He was convinced of her innocence, of course. He had seen Pritchard’s notes, had helped to prepare them. He knew there were questions that had never been asked at the first trial, let alone answered.
But it was more than that. He found Moulson thrilling to be near and to talk to. He saw her life as a three-act tragedy with opiates in the role of major antagonist. And her face mesmerised him. It had something better than beauty or symmetry. It had transparency. It looked like a mask but it hid nothing. Every emotion that showed there showed huge and clear and eloquent, as the muscles on the bad side struggled to throw up their asynchronous copy of the good side’s workings.
It was fair to say that Paul Levine came out of a different corner from most people as far as pain and disfigurement went. He had been a self-harmer in his teens, for more than four years, and that had been the time in his life when he felt most fully and wonderfully alive. He’d stopped cutting when he went to university because he’d become afraid that he would never be able to form a relationship with another human being that was as meaningful as the one he had with his own skin and the blood that flowed underneath it.
A handful of romantic encounters, short but deep, proved that he could make that kind of attachment and left him in a different place mentally. He’d never taken up the cutting habit again, but he remembered those days very vividly. He kept his kit – razor blades and bandages and antiseptic – in a shoebox at the back of his wardrobe where other men might keep porn. He surfed the websites where other cutters put up photographs of their most recent injuries. And he still saw the romance in those injuries, the beauty that was like an offering to a world that was too stupid to understand it.
Beauty was the word that came into his mind when Moulson walked into the interview room. The marks of her beatings mostly didn’t show, but the bruises hidden under her clothes caused her to walk with exaggerated care, like a woman twice her age. To Paul, paradoxically, that lent her an air of spectacular grace. He thought she moved like a queen in a medieval pageant.
He pulled himself together, set up his voice recorder and started to tell Moulson – in an over-loud, over-emphatic splurge – what he and his firm had been up to since the trial.
“We’ve examined all the witness statements for discrepancies, and we’ve gone over the police interview transcripts for procedural weaknesses. That gave us quite a few small leads to follow up, and one big one. We think we can make something of the fact that Alex Beech was home alone on the night of the fire. His parents said they were at work, but we followed that up and the timing doesn’t work. It’s possible they were at a pub on Alexandra Park Road. If they were, there’s an argument of contributory negligence right there. That ought to play in your favour, and might mean we can ask for a mistrial on the grounds of their perjury.
“Mr Pritchard also thinks we can go for a mistrial based on the emphasis the trial judge gave to your heroin habit in his summing up…” And on and on, all this stuff just pouring out as though a million words on other subjects could take the place of the handful he really wanted to say to her and couldn’t.
He could see that he was making a bad impression. Moulson didn’t say anything, and she didn’t move. He wished that he’d started off by asking her if she had any questions. He could have used that as a way of easing her into the discussion.
But he felt he had no choice now but to go on in the way he’d started. He hurried on to his next point, which was mental incapacity. “The conviction is only sound if the psychiatric assessments of you were accurate. If you were of sound mind. We want to open up that question again, and try to make more of the intolerable stress you were under living with an abusive partner. Your extended hunger strike after you were convicted, which came very close to killing you, speaks very strongly – I hope you don’t mind me saying this – to a disturbed state of mind. We think we can project that backwards and use it as evidence that you weren’t thinking clearly and rationally on the night of the fire.”
There was more. He was pretty sure there was more. But he’d got a little lost in his notes through looking at Moulson more than at the page, and he seemed to have reached the end without traversing all the territory on the way.
“I want to ask you something,” Moulson said as soon as there was silence for her to speak into. “Sorry, I mean… thank you for all this. I can see you’re doing a great job for me. I feel safe in your hands. But there are a few things I feel I want to get a better understanding of before the appeal.”
“Go ahead,” Paul said. He sat back with his eyebrows raised in an expression of attention and interest. He wanted so much for her to like him. He wanted to tell her how well he understood her, although he was astute enough to know that he really didn’t – that he was projecting his own fantasies on to her and seeing something that probably wasn’t there. He had form, unsurprisingly. Those college love affairs were marked, all of them, by a sudden rush to intimacy and then an equally sudden recoil. Paul was a romantic. That was the vice he succumbed to more than any other.
“Alex’s body,” Moulson said. “They must have examined it. I mean, there was an autopsy.”
“Yes, of course. The findings were submitted into your trial record.”
“And what were they? The findings?”
“How do you mean?”
“His injuries. Can you tell me what they were like?”
Paul considered this question. He knew the answer, of course. He knew every inch of her file. But how much detail did she want? “He was burned.”
Moulson leaned forward. “Yes, I know he was burned. But was there anything else? Injuries that didn’t come from the fire? I’m thinking he might have been attacked earlier. Before the fire started. That he could have been bruised or cut. Was there anything to suggest that? Would there be? Would injuries like that show on a burned-up body?”
Paul made a show of looking through his notes, although he didn’t need to. “I don’t believe there was anything like that,” he said. “Soft tissue injuries wouldn’t necessarily show, but cuts… yes, cuts would have been visible.” He knew a lot about cuts from a different context. He spoke with confidence.
“What I’m getting at,” Moulson said, “is that it might not have been the fire that killed Alex.”
“It wasn’t. Of course it wasn’t.”
“Then…”
“It was the smoke.”
Moulson’s eyes widened. It was as though this was news to her, although it couldn’t possibly be. It had all been covered at the original trial. But then she had been in shock back then. Maybe she hadn’t taken it all in.
“The smoke,” she repeated.
“Exactly,” Paul said. “It’s what kills most people in domestic and industrial fires. Twice as many as die from the flames. You were treated yourself, if you remember, for smoke damage to your lungs.”
Moulson didn’t answer. Paul remembered now what it was that he’d left out of his presentation. He’d meant to say more about John Street. “We also need to revisit your partner’s deposition,” he said, aware that he was changing the subject. “We want to establish what he did in between the time when he placed the 999 call and the time when the fire engines arrived. He claims not to remember much about that period, but we’re pretty certain he didn’t go back inside the block…”
We know that because of the smoke, Paul thought. That was the connection he’d just made in his mind. Everybody else had breathed in smoke and Street hadn’t. That bastard got out clean, when really he was the one who ought to have died. Not a professional opinion, not one he could ever voice, but still…