“They might as well just come right out and call me a murderer!”
“They’d be very happy to,” Pritchard said. “But they’re mindful of the sub judice laws. Most of them use the word ‘alleged’ quite liberally. Alleged murderer. Alleged crime. The magic ingredient in unfounded allegations. Some have taken to calling you ‘the Inferno Killer’, in quote marks. They have a star witness, by the way. You should brace yourself, because it’s going to get unpleasant.”
“Who? What witness?” But she knew.
John. John Street. Of course.
“Don’t let that prey on your mind,” Pritchard advised her. “I think he’s their weak link, to be honest. I’m delighted that they’re leading with him. I’m sure we’ll get to the truth. Now let’s go over that statement of yours and see which parts of it are fit for purpose.”
Not many, it turned out. Time and again the lawyer took Jess to task for stating as truth things she could only know by implication. “You were out of your head for large parts of the evening, yes? Then please don’t make assumptions about what you didn’t see and couldn’t hear. Your role here is to state the facts. Let me worry about the truth.”
“They’re the same thing!” Jess protested, but Pritchard shook his head.
“The facts are in the outside world. You can verify them with your senses or with objective tests. The truth is something that people build inside their heads, using the facts as raw materials. And sometimes the facts get bent or broken in the process.”
“I’m not going to lie,” Jess said.
“You misunderstand me. I’m not asking you to. I’m asking you to stay with the facts, where you’re on safe ground, and stop lunging off towards something dim and distant that you’re thinking of as the truth. That’s a dangerous voyage, and you shouldn’t try to make it alone.”
Jess didn’t argue, but only because she wasn’t up to the effort. She wasn’t good for much of anything right then. Up in the facial reconstruction unit of the Whittington Hospital in Archway, surrounded by people who mostly maintained a professional deadpan, she felt like a prisoner in a tower made out of other people’s words. Alex was dead. That little kid, who never caught a single piece of good luck in his life, was dead. And they were saying she did it.
She couldn’t even protest her innocence. Saying you didn’t do it and saying you didn’t remember doing it were two different things. She was sure in her own mind that something else had happened. Any one out of a million something elses. Alex had fallen down the stairs. His parents had killed him and then gone looking for a scapegoat. He’d killed himself. She wandered in her mind through the maze of these possibilities – and believed in none of them, because in her mind, Alex Beech was still alive. Still keeping up his endless vigil on the stairs. Nothing else made sense to her.
She had an unreliable temper (when was there ever an addict who didn’t?) but almost always when she got angry it was with herself. For cowardice, passivity, lack of backbone. For being so woefully short on what her Aunt Brenda (oh Brenda, I need you now!) used to call stick-to-it-iveness. True, she had hated John in recent times, and often wished him dead. But wishing without doing was exactly her speed. Surely you couldn’t become a murderer without knowing it. Maybe you could forget the act because of trauma or madness, but you couldn’t forget the intent. If it had ever been there, it would still be inside you, in your head or your heart, and a thorough search of the premises would find it.
Jess carried out a lot of searches, came up empty and went into the trial still believing in herself.
Over the space of two weeks, that belief was inexorably demolished.
3
These were the facts, which the prosecution established in a brisk and businesslike manner. There had been a fire. In Jess’s flat, which was number 16 Orchard Court, Colney Hatch Lane, Muswell Hill. It happened on an evening when only two people were in the flat – Jess herself, and her boyfriend, John Street.
Jess had been at the epicentre of the blaze (you only had to look at her face to know that). She had lain there until the firemen came in and carried her out. She probably would have died from smoke inhalation except that the drugs had sent her so far under she was hardly breathing.
Street had been injured too, requiring skin grafts to his badly burned hands. He got his injuries beating at the flames to put them out – trying to quell the blaze.
The fire didn’t have a natural or accidental origin. It was set on purpose. The crime scene investigators, who came in while the ashes were still hot, had traced it back to a metal wastepaper basket. One of these experts gave evidence in court. He was young, personable, straight out of a TV crime show. “Someone had filled the basket with papers, drenched the papers in lighter fluid and dropped a match in on top,” he said, describing the actions in the air with his hands. “Then the basket itself had been tipped over.”
“In an attempt to spread the blaze further and faster?”
“Objection,” Brian Pritchard interjected. “That’s interpretation.”
“Sustained,” the judge agreed.
The Crown prosecutor didn’t seem troubled. “My learned colleague,” he said, “is trying to leave open the possibility that the fire could have caught by accident. In your opinion, is that a genuine possibility?”
The CSI expert shook his head. “Absolutely not.”
“And why is that?”
“We were able to trace the chemical residues, and that gave us the spatter pattern from the lighter fluid as it was poured out. It was poured in a series of wide arcs around the wastepaper basket, extending up to five feet in each direction. So whoever was pouring it was not trying to start a blaze in the wastepaper basket itself. They were using the wastepaper basket to set the flat on fire.”
Jess experienced the first vertiginous moment of doubt. She remembered sitting on the floor with that wastepaper basket gripped between her knees, its mouth a blurred and wavering circle into which she was dropping… what? Something slick and cold that she had tried to tear but couldn’t, so she’d had to settle for crumpling and twisting and folding.
“Photographs,” John Street said when it came to his turn on the witness stand. “Jess was tearing up photographs of the two of us.”
“And why was that?” the prosecutor asked him in a completely unconvincing tone of surprise.
“We’d been arguing about… well, about nothing really. Nothing much. We’d shot up earlier in the evening.”
“You’d taken heroin?”
“Yes.”
“You’re both addicts?”
“Yes. And the hit wasn’t… wasn’t anything much, and Jess got crazy. She wanted me to go out and get some more, but we didn’t have any money…”
Some of this was raising answering echoes in Jess’s mind. Not the argument: there had been so many arguments, it was hard to zero in on any one. And not the ache of the incomplete fix: there had been lots of those too, as their need grew and their ability to feed it diminished. But that night’s high had seemed to her to be as deep as an ocean.
What she remembered was the photographs. Her dream (not a dream, she didn’t dream, just an image, just a thought) of holding her own face in her hands crystallised now into an actual memory. And the reek of lighter fluid, the slimy feel of it on her fingers. The doubt she’d felt earlier congealed into something like terror. She wanted to deny the things that were being said about her, but the memories trapped her, hemmed her into a space even tighter than the tiny dock in which she sat. It was as though there was a second trial running in parallel with the real one, in which she was the witness and the defendant and the judge. She was trying herself, and her defence didn’t hold up at all.
“Mr Street has testified that you set a fire in your flat on the night in question. In the wastepaper basket. Do you deny this?”
“No, I… no… no.”
“And is Mr Street correct about what it was you burned?”
“Yes.”
“Photographs of the two of you together.”