Apple Tree Yard (39 page)

‘Well…’ falters Dr Sadiq.

After that, it’s a blood sport. Mrs Price lists – one after the other – the manuals, the papers, the works by authors with impressive CVs. My heart is in my boots. I know all about citations. I know how the whole point of presenting a new theory is to anticipate the counter-citations from those who will disagree with you and to have, up your sleeve, a list of counter-counter-citations. I could have told them that. They should have me up there. This woman is a nice young woman, intelligent, competent, with a perfectly decent theory – but she is entirely lacking the aggression that will allow her to present her theory as fact. The objectionable Dr Sanderson is wiping the floor with her without even being in the room, just by the force of his certainty.

*

It is not quite lunchtime by the time Dr Sadiq is allowed off the stand. If the judge had insisted at that point, as he had every right to do, that Ms Bonnard continue with her case, then perhaps none of what followed would have happened. There would have been no time. Ms Bonnard would have announced there and then that you were not taking the stand – the judge would have issued the statutory warning that the Crown would be allowed to draw a negative inference from your refusal to do so – it is even possible that Robert would have opened his case there and then and that he would have called his only witness – me – immediately.

As it is, the judge looks at the clock hanging beneath the public gallery, in that obvious way that he often does. He smiles at Ms Bonnard, perhaps even feeling a little sorry for her, and says, ‘I think now might be a suitable juncture to adjourn.’

Ms Bonnard is only too happy to agree. After we have all risen and the judge has left, I watch her carefully from behind. She sinks back down into her chair and leans forward a little. I can’t see the expression on her face but I think – she must know she’s losing.

And then, from the corner of my eye, I see you leaning forward, lifting a hand, and giving a sharp tap,
tap-tap
, on the bullet-proof glass. Heads in the courtroom turn and I look at you too and it comes to me in a wave that you have been so still, so silent so far, that I have almost forgotten you are in the dock with me. The truth is, the man sitting a few feet away from me, the man who never moves or gives anything away by gesture or expression, he has seemed so unlike you throughout this whole process that I have almost entirely detached your fate from mine. Mark Costley, the thin figure in the dock, is so unlike X, the lover who pressed his open mouth against mine.

Ms Bonnard lifts her head and turns, gives you a weary smile.

The dock officer sitting next to me rises and touches my elbow and without looking at you again, I turn to leave the dock and return to my cell.

*

Ms Bonnard seems to have recovered when she returns from lunch, which is odd, because things are looking bad for her and she has nowhere else to go. ‘My Lord,’ she says, when we are all in position again and she is on her feet. ‘I will be offering no further witnesses.’

*

As Robert gets to his feet, he looks over at Ms Bonnard and I see him give her one straight, slightly questioning look, but she has her head down over her papers and does not return his gaze.

The judge smiles at Robert, as if he is relieved to at last have a fellow chap in front of him. Robert gives a slight bow and says, ‘My Lord, we are planning to call only one witness in our case, Yvonne Carmichael.’

I rise.

*

As I stand, so do my dock officers and we file past you and your dock officers – there is plenty of room in front of the seat but, even so, I would only have to move a little to one side to brush your knees as I pass. You stay immobile, staring straight ahead. The dock officer in front of me descends the three short steps to where there is a door in the side of the dock that allows us all out into the courtroom. As I cross the courtroom to the witness box, walking past the ends of the rows of desks where the police officers, lawyers and barristers are seated, I know that everyone is watching me but none more closely than the jury. I glance over at them at one point. I keep my head high.
You know what
, I think, and I wonder if it shows in my glance:
I’ve had enough
. I’ve had enough of being told what to do and how to look and how to sound. I am innocent. I didn’t kill anyone. And I have nothing to fear from these wooden procedures or the cops or the paperwork or Letitia in the breakfast queue or any of them. I’ve had enough of being afraid. I’m not even frightened of the jury. Maybe they should be frightened of me.

The members of the jury are riveted. They are watching me with the same sort of star-struck horror they might feel if they had been visiting a zoo and a jaguar had casually stepped through the bars of its cage and strolled among them. I’m so glad that I’m finally getting a chance to get out of the dock. Guess what, defendants in murder trials are human too. I read the oath loudly and firmly, hand the card back to the usher, and then look up and around the court, as if surveying it for the first time.

The witness box is a very different vantage point than the dock. You are raised up so that everyone can see you but with the pleasing side effect that you can look down on them. I know this room so well by now: the quality of the light, the hum of the air conditioning – I feel no fear. I sit on the drop-down seat behind me and as Robert stands, he gives me a fond look, half a smile at one corner of his mouth, a friendly twinkle in his eyes. The doubts I have had about the way he is conducting my defence melt away. I can rely on him.

‘Is your name Yvonne Carmichael?’ he asks me.

Instinctively, I copy the professional witnesses, the police officers and pathologists – I am not one of the others, the accidental witnesses, I am a professional too. I look directly at the jury. ‘Yes, that is correct.’

‘Mrs Carmichael, can you tell us what you do for a living?’

‘I’m a geneticist.’ 

22

Robert doesn’t spend too much time with my career, merely establishing where I work, how long I have been doing it. He touches briefly on my lengthy and stable marriage, my two grown-up children, the fact that my husband, like myself, is a respected scientist. I don’t like talking about Guy and Adam and Carrie – I can hear my voice dropping a register – but I know Robert has to do it in order to create the picture of me as Mrs Utterly Normal. It’s easy enough for him to do. I am. After a while, we get to the bit of my job that people are most readily impressed by, although it was actually one of the least taxing things I have ever done: my giving evidence at the House of Commons Select Committees. Again, Robert does not need to spend long on this, merely enough to establish my credibility and by the time he has finished, I believe myself incapable of the things I know I have done, let alone the thing I am accused of that I didn’t do.

‘And it was on the last of these occasions, that you met the man in the dock, Mr Mark Costley?’

‘Yes, that is correct.’

Robert stands up a little straighter, folds his arms, says casually. ‘Can you tell me your impressions of him?’

‘Yes,’ I say, ‘I liked him. We got talking in a corridor. He clearly knew his way around the Houses of Parliament, he gave me a guided tour, the Great Hall of Westminster.’ A tiny pause. ‘The Crypt Chapel. He knew a lot about the history and the way things were run. He seemed very competent.’

I look across the courtroom and get what I have been waiting for since our trial begun: you are looking at me. Your gaze is soft. I dare not look at you for more than a second. As my gaze shifts, I catch sight of the expression on DI Cleveland’s face – he is sitting two rows behind the prosecution bench, directly in line with where you are seated. DI Cleveland is looking at me too and his gaze is not soft. He is thinking,
You fucked him and I know it, I just couldn’t prove it
.

‘You became friends?’ Robert asks.

‘Yes, we met for coffee a few times.’

‘Just friends,’ Robert states, and I nod. Without waiting for a fuller answer, he goes on, ‘I believe Mr Costley wanted your advice.’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘His nephew was considering a career in science. We talked about it.’

Robert pauses at that point, a telltale pause, slow and deliberate, one that everyone in the court registers. ‘Mrs Carmichael, we now have to discuss the events that have led, indirectly, to you being here, in a position it is safe to say you would never have imagined yourself to ever be in.’ He pauses again. He leans forward and says, ‘Would you like me to request that the public gallery is cleared?’

Robert has warned me that he will ask this question and has told me to say yes, but the strange thing is, even though I am entirely prepared, my cheeks feel hot with the humiliation to come and the quietness in my voice is perfectly genuine as I say, ‘Yes, yes please, if that is possible.’

*

It is Robert’s gentleness, that is what makes me cry. It is when he prods me, in his modulated tones, with all the questions that the jury might themselves ask. ‘Some people’, he says gently, ‘will find it hard to understand that you couldn’t even tell your own husband about this horrible, vicious attack…’

My eyes well with tears – I can feel my face tense and wobble with the effort of staying composed. Still, I am able to look at the jury at this point and want them to understand, not just for myself. ‘I know that anyone this hasn’t happened to would have difficulty with that, and before this happened to me, I would have thought that way too. But actually, your husband is the last person you want to tell. If I had told my husband it would have been in my home. I would have brought it into my home. And in two years’ time, we might have been sitting at our kitchen table talking about how he felt about the fact that I had been attacked but it didn’t happen to him, it happened to
me…
’ And suddenly, I crack, and sob, and realise how angry I am. What the hell was Guy doing in Newcastle? Why wasn’t he at that party? Come to think of it, why weren’t you? All the people who claim they love me, my family, all my friends, where the hell were they that night?

When I look up, one of the jury, the Chinese woman, has tears running down her face too.

*

It takes some time for my hot, angry tears to stop. Robert pauses between questions but gradually, it becomes apparent to everyone, and to me, that I am unravelled. Even the lightest of questions – what did I do the weekend after the assault? – provokes a fresh flood of tears from me, and although I am surprised and humiliated by my inability to control myself, part of me feels a great wash of relief; to talk about it at last, to tell the truth, to acknowledge my fury and hurt – I step outside myself and observe myself doing this, being honest. How can anyone doubt me now?

Robert looks at the clock, glances at the judge, and asks me one last question. ‘Mrs Carmichael, when you went to Mr Costley and asked his advice, did you have any thought in your head of vengeance against Mr Craddock for what he had done?’

I shake my head, sob, clutch the tissue in my fingers like a child, wipe beneath my eyes, look at Robert, shake my head again, sob again.

‘Just to be clear,’ Robert says softly. ‘Did you wish George Craddock physical harm, did you urge or exhort Mr Mark Costley to kill George Craddock?’

I can only shake my head while I sob.

Robert looks down for a moment, waits for a while, then turns to the judge and says, ‘My Lord…’

‘Yes…’ says the judge. I look at him and he has a slightly disdainful expression. I guess him to be the kind of man who cannot cope when a woman cries in front of him, who feels filled with helplessness and irritation, like Henry Higgins in
My Fair Lady
. Why can’t a woman be more like a man?

‘May I suggest, in view of the hour and in view of the very obvious distress of my witness…’

‘Yes, I think so,’ the judge readily agrees. He looks around the court. We will adjourn until tomorrow morning. Jury, may we have you here at 10 a.m. sharp?’

The jury gather their bags. None of them look at me as they descend from the box and walk swiftly across the court. It seems odd that I have to sit here, watching them go. I can’t help thinking that they will be sleeping on the image of me, wounded and human, sobbing with sincerity in the witness box.

When they have gone, Robert steps out from behind his row of tables, lifting his hand to the dock officer who is waiting to escort me back to the dock. He comes over and places his hands together, knitting the fingers, lifting the fist he has made and giving a small shake of congratulations.

‘Well done,’ he says softly, seriously. ‘You did really well.’

I reply with a small smile and it is only then that it comes to me how completely drained I am, and a wave of missing Guy and my children and my home comes over me. I have managed to keep that at bay so well up until now, not to think of them, so other and extraordinary has this experience been, but it comes to me now, crashing over me in slow motion – if I don’t get to walk out of this court soon, go back to my normal life, then I will die.

*

That night, for the first time since my incarceration, I sleep well on my thin mattress in my cell in Holloway Prison.

*

The next day, I am escorted again into the witness box, dry-eyed and collected now, wearing a crisp white shirt, hoping that the worst of my examination is over and braced for the cross-examination by the prosecution – but I can’t imagine a plausible line of attack for them. They can’t try and blacken me by expressing doubt about the assault as they want Craddock to be a monster. They can ask about my relationship with you, I suppose, but they have no evidence either way. What can they do?

Robert is brisk in the remainder of his questions – he knows the jury has had a whole night to dwell on that image of me from yesterday, distressed and weeping. He knows they will probably be relieved to see me calm this morning, willing me to remain so. They are on my side. He does not return to the assault or its aftermath, choosing instead to concentrate on the events of that Saturday afternoon, how I picked you up at the Tube, drove you to the street, our conversation before and afterwards – how you refused to tell me what had happened. He finishes with the question, ‘Mrs Carmichael, did you, at any stage of this event, either before or during that drive to George Craddock’s house, urge Mr Mark Costley to kill or harm the man who had assaulted you?’