He held up a badly framed, washed-out photo which had estate agent’s listing written all over it. It was a perspectiveless shot of the landing outside the door of Jess’s flat, exactly as it had looked before the fire and still looked in her memory. The drab space was dominated by a large mirror in an overly ornate frame.
“The mirror,” Pritchard said, “is the pertinent fact. I’m going to play another piece of footage, starting at time point 22:47:13. That is to say, thirteen minutes before the witness, Mr Street, claims to have woken up. There’s something very interesting there that escaped all of our notice during the first trial.”
Levine tapped at the laptop’s keys. The screen blacked out for a moment, then the same image came back – minus John Street, who had disappeared from his front-and-centre position on the pavement outside the block.
The shot was now devoid of life and movement. But as Levine ran the image forward in extreme slow motion, a flare of light appeared in the third-floor window that looked into the stairwell.
“There are two puzzling things about what you’re seeing,” Pritchard said. “One is place, and the other is time. Jessica Moulson’s flat is here, on the right-hand side of the stairwell and well out of our field of vision. The light is coming from the opposite side, where the flat is empty and boarded up. Any thoughts about that, Mr Street?”
Street said nothing. He looked sick and unhappy.
“No? Well, the mystery is solved when you consider the position of the mirror. We’re seeing the reflection in the mirror on the left of the landing of Jessica Moulson’s front door opening on the right.”
Pritchard paused and swept the court with his gaze. “Of course,” he said, “that opens up a larger mystery. Why was Jessica Moulson’s door opening at a quarter to eleven? Who was there to open it? In order to answer that, we’ll need to go in closer.”
Levine tapped keys. The image zoomed and adjusted, zoomed and adjusted until the window filled the visible area. It was just about possible to make out a figure standing out on the landing, framed in the light from Jess’s open door. The detail was largely absent, but the blue shirt and red boxers made identification a whole lot easier.
Jess stared, stupefied. This made no sense.
Street stood on the landing for most of a minute before going back inside.
Levine froze the image. The courtroom was full of electrified silence.
“Would you care to alter your testimony, Mr Street?” Pritchard’s voice rang out across the courtroom. “When did you wake up again?”
The prosecution lawyers started to rise at the question, getting into gear for another objection. But then they sat down again, conferring in inaudible whispers.
“When, Mr Street? What time was it?”
“I don’t remember,” Street said. He made it sound like a plea, or a protest. He’d stopped looking at the screen now. His eyes ranged across the faces in the public gallery as though he was trying to enlist them on his side.
“A long time before eleven o’clock, certainly. And you’re not running yet. That comes later. In fact, you’re going back into the flat, even though – by your own testimony – you woke up in the middle of an inferno. But there isn’t any inferno yet, is there? That comes later too.”
Street just stared – at Pritchard, at the prosecutors, at Pritchard again. “Let’s move on,” Pritchard suggested evenly. The onscreen image unfroze. The homunculus in the boxer shorts made a second sortie. This time when he came back, he was running. He sprinted right past the window and was gone.
“How do you explain this, Mr Street? What was the false start there? What were you doing going back inside?”
“I don’t remember,” Street repeated.
“I find that a little too convenient to be true.”
“I was high. I was out of my head.”
“On heroin?”
“Yes.”
“Having shot up at eight o’clock?”
“Yes!”
“But you didn’t take any heroin that night, Mr Street. So that can’t be it.”
“Objection,” one of the CPS lawyers cried out, up on his feet. Ever since that earlier false start, he had been hair-trigger, ready to jump in as soon as he saw a suitable target.
Jess objected too in the privacy of her own mind. What was Pritchard doing? Was he trying to say that she and Street had both lied? That there was some sort of conspiracy between them?
The prosecutor addressed the bench, terse and indignant. “Mr Street’s toxicology results clearly show the presence of heroin in his blood on the night of the fire.”
“Your Honours, I’m coming to that. Those results are entirely pertinent to my argument.”
The judges conferred, heads down and wigs bobbing. “Proceed, Mr Pritchard,” Judge LePlastrier said at last. “But get to the substantive point quickly, if you please.”
Pritchard bowed gravely. “Mr Street, let me rephrase that statement as a question. Did you take heroin that night, yes or no?”
Street’s eyes opened so wide they looked as though they were going to fall out of his head. “I… Jess herself…” he stammered. “You know what she said!”
“Yes, I do. Everybody here does. In her trial testimony, she said you both shot up. But of course, and as a matter of custom and practice, you injected her first. Her testimony as to what happened after that can’t be taken to be one hundred per cent reliable.” Pritchard turned his back on Street. On the judges too. He walked back towards his desk, where Paul Levine was holding up a sheet of paper. Pritchard took it en passant and waved it in the air, still with his back to Street.
“The two of you,” he said, “you and Jessica Moulson, were admitted to the same hospital. The same burns unit. At the same time. You both had your blood tested at the same time. You both tested positive for heroin, which at that particular juncture seemed like the salient fact. Nobody was exercised to enquire any further, particularly as there was no disagreement between you and my client as to the fact of your addiction. These are the toxicology results my learned colleague just mentioned. Your own, Mr Street, and Jessica Moulson’s. Do you know what they show?”
Street made no answer. Pritchard turned around to face him. He was overdoing the theatricals a little, Jess thought in some dim corner of her brain that could still think. Mostly she was just listening, her mouth hanging open, her hands gripping the brass rail in front of her. Letting the words pile up in her mind into the shape of some edifice still to be defined.
“Murder,” Pritchard said, drawing the word out, “is defined as the deliberate, willed and planned ending of another person’s life. At one stage I had intended to stand up in this courtroom and argue that Jessica Moulson was innocent because she’d only tried to kill you, Mr Street, and not Alex Beech. That her crime was manslaughter, mitigated by the fact that she’d missed her aim.
“But she didn’t, did she? She didn’t miss her aim because she didn’t take aim in the first place. You did.”
Street shook his head violently, but didn’t speak. Yells and gasps erupted in the public gallery. In a movie, the judges would all have drawn their gavels and started up a carillon, but the judges – and the crown prosecutors – seemed to have been caught off balance too. They only stared.
Pritchard talked right over the noise. “Exposure to heroin is measured by assessing the amount of free morphine in the blood,” he said. He glanced down at the sheet in front of him, ran his finger along the lines of text with a frown of concentration, as though he was parsing them as he went, although Jess was sure he had all this by heart. “For you, that amount was barely perceptible. The doctors who treated you recorded a level of 0.02 nanograms of free morphine per millilitre of blood. The term is ‘background positive’. Indicating a regular habit serviced in the not too distant past. Jessica Moulson’s free morphine level, however, was recorded as 130 nanograms. The disparity, the ratio, in case your maths skills aren’t up to it, is a factor of more than 50,000. Astonishing, if the two of you had taken an equal dose at the same time.