“Yes.”
The bare truth. No equivocation. The only way of establishing what had really happened was to follow the trail all the way to the end. If she lied or swerved away, she might improve her chances of being found innocent, but not of actually being innocent. The one without the other was no use to her at all.
“Then your relationship with your boyfriend – with Mr Street – wasn’t going well?”
“No. Not very well. We kept on arguing. And… fighting. We fought. I mean, he… John… he used to… hit me.”
“Hit you? Physically abuse you? Did you report any of these assaults at the time? Tell friends what was happening, or family?”
“No.” We didn’t have any friends. And I couldn’t make Brenda any more unhappy than she was.
“But you went to your doctor, or to a hospital? An A & E? Your injuries were documented?”
“No.” He wouldn’t let me go. He didn’t want anyone to see. And he knew where to hit me so it didn’t show.
“Well, let’s confine ourselves to the verbal altercations between the two of you. There’s at least some consensus that they actually occurred. You argued about drugs?”
“And other things.” Everything, really. Nothing was too small for their mutual resentment to catch on and scrape against. Every chance word was a declaration of war. Mostly it wasn’t drugs at all, and it wasn’t love. It wasn’t even you hit me, John. You’re supposed to love me and you keep hitting me! It was you didn’t pull the chain, the last Mars bar was mine, you said that sarcastically, it’s your turn to go to the shops, this place is a tip, can you at least open a window? Because that’s what you do when you’re heading for a brick wall and accelerating. You pounce on trivia. The things that really matter can’t be said and don’t have to be. They’re lying like submerged rocks under the spray and froth of everything you do say. Everything you shout and scream and snarl.
“And how did you feel on the night of the fire?”
“How did I…?”
“About Mr Street. About your relationship. How did you feel?”
“It’s hard to say.”
“But if you had to put it in a few words. In one word, even.”
“I felt… trapped.” That wasn’t new. But it had been strong that night. Stronger than usual. The urge to get out of a relationship that had become abusive, dangerous and desperate. To push John out of her life and be herself again. When she tore up the photographs, it had started with that impulse: they were photographs of her and John together, and she was trying to rip him from her side, as though some weird voodoo might translate that act into reality.
She saw Pritchard in his seat at the defence table, staring down at his files and shaking his head slowly from side to side. But the word was out and she wasn’t sorry. It was the truth. The truth was her refuge. If she told the truth, everything would come out right.
But it didn’t. It just kept on getting worse.
The ninth day of the trial was the hardest. That was when Alex’s parents gave their evidence. They both worked, the father as a bus driver and the mother at the snack counter of the Muswell Hill Everyman. Two or three nights out of every week, depending on the vagaries of their shifts, Alex came home to an empty flat, warmed up his own dinner in the microwave and put himself to bed. The night of the fire was one of those times.
“So Alex was alone that night?”
“Yes.” Tears ran down Mrs Beech’s red, scrunched face. “I’ll never forgive myself. Not ever.”
Alone. And most likely asleep when the smoke started pouring up through the floorboards of his bedroom. He woke up already choking to death. He might have made it out of the flat, but either he couldn’t find his way in the suffocating pall, or he was just too weak from the smoke damage to get that far. He crawled into the polythene playhouse that was still in his room although he was too old for it now and never played in it. He died curled up on the floor, the molten plastic weeping white-hot tears on to his exposed flesh.
That was where the prosecution rested, more or less. The defence did their best, but Jess was briefing against them now. Her memories of the fire agreed on every point with the scenario the Crown’s lawyers had so eloquently and persuasively laid out. She told the truth, and damned herself.
She’d been moved out of the Whittington by this time into the remand wing at HM Prison Winstanley. The cell was half the size of her room at the hospital, but Jess liked it better. Nobody came near her. Nobody saw her. She was sinking into herself, like someone sinking into quicksand in an old movie. She didn’t welcome interruptions to that process. Well, maybe one interruption. But Brenda was ill. She’d been taken into hospital a week before Jess for multiple herniated discs, and she was still there. Still more or less unable to move. She couldn’t attend the trial and she couldn’t visit, but she’d written a dozen or more letters to Jess to tell her to be brave, to have faith in herself. That was Aunt Brenda’s universal prescription, and Jess loved her for it. It implied that there was something there to have faith in.
She was on suicide watch. Impassive guards watched her closely, like priests, for any signs of incipient despair.
And she had considered suicide. She’d thought about it lots of times, in the way of someone taking stock of all their options. But leaving aside the hurt it would cause to Brenda, it would be so hard to do. She would have to think of something in the bare, featureless cell that could be turned into an implement. She would have to get past her own instincts and her own cowardice. And she would have to do it before the guards noticed what she was up to and came running to stop her. There was no way. If there was a way, they would already have thought of it and put a stop to it.
On the eleventh day, she argued with Brian Pritchard and tried to dismiss him. She wanted to change her plea to guilty. Pritchard told her – almost angry, almost as though he cared – to pull herself together and think it through.
“How can you know whether you’re guilty or not if you don’t remember anything? Give yourself the benefit of the doubt, and give me a little room to work in.” Pritchard had already told Jess his own opinion, which was that John Street’s evidence didn’t hold together. Street was hiding something, and he should be pressed hard until he gave it up.
Jess let her not-guilty plea stand, but Pritchard didn’t get his wish. He started his very robust cross-examination of John Street at 3 p.m. on day twelve. On day thirteen, Street failed to present himself at court. The skin grafts on his hands had delaminated from the healthy tissue surrounding them and he had had to go back into surgery. Pritchard requested that proceedings be suspended, but he was standing in the path of a juggernaut. By that time, nobody in the courtroom believed that Jess was innocent, least of all Jess herself. The judge ruled that Street’s evidence was substantially complete, and that no purpose would be served by a delay. Pritchard glanced at Jess in the dock, saw the resolve in her eyes and let the point go.