He Said/She Said(23)

The vertical line between Kent’s eyebrows deepened. ‘That should be fine, but let me check with counsel.’

She followed a sign pointing to the witness room.

‘I feel like I should go and say good luck or at least hello,’ I said.

‘Did you not just hear what she said?’ hissed Kit. ‘There’s all sorts of rules against that. You’d look like you were conferring with her. It’s only going to jeopardise her case. What if it got thrown out, because of that?’

He was right, again.

Next to us, a glossy blonde was talking on a flip phone.

‘Yeah, it’s a rape this morning,’ she said, with all the detachment of someone describing a routine dental appointment. A journalist; of course. ‘Potentially quite juicy. Our defendant’s public school, lovely-looking boy. His dad’s a big cheese, CEO of a FTSE 100, was in the same year as Prince Charles at Gordonstoun although they haven’t kept in touch, more’s the pity because a link like that would be gold. Look, I’ll call you back at end of play, give you a good idea of whether it’s got legs. It better had, to be honest. I’ve turned down a double murder in Liverpool for this.’

She dropped her voice as Carol Kent came our way.

‘Mr Polglase says that’s fine,’ Kent told us. ‘Keep your phone switched on, and don’t wander out of signal.’

‘Thanks.’ Kit stood to leave.

The voice over the public address system was as Cornish as tin mines and pasties, long Rs raking in longer Os.

‘Crown versus Balcombe, Court Room One.’

‘I’m offski,’ said the reporter. ‘Talk later.’ She slammed the aerial back into the body of the telephone and followed the Balcombes through the double doors. She was followed by another journalist with a geometric bob, a Press Association card on a lanyard around her neck.

Seconds later, the place was deserted, only us, a few court staff and a little blue butterfly flitting around the foliage. The usher from earlier looked at us and frowned. I felt suddenly under scrutiny. The atrium seemed to shrink around us.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ I said.

‘You’ve changed your tune.’

‘Do you want to go or not?’

‘All right, keep your hair on.’

We’d never spoken to each other like that before.

The pretty bit of Truro town centre doesn’t extend far; within an hour we were already retracing our steps around the lanes. We wandered into the cathedral, pottered in bookshops and an art gallery. There was a museum but we decided to save that for if it rained. Lunch, in a pub at the bottom of the hill, was a baked potato, prawns swimming in mayonnaise and a half-pint each of a local ale called Bilgewater that tasted nicer than it sounded.

‘I wish I knew what was being said in there,’ I told Kit, grinding pepper over my plate.

‘Well, you can’t. That’s the whole point of your testimony. That it needs to stand independently of the complainant’s version. Otherwise it’s worthless.’

I pushed my food away. ‘I’m too tense to eat. What if our testimony isn’t enough to put him away?’

‘You’re acting like the whole thing’s on you. I’ve told you, there’s a whole team of people who’ve been building a case for months. I wonder what forensics they’ll have.’

We’d been through this before, too. It was an effort to keep my voice even. ‘There might not be any forensics. It’s just a case of who you believe.’

Kit shook his head. ‘Words are just so . . . flimsy, aren’t they? Like, you’re always telling me I’m too binary. That I only think in black and white.’ It was true: I nodded. ‘But in this case, we’re asking everyone to think that way and there’s no evidence for any of it apart from words. How can you possibly secure a safe conviction that way?’

‘What else is there?’ I asked.

He couldn’t answer, just looked pensive and took another inch off his drink. ‘We did a pretend trial in sixth-form,’ he said after a while. ‘I had to give evidence. A hypothetical drug-trafficking case. I was bricking it even then just getting up, even when it was all fake and in the common room.’

‘I didn’t know that!’ We were still at the point where new stories were both delightful – there is still so much to discover about you! – and an affront – why didn’t I know this about you before?

‘I take it Mac was the defendant.’

Kit’s face flickered in a memory, then he laughed. ‘Actually, he was the judge.’

‘Fucking hell!’

‘Our teacher had a sense of humour,’ he conceded. ‘Anyway, the point was, that once I actually did it, all the nerves went away, because I just said my thing, and that was all there was to it.’

I knew he was right, but it couldn’t still the nerves that took away my appetite for food but gave me a thirst. If we hadn’t been waiting for Kit’s phone to ring, I could have sunk three pints. Fat raindrops hit the windows like stones.

‘Museum it is, then,’ I said.

But the museum was closed for the afternoon. We went back to the pub and played a game of pool on an uneven table. (I won, obviously: despite months of playing against me, Kit had yet to internalise the mathematics of trajectory and ricochet. Where I saw sport, he still saw applied projectile physics. He had a terrible poker face; you could always see the next move coming a whole minute before he picked up the cue.)