He Said/She Said(113)
A heavy door slams outside, making us both jump. She’s as nervous as I am, I realise. At last our reflections lock eyes, each silently asking the other the questions too big – too dangerous – to voice.
How did it come to this?
How did we get here?
How will it end?
Chapter 63
LAURA
28 September 2015
Tonight there will be a blood moon; not a solar eclipse but its inverse, the earth passing between the moon and the sun. At three o’clock in the morning, the light passing through the earth’s atmosphere will turn the moon a rusty red. There are no windows in Kit’s cell in Belmarsh. He will only be able to observe the lunar eclipse if the twelve men and women currently deliberating his case find him innocent.
‘I feel sick,’ I say to Ling.
For once she doesn’t try to reassure me; she’s all out of platitudes. ‘So do I,’ she says.
I run my wrists under the cold tap. We are in the women’s toilets at the Central Criminal Court, better known as the Old Bailey to the public and simply the Bailey to those in the legal profession – and I am beginning to feel like a professional witness.
We are high up in every sense; Court Twelve is on the topmost floor, up eighty-nine steps. There is no milling about in the vast lobby for spectators at the Bailey, no spying on journalists or accidentally bumping into the players. Here, the public galleries – to which I am relegated, now that my performance is over – are segregated from the main business of the court. No matter who you are, no matter how involved you are in the case being tried, there are no privileges in the public gallery. It’s much stricter than the crown court at Truro. You’re not allowed to bring even a bottle of water in with you. My mouth is so dry that if I try to lick my teeth, my tongue sticks. I put my head under the tap and drink greedily.
‘Oh, Laura,’ says Ling. ‘God knows what’s in that water.’
She’s right; it tastes like dirty pennies. I gulp it down.
‘How long have the jury been out now?’
She looks at her watch like it hasn’t been thirty seconds since I last asked. ‘Three hours.’
‘They might not finish today after all. I should ring home.’
That’s not as easy as it sounds. At the Bailey, you can’t just pull a phone out of your pocket. They don’t even have somewhere you can check it in: I’ve had to leave mine in a café over the road. Ringing home means going down three flights of stairs, through security, across the road, into the café, then, after the call is made, doing the whole thing in reverse.
‘But what if they announce it when you’re gone?’ says Ling. ‘Like when you’re waiting for a bus and you go and get a drink from the shop and it goes past.’
It’s almost worth it to tempt fate, but I have to be there for Kit.
‘You’re right,’ I say. Besides, I don’t want to run the gamut of all those journalists. This trial has been front-page news, trending on Twitter, national television headlines, radio-debate fodder. I have been offered tens of thousands of pounds to tell my side of the story. There have been press photographers outside my house for ten days now.
The twins are five months old and at home. I had no choice but to go back to work when they were ten weeks old. And yes, I do resent it. With a husband on remand in Belmarsh and a six-figure legal bill on the horizon, I took the highest-paid job I could get, head of a British alumni fund for an American university, skimming cash from rich graduates to upgrade an already enviable campus. Not the most deserving of causes, but a well-paid one, and a prestigious gig; my appointment made the news pages of The Fundraiser. For the first time in my career, I had to have a professional photograph taken. I wore my hair down. There is no longer any reason for me to hide, nor indeed anyone to hide from. It is a measure of my exhaustion that this past week of compassionate leave, with its gruelling days in the witness box and the ensuing grind of watching from the public gallery, has been respite from the slog of working motherhood.
When we come out on to the landing, Mac’s there, smelling like fresh cigarettes. He’s started going to NA meetings again as a pre-emptive strike. Adele is next to her son, dressed in black. We exchange tight smiles. There are two courts on each stifling landing, supervised by unsmiling security guards. Their grid of CCTV screens forms a compound eye of legal dramas, all playing out in bluish monochrome.
Everything at the Bailey is in a different league. Instead of two regional barristers, this trial is being fought by Queen’s Counsels. Our silk is called Danny Hannah. He’s in his late fifties and I think I have just paid for his children to go to university. His horsehair wig is reassuringly disgusting and he has been insistent to the point of blitheness that Kit’s acquittal is a foregone conclusion. One newspaper columnist expressed astonishment that the case should come to trial in the first place although, as Danny explained, the outcry if the CPS had failed to prosecute would have been far louder.
That Kit killed Jamie Balcombe has never been in doubt, but for a murder charge to stick, motivation has to be proved. The echoes of that other trial are at times deafening.
Kit performed well in the witness box. He, and I, and the other witnesses, only served to underline that he acted in self-defence and in defence of his wife and unborn children. The past has been raked over, of course it has, and while we have both explained all the details of that night in my kitchen, we agreed, in whispers across a prison table, the things that should stay between us. Some truths cannot be swallowed whole. Forensics are on our side this time; Jamie’s prints on our knife and the bloodied slash in my T-shirt speak volumes. That the discarded knife on our kitchen floor came from Jamie’s former family home shows premeditation only on his part. Beth’s little dossier, laid out on my desk, nearly undid us; the CPS seized on it as proof of premeditation, hence the murder charge rather than manslaughter. In my cross-examination they suggested that I’d put it there on purpose, laid it out as the perfect excuse. I stood my ground like I was bolted to the floor. And of course we had Antonia to corroborate Beth’s written word. But juries are strange beasts. You never know.