He Said/She Said(75)
Amazingly, he was right. The bedroom was smoke-damaged but not fire-damaged. I opened the wardrobe and sniffed the nearest dress. It looked passable but the smell made me retch. ‘We might be able to air our stuff, or wash it out,’ I said. In silence, we bagged up the clothes and the contents of a bookcase that had escaped more or less unscathed, blackened spines wiping clean to reveal the titles beneath and the pages only edged with soot.
Everything else we left to be cleared by the landlord.
We bumped our bags down the stairs. Outside, the kebab man was sitting on an upturned crate, smoking a cigarette.
‘It’s a bad business.’ He looked down at Kit’s bandaged palm. ‘Where you off to now? You staying local? Your mate was asking.’
‘Mate?’ My voice shook without my permission.
‘That girl with black hair, she was here the other day. She was in a right state.’
‘I’ll bet she was,’ I said under my breath.
‘If she comes back,’ said Kit evenly, ‘tell her we’re going travelling. Backpacking. Taking a gap year.’
‘Yeah.’ The kebab man nodded. ‘Do you good, get a break from it all.’
On the way back to Adele’s, we drove past Lambeth register office. We stopped at a red light. A bride and groom in shiny, round middle age laughed on the steps in a hail of rice.
‘Let’s do it now. What are we waiting for?’ Kit’s voice was musical with the thrill of uncharacteristic spontaneity.
‘You mean it?’ It was the first genuine smile I’d given in days.
‘I’d fly you to Las Vegas tonight if we could afford it. But let’s fill in the forms. Whatever step one is. I want you to be my wife. This has only made me realise how much it matters to me.’ Determination had momentarily wiped his brow clean of the deep lines that had settled since the fire. ‘Look; about the only good thing about the police not being able to charge Beth is that we’re not tied to her by another court case. We can make a clean break. We get married. We start again. Change our names. Go and live somewhere else, maybe up where Mac and Ling are.’
The lights turned green without my noticing; I only broke our kiss to pull away when the driver behind blared his horn. I’d made my decision before I was out of first gear.
‘Let’s go for it,’ I said. ‘I can’t think of a better way to disappear.’
The traditional red telephone box had the traditional stench of urine, and I had to breathe through my mouth. Outside, cars nosed along the still-unfamiliar neighbourhood of Green Lanes, past the Turkish bakery that never seemed to close and the forlorn jewellers that never seemed to open.
That evening I had finally, and with a breaking heart, come to terms with the cure for my insomnia. In the week since our move to Harringay, I hadn’t slept for more than three hours. Exhaustion, if it continued at this level, was bound to loosen my tongue in a way beyond my control. I cradled the greasy receiver between my neck and chin, a five-pound Phonecard poised at the mouth of the slot. I had been in this position for five suffocating minutes, DS Carol Kent’s business card balanced on my other palm. The card was ragged at the edges and grass-stained from Lizard Point. The Jamie Balcombe Is Innocent campaigners would doubtless have wanted me to contact them directly but Kent’s wrath seemed preferable to their glee.
I had known on hearing the verdict that Jamie’s conviction was unsafe, but I had still believed it to be just. Now I knew that Beth, too, had lied to the police, and presumably again, under oath, about how she’d travelled to the festival, and while I could see her reasoning, it didn’t chime with what I’d seen of her after the assault. In our flat, she had revealed herself to be first voyeuristic, then petulant, inconsistent and finally violent. None of these things individually undermined Jamie’s guilty verdict, but collectively, they changed everything for me. My white lie was blackened, streaked with soot. Did I still believe Jamie was guilty? Yes . . . yes. Yes, most of the time. Did I still know he was guilty? No. The conviction was unsafe.
I knew what I stood to lose by making the call. The physical consequences hung over me. Perjury. Possibly perversion of the course of justice and contempt of court. It would be prison for me if I came clean, but this was as nothing compared to the personal consequences. I would be waving away my father’s pride in me, Ling’s respect; and almost certainly my relationship with Kit. The career I so desperately wanted to build was at stake too. I couldn’t see many charities trusting a convicted perjurer with their reputations. I punched in the area code, every number a step away from the only life I’d ever wanted. And yet confession was what I would have expected, demanded, from anyone else in the same position. It was what Kit would have expected from me.
A siren shook the windows as a police car in chase forced vehicles to part where they could. As it inched past me, the long arm of the law got me in a chokehold. The muscles in my neck started to cramp and the walls of my throat closed in.
I couldn’t do it. I saw, with horrible clarity, that I wanted my life and my reputation to stay the way they were. I never knew, till that moment, how big my ego really was. I consulted my reflection in a pane of dirty glass and felt a sudden, vertiginous loss of self. It seemed that I would rather take a chance, however small, on an innocent man serving time in prison than take responsibility for lying in court.