Apple Tree Yard (42 page)

Did he taunt you, my love? Did he tell you that he had enjoyed it, what he did, and that I had too? It’s hard to imagine Craddock being that defiant to your face. Perhaps he was fooled by your average build and casual dress. Perhaps he had no apprehension of danger. Or perhaps, you attacked him to frighten him, and would have done so whatever he had said to you.

But he fell, didn’t he? He fell to the floor. And at some point, something happened, some rage took over. Whether he taunted you, or whether you were merely caught up in the adrenaline of what you were doing, at some point, you did indeed lose control. He fell, or you knocked him over. He struck the back of his head on the edge of the counter-top in the kitchenette. And once he was on the floor, you did not stop. You stamped on him. You beat and kicked him to death. It is possible it took only seconds.

At some point, you stopped. At some point, you bent down, to see what you had done.

I wonder what happened then, my love. I wonder what happened in your head as that man breathed his last, the fine spray of expirated blood dusting your cheek as you bent over him – despite the time you had to dispose of the clothes and clean yourself, his DNA was still discovered on your arrest. DNA gets everywhere. At some point, you must have stood up, looked down at him as he lay on the floor and I imagine there might well have been a moment when your mind sheared in two, as surely as the nerve cells in your victim’s brain were sheared, when part of you was still living in your own narrative, the one you created and controlled, and the other part of your brain was trying to absorb the hard reality of what you had just done. For here is the thing about death and you must have realised it then – its irreversibility. Here, at last, was the fantasy that could not be put back in a box when the rest of your life, real life, intruded. Here was a permanent disassociation, the disassociation of George Craddock from life itself. At some point in the moments that followed, you would have had to compute that you were no longer living in a drama of your own making. You had lost control of the drama. It had happened and you could not make it un-happen when you returned to your wife and children in the suburbs. You had killed someone.

I can only imagine what happened then, and I imagine you walking away from the body for a few steps, thinking it through, pushing both hands, bloodied hands, into the hair either side of your temple, that wiry brown hair with its touch of grey, then turning back and seeing yes, the body was still there. It really had happened. The paradox of a corpse: life is gone, fled, but what remains is immutably present, and the fleeing of the life within is what means that the body itself can never flee. All those horror stories where corpses get up and walk again or haunt their killers, they were right on the nose. When you want the corpse to go away, what you are really wanting is to reverse your act. If you could breathe life into your victim once more, then he or she would be able to rise, turn their back, depart. I envisage you walking in small circles around that flat, steadying your breathing, unable to steady your mind.

But there must have come a point – and my dear, I wonder how long it took – when the two sheared halves of your brain rejoined to face the new reality. You were once a cop, after all, so you are a man who has had professional training in how to think on his feet. I wonder if you did it consciously or subconsciously – I’m not sure it matters. Either way, perhaps after some minutes of walking in slow circles, you must have chosen your route out of there, out of the circles. Your preparations for all eventualities, the clothing, the shoes, all that meant that you could not call 999 and report an accidental death. You were experienced enough, calm and rational enough, to know that. If it had not been for the preparations you so carefully made for a fantasy murder, you might have stood a much better chance of getting away with the real one. You could have told them what really happened, confessed to a fight in which a man had been accidentally killed, be distraught about the whole thing. Anyone with any sense knows that, long term, that would be the best way to avoid a murder charge. But everything you had done up until then to feed your fantasies was exactly what made reality look suspicious. So you gambled, with your freedom, and mine. You were not thinking of me sitting outside in the car – you were not thinking of me at all. You were thinking that if you called an ambulance now, that would be it – but if you took the high-risk strategy of fleeing, there was a chance, a very slender one, but a chance – if the body was not discovered for a while, if the CCTV cameras between that flat and the station were not working, as they often aren’t…

At some point, maybe there was some satisfaction in your head. It had finally happened. Your paranoid fantasies had come true. You were not just a man bored with his job who had invented a more exciting narrative – the narrative was a reality now. You had made it so. I imagine you would have swung into action quite efficiently. You would have addressed the issue of forensic evidence, retracing your steps from the moment you entered the flat, wiped any surfaces that needed wiping with a cloth you found in the kitchen, the one that smeared George Craddock’s dilute blood in a circle on the floor. You would have checked carefully that nothing was left behind. You would have gone to the hallway mirror and wiped any traces of blood from your face or hair. Only when these tasks were performed would you have stood behind the entrance door to the flat and taken the spare trousers out of your Nike hold-all and put them on, changed your trainers. At this point, I imagine you to be in the grip of something close to euphoria.

The sight of me, sitting in the car, patiently waiting for you, was that not enough? Was that not enough for the sobering reality of what you had done, what you were risking on my behalf as well as your own but without my permission – was there no point at which you looked at my face, as you approached the car and felt some small twinge of compunction? You forgot me, by which I mean, you forgot me as a real person, with her own needs and desires, her own narrative. By then, I was no more than a bit part in your story.
Drive
.

*

Courtroom Number Eight, Central Criminal Court, Old Bailey, EC1, so clean and modern and efficient – but even in this sterile, wooden room, with the square fluorescent lights in the ceiling and the blanket of weariness cast over its habitués, even here, there is an unmistakable frisson as the jury returns to the room. I know, just as you know, how much is at stake for you and me, but it is only as we are all bid to rise that I am reminded by looking around at everyone else in the courtroom just how much is at stake for them too. Each victory or defeat counts for or against a counsel. Ms Bonnard is compulsively clearing her throat. The judge has made his feelings known in the summing up, so his reputation within the business is at stake too – this is the only time in the whole trial, after all, that he is not the undisputed autocrat. The police officers know what result they want, of course, and DI Cleveland is adjusting his tie, flipping it beneath his jacket and shrugging his shoulders in a small movement, as if making himself neat will produce the right result. Even the jury who are now entering from the same door as the judge – they have been held in a special room while they deliberate – even the all-powerful jury don’t get to leave this court unscathed. In a few moments, at their say-so, a man and a woman will either walk free from the Old Bailey, to return to their families, their homes, their ordinary lives – or they will be taken away, to the underworld, another world, for many years to come. The members of the jury will have to live with that decision for the rest of their lives.

As I rise, I glance up at the public gallery, and it is only then that I see, sitting next to Susannah – my husband, Guy. He is staring at me, waiting for me to look up and see him. He is dressed in a pale blue shirt and a blazer, his thick straight hair clean and his face broad and open, looking at me as if drinking in the sight of me, trying to work out everything about how I am. It is too much. My knees begin to shake; my life, my real life, up there, a few feet away – I know he wants to support me but it is a torment. I try a smile, and he tries one back, but even he cannot prevent the fear from showing in his face. Susannah gives me a hopeful grin and Guy lifts a hand in a tiny wave of acknowledgement, a little apologetically I think, because he must know that his unexpected appearance will be making my head reel. ‘Sorry,’ he mouths. Later, he will tell me that he kept his promise to stay away from the trial, but he had made no such promise about staying away for the verdict. He came back from Morocco after a weekend with Carrie and Sath and Adam. He has been at our home the whole time. Susannah has been calling him with daily updates. He knows everything, as he stands there in the gallery and I stand in the dock, and we look at each other for a moment or two before we turn our heads to watch the jury file in.

I am standing. Miraculously, I am on my feet. It is miraculous because I cannot breathe. My chest is like a sack of rocks pressing against the rest of my body and I even have time to consider, briefly, if this might be what having a heart attack is like. I know it isn’t, though. The onset of a heart attack is often accompanied – I was once told by a friend in cardiology – by an overwhelming sense of doom, a black descent into a world that feels unfamiliar but inevitable. My breathlessness isn’t producing that result, on the contrary, it is sending me soaring – I am as light as air, for it has suddenly come to me: it is nearly over, thank God thank God… I am already imagining stumbling from the dock, walking through the court and out into the corridor. I am imagining running down the stairs to the exit, Susannah – and now Guy, yes, Guy – waiting for me in the street outside. I permit myself the images I have been avoiding for the whole of my trial: my kitchen, the shabby leather armchair by the double doors that lead out into the garden, where I often sit with a coffee – at this time of year it will be bathed in sun; Guy upstairs working, distracted and absent, my son sitting on the back step smoking on one of his rare visits home; my daughter cooking with her boyfriend in the kitchen – they like to cook for us when they visit. These are the separate but interlinked pictures that appear in my head, snapshots of my previous life, my domestic life, it is all so near to me now. When will the kids be back from Morocco? This weekend, they said, come what may.

But first, the verdict.

*

Relationships are about stories, not truth. Alone, as individuals, we each have our own personal mythologies, the stories we tell in order to make sense of ourselves to ourselves. That generally works fine as long as we stay sane and single but the minute you enter an intimate relationship with another person there is an automatic dissonance between your story about yourself, and their story about you.

I remember this from the trial. I remember how, when the matronly Mrs Price rose to her feet to give her opening statement, she was so calm, so well prepared. She had her story, complete. She did not need even to clear her throat. She glanced at her feet briefly before she began, to indicate, I guessed, her humility before the truth she was about to outline for the court. It wasn’t
her
story, her downward glance seemed to say, oh no, it was what
really happened
. Whatever my feelings towards that woman and the processes she represented, I had sufficient detachment to observe and admire this: she had a hypothesis, just as I have hypotheses. Hers was tested by assertion, by trickery if you like, by the misplacement of evidence from context to create that smoke and mirrors effect, so I’m not sure that the scientific analogy really holds water, but it did make me think this much: as a scientist, I have told more stories than I ever realised, or admitted to. You, Mark Costley, were a fantasist, a person who could only manage his normal life as long as it was propped up by a series of self-flattering tales in which you were a spy or master seducer or avenging hero and who knows what else. Your stories had become so necessary they had claimed you, detached you from any sense of objective reality. And the end of all our stories was this: you and I went to prison. 

24

The day after my mother died, I followed my father from room to room. I did not approach him, or try to touch him. I was not seeking physical comfort, merely his presence. My mother had discharged herself from the Community Residential Adult Mental Health Unit in Redhill – she had been doing well in the weeks running up to her death, but later there was an enquiry about why she had been allowed to leave when she was known to be at risk. She had walked until she found the railway line – the same line my father used to commute to work in London and the same line I myself would use in years to come. She found a place where the line was accessible by easing through a wire fence – she must have ducked her head to get between the wires – and a scramble down a steep bank. A witness saw her descend the bank by sitting on her backside with her knees raised and her feet flat against the soil, placing her hands either side of her body, letting herself down the bank slowly, as if she was afraid of falling. The driver of the train said at the inquest that although she was standing in the middle of the tracks, between the rails, she was facing away from the oncoming train, and he wondered if she did that because she didn’t want her face to haunt him. I wasn’t allowed to attend the inquest but I heard my father and aunt talking about it later, what the driver said, and how warm it had been in the coroner’s court, when it was so cold outside.

My memories of my mother are still sharp, although there are only a few of them. I remember sitting at the kitchen table with her, doing cat’s cradle – I must have been four or five at the time. We were doing it with rough green wool. She was holding her fingers up for me to weave the wool and I was singing some vague chant I had learned at school. We weren’t very good at it, not as good as I was with my friends anyway – it was more a holey cobweb than a cradle. Her legs were bare, tucked neatly under the chair in which she was sitting. Her ankles were chunks of bone above her slippers.