The Regenhardt Dilemma

Nelly Regenhardt had been writing to prisoner B6732FH for nine hard years and had never received a reply. But she had seen The Shawshank Redemption, and came to understand that in the matter of correspondence, persistence always won the game. And win the game it did. Ten years after her husband had been shot in the head by the very man she had been writing to, she received a standard reply: Prisoner B6732FH will see you on (appointed date and time), at a venue very much decided upon: HMP Wingfield: Category A. 

But let us go back to the beginning, or at least the beginning that is pertinent to this story.

Nelly Foster married Johnny Regenhardt in the spring of 1988 at the sapling age of twenty-two. It was an unremarkable romance. They were people of middling merits, neither ugly nor handsome, neither clever nor stupid: just two, solid, dependable people who considered the options and chose each other. Did they love each other? Yes, and that should be noted. They found each other attractive, neither had quirks the other could not tolerate, and they shared many interests together. Nelly stacked shelves and Johnny was a foundry man, a dangerous occupation but well-paid. During the nineties they raised a boy and a girl, Russell and Samantha. They weathered the teenage years during which doors were punched, walls were kicked and Nelly was called a bitch and Johnny was left unscathed, because fathers often are. Now the children were in their early thirties and though their lives were not perfect, and Russell in particular still gave her some sleepless hours, they were average people with expectations to suit. 

And thus the years rolled on. Wood-chip on the walls and an avocado bath set which showed the soap scum. Nelly and Johnny’s affection for each other had never wavered. Their children loved their father. They were proud of him in that quiet, solid way that the poets never lyricise. On the morning of their parents’ twenty-seventh anniversary, they came round for breakfast. ‘It’s mahogany this year,’ Nelly twittered. 

‘And I am going to find you something in mahogany,’ said Johnny. ‘To celebrate our monogamy!’ And of that there was no doubt. Never had the sepsis of jealously infected the veins of either. It would, indeed, be almost laughable if one or the other were to have an affair. Too much trouble, they’d agreed. 

They had a meal planned for the evening. Nelly was going to the hairdressers, perhaps buy a new outfit, and Johnny was out shopping for something in mahogany. And here is where things got grim. In the middle of the afternoon he became the sensational casualty of a gang war which had nothing to do with him. He was leaving an antiques shop in the high street when a bullet in the possession of a bad shot entered his frontal cortex and killed him instantly. It made a mess and Johnny wouldn’t have liked that. He had been a tidy man, a man who immediately washed up after dinner. 

Two days later the police gave her the anniversary gift he had purchased: an old, battered, charming tea caddy of the late-Georgian era. She would have loved it, but you will understand that, given the circumstances, she did not. She did not keep it long. In the following days, Johnny became big news - the ordinary Joe who had become the latest victim of this violent society. 

And now we must talk of other matters. During the period of Nelly and Johnny’s long marriage, there simmered another story; a story of greater length but less intensity than the story of Johnny’s death. It took the police many years to join the dots, and the media did not award the merit of front-page coverage until an indignant mother began to talk. She talked about the death of her son, who was gay and was sometimes given to prostitute himself in order to buy drugs. His body was found on wasteland, mutilated, abused, beaten, naked. When female prostitutes were murdered it was bad enough, this mother said, but when male prostitutes are murdered, it is worse. No one cares. And he was a good boy but with a bad habit. She loved him, she had raised him. She still had the memories of his chubby feet and his sports days and measuring his height on the airing cupboard door. And people, the media, began to ask questions. How many men and boys had been killed in this area? Why were the deaths not accorded the front page status they deserved? Why were they a small article in a big paper - Man Found Murdered. Are the police institutionally homophobic? Well. You get the picture. 

Let us not obsess the details. We all watch the shows on TV. The DNA that is kept, the DNA that is lost, the DNA that they never thought to gather because the science was not quite there. And several weeks after Johnny’s death the story exploded. There were nine that they knew of, that they could prove were linked by one commonality. They had the same killer. They were not all prostitutes, occasional or otherwise - but they were all gay. Facts were collated and connecting lines were drawn. Men going missing from gay clubs. Most had been cremated because there is only so much damn soil a small nation can dig up to bury their dead. But the police issued a statement to warn the public of a serial killer. No, the suspect was not on their DNA data base. It was thought that the murders began in the early 90s and continued until the year before. The date of Nelly and Johnny’s twenty-sixth anniversary, as it happened. Jade. Nelly got a pin box. 

You can see where this is going. But of course, when this was big, brewing, bubbling news, Nelly was in a world of grief. Her children were struggling, and although both of them had moved out to live with friends in flats, they moved home again for a little while. But their father’s death had been a noble one, a death of the true innocent, unencumbered by embarrassing circumstance or any foolishness on his part. No one could say of Johnny, ‘he should have known better,’ or ‘well, if you lay down with dogs you’ll get fleas,’ and so a month later the children left home again and partnered up and had small children of their own, leaving Nelly alone with her memories and an odd, driving desire to clean out the garden shed. 

Now, this was a shed: not a structure of note, not a den, not a place to escape with a brandy and cigar. It was 6’ x 6’ with wraparound shelving and the floor space of two adult paces. It was where the lawnmower lived, some old books decaying and yellowed, pots of dry paint, folded deckchairs, tool boxes and cobwebs. A month after Johnny’s death, Nelly felt compelled to clear it out - to throw away those things that were no longer strictly necessary. She had been ruthless in the house and she intended the same fate for this little wooden building in her garden. The married part of her life was over, and however much she wished otherwise, she was not one of nature’s Miss Haversham’s, living the rest of her life pinned, like a butterfly to a board, at a fixed moment in time. 

Nelly began with the old books, which were worthless now, and could be recycled for pulp. She was in the habit of riffling through the pages before she boxed them, just in case an old scrap of memory - or a ten pound note - should drift out. And it was within the pages of a paperback about the Great Exhibition that a stiff, polaroid photograph fell to the wooden floor beneath her. It was blurred, but it was clearly taken in the dark, out of which loomed two white hands supplicated in prayer. The hands were bound. The wrists were marked and sore from constriction. 

Now I would not insult your intelligence by pretending that Nelly thought nothing of this: that she merely frowned a little and tossed it in the rubbish bag she had put to one side for the useless things and the dead spiders. Indeed, Nelly thought a great deal of it. It was too strange, too sinister to be ignored. And in that moment she recalled a brief, dead-eyed glance at the papers in which the subject of bound hands had arisen. The context escaped her but the feeling did not. And so she went through the books more meticulously than before, but found nothing else. Or at least, nothing like that.

The tool boxes would stay, as would the lawnmower. The paints, the old pieces of cloth, the long sticks (presumably for stirring paint) had been discarded, which just left a blue and rusting toolbox on the top shelf. And within this box lay a trove of personal treasures which, even the dumbest person in the dumbest film, could not ignore. An inscribed St Christopher - he always wore it - an aquamarine silk scarf - he was wearing it that night - a ring, several rings, a leather friendship bracelet, and more, so much more …. all of this Nelly discovered on the internet, in the kitchen, a month after Johnny’s much lamented death. And that is when she began writing to prisoner B6732FH. 

You don’t need the prison scene. You can imagine it: the scans, the noise, the smell, the awful fetid sterility. The long journey towards it, during which Nelly sought to analyse her inner-self. For ten years, she had harboured a secret that was so devastating she could not consider it for long. She continued stacking shelves, she played the dutiful and loving grandmother, and she absorbed herself in the television and in reading, wherein other people’s lives could divert from her own. Rarely, however, was the subject of a serial killer’s wife raised. She felt unique in a very bad, inarticulate way. People would say that she must have known. People have said that in the past, with other serial killers’ wives, and she had no doubt they would think the same of her. But she had not known, any more than she could know how to prove a negative. 

Had Nelly and Johnnie’s marriage been childless, she would not have hesitated to go to the police. But they were not childless, and although the burden was a hard thing to carry, she knew that her children would never get off their knees again under the weight of it. Their sometimes difficult, precarious lives would be compromised and, she felt sure, ultimately destroyed. She was aware - Oh! You have no idea how aware she was - that there were mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, friends and colleagues of murdered men who were desperately seeking some resolution, even if its form was corporeal. But she had to look after her own backyard, as everyone ultimately must. 

The prisoner had received a long sentence. It was not just Johnny he had killed in his spiteful, mindless warfare. The defence had tried for the lesser charge of manslaughter but the judge had pronounced that the defendant had woken that day with every intention of killing someone - in which regard, the actual victim did not change things. And he was a sorry specimen, waiting at the sticky table for a stranger he had left widowed. And the ageing, somewhat dowdy woman who sat down across from him was in no mood to waste time.

‘I have not come to tell you I have forgiven you for killing my husband.’

The prisoner looked surprised. ‘Oh. It happens a lot, that. People find God sometimes, in here and outside.’ 

Nelly was surprised by his eloquence. He had a voice for recitals. ‘Well, God hasn’t found me,’ she said. ‘I have been writing to you all these years for something else entirely.’

The prisoner waited. 

‘I have come to thank you,’ she said. 

This caught his attention, and Nelly watched carefully as he formed his conclusion before his features announced it. ‘He was hitting you. You were abused, and when I killed him it all ended.’

He sat back, arms crossed, pleased with himself. 

‘Something like that,’ said Nelly, gathering herself to leave. ‘I don’t know,’ she told him as she stood up, ‘whether my gratitude is any help to you. But I needed to tell you to your face. That you have no idea just how grateful I am.’

Not quite the end. Several days later, Nelly was again at her kitchen table struggling with an unwelcome feeling: she was quietly mortified the prisoner had thought Johnny was a wife-beater. How bizarre, she thought, that I should worry about that. And then the sound of a car and a call - ‘Hi, Mum,’ through the window.

Nelly straightened her clothes and stood up. Her son Russell was in the habit of turning up unannounced, between jobs, looking for tea and biscuits. He burst through the door in his noisy manner and clicked the kettle on. After a few pleasantries he said:

‘I hope there aren’t any serial killers in our family!’

Nelly looked at his back, broad and straight. ‘What?’ she said.  

‘I’ve always been interested in our ancestors. Our family tree,’ he said, seating himself across from her. ‘So I’ve signed up for a couple of those genealogy websites. One traces the family line through old records, and the other takes a swab of your DNA to find out whether you’ve got any foreign blood. I’m pretty certain we’re one-hundred percent British. On your side anyway,' he corrected, dunking his Rich Tea into his PG Tips as if to prove the point.

It is curious how a person can feel colour, or the absence of it. When Nelly is embarrassed she is aware, without looking, that her cheeks have gone red. And now, without looking, she is aware that all the colour has leached from her face. She has gone white. 

‘I see,’ she said, little more than a whisper. ‘So, you’ll be on the database. And the police can access it.’

‘Yep,’ said Russell. ‘Just as well we’re a law-abiding lot.’ 

‘Darling,’ said Nellie. ‘Would you call your sister and ask her to come here immediately. I have something to tell you both ..’

And this marked the beginning of all their troubles, but the end of the Regenhardt dilemma.