Through the window, faintly, she heard the protesters chanting something that had her name in it. She couldn’t make out the whole of the rhyming couplet, but the rhyme words were “dead” and “instead”. She got the gist.
The afternoon session began with the judges’ decision on the issue Pritchard had raised – the question of whether it had been right to try Jessica Moulson for murder when the death of Alex Beech had never been a project she entertained. They decided that it had, notwithstanding the apparent contradiction. A plot to kill, they said, was in itself mens rea, the intent that was needed in law to distinguish murder from mere manslaughter. The fact that the plot had killed the wrong person should not and could not be offered in mitigation.
Brian Pritchard took the bullet with the very slightest of bows and moved on to the next matter on his extensive list, which was the presentation of the prosecution evidence in the original trial.
Once again the ins and outs of what was being said were hard to follow and, for the most part grindingly dull; until out of nowhere the debate suddenly became a little more intense. Pritchard was talking about the duty of disclosure and questioning whether – for example – a continuous CCTV feed (such as the one from the street in front of the block where Jess and Alex Beech used to live) counted as a single piece of evidence. He seemed to be suggesting that the prosecution should have identified specific segments of video to be entered into the proceedings. The judges, at considerable length, disagreed.
“The presumption then, Your Honours,” Pritchard said, “is that the entirety of this video feed, from the creation of the world until the present day, can now be considered as having been entered into evidence for an act which occurred at a very precisely defined moment.”
“Mr Pritchard, please don’t belabour the point,” Judge Macclehurst told him sharply. “Remember that time is infinitely divisible. If you want to open this particular can of worms, it might be difficult to close it again.”
“I’m merely establishing, Your Honour, whether a body of evidence that is potentially of infinite size can be considered to have been adequately disclosed.”
“Then I believe you may take that as a yes.” Pronounced in a dry tone, this got a small chuckle from some of the reporters and a half-hidden smile from the clerk of the court. Pritchard didn’t join in the laughter but he seemed pleased rather than put out. He glanced across at Paul Levine – a look that Jess caught but didn’t really understand. “I am grateful for the clarification, Your Honours,” he said mildly.
And on and on. Pritchard held forth on one technicality after another. Jess tried for a while to stay abreast of what was being said – it was her life that was in the balance, after all – but in the end it defeated her. She defocused her eyes and her mind and wandered away from it.
Her body stayed where it was. The other part of her, the part that walked at night with the ghost of Alex Beech, climbed cautiously out and stretched itself. All the noises in the courtroom died at once – not just Pritchard’s booming voice, but the sounds of breathing, the rustling of paper, the million-fold noises of bodies just being bodies and never quite being still.
She felt an immediate and dizzying sense of relief. Nobody could pursue her here and bring her back. Nobody would even realise she was gone. It was like the scene you saw in old movies sometimes where someone left a pillow or a wadded coat stuffed down under their blankets so it looked like they were in bed asleep while they slipped away unsuspected for some crazy adventure.
Jess circled the court, staying out of the shafts of sunshine that came in through the skylights above. Alex had said that light hurt him. Jess felt it not as pain but as pressure, the bright beams beating against her insubstantial body like a tide, so that she had to push against them just to stay where she was.
She studied the sketches some of the journalists were making of her. They were mostly very good, although some of them turned her bored, blank look into something belligerent and sinister. She read the notes the reporters were taking too, where they weren’t written in shorthand. Most of them were descriptions of her, or rather fragments, impressions, odd words and phrases to be slotted into descriptions later. Glassy-eyed, cold-eyed, flint-eyed, one had written. Another one had unnatural stillness, underlined twice. Well, that was probably fair. Some hadn’t written anything at all yet – presumably keeping their powder dry for when things got interesting, if they ever did.
Jess was tempted to go further afield, but that was probably a bad idea. It was always possible that Pritchard or one of the judges would speak to her, ask her a question, and she didn’t want her catatonic state to be discovered.
Could she still move her body when she was outside it? She tried, flexing the fingers of her ghost hand and willing her real fingers to move. Nothing at all happened. That didn’t surprise her, but it frightened her a little to realise how helpless her body was when she abandoned it like this. She crept back and climbed inside her own flesh with a prickling sense of relief.
The experience left her exhausted, but glancing up at the courtroom clock she realised that much less time had passed than she’d thought. Her out-of-body experience, which had felt like an odyssey, had taken up no more than a couple of minutes.
She was emotionally drained too. Ghost-walking had given her a feeling of freedom, and re-entry made her painfully aware that this feeling was totally illusory. However far she let her mind roam, it would always be tethered to her body.
She was tied to other things too. In the toilet next to the room where she’d eaten her lunch, taped behind the cistern of the middle cubicle, Grace’s package waited for her. Jess could take it or leave it, but she couldn’t escape the consequences either way.
Pritchard sat down at last, and the judges once again asked the CPS lawyers if they had anything to say for themselves. This time they did, and another hour or so passed while they rebutted Pritchard point for point. And on each point the judges finally agreed with them.
Pritchard had made more than a dozen separate submissions in the course of the day, and every single judgement had gone against him. He seemed completely at ease with that. Presumably getting a mistrial declared had always been a long shot.
But the last time he stood up, his manner seemed different. Jess thought she saw him gather himself. He stood more erect, his posture and his tone more combative. “Your Honours,” he said, “there remains the question of witness evidence.”
“We’re not minded to allow it,” LePlastrier said. “We’ve read your submission, Mr Pritchard, but it would be an enormous departure from the structures in which we work. The courts of appeal concern themselves with substantive points of law, not with matters of evidence, however hotly contested.”
“Yes, Your Honour,” Pritchard agreed. “But I’m not talking about contested evidence, I’m talking about evidence that was never heard. On the twelfth day of my client’s trial, her boyfriend John Street – the only eyewitness to any part of the relevant events – was called to give evidence. Towards the end of that day, I began my cross-examination. But I was never able to complete it, because Mr Street went in for surgery the next day. Complications relating to the skin grafts on his hands, I believe. It was not possible to recall him to the stand during the remainder of the trial.”
The judges looked grave. So did the CPS lawyers. Jess had the sense of the same penny dropping in many minds.
“So,” Pritchard resumed after a slight pause, “it seems to me that the defence should be allowed to question Mr Street again. The only alternative would be to declare a mistrial and begin again from the opening chorus.”