The Screen

The detective who took her statement about the pavement came up the outside stair at ten on Monday with a laptop and a bag of pastries from the one bakery in the town that was still open, and said, “I thought it’d be rude not to.”

She was from Kofi’s team, a woman of about Esther’s age with a Bristol voice, and she typed with two fingers faster than most people typed with ten. Aled let her in, and saw the laptop, and went into the front room without a word. The door closed.

Esther told it in order. The gate. The man from the right. The anorak, the hood down, the hands. Esther, like a neighbour. And then the rest of it, which she had now said to Kofi, to the analysts, to a lawyer from the Crown three times slowly, to herself in the pool one word to a length; and which a stranger had said to her on her mother’s path on Saturday, in front of her mother’s gate, and walked away.

“Same words?” said the detective. “Word for word, as he said it at the meeting?”

“The same words.”

“The Miss and everything.”

“The Miss and everything.”

The detective typed it. She read it back. Esther listened to her own sentence in a Bristol voice and thought, as she had thought on the path with Aled’s hand come up open between her and the man, and in the car, and every hour since: he heard it.

She had thought of it before the car door shut. She had been standing at his shoulder and she had seen his face not change, which was how she knew it had gone in. The seven words she had wanted to give him in the cottage kitchen, with the rain on the window, so that for once in twenty-two months somebody would hear them who was not going to write them down. And he had them now, from a man in an anorak, and on Saturday night he would have had to write them down.

It did not make her angry. She had expected it to. It made her feel as though something had been taken out of her hands and put down somewhere she could still see it and not reach.

“Sign here,” said the detective, and turned the laptop round.

· · ·Scene break

The Crown wanted the screen.

Kofi rang at one, from a corridor, between two halves of the other trial, to tell her so before somebody else did. After Weston, he said. After the man had come to her mother’s gate. The Crown’s lawyers had talked to counsel, and counsel was going to talk to her that afternoon anyway, and it would come up.

“You can still say no,” he said.

“I know I can.”

“I know you know. I’m telling you anyway, so that you know I know you know, and then we can both stop.” A pause. “The correction’s gone over. This morning. It’s two paragraphs. It’s fine.”

“It’s not fine.”

“It’s two paragraphs, Esther,” said Kofi, and somebody called him, and he went.

· · ·Scene break

Clare Nicholls KC met her at half past three in a room in a building in Bristol that had carpet tiles and a view of a car park, with a woman from the Crown’s office beside her to take a note of everything that was said.

That, Nicholls explained at once, was the point of the note. “I’m not going to talk to you about your evidence. I’m not allowed to, and if I did, Mr Lacey would be entitled to know I had, and he’d be delighted. This is so you know my face. So that when I stand up on Thursday week, you’re not looking at a stranger in a wig.”

She was tall and grey at the front and ate an apple while she talked, holding it in a paper napkin. Esther liked her in about four seconds and then made herself stop, because she had liked Garside in about four seconds too, once.

Aled was outside the door. He had walked her to it along a corridor with nobody in it, and opened it, and closed it behind her, and she knew without turning round that he was standing a yard from it with his back to the wall and his hands loose.

Nicholls told her the order of the days. The jury sworn on Monday, the openings, which would take most of the week; she would be called on Thursday, probably; she would be in the witness suite from Monday, in case. She would be taken through her evidence by Nicholls, and then Mr Lacey would ask her questions, and then Nicholls might ask a few more, and then she would be released. She would be allowed water. She would be allowed to ask for a question to be repeated. Once she had started, she would not be allowed to talk about her evidence to anyone at all until she had finished, not Kofi, not her mother, not the officers.

“That one’s easy,” Esther said. “They won’t let me anyway.”

Nicholls looked at her over the apple, and did not ask what she meant.

“The screen,” she said.

“I know.”

“I’m obliged to raise it. After Saturday the Crown thinks you should have it, and so do the police. So I’m asking you, formally, and Ms Tully is writing down that I asked.” The woman with the note did not look up. “There’s no shame in it. There’s no cost with the jury. The judge tells them it’s routine, and it is.”

“I know. Kofi’s told me. Twice.”

“Then I’ll ask you once.” Nicholls put the apple down on its napkin. “Would you like it?”

Esther thought about the dock. The chair on the left. Nine of her paces and a pane of glass. She thought about her mother’s gate, and a man in an anorak saying her name in the voice you would use to say it to a neighbour.

“No,” she said. “Thank you.”

“Can I ask why?”

“I said at the court visit. I want to see him when I say it.”

Nicholls looked at her for a long moment. It was not the look of someone about to argue; it was the look of someone checking a figure.

“Then I’ll tell you one thing that isn’t about your evidence,” she said. “It’s about juries. I’ve stood in front of a lot of them.” She picked up the apple again. “The jury will forget every figure you give them. Every one. By the second week they won’t remember whether it was fourteen million or forty. They’ll remember whether you looked at him.”

Esther did not say anything.

“That’s not advice,” said Nicholls. “Ms Tully, that’s not advice. It’s an observation about juries in general.” She finished the apple. “Is there anything you want to ask me?”

There was one thing. It had been there since Thursday afternoon at twelve minutes past three, and it had got heavier every day, and Esther knew before she opened her mouth that she was not allowed to ask it and that she was going to anyway.

“The correction,” she said. “Will he use it?”

Nicholls did not look away.

“I can’t talk to you about what anyone will ask you,” she said. “You know that.”

“Yes.”

“But I’ve read it. And I’ll say this, because it isn’t about your evidence either. It’s about you.” She wrapped the core in the napkin. “Thank you for sending it.”

· · ·Scene break

In the car going back, Imran drove and Aled sat in the front and she sat behind with her forehead nearly on the glass, and watched the motorway lights come on one after another in the dusk, and admitted it to herself.

It was not Tyrer.

She had been telling everyone for a year that she was not afraid of him, and she was not; she had sat across a table from him, and it had been his sentence and not his face she took home. She could look at him through a pane of glass for as long as it took. She had already decided that at Christmas, and in the empty court, and again this afternoon. She could have had the screen up and it would have made no difference to the thing she was actually afraid of.

The thing she was afraid of was a question.

Not a hard one. Hard ones she liked; hard ones had answers, and you went and got them. It was a simple one, asked politely, in a voice that never went up, about a figure in a schedule or a date in a notebook or a word in a sentence, and her standing in the box with her hand on the ledge and not knowing the answer to the penny. Being the woman who had to say I’m not sure in front of twelve people who would forget every figure and remember that.

She had never said I don’t know in a meeting in her life. She had been in rooms where people said it and watched them lose the room, and she had made herself the person who never needed to.

In the front of the car Aled said something to Imran about the exit, and Imran said, “I know, I know,” and she watched the side of Aled’s face in the dashboard light, with the mark on his cheekbone from the door frame going yellow, and thought that he was the only person she could have told, and that it was, of all the things in the world, the one she could not tell him.

· · ·Scene break

She came down for water at twenty to two.

The kitchen light was on. Jas was at the table with her revision cards in two piles and a mug of something that had stopped steaming a long time ago, and her right wrist in a black support strap that she had not been wearing on Saturday.

“Sorry,” Esther said. “I’ll be quick.”

“You’re all right.” Jas moved one pile an inch, which was an invitation or was not. “Can’t sleep?”

“I never can, the week before something.”

“This is the week before something?”

“The week before the week.”

Jas laughed, a short one. Esther ran the tap and filled the glass and then, because the invitation was still there, sat down in the other chair.

“What are they?”

“Law,” said Jas. “Procedure. Powers. What you can do and what you can’t and who you have to tell when you have.” She pushed a card across. “Test me. My partner won’t any more. He says it’s like being interviewed.”

Esther tested her. They did twenty cards and Jas got eighteen, and the two she got wrong she knew she had got wrong before Esther turned the card over, and swore at them, quietly, in a way that made Esther like her very much.

“How’s your wrist?”

“It’s a wrist.” Jas turned the strap round. “Arjun thinks it’s a superhero thing. I’ve told him I got it fighting a car. Which I did.”

“How old is he now?”

“Three and a half. The half matters, apparently.” Jas squared the cards. “He’s asleep when I get home and he’s asleep when I leave. I see him for an hour and a half in the afternoons, if I don’t sleep through it. After April, if I pass, it’ll be days. Proper days. I’ll put him to bed.”

“You’ll pass.”

“You’ve known me a fortnight.”

“I’ve tested you on twenty cards,” Esther said. “You got eighteen and you knew which two.”

Jas looked at her. It was a look Esther had seen before, across the log in the cottage kitchen on the second night, when Jas had said she’s got you to Aled with her eyebrows up. There was nothing unfriendly in it. It was the look of a woman who counted things too.

“He’s never done a night,” Jas said. “On this. Not one.”

Esther held her glass.

“Fifteen nights. I’ve done thirteen of them and the relief did the weekend. He was down for four. He’s been on days every day, and he’s gone home every night, and he’s never once been in a car with you without somebody else in it. I’ve driven most of them.” Jas turned a card over and back. “I’ve worked with him five years. He’s the most careful man I know. I’ve never seen him careful like this.”

The strip light hummed. In the front room the monitor showed the yard, grey and empty, and the gate she was not allowed to use.

Esther did not say anything. There was nothing she was allowed to say that would not be a lie or the truth, and she would not tell Jas a lie, and the truth was not hers to tell until the fourth of March, and then only after.

Jas watched her not say it.

“I’m not asking you anything,” she said. “I want that on the record. Because one day somebody will.”

She said it quite gently. She picked up her cards and her cold mug and went back to the front room, where the monitor was, and pulled the door half to behind her, the way she always did; and Esther sat at the table in the kitchen above the shut bakery with a glass of water she had not drunk, and understood that there was now a third person carrying it, and that this one had not been asked.

· · ·Scene break

On Tuesday it rained. Kofi rang to say the Crown had noted her decision about the screen, again, in writing, and that he would stop asking now, and that he was proud of her, which he had never said before and said very fast. She read Schedule Fourteen again, alone, with the door a hand’s width open, and the figure was still wrong on the page and right in her head, and the correction had gone over, and there was nothing more to do about it but be asked.

Aled went home at quarter to eight. Jas came on. Esther went to bed at eleven and lay awake, as she had known she would, and at some point slept.

She woke to the phone.

Not hers; she had none. The officers’ phone, in the front room, through two walls. Her watch said four minutes past four. She heard Jas answer it on the second ring, and her voice go low and quick, and then stop.

Then a long silence. Then Jas, one word, clear enough to come through the wall.

“Totterdown?”

Esther sat up in the dark.

She heard Jas say when, and anyone inside, and no, and right, and thank you. She heard the call end. And then, after a moment, she heard Jas make another, and wait while it rang for a long time, and say, when it was answered, in a different voice, the voice of someone waking a friend:

“Aled. It’s Jas. Sorry.”

Esther got out of bed. She did not reach for the dressing gown on the back of the door. She turned on the lamp and found her jeans, and her jumper, and her watch, and she was dressed, with her shoes laced, before Jas knocked.