The Child(103)

? ? ?

I sit back down with Kate and catch my breath after Will goes into court. I feel elated and destroyed by the confrontation, shaking with the effort.

“You did brilliantly,” Kate says. “All over now.”

Well, almost.





EIGHTY-FIVE


    Emma


TUESDAY, MARCH 26, 2013

I started calling the baby Katherine after the police interviews, because she was a person at last. I’d named her for Kate. Without her, I would still be in hell.

Paul calls her Katherine as well. Naming her means we can talk about her and grieve for her. My child. I hadn’t realized how much I missed her. She was a physical presence in my life for such a short time—like Angela with me—but she’s been part of me ever since, my ghost child.

I had to wait another week to hear what the police would do. It was DI Sinclair himself who rang. He said I would be formally notified but he wanted to tell me there was no evidence I had harmed my baby and he was recommending no further action. He said it wouldn’t be in the public interest to pursue me after twenty-eight years for the technical offenses of failing to register a birth or to notify the Coroner. I tried to thank him but I couldn’t get the words out and Paul took the phone from me to thank him.

It felt as if everything was going to be all right, like Paul said.

But we couldn’t say good-bye to Katherine properly until the end of the trials. Jude’s first. It was over before it began, really. A guilty plea, a psychiatric report that said she knew what she was doing was wrong, and a prison sentence.

She looked at me as she was led away, but she didn’t look like Jude anymore. She looked like a husk. I nodded to show I’d seen.

? ? ?

She’s asked me not to visit her in prison. She said it would be too upsetting for both of us. So I am writing to her instead.

Then Will. A horror story. DNA tests had to be done again on my little girl’s tiny bones to show that Will Burnside was her father. They hadn’t damaged her, the police said when I asked. They’ve been so gentle with me and her.

When I finally took the stand, in January 2013, my legs were shaking, but I wanted to be there. To bear witness. Will’s barrister accused Barbara and me of inventing the whole thing, laying bare my mental health problems with fake concern and alleging we were vindictive whores. Well, he didn’t use those words, but we all knew that’s what he meant.

“I’m an innocent man,” Will said, when he got his turn, switching on the charisma as if it was a button on a remote control.

“Hardly innocent,” the prosecutor said. “You have admitted having sex with a number of women, including former students.”

Will didn’t miss a beat.

“They were willing partners,” he said to the jury, taking off his glasses. “But sometimes women throw themselves at you and then complain afterwards if you don’t answer their letters or stay in touch.”

“But some were girls, Professor Burnside, not women, weren’t they?” the prosecutor said. “Miss Massingham was fourteen, wasn’t she?”

He couldn’t deny it. Katherine had told her story.

“Those I had sex with wanted it,” he said and tried to make eye contact with the jurors. “They were begging for it.”

“Hard to beg for it, Professor, if you are drugged,” the prosecutor said.

“It was a different time then. There was a lot more sex going on. Experimentation with drugs,” Will said.

But he must’ve known he was fighting a losing battle. The jury didn’t know, but Alistair Soames had already admitted his part and given the detectives chapter and verse on their use of Rohypnol. The friend who’d supplied it was long gone, DI Sinclair told me. An accidental overdose. Well, what goes around . . .

When the jury went out, Will’s bail was revoked and he was taken down to the cells under the court to await the verdict. It was a bad sign. He came back to hear the jury foreman pronounce the word “Guilty” over and over, and the life sentence had silenced everyone, but he looked at me once as we all stood to allow the judge to retire. A look of pure hatred.

I simply looked away. He was nothing to me now.





EIGHTY-SIX


    Emma


MONDAY, APRIL 1, 2013

There were three of us at the funeral. Me, Angela, and Kate. It was what I wanted. Paul and my dad, Nick, would wait for us at home.

The funeral director had helped me choose a casket for the child. My child. A tiny, woven willow coffin with a simple plaque bearing the name Katherine Massingham.

I’d decided I would do it properly, but I couldn’t bear the thought of putting the baby back in the cold earth. Angela had suggested a cremation and then scattering her ashes together. I loved the idea of her being carried by the wind and we’d talked about taking her down to the coast, to Dorset we thought, when everything was over.

We held hands as we waited for our turn at the crematorium. There was a big funeral before ours with flowers and undertakers in top hats and tailcoats, like at a wedding.

I hadn’t wanted a hearse—too lonely for my little one to travel like that—so the undertaker brought her in a car and handed her carefully to me. She was almost weightless and I was immediately back in our garden, the carrier bag in my hand, held away from me as if it was toxic. It was twenty-eight years ago today. So long ago but it was as if it had happened yesterday.