The Witness Suite

He had walked it on Friday, alone, at the same time of the morning, with a stopwatch on his phone and a plan of the building folded in his inside pocket, and he walked it again now in his head as Rashid brought the car down the lane behind the Crown Court at twenty to nine.

The side entrance. A steel door between the bins and a ramp, with a camera over it and a bell. A security officer called Maxine who had been told they were coming and would not look at Esther, because she had been told that too. A lift that smelled of floor polish. The second floor. Then a corridor, the only stretch of the route that was public: twenty-two yards of blue carpet from the lift doors to the door of the witness suite, past the doors of Court Two and Court Three and the gents between them. Twenty-two yards took nineteen seconds at a walk. He had walked it four times on Friday to be sure.

Tyrer would come up from the cells, under the building, straight into the dock. He would never be in a corridor. Colley and the nephew were on bail and came in by the front with their solicitors, through the security arch, like anybody; the front doors opened at half past nine; Colley, according to the officer who had sat through his bail hearings, never arrived before ten to ten. So they came at twenty to nine, and the corridor would be empty, and she would be in the suite with the door shut before anybody who wished her harm was in the building.

That was the plan. He had written it on the back of an envelope first.

“All right?” he said, without turning round.

“Yes,” said Esther, behind him.

She had not said anything else since the bakery. She had come down the outside stair at quarter past seven in a dark suit he had never seen, with her hair up and the forty-second notebook in her bag, and she had looked at the yard and the gate and the car the way she had looked at the dam at the reservoir, as though she might not see them again and wanted them filed.

· · ·Scene break

Maxine opened the steel door before he rang. The lift came. The second floor.

He went out of the lift first, and looked left and right, and the corridor was empty, twenty-two yards of blue carpet and strip light and the smell of a building that has just had its heating come on. He nodded. Esther came out beside him, a half-step behind, on his right, the wall side. They walked.

Eight yards. Court Two, its doors shut. Twelve.

The door of the gents opened and Gavin Colley came out of it, drying his hands on a paper towel.

Aled knew him from the photographs. Fifty-one, heavy in the shoulders, a good grey suit and a tie with a small pattern, the face of a man who had spent thirty years being the sensible one in meetings. His solicitor came out behind him, still talking. They were twelve feet off and in the middle of the corridor.

Aled did not stop and did not speed up. He moved. One long step across her, so that his shoulder was between her and Colley’s line, and his hand came up open at his side, not touching her, the way it had come up at Pat Mayhew’s gate. He kept walking. She kept walking. He felt her keep pace with him without a hitch in it.

Colley looked at her past his shoulder. It was an ordinary look. It was the look of a man who has seen someone he knows from work.

“Morning,” said Colley.

He said it pleasantly, and dropped the paper towel in the bin by the gents, and turned away towards Court Three with his solicitor, who had stopped talking.

“Good morning,” said Esther.

She said it in the voice she used for figures, clear, without any weight, and did not turn her head, and walked the last ten yards to the witness suite beside him at the same pace she had walked the first twelve, and went through the door when he opened it; and it was only when the door had shut behind them both that he saw her put her hand flat on the wall, just for a moment, as though checking it was there.

· · ·Scene break

He logged it at five past nine. 08:44. Second-floor corridor. Defendant Colley (on bail) exited gents approx 4 m from principal. Said “Morning.” Principal replied “Good morning.” No other words. No approach. Defendant arrived early, contrary to pattern. He rang the Crown’s office and told them, because the Crown would want to tell the judge; and then he stood with his back to the door of the suite and thought that he had walked it four times on Friday and had never once thought to look at the gents.

Twelve feet, a paper towel, and one word. Nobody had done anything. There was nothing in it anybody could charge. That was what it was for. It was the same as the man at the gate in Weston and the petrol through the letterbox, and he understood it now, standing there, the way you understand the shape of a building from inside it: none of it was meant to hurt her. It was meant to tell her that there was nowhere she went that they could not also be. Her swimming pool. Her mother’s path. Her own hall. And now the corridor outside the room where she would say it.

“You can sit down, you know,” said a voice behind him. “Nobody’s going to mind.”

It was Mr Pym, in his cardigan with the leather buttons, carrying a tray.

· · ·Scene break

The witness suite was three rooms off a small hall, with soft chairs in a fabric chosen not to show anything, a box of tissues on every table, a water cooler that made a noise like a man clearing his throat, and a window of frosted glass that let in light and nothing else. Esther had the smallest room, with a door that shut, because she was who she was. There was a kettle. There were magazines from the spring before last. There was a sign on the wall explaining, in large type and three languages, that witnesses must not discuss their evidence with each other.

Mr Pym had brought tea, and biscuits on a plate with a doily, which Aled suspected he had brought from home.

“The jury’s being sworn,” Pym told them at twenty to eleven, from the doorway, in the voice of a man giving the cricket score. “Then there’ll be a bit of law. Then the openings.” He looked at Esther. “You won’t be wanted today. They never want the first witness on the first day, whatever they tell you. But they like you to be in the building.” He turned to go, and turned back. “You were very good at the visit, you know. I remember.”

“Thank you,” said Esther.

“Most people look at the floor,” said Mr Pym, and went.

After that there was nothing to do but wait, and he had been waiting for a living for fourteen years and had never found a way of doing it that did not show.

He stood by the door. Rashid sat in the hall outside with the radio and his feet on a chair, reading the paper back to front. Esther sat at the table in the small room with her statement in its folder, and did not open it, and did not open the notebook either. At quarter past eleven, somewhere in the building, through several walls and a floor, a court rose or sat and a great many chairs moved at once, and she lifted her head at the sound, and so did he, and he knew that Clare Nicholls had stood up in Court Three and begun to tell twelve strangers what Esther Mayhew had found, and that neither of them was allowed to hear a word of it.

The officers’ phone went at noon. It was Pat.

“Is she there?”

“She is, Mrs Mayhew.”

“Don’t put her on. She’ll only have to say she’s fine. Tell her this.” A pause, the sound of a paper. “Five letters. Hurt, about the end of heart. It will out.” Another pause. “Say it back.”

He said it back. He went to the door of the small room and said it again, and Esther looked up from the table and said, “Truth,” before he had got to the end of out, and then, “Hurt rearranged round a t. The end of heart. Truth will out.” She sat back in her chair. “Tell her that’s not funny either.”

He did the clue in his head in the hall afterwards, as he had at the cottage. It took him most of a minute. It was not funny. He thought it was the kindest thing anybody had said to her all day.

· · ·Scene break

Adair rang at half past three.

He went out into the little hall to take it, and nodded at Rashid, who put the paper down and went and stood in the doorway of the small room in his place.

“Where are you?”

“Witness suite, ma’am. She’s not been called. The usher says tomorrow’s openings as well, and legal argument Wednesday. Thursday for her, most likely.”

“I know. I’ve had the Crown on.” Adair’s voice had its reading glasses on. “Listen. The defence told the judge first thing, before the jury came in, what they’ll be saying about her. They’ve got the correction. They’ve had it a week. Lacey’s going to put it at the middle of everything. It was one figure in one table and he’s going to make it the whole of her.” She let a pause go. “Schedule Fourteen, if that means anything to you.”

“It doesn’t, ma’am.”

“Good. It shouldn’t. Nicholls got in first and told the jury about it herself in opening, to take the sting out, so it’s in open court now and it’ll be in tomorrow’s papers. There’ll be people outside who’ve read it.” Another pause. “I’m telling you so you know how the next week’s going to feel from where she’s standing. I’m not telling you so you can tell her. You can’t. Not a word, not a look.”

“No, ma’am.”

“She’ll hear it from the Crown if the Crown decides she should. Not from us.”

“I understand.”

“I know you do.” He heard her turn a page. “Something else. The duty sergeant tells me you’ve not done a single night on this.”

He stood in the little hall with his back to the frosted window.

“No, ma’am.”

“You were down for four, the first week.”

“I swapped them with Jas. She wanted the overtime.”

It was true. It was all true. It was the truth with the reason left off, and he had said it before, on the Thursday of the lane, to a duty sergeant who had not asked why; and now he was saying it to his inspector, who had not quite asked why and had left the space for it, a space he could have filled with one sentence and ended there, in the little hall of a witness suite, with his principal on the other side of a door.

He could hear Esther’s pencil through the door. She was doing the rest of her mother’s crossword.

He had agreed. At ten to six on a Tuesday, in a kitchen above a shut bakery, with the kettle boiled behind him, he had closed the number and put the phone in his pocket and said agreed. It had been his choice to carry it. It was still his choice. He had known there would be a morning like this one, when somebody with the right to ask would ask, and he had known what he would do.

“Jas’ll pass her exam on it,” he said.

“She will,” said Adair, and he could not tell, from the way she said it, whether she had heard anything in it or not. “Nobody’s complained. Get her home.”

· · ·Scene break

They let her go at ten past four. The corridor was empty. Colley had gone out by the front with his solicitor at the adjournment, and Maxine had watched him go and rung up to say so, and the twenty-two yards of blue carpet took nineteen seconds, and nobody came out of the gents.

Rashid drove. Aled sat in the front. Esther sat behind him with her bag on her knee and her mother’s crossword folded into the back of the notebook.

It was nearly dark by the time they were on the motorway. The lights came on one after another along the central reservation. Rashid had the radio on low, and turned it off at the news, without being asked, before the headlines.

“They’re going to make it about the mistake,” Esther said.

She said it to the window. He did not turn round.

“I can’t—“

“I know you can’t. I’m not asking you.” Her voice was level and long, the voice she used when she was sure. “I’m telling you what I’d do, if I were him. It’s what I’d do. You’ve got a witness who’s been right about everything for twenty-two months, and then you find one thing she got wrong, and she found it herself and told you, and you think, well, that’s her honest, that’s no good to me. Unless I can make it mean something else. Unless I can make every other number she’s ever written look like that one.” She stopped. “That’s what I’d do. I’d make it the whole of me.”

He sat very still in the front of the car.

He’s going to make it the whole of her. Adair’s words, three hours ago, on a phone in a little hall. She had got to them on her own, in the back of a car, from nothing.

“Rashid,” she said. “You can put the radio back on. I won’t hear anything I haven’t just said.”

Rashid did not put the radio back on.

In the mirror on the sun visor he could see her. She had her hands flat on the notebook on her knee, one each side of it, the way she put them either side of a mug when she was about to lay something out. She was not looking at the window now. She was looking at the back of his head, and she knew he could see her in the mirror, and she did not look away.

It was the longest either of them had let a look go on since the kitchen at ten to six, and it was not the kind the terms had been written to keep out. It meant: you know, and you can’t say, and I know you know. It meant that she had guessed, and that he had just told her she had guessed right by sitting so still, and that neither of them could ever say so to anybody.

He did not look away either. It was the one thing he could give her that was not a word.

“Thursday,” she said.

“Thursday.”

“I’ve got three days,” said Esther, “to decide whether I’m going to be right about everything else, or whether I’m going to stop minding being wrong.” She looked out of the window again. “I don’t know which. I’ve never not known which.”

Rashid indicated, and took them off the motorway, and they went on into the dark towards the shut bakery with its whitewashed windows and its kitchen with two chairs; and Aled sat in the front with his hands on his knees and his phone in his pocket, and the number he had not rung in it, and counted. Tuesday. Wednesday. Thursday, and the witness box, nine of her paces from the glass. And the morning after she had finished, at seven, a call that would end him; and he found, turning the number of days over in his head the way she turned a mug on a table, that he was not counting down to that call any more.

He was counting down to her coming out of that box.