He Said/She Said(21)
We spend a few moments watching the North Sea churn to a creamy yellow foam in our wake. A family of seals swims dangerously, stupidly, close to the ship, arousing in me sentimental thoughts of my own incipient family. All roads lead back to Laura.
‘First picture of the trip,’ I say, setting my phone to selfie mode. I hold it at arm’s length and manage to capture the two of us, grinning over brown bottles of beer, the sea a blue blur in the background. When I try to send it to Laura, there’s no signal. That’s the problem with the middle of the North Sea; no phone masts.
‘You can get Wi-Fi, but only in the lobby, although apparently you can pick up a signal on most of the top deck,’ says Richard, whose hourly weather updates depend on knowing these things. On my land-lubber’s legs, I climb a white-painted staircase to the next level; the metal banister is cold under my hand. Up here, it’s deserted, and I can see why. The wind is sharp, loud and disorienting. I take shelter behind a steaming air vent, where it’s warmer as well as quieter. It takes under a minute for my phone to lock on to the Wi-Fi, and I send the picture to Laura in London.
Looks like the world’s geekiest ever stag do, she bounces back. I smile and pocket my phone, and turn to rejoin Richard.
Leaning on the railing with her back to me is Beth.
It’s the hair I recognise first, that wild unbrushed mess that writhes in the wind like something alive. The image of her is so ingrained in my retina that I can process the rest of her in a split second. Right height, right curves, and those crazy patterned trousers that billow around her legs are just the sort of thing she would wear. The scratchy combination of sympathy and fear is back, stronger than ever. Here come the usual flashbacks, a time-lapse film from the moment we each met Beth to our last sight of her: the day-dark field, the courtroom, the stranger in our flat, the figure in the dust cloud, the moving image on a computer screen. The end credits; Laura, this morning, at the top of our steps, brushing imaginary cobwebs away from her arms before letting her hands drop to her belly. And now the final frame. I don’t know how it ends. I don’t have a plan. I’ve been waiting so long that I’m not ready any more.
Chapter 11
LAURA
8 May 2000
Lachlan McCall died on the first May Day of the new millennium and was buried three days later. At the wake, Mac got so drunk he threw up all over Kit. We had to pick Kit’s only suit up from the dry-cleaner’s on the way down to Cornwall.
Jamie Balcombe’s rape trial began on a Monday. That morning, Kit and I stood with our backs to the courthouse, looking down and around over the little city of Truro, the last in England. Behind us, a high Victorian viaduct curved a huge protective arm around the valley. Below nestled the modest cathedral, surrounded on all sides by the kind of red rooftops that Santa sails over in his sleigh. The crown court sat on top of a vertiginous hill; a terrace of little pastel cottages seemed about to slide down the slope and land in the river Kenywn, which gurgled over a thin weir. Feeling that the slightest tilt forward would tumble me straight down that hill, I gripped Kit’s arm.
‘They won’t need us this morning,’ he said, returning my squeeze. ‘They’ve got to set it all up, and get Beth’s version of events. That’ll take till lunchtime, at least.’
Technically – of course, as ever – Kit was right. There was no chance of either of us being called to give evidence yet. The witness care service had told us that today would be about the prosecution setting out their case. Even Beth might not be called today and, as secondary witnesses, we weren’t allowed in the courtroom until she had finished giving her evidence. I acknowledged the legal wisdom of this even as I flared against it. Nothing she could say would change my original statement. I knew what I had seen.
It was our first time back in Cornwall since the Lizard, and only our second time out of London. We had been conscientious students but the new challenge of building a career was a shock to both our systems. I was temping and Kit was a post-grad, having waltzed with his double first from Oxford straight into a doctorate at UCL, with a part-time sideline marking undergraduate essays; this wretched trip was the closest we were going to get to a holiday. Our hotel room was paid up until the Thursday, and our return train tickets booked for Friday morning. Meagre but welcome expenses were being paid. We had arrived late the previous evening and, after a sleepless night in a chintzy hotel with smugglers-cove paintings on the walls, we were still creaky from the long drive down from our little flat in Clapham. Just the two of us lived there. The original plan to get a houseshare with Mac and Ling had been scuppered by Juno, the baby they had unintentionally conceived a few weeks before the Cornwall eclipse, now two months old and with lungs the size of London.
Since the Lizard, or rather since we knew that the case would come to trial, we’d been mugging up on court procedure. My new knowledge swung me between hope and despair. I took some comfort knowing that so many rapes never even got tried; how ironclad a case must be for the Crown Prosecution Service to take it to court. Then I’d think about the conviction rates again, and feel a plunging despondency. The only constant was the image of a girl, covered in snot, face down in the mud, being assaulted, being raped. Somewhere between then and now I had stopped being scared of the word and armed myself with it instead.
‘They’ll probably let us go as soon as we’ve reported for duty,’ he said as we approached the front door. I looked up at the faux-Romanic columns, pebbledashed then painted an ugly weatherproof grey. The day’s listings pinned to an outside wall told us that R. v. Balcombe would be held in Court One, with Mr Nathaniel Polglase prosecuting, Miss Fiona Price defending and Justice Edmund Frenchay presiding. Reality pulled its focus sharp.