Court Three

DC Stuart Frain sat wherever he liked.

He sat in the second chair at the kitchen table, every day, with his coat on and then with it off. He sat on the arm of the sofa in the front room with his feet on the desk. On the Thursday he sat on her bed, for a moment, to tie his shoelace, while telling her through the open door that they would be going to Kofi’s office at two, and was up again before she had decided whether to mind, and she did not think he had noticed he had done it.

He was not unkind. That was what made it hard to hold against him. He was twenty-nine, and correct, and decent, and he brought her a newspaper every morning without being asked, with her own name in it on page nine; and when Pat rang the officers’ phone on the Wednesday he said, “She’s fine, Mrs Mayhew, she’s having an early night,” and rang off, and told Esther afterwards that her mother had called.

“Did she leave a clue?”

“A what?”

“A crossword clue. She always leaves one.”

“Oh.” Frain thought. “She said something. I didn’t write it down. Sorry.” He smiled at her, an easy smile. “You’ll want an early night anyway.”

It was a quarter to eight.

She went to bed at eleven. She lay in the back room over the yard and thought: every decision comes with its reason. She had written it on a list at a cottage table, and a man had said yes to it and kept it for four weeks without once being reminded, and she had not known, until it stopped, how much of every hour it had been holding up.

Frain decided things. The blind went down, not to the second slat; “Best not,” he said, and when she asked why, he said, “Policy.” The yard was off, because he had not thought about the yard. The car went in nose first and came out backwards, and he did not whistle.

She had Adair’s number. She had it folded in four in the back of the forty-second notebook, and by heart, and she thought about it on the Thursday night, and did not ring it. It had not been given to her for this. It had been given to her by a man who had wanted her to have a way of saying no to him, and she was not going to spend it on a young man who sat on beds to tie his shoes.

She gave Kofi her statement on the Wednesday. It took two hours. She stood beside what Aled had said, in her own words, and they were the same as his in every particular, because there was only one thing that had happened, and it was nothing.

· · ·Scene break

The defence made its application on Tuesday the sixteenth, with the jury out of court.

She was not in Court Three. She was in the witness suite, in the small room, with Frain in the doorway and Mr Pym bringing tea, because the Crown had asked her to be in the building in case the judge wanted to hear from her. He did not. At half past three Kofi came up the twenty-two yards with his tie loose and sat down in the chair across from her, which Kofi always did, and put his hands on the table.

“It’s refused,” he said.

She did not move.

“Lacey made it. He had to; it was his duty, and he said so, and he made it very well. That the officer protecting the Crown’s main witness had feelings for her and hid them from his own force for a month, and that nobody could know what passed between them in those kitchens, and that the jury should be discharged or your evidence put aside.” Kofi rubbed his eyes. “Nicholls didn’t argue much. She didn’t need to. She just gave the judge the papers.”

“Which papers?”

“All of them. The rota. The log, with the one line in it. Aled’s statement. Yours. Jas’s.” He looked at her. “Do you want to know what Jas’s says?”

“Yes.”

He took out his notebook, and found the page, and read it in the flat voice he used for reading things into a record.

“On the twenty-third of February, at about 01:40, I told the witness that I was not asking her anything, and that I wanted that on the record. I am putting it on the record now that there was nothing to ask. In twenty-nine nights I never once saw DC Pryor alone with her, in a car or a room. He did not do a single night on this operation. I did them.”

Esther looked at the table.

“And the transcript,” said Kofi. “Last Monday. Has any police officer discussed your evidence with you? No. None of them. No. They leave the room. The judge read that out.” He put the notebook away. “He said he was satisfied nothing had passed between them that touched your evidence. He said the officer’s account and the witness’s agreed with each other and with everything written down at the time, and with a colleague who had every reason to notice and did. He said whether the officer should have reported it sooner was a matter for his force and not for this court. And he said —“ Kofi stopped, and found it. “He said that what the two of them had not done was the whole of the answer.”

She sat with that.

“The jury come back tomorrow,” Kofi said. “Nobody tells them anything. There’s nothing to tell.”

“How is he?”

It was the first time she had asked anyone.

“At a desk,” said Kofi. “Somewhere with no windows. He’s been told to keep away from you till this is over, and he’d have kept away if nobody had told him.” He stood up. “Twenty-two months, Esther.”

“I know.”

“No, I mean it the other way.” He had his keys in his hand. “Twenty-two months, and it was nearly him that lost it, and it was him that saved it. I don’t know what to do with that. I’ll think about it at the weekend. If I ever get a weekend.”

· · ·Scene break

The jury went out on Tuesday the twenty-third and came back on Friday at ten past two.

She was in Court Three for it. She had been told she could be, now that she was not a witness in it any more, and she sat at the back by the door, where the big young PC had stood on her first day and Aled had stood on the visit, with Kofi on one side of her and Frain on the other. Frain sat with his legs crossed. Kofi sat as if every chair in England had been put there for his back, and did not move at all.

The woman in the green cardigan was the foreman.

Esther had not known. She watched her stand up, at the end of the front row, with a sheet of paper in both hands, and she thought: of course. Of course it was you. You wrote everything down.

The clerk asked the questions. The woman in the green cardigan answered them. Roland Tyrer: guilty. Gavin Colley: guilty. The nephew, whose name Esther had never once said aloud and did not now: guilty. It took less than two minutes. She had expected it to feel like something. It felt like a total coming out right at the foot of a column: expected, checked, and very quiet.

Tyrer did not look at her. She did not look at him for long. There was nothing left to look at him for, and she had done it once, for five seconds, when it counted.

The judge thanked the jury. He said sentence would be in May. He rose, and the court rose, and Kofi breathed out beside her for what sounded like the first time since October.

· · ·Scene break

The woman from the other unit came to the witness suite at four, with a folder.

She was kind and tired and had done this before. She sat across the table and explained it in the order it went: a new name, somewhere a long way from Bristol, a flat and help with work, contact with her mother through a route that could not be followed, and the rest of her life without anyone who wished her harm knowing where it was being lived. The risk had dropped, she said. The men were convicted; the reason for frightening her was gone. It had not gone to nothing. People who had lost could be spiteful. This was the offer that made spite not matter.

“A clean start,” the woman said.

Esther looked at the folder. She thought about the photograph of a woman in lane three, and a man at her mother’s gate, and a blue door burnt black round the letterbox in the shape of a hand.

“No,” she said. “Thank you.”

“You don’t have to decide today.”

“I’ve decided.” She put her hands flat on the table. “I’ve got one name. I’ve just spent seven weeks getting it back. I said it in that court to a man in a glass box and I’d like to go on using it.” She stopped, and then said the rest, because it was true and she had never said it aloud to anybody. “I want it on a door. My own door. That’s all I’ve ever wanted that wasn’t a figure.”

The woman closed the folder. She did not argue. She had, Esther thought, seen people say yes to it and seen what it cost them, and was not sorry to hear no.

At six, from the bakery flat, on the officers’ phone, Esther rang Inspector Adair’s direct line for the first time.

“Lorna Adair.”

“It’s Esther Mayhew. I’m ending my protection. Tonight. I’ll put it in writing if you want it.”

There was a pause.

“I’ll want it,” said Adair. “You know what the assessment says.”

“Lower. Not nothing.”

“Not nothing.” Another pause. “Then you’ll have an alarm and a number.”

“And you’ll have a bad month.”

“I’ve had it,” said Adair, and Esther heard her nearly laugh. “Go on, then. Good luck, Ms Mayhew. You were very good in there. I’m told.”

· · ·Scene break

Kofi rang at half past six to say the whole Crown team was in the pub on the corner by the court, Nicholls and the note-taker and the analysts and a solicitor who had wept, and would she come.

“No,” she said. “Thank you. I’m not drinking tonight.”

Kofi was quiet for a moment.

“Right,” he said, in a different voice. “Right. Well. Mind how you go.” And then, very fast, before he rang off: “He’s never had a principal complain, you know. Not one, in fourteen years. I checked.”

Frain drove her to Totterdown at seven. The hall had been stripped to the brick and the door was new, not blue yet, a flat primer grey, with a new lock and a panel for the alarm the unit had put in on Wednesday. He walked her in and showed her the buttons, and gave her the number, and the keys, and stood on the step.

“That’s you, then,” he said, pleasantly. “You’ll want an early night.”

“Goodbye, Stuart.”

He went. He did not try the handle. She stood in her stripped hall, which smelled of new plaster now and only faintly of the other thing, and looked at the shelf on the left at head height, which was new too, and empty; the box was in the boot of a car she had already rung for.

In her coat pocket, folded in two, there was a revision card. On the front it said Powers of entry in Jas’s writing, and some notes. On the back it said an address, and under the address, in the same writing: Second bell. He’ll not have put his name on it.

Jas had put it face down on the kitchen table at twenty to two on Thursday morning, among the others, and said, “I’m not giving you anything. That’s a revision card.” Then, at the front-room door, without turning round: “He rang me on Saturday. He said you could have it if you wanted it, once it was over. It’s not over. And you don’t have to want it.” And she had gone back into the front room.

· · ·Scene break

The house was tall and narrow and cut into flats, at the end of a street in a town she had never had a reason to go to, and it took forty minutes in the taxi, and she did not count the turns.

There were four bells by the door. Three of them had names typed on slips, faded. The second had a card, new, cut to fit the little brass frame, and on it in upright capitals in black biro, pressed hard, the kind she could have read across a room:

PRYOR.

She stood on the step and looked at it for a long time.

Then she rang.

He came down. She heard him on the stairs inside, not hurrying, and the chain, and the lock, and the door opened, and he was there, in a shirt with the sleeves turned back and no tie, with the mark on his cheekbone from a door frame at Weston healed to a thin white line.

He did not say anything. He looked at her, the whole of her, from the step up, the way he had looked up and down her street on the eighth of February, in an order he had agreed with himself a long time ago.

“You put your name on it,” she said.

“Saturday.”

“Jas said you wouldn’t have.”

“Jas doesn’t know everything.” He held the door. “She knows most of it.”

“I’ve ended my protection. At six. Adair has it. And I didn’t go to the pub.” She said it on the step, all of it, before she went an inch further. “Kofi asked. I said no. I’ve had a cup of tea at five and nothing since. I’m telling you so you’ll know. Whatever I say next, I’m sober, and I meant to say it.”

He looked at her a moment longer.

“Will you come up?” he said.

· · ·Scene break

His flat was one room and a bathroom, as she had guessed it would be, and nothing on the walls. A bed, made square. A cooker, with a clock on it. A table by the window with two chairs, and his keys on a smaller table by the door.

He did not shut the door. He left it standing open on the landing, and she saw him leave it, and understood why: that there should be nothing between her and the stairs but the width of a room.

Then he went to the table, and pulled out a chair, and sat down in it.

She stood where she was. She watched him do it: a man sitting down in a room she was in, for the first time in forty-six days, at his own table, with his hands on his knees and his face turned up to her. He did it plainly, the way he had once said Forty-three, as if checking the word as he went.

She sat down across from him.

“Thirty-eight days,” she said. “Since the kitchen, the night of the move. I’ve counted every one of them, because I count things, and I’d like to stop.” She kept her hands flat on his table. “I’d like to stop waiting. I want to stay here tonight, with you. Not because I’m frightened, and not because I’m grateful, and not because you looked after me; you’re not my officer, you’ve no say in where I sleep, and I’ve checked all of that, twice. Because I want you. I’ve wanted you since a car park by a reservoir. That’s the finding.”

He did not answer at once. He gave it the time it needed. She had known he would.

“Then I’ll ask you one thing,” he said, “and I’ll wait for the whole of the answer. Is this what you want? Not the thirty-eight days. Not the end of it. This, tonight, me.”

“Yes,” said Esther. “You. This. Tonight. And if I change my mind, at any point, I’ll say so, and you’ll stop, and I’ll have lost nothing, and nor will you. And the same for you. If you want to stop, you say it.”

“I’ll say it.”

“In words.”

“In words,” he said. “I’ve had nothing but you in my head since a Thursday in a room over a garage. That’s not changed, and it won’t tonight.” He looked at the open door, and back at her. “It’s open. It stays open as long as you like.”

She got up.

She came round the table and stood in front of him, and he stood too, slowly, as if he were not sure yet how it was done. She put her hand up to the side of his face, to the thin white line on his cheekbone, and it was the first time she had ever touched him, and he closed his eyes.

“Esther,” he said.

“Yes.”

He kissed her then, or she kissed him; afterwards neither of them could have sworn to it in a statement, and neither of them minded. It was not long. It was long enough to settle it.

Then she stepped past him, across the width of the room, and closed the door.