He Said/She Said(114)
‘All parties in Smith to Court Twelve.’ The public address system has the crackle of old vinyl.
My hands are loose at my sides; Adele grabs one, Ling the other, and Mac holds onto Ling. We stay that way, as if in group prayer, until the security guard motions us in.
Not for the Bailey the intimacy of Truro Crown Court. This public gallery is all brass and marble, a balcony twenty feet above the players. The press bench is busier than it has been since the trial began. Our old friend Alison Larch is in the throng, a weird version of her past self. She’s done something to her face so that her top lip juts like a bill; light bounces off her smooth brow. Mac holds on to the brass railing in front of him. The veins bulging on the backs of his hands threaten to burst through his skin.
The Balcombes are already seated. I think they may have remained in the gallery since the jury were sent out. It is not the full entourage this time but just Lord Jim, as he now is, and Lady Sally. The brother was there for the beginning of the case, but was ejected after calling Kit a murdering cunt shortly after the indictment. I don’t know what’s happened to the sister. Sally Balcombe shakes and walks with a stick now. She has not been here every day, but Jim has been a constant presence. At first, he took the front row, like us. But, as the trial progressed, and his son’s reputation was slowly torn to strips, as the layers of delusion and violence were exposed, Jim retreated. When the intern from Jamie’s company came forward to describe her ordeal, he shifted into the middle row and now he is tucked away in a back corner, beyond the sightlines of the press and, mercifully, of Kit. I can sense Jim’s frustration even from here. It will be killing him that he couldn’t select the prosecution barrister, that such a basic thing as getting his son’s killer put away is beyond the reach of his wallet. I don’t want to feel sorry for Jim and Sally Balcombe but I can’t help it. They must be doubly grieving as their memories are overwritten by the picture painted in this court.
My husband is in the dock below me, wearing the navy suit I bought him before I realised how much weight he’d lost. He is handcuffed to an officer: another one guards the door, which makes me want to laugh – I mean, as if. I lean over the marble sill so that he can see me. The dock in Court Twelve is shallow and wide, with eight flip-up chairs in a row. I’m pretty sure the jury can’t see the empty chairs on either side of him, although from my viewpoint up here in the gods, they have always seemed to underline his ultimate innocence. This is how bad it could be, those empty seats suggest. He could be a conspirator, on trial with someone else, one of half a dozen men accused of the same crime. He could be a real criminal.
Those empty seats also remind me how close I came to standing there beside him.
Kit turns and looks straight up at me, his eyes heavy with our history and a guilt that has nothing to do with the dead man.
‘All rise for the judge,’ says the clerk, and even Sally Balcombe gets to her feet.
The judge – a Lord Justice, no less – steeples his fingers and orders the jury returned. The twelve file in, brisk with their own importance. I keep my eyes on Madam Foreperson, a tweedy brunette who has remained inscrutable throughout what I have seen of the trial, and who stays that way now.
‘In the matter of Crown versus Smith, how do you find the accused?’ says the judge.
Anxiety sends fire ants marching all over my skin and I claw my fingers to scratch. Madam Foreperson clears her throat. ‘Not guilty.’
There is a dry groan from the Balcombes behind us. Mac rather theatrically touches his head down on to the brass bar in front of him, and so misses the moment that Kit looks our way; you couldn’t call the expression on his face a smile, more a release of the grimace he’s been holding since his arrest.
‘Oh, thank fuck,’ says Ling. ‘Thank fuck for that.’ She turns to me. ‘Are you ok?’
How am I supposed to answer that?
He doesn’t just get to walk free. There’s paperwork to be processed first, down in the cells. Documents have to be faxed to Belmarsh and then back again. It will be half an hour at least before I can see him again and when I do it will be in public. You’d think that they’d have a special reunion room for this purpose. After all, the Bailey is riddled with rooms, huge echoing atriums and poky little cubby holes. I saw dozens of them lying empty when I was waiting to be called as a witness. But no. When all the forms have been filled, he will be released into the street. This is undignified in itself and doubly so when you consider the bank of cameras waiting for us on the pavement. It’s a final humiliation.
But he is not out yet, and so we are free to sneak out to the café the long way round, through Warwick Passage, a brick-tiled subway next to the public entrance. There, I fall upon my phone as though it were one of my children rather than a mere link to them; I learn that the babies are fine, sleeping off their lunchtime feed. I feel a degree of release. After coffee, the four of us trail back to the Bailey to wait for Kit. The street outside the entrance is entirely nondescript yet instantly recognisable from the TV news, or maybe it’s only the journalists who make it so. We hide from them in Warwick Passage, waiting for Danny Hannah QC to ring my mobile. I count the hairline cracks in the white tiles that line the walls. When my phone goes, Kit’s already on the way down. It’s a sixty-second warning. My stomach executes a series of perfect back-flips as I step into the street.