Apple Tree Yard (33 page)

The other full-body graphic is of Craddock. He was wearing a light brown shirt and the blood on it is more clearly visible – his own blood, the blood that would have poured from his nose after it was broken. When this graphic is discussed with the blood spatter expert, it is noted that a button is missing, that there is no way of knowing when this button became detached from the shirt, but as there is a small bloodstain clearly visible around the buttonhole that would suggest it happened prior to the assault upon him. This chimes for me with the cereal bowl left on the dining table all day. Craddock lived alone, divorced. He bought designer shirts but couldn’t be bothered to sew the buttons back on, even though he didn’t have much to do in the evenings, I imagine: mark students’ papers, watch television, masturbate to the porn he accessed regularly on his computer.

Once more, your barrister, the cool Ms Bonnard, rises up to cross-examine the expert witness. The argument this time is about the difference between blood and dilute blood. Dilute blood is blood that has become intermixed with another fluid, water, say, or urine. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a bucketful or a single drop, it still counts as dilute. There is some debate about whether Craddock emptied his bladder during the attack. The blood splatter expert is presented with the relevant page of the pathologist’s report that says his bladder was empty but is unable to confirm whether that would have occurred during the attack or whether the victim had urinated just before the assault. Again, Ms Bonnard’s argument is obscure to me – as far as I can tell, her purpose is to highlight that Craddock’s bloodstained clothing was not tested for the presence of urine when perhaps it should have been, and there is also some business about whether a smear of blood found on the floor was dilute or not. It is clear that Ms Bonnard will let no prosecution witness go unchallenged – there is to be no piece of evidence from the prosecution case that is to be left without a question mark hanging over it.

And again, when Robert my barrister gets to his feet, it is merely to turn to the judge, bow politely and say, ‘My Lord, I have no questions for this witness.’ Again, the jury glances at Robert questioningly. This time, one or two of them glance at me.

*

After the experts are done, there is a row of witnesses that I think of as the amateurs. Together, they take up the rest of the second day and the whole of the third. It seems to me that their main purpose is to ensure that the prosecution case is not presented too quickly. There is only one witness to Craddock’s actions earlier in the day – the man at the grocery store. Craddock went in there that morning to buy the
Guardian
and the
Sun
, a litre carton of milk, twenty Malboro Light cigarettes, a tube of Werther’s Originals and a packet of salami. He paid with a twenty-pound note. He was given the items in a blue and white striped plastic bag. He put the change directly into his pocket rather than a wallet. There is CCTV footage of him at the counter. I glance down when this is shown to the court, on the two television-sized screens either side, one on the wall, the other suspended just below the public gallery. Even now, even after all this, the thought of seeing him as a moving, living human being fills me with revulsion and I am returned briefly to what he did: his face in mine, the students with their bin liners moving around the empty Events Hall, my face pressed against the cab’s interior on the way home, the smile he gave me through the window of the hairdressing salon.

The questioning is very detailed, once again. ‘And how would you describe the manner in which he said this?’ the off-licence man is asked by the prosecution counsel at one point. The statement in question is: ‘And twenty Malboro Lights.’ All that is established by this examination is that George Craddock appeared completely normal that day, not anxious or frightened in any way, and that as far as anyone could tell, no one was following him.

Some witnesses are despatched with what seems to be discourteous haste. A neighbour of Craddock’s who observed my car driving down the road is asked, ‘When you say the car was driving slowly, do you mean very slowly?’

The neighbour is an elderly white woman who has dressed up for the occasion in a smart navy suit. Her hand trembles as she reads the oath, enough to make the card flutter. She glances at the dock as she enters and again as she leaves but during her evidence, she looks firmly ahead.

‘Er, I would say very slowly, yes, as if they were looking for something…’

Ms Bonnard is on her feet immediately. ‘My Lord, this witness is not here to speculate about the thoughts of the people inside the car in question.’

The judge inclines his head. ‘Mrs Morton, you will kindly keep your answers to the specifics about which you are asked.’

‘Oh yes, sir…’ trembles Mrs Morton.

‘So, very slowly then?’ repeats Mrs Price.

‘Yes, very slowly I would say.’

Even Ms Bonnard has no further questions for this witness and Robert, of course, has none.

When the judge tells Mrs Morton she is free to go, she looks crestfallen, as if she has failed an audition.

*

On the fourth day of our trial, the morning is taken up with legal arguments – it is a debate about the admissibility of hearsay and bad character evidence and has something to do with the witnesses that the prosecution wishes to call about you, your past life. Now that we are moving on to you, that will lead, inevitably, to me – and to what Craddock did. It is all about to get much harder.

The jury is not called until the afternoon, during which there is another event that plunges the court back to reality, sucks us down into the vortex of it, as events dotted throughout the trial will do every now and then, often when I least expect it. I am tired, at this point, although not as tired as I will be later. I’m not sleeping well in prison: no one sleeps well in prison unless they are given a pill that knocks them out cold. 

*

The public gallery is almost empty for once – the incident with your wife has yet to occur, there are no students that day, and Susannah hasn’t made it this afternoon. There are two people sitting at one end who I think might be distant relations of Craddock, and the two retired people who have come most days at the end of the gallery nearest the door.

The woman who discovered Craddock’s body is in the witness box. She was his landlady. She identifies herself as Mrs Asuntha Jayasuriya, the Managing Director of Petal Property Services. She owns seventeen rental properties in the area. It was only chance that the body was discovered so quickly – we might have had a week, ten days maybe, before someone at the University reported that he had not shown up for work and the police went round. We were unlucky. Craddock was in arrears with his rent. Mrs Jayasuriya’s staff had written to him several times but received no reply so she had decided to turn up unexpectedly on a Saturday afternoon. She wouldn’t normally do that, but Craddock had been a long-standing tenant who hadn’t been in arrears before so she wanted to know if there was a problem, and she was in the area anyway. She let herself into the building and walked up the stairs to the first-floor flat, hoping to surprise him, although it was she who was about to get the surprise. She had her nephew with her but instructed him to wait for her in the hall. There was no answer when she knocked on the door of Flat B but she could hear voices from the radio, which made her suspicious that Craddock was in but just not answering, so she knocked loudly, called out, ‘I’m coming in now, Mr Craddock!’ and let herself in with her key. Once inside, she didn’t even have time to call out his name again. The door opened straight into the sitting room and she saw the body immediately.

Mrs Jayasuriya must be a lady of some self-possession as well as a successful businesswoman because she did not scream or shout for her nephew to come. She stayed standing exactly where she was and dialled the emergency services from her mobile phone. She remains rigid in the witness box while the tape of the call is played to the court. There is no trace of hysteria or even shock in her voice.

‘Emergency services, which service do you require?’

‘Police, please, and an ambulance, but it’s too late I think. I think he’s dead.’

‘Who is dead please?’

‘A man. The man who rents my flat. I’m here at the flat and he’s lying on the floor. There’s blood here. He’s dead. The address is…’ Mrs Jayasuriya gives the address with full postcode.

‘Right, they are on their way and what is your name please?’

‘My name is Mrs Asuntha Jayasuriya. That’s J, A, Y…’ she spells her name slowly.

‘And how do you know he’s dead?’

‘It’s obvious.’

Then, on the tape, there is a small commotion as the nephew enters and can be heard calling, ‘Auntie! Auntie!’

Mrs Jayasuriya snaps back at him in a language I don’t recognise. It sounds as though she is telling him to stay back.

This would not necessarily be a shocking moment – Mrs Jayasuriya is measured and pragmatic – but there is still something about it that silences the court, deadens even the small foot shuffles or turning of papers that characterise much of the other evidence. It is the wormhole effect. We are there. We are listening, and picturing, and present, and George Craddock is lying on the floor in front of us, his feet toward us and his head just into the kitchenette, and there is blood, and the alarmed calling of the nephew in the background and then beyond that, the incongruously urbane tones of a presenter on BBC Radio 4.

*

The jury are not called on Friday. The legal arguments about hearsay evidence continue. You and I are there, in the dock, as usual, listening to it all. At one point, you lean forward in your seat and place your forearms flat on the small shelf in front of you, resting your chin on your arms and staring straight ahead. I cannot tell if you are bored or unusually intent.

I cannot imagine your experience of all this so far. The Category A holding area here is probably very similar to the one I am in but your prison experience will be very different, I suspect. And you have been there for so long now. Have you acclimatised? Are the privations of it routine? Are you frightened? You look so changed, so other, from how I remember you, from the brief glimpses I have been allowed, and it comes to me that the heady, early days of our affair now seem like things that happened in a film. I cannot believe we had sex in the Houses of Parliament. I can scarcely believe that we ever had sex at all. That acute feeling I felt, the giddiness of it, as if I had plunged my face into a bouquet of lilies, their scent so blissful it would make me feel faint – that was what it was like. Was it happiness? Was that all it was? Or was it a kind of addiction, to the story, to the drama of what we were doing? If it was a film, we were the stars.

*

I have no visitors over the weekend. Susannah offered to come but she was giving up enough time to attend the trial so I told her she mustn’t. I made up a story about needing to spend the weekend not thinking about the trial, but in fact I wanted her to have a break.

There was no break for me, nor would there be. In the queue to get breakfast, a large woman called Letitia bumps into me with her meaty upper arm and shoves her face in mine and says, ‘Rich bitch, how’s the trial going?’ Rich bitch is what they call me in here. Everyone is called something.

Letitia is not making a polite or friendly enquiry. I turn my head away, and Letitia, who has thin, grey-blonde hair and a nose that has been broken several times and the glint of genuine psychosis in her eyes, puts a fat forefinger beneath my plastic tray and neatly flips it up from the counter and over me. Hot tea sears through my T-shirt and baked beans splat against my trousers and the guard in the corner calls out wearily, ‘Letitia! Here
now
please!’

A very young, very pretty black girl in front of me hands me a thin paper napkin from the pile on the counter and says casually, ‘That fucking dyke’s out of order.’

During Association Hour, Letitia sits in the corner of the room and glares at me when while the television high up on the wall blares advertisements and the new drug addict on our wing stands facing the wall and slowly bangs her head against it. ‘Oi, Muppet!’ shouts Letitia at the drug addict. ‘You’ll give yourself a fucking headache!’ Then she returns to glaring at me. I ignore her. I’m annoyed she’s still been allowed Association after this morning’s episode. Her aggression doesn’t frighten me, though – after a week of processes, it comes as a relief.

*

On Monday, the prosecution starts on you – on us.

The first witness is a police officer. Her name is Detective Sergeant Amelia Johns. She is a trim woman with short red hair, pale skin and a small, almost featureless face. After taking the oath, she adjusts her police tunic and smooths her skirt before sitting in the drop-down seat.

Mrs Price is already on her feet. ‘Thank you, officer,’ she says. ‘You are a Detective Sergeant in the Metropolitan Police; can I just establish how long you’ve been a police officer for?’

‘I’ve been a police officer for seventeen years,’ DS Johns replies, looking at the jury.

‘And you were initially based in the borough of Waltham Forest, is that right?’

‘Yes, that is correct.’

‘But you moved to the borough of Westminster, is that true?’

‘Yes, that’s correct, seven years ago. I was seconded to the security team for the Estate of the Palace of Westminster and its immediate environs.’

‘And would you just explain to your jury how that security team works, it’s a slightly unusual situation, isn’t it?’

DS Johns gives a slight smile and says, ‘Well, yes, it surprises some people the way it works. Security at the Houses of Parliament isn’t actually run by the Metropolitan Police, it’s run by the Estate staff. The Metropolitan police officers there all fall under the control of the Estate.’

‘So if I understand correctly, officers who work there are actually more like private security guards?’

DS Johns gives her smile again. ‘Yes that’s one way of putting it.’