind of mother would desert her son like that?
    *
    Over the next two days, I gained five cases and two reports, which Danny had been entrusted to allocate as Hilary was still off sick.
    Danny’s allocations meetings consisted of the four of us sitting around Danny’s desk with a pile of report requests and orange files in the middle, playing paper, scissors, stone.
    I did a bomb (thumb up, beats everything) each time a sex offender appeared, and while Robert and Danny maintained that bombs are not part of the game, Penny told them to let it be.
    ‘Just leave it,’ she said. ‘I’ll take them.’
    After the game was completed, we spent a half-hour swapping anyway, using arguments like:
    He lives near my house, so I don’t want him ’cause I’ll keep bumping into him.
    He lives near my house, so I do want him so I can do home visits 3.30 each Friday.
    I had her last time. Your turn, Mrs.
    Give me that. I love