Mr Lacey

“You pride yourself on being exact, Ms Mayhew,” said Anthony Lacey. “Let’s be exact.”

He said it kindly. He said everything kindly. On Friday he had spent five hours being kind to her, and she had come out of the box at twenty past four with a mark on the side of her finger and no idea where he was going, which she had understood by Friday night was the point.

Now, at three minutes past ten on Monday, the screens along the front of the jury benches changed, and she knew.

Schedule Fourteen. Six years across the top. The lettings companies down the side. And the fourth line down, year four, which somebody in the defence team had shaded in pale yellow, so that twelve people who had not known on Thursday what a schedule was could find it in a second.

“Would you read the jury the figure that’s highlighted?”

“One million, eight hundred and forty thousand pounds.”

“And what should it say?”

“One million, four hundred and eighty thousand pounds.”

“So it’s wrong.”

“Yes.”

“By how much?”

“Three hundred and sixty thousand pounds.”

He let that sit. He had a way of letting things sit that she recognised, because it was hers: he did not fill a silence that was working for him.

· · ·Scene break

On Friday he had not mentioned it once.

He had taken her through her training, and her years at Garside Venn, and every piece of work she had ever put her name to, gently, as though admiring them. He had taken her through her method. How she traced a payment. How she decided that two companies were one company wearing two coats. How many of the thirty-eight she had visited, and how many she had only read about, and whether she would agree, as a professional, that reading about a thing was not the same as seeing it. She had agreed. She had agreed to a great many things on Friday, all of them true, and she had felt each one go into a pile somewhere she could not see.

She had known it was coming. She had known since a Thursday afternoon at twelve minutes past three with a pencil in her hand. She had lain awake over it on Saturday and Sunday, and sat at the top of a staircase for two hours on Sunday evening not talking about it, and it had been the best two hours of the whole four weeks, and it had not made this any smaller.

“You read this report before you signed it,” Lacey said.

“Yes.”

“How many times?”

“Eleven.”

He looked at her over his papers. It was not an unkind look. It was the look of a man who had been given a better answer than he had expected, and was going to use it.

“Eleven times,” he said. “And you signed a declaration, on the last page, that you believed the facts in it to be true.”

“Yes.”

“And they weren’t.”

“That one wasn’t.”

“When did you find it?”

“The eighteenth of February. Twelve minutes past three in the afternoon.”

A juror in the back row smiled, and stopped. Lacey did not.

“Eleven days before this trial began,” he said. “Four months after you typed it. And nobody else had found it. Not the police. Not the Crown. You.”

“Yes.”

“And you reported it.”

“The same afternoon.”

“That was the right thing to do.”

“Yes.”

“I’m not suggesting otherwise. I’m grateful.” He turned a page he did not need to turn. “But you’ll understand the difficulty it gives the jury, Ms Mayhew. You’re the Crown’s expert. The whole of their case about where this money went comes through you. Three hundred and eighty pages. Twenty-two schedules. The jury can’t check them. They have to trust that you’ve got them right.” He put the page down. “And here’s one you got wrong. Eleven readings. Your signature. If you were wrong about this, Ms Mayhew, what else?”

· · ·Scene break

She had had a week to decide.

Being right about everything else, or not minding being wrong. She had said it in the back of a car last Monday night as if they were two roads, and she had not known which one she was on, and she had never in her life not known which road she was on.

She knew now. She had not sat down and chosen it. She had been choosing it a little at a time, in the box on Thursday with a beer mat and on a staircase on Sunday with a bag of pound coins, and she found out which road she was on when he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said.

The room was very quiet.

“After I found it,” she said, “I added up every column in the report again. Every schedule. By hand, in pencil, in the margin. That one was the only one that didn’t foot. I’ve checked everything I know how to check. If there’s something else wrong that I haven’t found, I’d want to be told, and I’d tell the court.” She kept her hands on the ledge. “I can’t promise you there isn’t. Nobody who’s ever written three hundred and eighty pages could promise you that. I can tell you what I did to find out.”

“So there may be other errors.”

“There may be. I don’t believe there are. I’ve told you why.”

“And the jury is entitled to wonder.”

“Yes,” said Esther. “That’s what they’re for.”

Lacey looked at her for a moment longer than he needed to. Then he nodded, very slightly, the nod of a man acknowledging a point he had not conceded, and moved on to her firm.

· · ·Scene break

He was very good on her firm.

He had the letter. Of course he had; it had gone in the pile, in case, and the pile had gone across. He read the jury the words mutual agreement and asked her what had been mutual about it. He asked her whether it was right that the senior partner, a man of thirty years’ standing, had looked at the same flats and the same rent and declined to take the view that she took.

“He didn’t look at the flats,” she said. “I did.”

“But he looked at your work.”

“He did.”

“And he didn’t agree with it.”

“He said, We don’t take a view, Esther. We give an opinion.” She heard her own voice go level and long. “That’s not disagreeing with it. That’s declining to have one.”

Somebody on the press bench wrote very fast.

“You were offered a sum of money when you left,” said Lacey. “And you didn’t take it.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I didn’t want to have been paid to go.”

“You’d rather have had the cause.”

“I’d rather have had my job,” she said. “I didn’t have a cause. I had sixty-one flats.”

“Your theory about sixty-one flats.”

“It isn’t a theory. I walked five of them. They were empty.”

“Your theory about why they were empty.”

“I don’t have a theory about why they were empty,” said Esther. “I have that they were. What it means is for the jury.”

Lacey smiled then, for the first time that morning. It was brief and it was not for the jury. It was, she thought, for her; the smile of a man at a chessboard who has seen the other side make a good move and does not mind admitting it, because there are a great many moves left.

The judge rose for lunch at five past one.

· · ·Scene break

Aled walked her to the suite. Nineteen seconds.

She did not say anything and he did not ask. She ate a third of the sandwich and turned the mug round a quarter at a time, and he stood inside the door and looked at the wall clock, and once, only once, she looked up and found him looking not at the clock but at her, with no expression at all; and she understood that he could see from her face that it had been bad and that it had not been the worst, and that he could not ask her which part was the worst, and that he was going to stand there being unable to ask for fifty minutes, because that was what he had agreed to do.

“Five to,” he said.

“Five to.”

· · ·Scene break

In the afternoon he came to the sentence.

She had known that too. Everything else he asked her was about the report; the sentence was the one thing in the case that was not a figure, and a figure was a thing you could check, and a sentence was only a woman’s word.

“The site meeting,” said Lacey. “About four in the afternoon, you’ve told us.”

“Yes.”

“You didn’t write anything down at the meeting.”

“No.”

“You’d a notebook with you. You always have a notebook with you, you’ve told us that as well.”

“I didn’t write it at the meeting. I didn’t want him to see me write it.”

“So you wrote it at twenty to midnight. On the edge of your bath.” He did not make anything of the bath. She was grateful to him for that, and was annoyed to be grateful. “Seven and a half hours later.”

“About that.”

“After you’d gone home. Had something to eat, perhaps. Thought about your day.”

“Yes.”

“Thought, perhaps, about what the man at the head of that table had meant by whatever he said to you.”

“Yes.”

“So by twenty to midnight, Ms Mayhew, you had a view.”

“I had a view,” she said. “I wrote down what he said, not the view.”

“Word for word.”

“Yes.”

“You’re certain of every word.”

She looked at him.

It was a simple question, asked politely, in a voice that never went up. She had known in the back of a car two weeks ago that it would come in this shape, and she had been afraid of it ever since, more than of the man in the middle chair behind the glass. A word in a sentence. A thing she could not answer to the penny.

Seven words and a name. She had written them at twenty to midnight. She had said them to Kofi and the analysts and the lawyer from the Crown, three times, slowly. She had said them in the pool, one to a length. She had heard a man in an anorak say them at her mother’s gate. She had said them on Thursday, in this room, in Tyrer’s own voice, and watched him look away.

And every time, under the sentence, there had been the other one, the one she had never told anybody. The one she had lain awake over, not on Saturday, but for two years.

Doesn’t like to be counted. Doesn’t want to be counted.

In her head they weighed the same. They always had. She had written like, sitting on the edge of her bath, because like was what she had heard, she thought, and she still thought it; but she had heard it once, across a table, from a pleasant man, at four in the afternoon, and she had not written it down for seven and a half hours, and she was an accountant, and she knew what a figure was worth that had not been recorded at the time.

She could say yes. Everyone in the room expected her to. The woman in the green cardigan had her pen up.

“I’m certain of the sentence,” Esther said. “I don’t know whether he said like or want.”

· · ·Scene break

For a moment nobody moved. Nobody wrote. It was as if the whole room had been leaning forward for a figure and had been handed, instead, a person, and did not for a moment know where to put her.

Then the woman in the green cardigan put her pen down on the bench in front of her, quite gently, and looked at Esther, and went on looking. The man next to her looked too. Along the front row, and then the back, twelve people stopped looking at the screens, and the yellow line on them, and looked at the witness box; and Esther stood in it with her hands on the ledge and let them.

She had been afraid of this for a year. Of saying I don’t know in a room full of people and losing the room.

She had not lost it. She could feel where it was. It was on her.

Lacey was quiet for longer than he had been all day.

“You wrote like,” he said at last.

“I wrote like. I believe it was like. I’m not going to swear to one word in seven when I didn’t write it down for seven and a half hours.” She kept her eyes on him and not on the dock. “I’m certain of what it meant. I’m certain of the rest of it. I’m certain he said Miss Mayhew, because nobody’s called me Miss since school. I’m not certain of that one word. So I’m telling you I’m not.”

“Thank you, Ms Mayhew,” said Lacey. “That’s very fair.”

He meant it. She could hear that he meant it, and that it had cost him something, and that he was far too good to let it cost him more by staying there. He looked down at his papers.

“One last thing. You’ve been under police protection since the eighth of February.”

“Yes.”

“Living with police officers, in effect. For four weeks.”

“Yes.”

“Has any police officer discussed your evidence with you?”

“No.”

“None of them.”

“No,” said Esther. “They leave the room.”

Lacey looked at her for a moment. Then he said, “Thank you. Wait there, please,” and sat down.

· · ·Scene break

Nicholls asked her three questions.

Who had found the mistake in Schedule Fourteen. I did. Who had reported it. I did. When. The same afternoon. And then she thanked her, and sat down, and the judge looked down at Esther over his glasses for the last time and said that she was released, that she was free to go, and that the court was grateful to her.

It was twenty to four. The clock over the bench said so, and her watch said so, and for once they agreed.

The usher opened the side of the box. She stepped down. She did not look at the dock on her way to the door, because she had nothing left to look at it for, and she did not look at the jury, because it would not have been fair to them; she looked at the door, and the usher held it, and there was the blue carpet, and a yard from the door, with his back to the wall and his hands loose in front of him, Aled.

She stopped in front of him.

She did not touch him. Neither of them had touched the other since his hand came down on her head in a car on a roundabout at Weston, and she did not touch him now, in a court corridor, with the usher behind her and a PC at the lift and the whole of a building that wrote things down. She kept her hands at her sides. She had kept them there for twenty-eight days, and she could keep them there for twenty-two yards more.

“I’ve finished,” she said.

He looked at her face for a long moment, the way he had looked at it on Thursday, reading the whole of the day off it, the yellow line and the letter and the one word in seven; and whatever he read, he did not say it, because he did not need to any more, and because he still could not.

“I know,” he said.