He Said/She Said(101)

That morning, I stared through dim light at the shipwreck painting on the wall, wondering where Beth was now, and whether she had slept. She must have been reliving from the inside the sickening image that played over and over in my mind’s eye, of Jamie tearing into her. The thought of it made me whimper; beside me, Laura stirred in her sleep. I put my hand on her shoulder until she stilled again.

My heart hurt with the hope that Beth would keep quiet about our night together.

I am glad that I didn’t know then how impulsive she was, or it might have stopped beating altogether. No matter how hard the defence might go at her, I willed her to keep sight of how my quick thinking, in the moments after Laura found her, had made this trial viable.

I had been waiting for ten months to get the call from the CPS saying that they knew about my involvement with Beth, that she had confessed to it at the last minute and their whole prosecution would fall apart if Jamie’s defence so much as blew on it. I was merely waiting for it to come out at trial.

There seemed infinite variables to consider. Would Beth break down and tell them about me under cross-examination? Had someone seen us after all? Had they found my DNA on her? Hair, skin; we had been all over each other. Semen. We had both showered the following day, but body fluids loitered internally for days. While they did not have my DNA on file, I was sure that, if they mentioned an unidentified male, I’d do something to give myself away – to Laura if not to the court. At night I dreamed that the defence team had somehow swabbed me in my sleep, and had dreams where they called me as a surprise witness, my infidelity literally under the microscope.

It was only when we were back in Cornwall that I realised finding traces of a man other than Jamie on Beth’s body had implications for her, too. I knew from Laura that although they weren’t supposed to get a woman on ‘loose’ behaviour, it didn’t stop them trying.

Laura’s insistence on hanging around the courtroom that first day was pure torture.

The only alleviating factor was that she appeared too wrapped up in the process to notice that I’d gone into lockdown; or, if she did, she attributed my strange behaviour to a grief that was in truth so far down my list of priorities that I wondered sometimes if I’d ever get round to it. I’m still not quite sure that I have.

I made the effort to talk about the case because saying nothing would have looked suspicious, but it was like playing tennis with live grenades. I tried to talk in generalities, about the nature of consent, but even then I couldn’t seem to say the right thing. My life since that week has been lived as though with a glass of water balanced on my head. It is just about possible to walk without spilling a drop if you devote all your concentration to balance. These days, protecting Laura is something so internalised that I can do the emotional equivalent of dancing or turning cartwheels without spilling a drop, but back then everything I did was controlled and conscious and the result was a physical tension, across my face and shoulders, that fast became as much a part of my body as my head or my hands.

On the third day of the trial, when Fiona Price stood up to cross-examine me, I almost confessed on the spot to pre-empt the grilling I was convinced was coming. But I held my nerve, and it paid off when I realised her baffling questions were a set-up for Jamie’s cover story about drugs in his pocket. Later in the proceedings, I was sure I’d given myself away when the barrister asked the doctor if she’d found any ejaculate when she swabbed Beth and I shot forward like I’d been catapulted from my seat. To my paranoid mind it was as good as a confession, but Laura just rolled her eyes, then turned them straight back to the evidence.





Chapter 56





KIT

31 May 2000

I didn’t get Beth alone until the second time she came to visit us in Clapham, and even then, privacy meant a hurried conversation while Laura showered. My dirty little secret had kicked off her silver trainers at my front door and was barefoot at my stove, slowly scrambling eggs to go with the smoked salmon and bagels she’d bought. Her straight back was turned to me. There was nothing in her posture to suggest anything like the anguish that pressed down on my shoulders, so much so that I was surprised whenever I brushed my teeth not to see a stooping zombie in the mirror. Far from freeing me up to move on with my life, the effort I’d put into keeping it together in the run-up to the trial had used up a whole year’s reserves of discipline and the London life I’d been so keen to return to was falling apart. I wasn’t sleeping. The undergraduates I was supposed to be mentoring hadn’t seen me for weeks and I’d had a written warning from the department about my continued absence. Mum had gone from nursing a dying husband to worrying about a degenerating son. Mac had taken cash from her purse, forged cheques in her name and sold her computer. I was only lending him money because I couldn’t bear to have him steal from me.

‘Beth.’ I kept my voice low even as Laura sang tunelessly over the whirring Vent-Axia and the patter of water on the curtain. The irony weighed heavy on me that only illicit lovers usually understand the urgency of such snatched moments. ‘I’m sure the verdict won’t be overturned. There’s no way they’ll get an appeal past a panel of judges.’ (I’d read on the internet that judges hate appeals; it calls their judgement into question and if you take that away, what have they got left? The only thing they hate more, apparently, is perjury.)