Free Polls Apart by Clare Stephen-Johnston Page A

very kind man, driven by his desire to improve the lives of others. Until I met him, I was a very inward-looking person. But almost as soon as we started talking I knew I had met someone who I would admire and learn from; someone who genuinely wanted to change the lives of others for the better. That was tremendously attractive to me.”
    “What were the early years of your marriage like?” Marie shot the question out like a bullet, afraid that to linger over any word would give Anna time to close the shutters on her life which, for now, seemed wide open.
    “There was a lot of storming and forming in the first couple of years,” Anna chuckled. “Richard and I are both stubborn people with very strong opinions, so that could cause a lot of tension between us. But in the main we were really happy. We were very in love and very committed as a couple and that kept us going through the bad times.”
    “And what were the bad times?” Marie looked up from her notepad, making sure she could catch any change in emotions from Anna.
    “Just times when the past would catch up with me, in particular the death of my mother which I still struggle with sometimes,” Anna sighed. “My relationship with her hadn’t been easy so my grief can be all the more intense because it’s fuelled by rage. I often took that anger out on Richard. But he was strong and he never cracked under the pressure. He knew I needed to work the pain out of my system and he gave me space and time. A lot of men wouldn’t do that.”
    “Where do you think things started to go wrong?”
    Anna slowly took a sip of coffee while she thought through her answer. As Marie watched, she realised this was a question the actress had not yet posed to herself.
    “I think… looking back, things changed a little when he became party leader. The pressure was higher, he started to become much more aware of public perception. Suddenly, if I decided to wear a revealing outfit for a shoot, that became a party issue, rather than my own personal decision. Increasingly I was expected to seek approval before accepting work and that caused a lot of tension between us.”
    “Did Richard know about your past work as an escort girl?”
    “Yes he did,” Anna replied matter-of-factly. “But when I first met Richard he didn’t see a former escort girl in me, he saw someone who had been failed by her mother and by the government under which I grew up. I was the very kind of person who Richard wanted to fight for. What happened to me in my youth made him so angry – and I loved him so much for it. Richard loathes injustice, which is why I still find it so hard to believe that when I needed him most, he turned his back on me. That’s not the Richard I know. That’s Richard the political machine and not Richard the man.”
    Marie shifted in her seat slightly, her heart rate quickening as her mind signalled a major story ahead.
    “What was it that happened to you that made Richard so angry?”
    “I was abused by my stepfather.”
    Marie fought desperately to hold Anna’s sustained eye contact so as to conceal her shock at what her interviewee had just revealed. She had to maintain Anna’s trust or the actress could shut down at any moment.
    “Was it verbal or physical abuse?”
    “It was verbal, physical, sexual, you name it. We got it.”
    “We?”
    “Me and my sister, Libby.”
    “Where was your mother when this happened?”
    “Out of it.”
    “How long did this go on for?”
    “Five years, four months and fifteen days.”
    “And how did it stop?”
    “We killed him.”
    Anna regretted her confession the second after she told Libby what she had said. Her sister had bustled in from the supermarket just minutes after Marie left with the photographer, and had been happily setting about putting the shopping away when Anna reached out and touched her arm. “I told her, Libby.”
    “Told her what?” Libby turned to face her sister, her eyes wide as she clutched a tin of