People in Season (22 page)

The judge didn’t have to worry about his own court dress. It was decided long before he was born. Black robes and a dusty grey wig, the uniform had been kept for centuries to demonstrate that this was not a man deciding the fates of those who stood in his chambers, rather, by some method of transubstantiation, he was the law incarnate, a concept literally taking human form. Evidently prepared for the nation’s watchful eye, he had a speech prepared to open the proceedings. He took to the bench like a man trained in classical acting.

‘It’s a hefty matter we’ll be dealing with over the course of these weeks, one which, though it exhausts our optimism, and thins our hair, we are lucky enough to understand as an assault on the fabric which we define ourselves by. What we’re here for today is to decide if this woman is responsible for a despicable deed, the taking of Francis Mullen’s life. This burden, necessary as it is for us to function as a whole, will fall to the representatives of the citizens of our state: the jury assembled to my right. It is these people I address now.

‘There are conventional transgressions and moral ones. If an onlooker from the press should happen to interrupt me as I speak, try as I might, I would not be able to lock them away for it. There is the argument that there are no absolutes in morals. In this way, what is wrong in one culture may be acceptable in another. In our reform of the law, in our acceptance of the UPD act, we defined a moral transgression for ourselves as one which engages our sense of empathy, a quality which may come naturally to us but which the boundaries of are learned. This is important, because no matter the country they are raised in, no matter the continent, the UPD have shown extreme difficulty in understanding the local differences between moral and conventional transgressions. How do we react to this? In order to be considered an agent responsible for one’s actions, one must have a full understanding of their own choices that led to what they did and the implications of those choices. The UPD are aware of all these things, but do not comprehend the abstract results because they are incapable of giving the thought the weight required to do so. In our system, unequal treatment is justified when it allows for good or bad fortune. Some people are born lucky – beautiful and talented – others unlucky – disabled and sick. This is neither just nor unjust. They are merely facts of the world. The law is not as cold and detached as that. As a sentient species we come together as institutions to deal with these matters, compensating for the injustices that we perceive. We are a people who interpret each other’s movements as demonstrations of intention and choice. The social contract we enter into is a concept that allows for acceptance of responsibility and possibility of guilt. One must see oneself as a cause of events in the world whose actions should be analysed and judged.

‘Keeping that in mind, when we go through the process of deciding whether or not Joanne Victoria committed the killing of Francis Mullen, we are not asking if she is guilty. Having been processed, we know she is incapable of experiencing this gift. Since the untouched personality is beyond cure or reform all we can do is isolate those who suffer from it. Ms. Victoria has already been removed from the work environment she might have polluted. The process we have at hand now is to decide if she also committed the most heinous of moral transgressions: Murder, a crime which would have her removed from our culture altogether.’

The trial was not broadcast. A single sketch artist was permitted to create pieces for news outlets and historical posterity. Her eyes in all the drawings were black. When Ava received them, she ordered that they be altered to the deep wavering emerald green that they remembered in Joanne so well, infringement laws be damned. Joanne was not allowed contact with her former colleagues, though Ava was sat behind her every day of the trial. She had waved hello and snuck sympathetic words to her any chance she got, her hand even reaching out to Joanne’s shoulder on occasion to buoy her spirit during some of the more difficult stages, though she was always ignored by her former boss. Joanne had retreated inside herself and she wasn’t coming out. In the drawings that were made, Ava’s features were rarely visible. All that could be identified of her was a dark shadow behind the woman who had become so knotted in those strings that attached them all.

Dylan talked to Joanne that first night in her cell after the scan in ChatterFive. Her arms were folded around herself as if she were cold, though the chamber was dry with acrid heat from an electric radiator on the wall. Despite this, she was much more composed than she’d been when they’d taken her out of the newsroom in handcuffs. She met the detective’s greeting with a steady glare.

‘You’re not smoking,’ he said

‘I didn’t know I was allowed.’

Dylan said that she was welcome to and waited for her to light up, but instead, she’d wrung her fingers.

‘There’s something very wrong,’ she informed him.

Did he agree with her at the time? He can’t remember now. Everything is muddied as he looks back. ‘Joanne,’ he asked tentatively, ‘what were you doing at Agent Mullen’s home on the night of the 22nd?’

‘I was there was I?’ Her eyes lit up and then sank, like a fish jumping out of water and falling back in with a splash. ‘I suppose you’ll have to talk to my solicitor about that. He might have a different idea than you.’

The line between them was drawn.

There was no direct evidence linking Joanne to the crime. The witness report of the landlord, who confirmed under oath that she arrived at the social agent’s apartment drunk and upset some days previous to the murder, was the strongest weapon the prosecution had in its arsenal. But what of the poison accounted for in SimperP’s records and used in the medical trials of Doctor Alistair Evans? Dylan was adamant that the corporation and its lethal drug needed to be linked to Joanne for any kind of prosecution to hold water, at least, for any man with good conscience. His chief had raged at the idea. Not only was his lead detective on the case making more work than needed, but he was trying to drag a megacorporation that had just set up in the country months ago into the most controversial court case of the past decade. Not only would it cost the state more effort and money than they cared to spend on a single dead man to bring SimperP to trial, the current government had worked for years courting the pharmaceutical business into the country, basing any number of campaign promises on the potential for jobs and revenue they would generate, and here was Dylan the scruffy Garda trying to scare them away. It would be career suicide for all involved. No, his chief informed him. The drug used on Mullen would only be mentioned if the defence brought it up. They had a suspect, now it was time to prosecute her as efficiently as possible.

‘If that’s all that’s important then our job is a farce,’ said Dylan.

Give them a pass just so they could provide employment? It was blood money. He insisted that he would not take the stand as lead officer on the case if a link between Joanne and SimperP could not be established.

As it happened, his stance had little effect. Shortly after the confrontation with the chief, their department received another case file from SimperP. Sometime after Dylan’s visit to Doctor Evans’ office, the corporation had become concerned with possible breaches in security and began its own internal investigation. On doing so, it turned out a young woman within the building had been smuggling out small amounts of the drug in question, probably to sell on for her own profit. She had been caught on video pocketing a bottle of pills which had left the doctor’s sight. She had been fired and some weeks later, in an expedited rate for the local justice system, prosecuted, now serving time on bail. Watching the video, Dylan was shocked to see that he recognised her. It was the medical clerk, the doctor’s secretary. Immediately, he proclaimed that she was a patsy, only stealing medication at the instigation of her superior and set up in advance to take any legal ramifications that he might run into. The detective cut himself off, aware that his boss was ready to hand him a tinfoil hat. Ignoring the theory, the chief was quick to explain to Dylan that they could spend their time trying to establish a link between Joanne and the black marketer, but that it could easily be a waste of effort – who knew how many hands those pills passed through before getting to the editor, and all that besides, it still wouldn’t be worth the hassle of bringing the corporation into the matter. Not being able to stomach the politics of it all, Dylan walked away from the chief, stubborn in his refusal to agree with the reasons. He was not asked to testify at the trial, neither by the defence or the prosecution. The chief, dismayed at his officer’s naiveté, found a loophole to prevent it. As the body of his department had pressed the original charge when Joanne arrived at the station, the testimony of the officer on scene was not needed. The chief, that career driven type, had worked it out so that he would be on hand to illustrate some of the more technical details of the investigation and was all too happy to take the stand and explain the conditions that led to Joanne being arrested and charges being pressed. It wasn’t very complicated. Between him and the prosecution, she was portrayed as a vicious drunk who’d interfered with processing from the first day. She kept alcohol in her office, was addicted to painkillers, and as a final insult to Dylan, it was hinted that she had arranged for a fire drill during the social agent’s initial presentation. Though the defence objected to the supposition, the idea had been planted into the jury’s collective consciousness. If Dylan had been up there, he would have only been too happy to express his opinion of this happening, and yet he remained silent, mortified that by telling the truth he would only have cast suspicion on one of the few people who was going to take the stand to defend Joanne: Ava O’Dwyer.

But really, what could ChatterFive’s stand-in editor say to save the old one? She denied Joanne was an alcoholic but didn’t rule out the fact that she did enjoy a few more drinks than others she knew. She couldn’t deny that she’d been witnessed on numerous occasions as the head of a supply line of painkillers for Joanne. When asked if she had ever thought Joanne Victoria could be UPD, Ava insisted that no, she was a wonderful woman, an amazing mentor who had given her tremendous opportunities in life, and then, fluttering her eyes shut, her voice cracked. She broke into tears on the stand. She never saw it coming, she said. Though she couldn’t deny the facts. She was UPD, the scan had twice proven it. ‘How could I not have known?’

Some defence, Dylan had thought. Others forgave her for it. It was an emotionally charged time. In the end, it came down to the opinion of the jury as to whether she committed the crime.

When Dylan Wong joined the Garda Siochana all those years ago, he had been assigned to the riot squad, a force in demand, to be on call at the drop of a hat, sent into the city to douse the flames of a people full to bursting with suppressed thoughts. The triggers identified: misworded news items, viral fictions let loose on social networks, policy changes regarding the dole, UPD manipulation, or any standard smug smile from a disgraced politician, were incidental so far as he could tell. Being called out was like jumping through a portal into another world where all rationality disappeared in a riot as disgruntled office workers readied to hurl bricks alongside youths who were only too happy to mug them after. In these brief flashes, they joined as one and destroyed all that was in their path. The contributing factors were so many and so intertwined that finding a single rationale for it was an exercise in futility. In an ouroboros of events the tail end of one incident was the beginning of the next. If there was a flare point to subdue it was long before anything illegal had happened. The role of the police, he suspected, was simply to brush the evidence of a faulty system under the rug. Dylan joined the force to make a difference, and in that squad, no single officer seemed capable of doing as much. Transferring out, he worked up to his posting today, where he could at least put a face to the irrationality in the shape of his murder suspects – one person at a time, categorising reason and choice, cause and effect. But here, all these years later, the crowd were back to haunt him.

Try as the system might, the jury was not immune to the public mood, which had come to its conclusions long before they were chosen and isolated. She was the murderer they needed. The UPD reforms had been created to protect the people. A social agent of them was dead. Who else would kill him but the untouched?

And so it was.

It had been decided before the trial, before the murder, before the law. And her sentence too was written in stone. With blindfolds on, the firing squad took aim and let their ammo loose on the wide-eyed condemned.

‘I’m sure that you don’t understand why this has happened to you,’ the judge proclaimed. ‘That you have no shame whatsoever in the committing of this crime. All I can say to that is, we would be the guilty party if we did nothing to balance the matter. The jury has done their duty today, they’ve decided it. The wolf must not be allowed walk among the sheep.’

When Joanne received the verdict, she edged around to Ava, who had her hands outreached to the editor, ready to catch her as she fell crying into her arms. Seeing Ava tear up in sympathy, Joanne took her only chance to strike, and slapped the skinny bitch’s face with what remaining strength she had leftover from the long ordeal. The sound echoed through the courtroom and not long after, followed by the gasps of onlookers, was heard around the country – That’s the UPD for you, lashing out at the only woman who came to her defence.

After this, in her stoic support of Joanne, Ava was close to sainthood. Regarding the slap received, she was silent, apparently taking it to heart and still reluctant to betray the person she once thought was Joanne. On the matter, she remained composed, astutely picking up from where the judge had left off. She said in an editorial that, ‘If as a people we’re defined by our ability to place value where none exists, then the woman I thought Joanne Victoria to be, was, and always will be, real. The person who murdered Francis Mullen is someone else entirely.’