Our Kind of Cruelty(87)

Xander walked towards me and I sat back down, my whole body shaking. The whole room seemed to be shaking. But I drew strength from your continued distress, V, because I knew we were together in our pain; I knew I had more lies to tell about you, and that telling them was the only certain way to protect you, to keep you safe while I was locked away. ‘Mike, you need to tell the court what sort of a hold Mrs Metcalf had over you.’

We hadn’t prepared that question and I felt it run into me like a punch. ‘We are very much in love,’ I said and my voice sounded hard and loud.

Xander nodded, conciliatory. ‘Yes, I don’t doubt that. But would you have done anything for her?’

‘Absolutely. I still would.’

‘There’s nothing you wouldn’t do?’

‘Nothing.’

The silence throbbed around us. ‘Even after all this? Even after all she’s said about you?’

I nodded. ‘Verity will have her reasons. It will be OK.’

I remembered something else last night, V, something which came to me late as I lay on my bunk turning everything over in my mind. I remembered when we went into that gift shop in Edinburgh, the year we went to the festival. How we were looking through a pile of quotes on wooden plaques and laughing and then you stopped. How you held one up and said it was the first quote you’d ever come across which actually meant something worth remembering. I read it over your shoulder that day: I must be cruel only to be kind; Thus bad begins and worse remains behind.

‘We should remember that, Mikey,’ you said to me, ‘Shakespeare is always right.’ And I didn’t understand then why you thought that, but I do now, I absolutely do now.

We must work and bend the truth. Others might see it differently, but, my darling, our kind of cruelty is love by any other name.

Xander snapped shut the papers. ‘Did Mrs Metcalf ever ask you to hurt Mr Metcalf in any way?’

I paused, but only briefly. And, V, I looked straight at you. Remember that. I took a breath deep into my stomach because we had reached the moment I have spent the last weeks debating: what constitutes the truth? Does it exist only in what we say to each other in flimsy puffs of air, often without real thought? Or is it, as I suspect, more than that? No, surely it is the foundation of all we are. It is in our bones, in our being. It begs to be interpreted in order to reach its true potential.

‘She asked me to help her,’ I said, my heart hammering in my chest and my blood singing in my ears.

Xander stood still for a moment and it was good to see him wrong-footed. I felt him look straight at me but I didn’t return his stare because I was never going to take my eyes off you. ‘When did this happen?’

‘When I went to her house on the Monday. After we kissed we spent a lot of time talking about how we were going to handle the situation, like I’ve said.’ I stopped for a moment, remembering how the floor had felt underneath me, how we’d sat up, how we’d shivered with desire. ‘As you know she said that she wished things had worked out between us.’

My God, V, you are the most beautiful being ever to have existed, that’s what I thought when I looked at you then. I could swim into you and lie still forever. But I knew Xander and all the rest of them would need more. I knew the story needed a more definite climax.

‘She told me she wanted to get out of the marriage but that she couldn’t do it alone. She asked for my help.’ The words pricked me as they left my body.

‘Mr Hayes, what did these words mean to you?’ Xander asked through my thoughts.

‘That she was scared because she hates confrontation. I’ve always saved her from bad situations and she knew I could help her with this one. Verity didn’t want Angus dead, just like I didn’t want him dead. But we had to be together. Do you understand that? It is simply impossible that we don’t end up together.’

I was speaking only to you, V, and you never moved your gaze from mine for one second. You stopped crying. And I knew then that you finally understood what I had done.



Xander and Petra spent ages summing up, all going over and over the same wrong thoughts in the same wrong ways. And then the judge could have had his lines written for him by Xander. He spent a lot of time summarising the legal issues: how to find me guilty of murder was the most serious verdict the jury could bring against me. How to do so they had to be absolutely certain of my intention to kill Angus at the moment I hit him. How they had to be sure I wasn’t acting in self-defence. He also reminded them about my upbringing and the mental strain I had been under at the time. He told them that the option to convict of manslaughter was a realistic expectation.

He did little to hide his revulsion for you, V. He reminded the jury how you had lied, even under oath, about Angela and the Kitten Club, and how you find it hard to remove yourself from unwanted situations, especially ending relationships. He talked for a long time about, as he put it, your extreme and unusual sexual appetites, and how you clearly used your sexuality to exert control over me. I shut my eyes as he spoke to stop myself from screaming out in your defence, but these are the trolls we have to deal with. These are the maggots who would not be fit to feed on our corpses.

In the end we only had to wait twenty-four hours before we were called back in. I was found not guilty of murder, but guilty of manslaughter. And you, my love, were found guilty of accessory to manslaughter. I looked over to you when the verdicts were read out and I saw your knees buckle and how your warden had to steady you with her arm. Suzi cried out, but I’m not sure you heard. We had to stay standing to hear Judge Smithson talk about how tragic this case has been and how he believed that neither of us had meant for it to end in Angus’s death. He spoke about responsibility and the dangers involved in game-playing and using others.