Apple Tree Yard (31 page)

All this I think only later, much later in the trial, when there is plenty of time for reflection during the many bureaucratic and legal delays that, I come to appreciate, are part of the process. But as I enter the dock for the first time, there is no time to think these thoughts for although the light and the bustle of the people is what strikes me first, I see immediately that, already seated between your own two dock officers – there is you.

My dear
, I think.
How you are changed
. Even though I allow myself to stare at you only briefly, I take in everything about you and, despite our predicament, it breaks my heart. You have shrunk – physically shrunk in each direction, even though I am standing and you are seated that’s how it seems. How can being on remand have made you smaller? Your suit jacket – that same expensive grey suit that I stroked in the Crypt Chapel beneath the Palace of Westminster – seems to hang off your shoulders. Your cheeks are hollow – even though you are clean-shaven for court, there is a tinge of grey to your skin, as though stubble would suit you better. Your hair is combed neatly, a little flat, and I notice that it is thinning on top. Was it always thinning, or is it just that I notice it now because you seem so vulnerable? Your large dark eyes, the eyes that stared at me in the early days of our affair, those eyes now have a vacant look, as though you are looking at me and not seeing me. Our gazes meet for a moment, but there is nothing there.

 I sit down in the dock, one of your dock officers and one of mine between us. It must be an act, I think. He knows there can be no visible connection between us; it would damage us both. But the vacancy in your glance is terrible. Where are you?

You have been held in the Category A cells, a different area from me. They brought you up first. Your name is first on the indictment, so you will do everything first during our trial. Even now I am seated, I can’t resist trying to glance past the officer for another look at you. Last time I saw you, you were sitting in the passenger seat of my car as we pulled up at South Harrow Tube station. I would give so much just for half an hour alone with you before this all begins, not to talk about anything related to our separate defences, just to be able to look into your eyes, touch your face.

That suit – the same, expensive dark grey suit you wore that day in the Houses of Parliament, when you took me down to the Chapel in the Crypt. You knelt at my feet afterwards as you slipped on and zipped up my boot. I am back there for a moment, and think how what we did together would seem so sordid if it were related to this court and yet it was so innocent. We hurt no one by that act.

All the same, thank God none of that is going to come out in this trial, I think then. The hot shame I feel is not for the act itself, but for the way the act would be presented within the context of the charge now levelled at us, the way it would be used to blacken and damn us. How the prosecution would love that information – but they don’t have it, I know that much, because of the law of disclosure. You will have seen the disclosure documents too, the ones where the case against us is outlined. I wonder if that is why you wore that grey suit for the first day of our trial. I wonder if you are signalling to me our triumph in that respect. No one knows about us and no one will. All we have to do is keep our nerve.

I look at the barristers to distract myself from you, and that is when it happens, a momentary confusion on my part, the significance of which will become clear to me only later. I see the prosecution barrister and she is exactly as I was warned she might be, a young woman, mid-thirties, small and immaculate, auburn-haired, steely-eyed. But she’s sitting in the wrong place, I think, with a small inward frown. The layout of the court has been explained to me. Why is she sitting at the table next to Robert’s, to the right of him? I glance across the court, then I realise. The prosecution barrister is not the young, immaculate woman. The prosecutor is a woman the same age as myself, large in her black robes, bespectacled, a school-matron type. She is sitting in the correct place, on the left-hand side of the court. Her junior is a young man who is rocking back in his chair.

The young, precise woman with the auburn fringe is not, as I first thought, counsel for the prosecution. She is part of the defence – not my defence, of course. The young woman is representing you.

The door to the bench opens and the usher enters, a woman with dark curls, a robe but no wig. She rattles through her lines, ‘All rise. All ye who have business here today gather near…’ her voice becomes a mumble, rising again with ‘…God save the Queen.’ She holds open the door for the judge and, all at once, everyone is on their feet: the defence barristers break their cluster and hurry to stand in their places, the young man who is the prosecution’s junior stops tilting his chair and jumps up. The woman dock officer to my left nudges me with her elbow even though I am already rising. This collective act of deference does more than anything that morning to underline the seriousness of my position, to tell me I am helpless before authority in a way I haven’t been since I was a child.

It is my first glimpse of the judge. He is short, with an expressionless, crumply face. He doesn’t so much walk to his chair as process, with the air of a man upon whom responsibility sits rather lightly, a man who was gratified but unsurprised when power was conferred upon him. He turns and acknowledges the court. The barristers ranged in front of him, the lawyers and police officers, all bow, then sit. He glances towards the dock and I give an awkward little bending motion, then sit down as well.

The jury panel is called in. They enter through a door on the left and stand in a huddle beneath the public gallery, which is still empty. They look out of place, this ordinary group of men and women, in their outside coats and with their bags and rucksacks. The clerk calls out names, one by one, and I watch each juror as he or she makes his or her way across the court. Everyone in the court is watching them, each of us making our own calculation as to their possible disposition. Does the bald young man with the earring, who reddens as he walks but keeps his head up, seem like a bit of a hard nut; someone who has maybe been in a fight or two himself and might admire a man’s ability to defend himself? Is the grey-haired woman who looks like a social worker likely to be predisposed to a defence of diminished responsibility? That older white man with a military bearing, he looks like a man who might think women are naturally devious – but the opposite could be true of course. He might also be possessed of an anachronistic sense of chivalry that believes women to be innately less capable of violence.

Once all twelve are in place, there is a deal of shuffling and coughing as they settle. Most of them do not look over at us, seemingly aware that everyone else in the court is staring at them. They all seem, to a man and woman, terribly embarrassed to be here.

Then comes the swearing in. Silence in court is demanded as each stands and takes the oath. All but five of them swear by Almighty God. Of the remaining five, two swear by Allah and one other by the Guru Granth Sahib. Only two take the secular oath.

The judge makes his opening remarks, about how the jury must come to their conclusion only on the evidence they hear in this court. He concentrates in particular on the evils of researching our case on the Internet. They are warned about Facebook, Twitter and all other social networking sites, and the sound of such references in the mouth of a man wearing a horsehair wig sound so intrinsically comic that one or two of the jurors smile. Then the judge looks at the papers in front of him, leans forward and says to his clerk, politely. ‘I don’t appear to have a batting order…’

The clerk turns and stands and points at a piece of paper to his left. ‘It’s right there, My Lord.’

‘Ah, many thanks.’

The prosecuting barrister is on her feet already, the matronly woman, large and slow she seems, but serious, trustworthy. I would trust her. The judge has given her the nod. She looks at the jury, then says politely, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I appear for the Crown in this case…’ Her voice is quite quiet, with a soft, Scottish burr. Her tone is downbeat, no obvious theatrics or righteous anger, merely a sorrowful acknowledgement of the sad necessity of her – of all of us – being there.

‘On a Saturday afternoon in October of last year, a man was making a cup of tea in his kitchen.’ The whole court is silent. ‘Living alone, divorced some years ago, he didn’t have much to do at the weekends. He had filled his teapot and was placing two biscuits on a plate, when the phone rang. It was his widowed father, calling from the West Midlands.’

At this point, the door to the public gallery opens – the public are being let in a little late. Everyone glances up as the security guard admits the small crowd of people who inch in self-consciously. Immediately, I see Susannah. She gives me a wan smile. Two young men follow in behind her with an older man, law students and their lecturer I guess, and then about half a dozen people who I guess to be curious members of the public.

The barrister has paused only briefly. ‘His father was called Raymond,’ she continues, and we all return our attention to her. ‘Raymond was a retired Methodist lay preacher, and the only person in his life with whom the man still had close and fond contact. The man answered the call, and asked his father in detail how he was. His father was – is – in the early stages of multiple sclerosis, partially disabled. After ten minutes or so, the man mentioned to his father that he had a pot of tea brewing and his father replied that he should pour his tea before it became too strong, or to use his vernacular, “too stewed”...’

The prosecutor pauses at this point, looks down at her notes, picks up the water glass in front of her and takes a small, neat sip. Then she looks at her notes again before continuing, not as if she is reminding herself of something, but as if she is reminding the rest of us of the seriousness of the story she is telling. I am to observe her doing this often during the trial and quickly come to regard it much as I regard Robert’s gown slipping from one shoulder, as an affectation, a carefully cultivated physical tic. She looks up again.

‘The man ended the conversation,’ she resumes, ‘by saying that he would have his cup of tea and then call his father right back. His father replied that he was going out to the corner shop shortly but if he missed him, he would try him again later. The man told his father to take care as his father was unsteady on his feet. He was concerned about his father stumbling on the kerb.’

At this point, she pauses again, but only slightly. She doesn’t want to come over as melodramatic. ‘It was the last conversation that man was to have with his father. It was, in fact, the last conversation that man was to have with anyone.’ A small cough. ‘Anyone, that is, apart from the person who was about to kill him.’

I have been so lulled by her tone, by her storytelling capacities, that it is only at this point that it comes to me, forcefully, that we are under way. There is no X or Y any more, no personal mythologies or mysteries: there is only evidence. The trial of Regina v. Mark Liam Costley and Yvonne Carmichael has begun. 

17

When counsel for the prosecution, Mrs Price, began her opening statement, her tone was low, sorrowful, as if she really didn’t want to be there, performing her sad duty. But as she outlines the facts of our case, her voice becomes stronger and she stands up a little straighter, as if the truth is making her tall and able, as if even she, measured as she is, cannot help but feel indignation at the temerity of our
not guilty
pleas.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ she says in conclusion, and looks at the jury directly. ‘You will hear defences being offered in this court. You will hear the first defendant in this case claim that he should be found not guilty on the grounds of diminished responsibility, that he was not responsible for what he did that afternoon, because he has a…’ She gives the smallest of pauses, just enough to let a tiny amount of incredulity in through the gap. ‘A
personality disorder
… You will also hear a defence submitted on the part of the second defendant, that she is…’ that tiny pause again, ‘
entirely innocent
, that she knew nothing of the first defendant’s intentions when she drove him, and his bag containing a change of clothing, up to the doorstep of a man who had viciously assaulted her. You will hear her claim that she had
no idea
what might be going on as she sat waiting in the car outside that property, waiting an inordinate amount of time, you might think, for someone to whom she was just giving a lift. You will be told that she had
no thought whatsoever
that something might be amiss when he took so long to return, having changed his clothes and footwear but having neglected to change his socks, the socks that transferred blood to the mat in the footwell of her car.’ A long pause, this time, for those tiny notes of incredulity to find each other in the ether of the courtroom, bind together like atoms, form more than the sum of their parts. She lowers her voice a notch. ‘The prosecution case, ladies and gentlemen, is that this is…’ she raises it again, ‘…
nonsense
. The prosecution case is that this was a joint enterprise murder, jointly discussed and agreed between the two parties, that they planned it, quite coldly, in advance, that one would do the deed and the other drive the getaway car, all the better to facilitate their escape, that each were in full knowledge of the other party’s behaviour, and that each is therefore as guilty as the other.’

After this rhetorical flourish, she pauses and looks down at her desk, where she also has one of the huge white plastic folders, the lever arch sort, the same as the ones the jury and we in the dock have, along with two other large landscape-style folders with plastic binding along the left-hand side. These are Exhibits One, Two and Three. She moves the folders around on her desk, unnecessary shuffling, I think, to indicate that now, at last, we are getting down to business.