‘Isn’t that what people do when they’ve had too much? Disgusting. She seemed better after that, but the vomit was all over her. I told her to have a bath. Said I’d run it, like I always did. But she wasn’t having any of it. She slammed the door on me and turned up the bathroom radio. Radio 1. Her favourite station. So I left her to it while I washed up.’
I interrupt. ‘Weren’t you worried about her being alone in a bath if she was drunk?’
‘Not at first. Like I said just now, she seemed better after being sick – more sober – and anyway, what could I do? I was worried she’d report me to the police again. Sarah could be very imaginative.’
‘So when did you go and check on her?’
‘After half an hour or so I did get worried. I couldn’t hear her splashing and she wouldn’t answer when I knocked. So I went in.’ His face goes blank. ‘That’s when I found her. Almost didn’t recognize her, even though her face was up. Her skin was purple. Dark red and purple. Some of it was peeled back. There were these huge blisters.’
My body shudders involuntarily.
Joe goes quiet for a minute. I’m glad of the break. ‘She must’ve slipped and fallen in. And the water was so hot,’ he continues. ‘Much hotter than you’d expect after thirty minutes, so I can’t even guess what it was like when she got in. I burnt myself lifting her up. I tried to resuscitate her, but I’ve never done a first aid course. I didn’t know if I was doing the right thing. So I dialled 999.’
He is saying the last bit in an even, steady tone. Not distraught. But not totally detached either. Like someone trying to hold it all together.
‘The police said you didn’t seem very upset when they arrived.’
His eyes are back on mine. ‘People show emotion in different ways. Who is to say that the person who wails loudest is the most distressed?’
He has a point there.
‘I’m telling you the truth,’ he adds firmly.
‘But the jury found you guilty.’
I sense a tightening behind the eyes. ‘They got it wrong. My defence were idiots.’
The HOPE poster stares mockingly down.
‘An appeal is generally only launched if there’s new evidence. The bones of what you have said are already in the files. Even if what you’re saying is true, we have nothing to prove it.’
‘I know that.’
I’m losing patience now. ‘So do you have new evidence?’
He is staring hard at me. ‘That’s for you to find out.’ He picks up the pen again. ‘PEAL,’ he is writing now. Over and over again.
‘Mr Thomas. Do you have new evidence?’
He just continues writing. Is this some sort of clue?
‘What do you think?’
I want to snap with frustration. But I wait. Silence is another trick I learned from my brother.
There’s the steady sound of ticking from a clock I hadn’t seen before. It has a handwritten notice stuck up underneath it: DO NOT REMOVE. Unable to stop myself, I give a short snort of laughter. It’s enough to break the silence.
‘One of the men stole the last one.’ Joe Thomas is clearly amused too. ‘He took it to bits to see how it worked.’
‘Did he succeed?’ I ask.
‘No. It was finished.’ His face becomes hard again and he draws an imaginary line across his throat. ‘Kaput.’
The action is clearly designed to intimidate me. It does. But something inside me makes me determined not to show it. Carefully, I look across at the piece of paper on the desk. ‘What’s the significance of “peal”? The one with “e” and “a” in it.’
‘Rupert Brooke.’ He speaks as if it was obvious. ‘You know. “And is there honey still for tea?” Church bells pealing across the village green and all that.’
I’m surprised. ‘You like the war poets?’
He shrugs, looking out of the window towards the exercise yard. ‘I didn’t know them, did I? So how can I say I like them? But I can guess how they felt.’
‘How?’
His face swivels back to mine. ‘You haven’t done your homework very well, have you, Miss Hall?’
I freeze. Didn’t he hear me when I introduced myself as Lily Macdonald? And how does he know that Hall is my maiden name? I have a flash of Ed’s warm hand holding mine at the altar. This meeting had been arranged before my marriage, so maybe Joe Thomas had been given my previous name. Maybe he wasn’t listening properly when I introduced myself. A niggling instinct tells me that it would be safer not to correct him at this stage. A correction might not get us off to the right start.
Besides, I’m more concerned with the reference to the homework. What did I miss? A lawyer can’t afford to be wrong, my boss tells us all, again and again. So far, I’ve been all right. Not like one of the newly qualified lawyers who was taken on in the same month as me and sacked for failing to lodge an appeal within the given time.
‘It won’t be in your notes,’ he adds, observing me glance down. ‘But I’d hoped that your lot would have done more digging. Think about it. War poets. What did they go through? What behaviour did they display when they came home?’
I feel like a struggling student on University Challenge. ‘Shock,’ I say. ‘Many refused to talk because of post-traumatic stress.’
He nods. ‘Go on.’
Desperately, I try to dredge up my A-level memories. ‘Some of them were violent.’
Joe Thomas sits back, arms folded. A satisfied smile on his face. ‘Exactly.’
This isn’t making sense. ‘But you weren’t in the army.’
‘No.’
‘So why did you kill your girlfriend?’
‘Nice try. I pleaded innocent. Remember? The jury made a mistake. That’s why I’m appealing.’ He jabs at my notes with a long artistic finger that doesn’t match his substantial frame. ‘It’s all there. Apart from this extra clue, that is. Now it’s over to you.’
There’s a scraping of the chair on the floor as Joe Thomas stands up unexpectedly. For a moment, the room spins and my mouth goes dry. What is happening? All I know is that those very dark, almost black, eyes appear to be looking right through me. They know what’s inside me. They see things that Ed doesn’t.
And most important of all, they don’t condemn.
He leans towards me. I catch the smell of him. I can’t put my finger on it. Not a pine or lemon cologne smell like my husband’s. More like a raw, wet, earthy animal smell. I feel a strange shortness of breath.
BANG!
I jump. So does he. Stunned, we both look at the window where the noise has come from. A large grey pigeon appears to be frozen in the air, just outside. A white feather blows gently in the breeze: the bird must have flown into the glass. Miraculously, it is now flying away.
‘It’s alive,’ says Joe Thomas flatly. ‘The last one died. You’d think they’d be put off by the bars, wouldn’t you? But it’s as if they know better. Maybe they do. After all, birds reach heights that we know nothing about.’
Criminals, my boss warned me, can be remarkably soft in certain areas. Don’t let it fool you.
‘I want you to go away and come back next week.’ The instructions clip out of Joe Thomas’s mouth as if this scene hasn’t taken place. ‘By then, you need to have worked out the connection between the war poets and me. And that will give you the basis of my appeal.’
Enough is enough. ‘This isn’t a game,’ I say shortly to hide the inexplicable mixture of fear and excitement beating against my ribcage. ‘You know as well as I do that legal visits take time to organize. I might not be able to come back so soon. You have to make the most of this one.’
He shrugs. ‘If you say so.’ Then he glances at my still-tanned wrists with my silver bracelet and then down to the shiny gold wedding ring, heavy with newness. ‘By the way, I got it wrong just now, didn’t I? It’s Mrs Macdonald, isn’t it? I trust you had a good honeymoon.’