Friday, 20 April 2035 （cont.）
From the second the title music started up with its atmospheric pan pipes, I knew there weren’t going to be any shades of grey in this interview.
Guy Majors’ cringe face loomed into shot upon a series of stills of Rhiannon when she was little, and his reasoning for talking to her was clear: he thought she was the coolest thing on two legs.
He was as in love with her as River was.
It was obvious from the years he’d spent following her case. The man was obsessed.
He looked different to when I’d seen him at the prison – another layer of tan, more bling to his wrists and neck, and his hair had risen at least an inch off his scalp so it was slightly bouffant.
He began his intro in the typical way: a blinding array of white veneers and a self-aggrandizing welcome.
‘Tonight on Guy Majors: The Real Deal, I’m celebrating my thousandth show with a real world exclusive. I have privileged access – the only journalist on the planet – to one of the most vicious, notorious and deadly serial killers of all time: Rhiannon Lewis, aka The Sweetpea Killer.’
River lay on his stomach, head towards my TV, mouth agape like he was trying to drink it in – the lights, the music, the extravaganza opening up before him.
The camera pulled out to show Majors standing in a nondescript floodlit courtyard before the large, shadowy prison.
‘This world-exclusive interview, where I will take you by the hand into the cold, calculating mind of one of the most evil women in the world, takes place tonight, exclusively live on ITV, here inside Haverfield, the Category A Prison near Bristol in which Lewis has resided for the past five years and where she is serving a full-life tariff for her unspeakable crimes …’
The first twenty minutes was stuff I’d seen before on other documentaries: him, younger and paler, visiting her crime scenes, standing beside graves of victims, looking around mournfully, spliced into new footage of him.
There was stock footage of Rhiannon at various points in her life; dancing at a hen party, smiling at her desk in the newspaper office, her handcuffed and being led inside a police station in Thailand.
There was footage of The Bad Seeds, crying outside the courtroom; the same ones waving banners as the secure van drove past and doing talking heads on the news the day of her sentencing. The woman was adored, worldwide.
I reluctantly sat back against the wall with my duvet pulled around me.
The start of the interview was predictably drawn out as Majors waited with bated breath in a large well-lit room, nothing like the one I met her in.
This was like where you’d do an aerobics class.
There were exercise balls and a stack of crash mats along the walls and tall windows with metal bars visible on the outside.
When Rhiannon finally entered, alongside two prison officers, she was cuffed at the hands and feet.
I asked River. ‘Why did they cuff her? They didn’t when I met her.’
‘To show the world how dangerous she is,’ he replied, eyes still fixed on the screen. ‘So he’s some big brave hero for being in the same room as her.’
‘Oh right,’ I said. ‘But they’re unlocking her cuffs her now.’
‘Yeah. Well, that’s Majors, isn’t it? It’s all for show.’
‘Hello, Rhiannon,’ said Guy, reaching out to shake her hand in a moment that went to full close-up, and meant to shock the world as much as when Princess Diana shook that AIDS patient’s hand in the eighties.
‘Hello,’ she replied.
Rhiannon spoke in one-word answers for the most part, giving little away that Majors didn’t already know. He finally got to her first kill, when she was eighteen, then skipped to the second, where the books began – the guy in the canal whose penis she cut off.
‘He wasn’t the second,’ she announced suddenly.
Guy stopped in his tracks like he’d hit a red light. ‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Pete was the first but Dickless Dan wasn’t the second. He was the fifth.’
It was like the country held its breath. She was confessing to three more murders in real time that nobody knew anything about. Guy’s face lit up like a fruit machine.
‘Tell us more, Rhiannon, if you will?’
‘I can’t remember the exact timings but I was around nineteen when I did the second.
He was an Austrian university student in Wrayburn Park.
Think his name was Jonah or Jonas or summing.
I was supposed to get a taxi with a friend but she fucked off without me so I started walking and this kid came out of nowhere and started pestering me at a bus stop.
Touching where he shouldn’t. I led him into the park and it was, literally, “Goodnight, Vienna”. ’
‘You said there were others you hadn’t previously confessed to?’
‘Yeah, another about four years after that, so I’d have been twenty-three, down by the canal. It’s a good spot that canal – no cameras, no witnesses. All sorts end up in that water.’
Majors looked like he was foaming at the mouth. But she wasn’t done.
‘And another time it was this drunk tramp, again beside the canal. He started calling me sexist names and I pushed him like that—’ She did the action and Majors visibly baulked.
‘He hit his head, knocked himself out and I just sort of kicked him into the water. It didn’t make many waves in local press.
“Pissed Hobo Dead in Canal”. Who gives a toss, right? ’
There was a close-up on Guy looking horrified. He consulted his notes. ‘And that brings us to 2018 when you murdered Dan Wells at the same canal.’
‘Dan, Dan the Dickless Man, yeah.’
‘Then a few days after, Gavin White in Victory Park.’
‘Yeah, and he deserved it.’
‘And then Julia Kidner, who you kidnapped and held captive for three months in your parents’ old house?’
‘Indeed.’
‘Kevin Fraser, Martin Horton-Wicks, Derek Scudd, Dean Bishopston …’
‘Yeah, I was in a bad place that night, with Dean Bishopston.’
Guy sighed and adjusted his reading glasses, going back to his list. ‘Austin James Thompson, aka AJ, your baby’s father …’
Guy waited for a reaction. River glanced at me and waited for my reaction. I held my breath and waited for what she was going to say. But all she said was
‘Continue …’
So Guy did. ‘Elderly fortune teller Gwendoline Pell, Patrick Edward Fenton, Troy Shearer. Your former colleague Lana Rowntree whom you coerced into suicide …’
‘Hardly coerced. She was oven ready – I just waited for her to get to temp then opened the door.’
‘Tim Prendergast?’
‘Technically he fell. So did Fenton.’
‘You got away with it for a long time, didn’t you? You fled the UK in 2018, after having your baby, then you were finally apprehended in Thailand in March 2030. A total of twelve years on the run. How did you evade capture for so long?’
‘Luck, I guess. Luck and The Bad Seeds.’
I scrolled my phone. She was the top trend on all social media platforms in the UK. #BadSeeds was second.
‘The Bad Seeds being your fans across the globe who started the hashtag #KeepHerBuried, meaning that if they ever saw you in public, they wouldn’t raise an alarm.’
‘Yep.’
‘Do you think it’s right that they kept you free as long as they did?’
‘No. I shouldn’t be anywhere near freedom, someone like me.’
I jolted at that. It was exactly what I’d said to her in the prison. Verbatim. My heart pulsed as she continued.
‘A polite society doesn’t thrive with someone like me in the mix. I have done unspeakable things, but most of the unspeakable things I’ve done were to unspeakable people. Still, I don’t deserve freedom.’
‘Did you ever want to stop killing?’
‘When I was pregnant. My baby tried to stop me. She was like an in-utero probation officer. Checking on me, making sure I was toeing the line, keeping me on the straight and narrow. The second I knew I was having her, I had to be better. I didn’t always want to be but she showed me goodness.’
Rhiannon looked directly into the camera. Directly at me.
‘I tried to be better but there was too much against me. I’m not perfect and she deserves perfect.’
A painful lump caught in my throat. I coughed it away and pretended I needed the loo so River wouldn’t see me cry. When I came back, Guy was asking her about regrets.
‘What do you regret, Rhiannon?’
‘I wish I’d eaten more Tangfastics. You can’t get them anymore in here and I miss them. I used to love Maoams too but since I hit perimenopause, I can’t afford the teeth.’
‘That’s not what I meant. The people you hurt. The people you killed. Do you regret taking any of their lives?’
She stared at me again, right down the camera lens. ‘Yes. I do.’
‘Which ones?’
‘Just one. I regret AJ.’
‘Why AJ especially?’
‘Because he didn’t deserve it. And because I’ve seen the consequences of that murder. I’ve seen it in the eyes of my child who misses him dreadfully, even though she never met him. And I feel ashamed, knowing what I deprived her of, because that kid deserves the world.’
‘Wow,’ said River. ‘She really means that.’
‘No, she doesn’t,’ I scoffed, quick to cool the fire burning in my throat. I didn’t want to believe she meant it because that would mean she had a conscience. That would mean she was fully human and not some monster. What was she playing at?
And then I remembered the three wishes she’d granted me during our visit – to let River go, to apologise for all her killings (especially my dad) and to tell me where my brother was. She’d fulfilled them all. No side-eye, no manipulation tactics. She’d given me everything I asked for.
Majors’ upper lip glistened. ‘He’s nervous,’ said River. ‘You can tell.’
‘Do you still feel those same urges?’ Guy asked her next.
‘Sometimes,’ she replied, without blinking. I had never seen her blink.
‘Have you wanted to kill whilst you’ve been in jail?’
‘No. You get more goodies when you behave.’
‘Like seeing Ivy, your daughter, who visited you last week?’