“But perfectly explicable if you bought two good hits and injected them both into my client.”
Jess was already sitting down, but it was as though she had just tripped and fallen. The breath was pushed out of her in a gasp of what sounded like – felt like – pain. Her hearing faded out, then returned with a background hum that drowned the words. The CPS lawyers were arguing with the judges. The judges were arguing back. She fought to make sense of it.
“Would you care to rephrase that as a question, Mr Pritchard?” LePlastrier asked.
“Did you inject the whole of what you cooked into Jessica Moulson, Mr Street?”
“No!” Street yelled. “That’s bullshit. I did us both. Ask Jess! I did us both!”
“Then you weren’t trying to kill her? I think you were.”
“Objection.” This time the CPS lawyer sounded like a poker player checking to stay in the round. He didn’t even stand up. “No motive has been established for—”
“We have an abundance of motives,” Pritchard said. “Almost too many motives. Mr Street was now in another relationship, were you not, Mr Street? With one Nicola Saunders, well known to my client as well as to yourself. Do you deny that you and Ms Saunders are now lovers?”
“No, but that… that was after…”
“You’re under oath, Mr Street. And your mobile phone records make a liar out of you. But perhaps you’re just polyamorous. Many people are. I’m more inclined to see money as the salient issue. You took out joint life assurance policies only two months before the fire, so my client’s death would have been your pay day. A pay day you needed because you were in debt to the point where your credit wasn’t even good with your drug dealer.”
Pritchard was fairly in his stride now, and he’d abandoned the polite consultative tone altogether. He was a tidal wave of righteous rhetoric. Street was trying to speak up too to contest these points, but if anything was coming out of his open, working mouth, it could not be heard.
“So when Jessica Moulson refused to die of an overdose, you didn’t give up. There was too much at stake. You decided to stage an accident. To be fair, she helped you with the staging. She was sitting in the living room tearing up photos. Trying to excise you from her life, which is an impulse I can easily understand. And you knew that photographic paper was flammable. Not as flammable as film stock though, which was why you had to go back inside to coax the blaze along. In the end, you were obliged to use lighter fluid.”
“This is bollocks!” Street wailed. “I didn’t even know there was any lighter fluid left! I’d given up smoking months before!” And nothing he could have said would have sounded more like a confession, Jess thought in scalp-prickling wonder. It was such a tiny thing to cling to. If you were innocent, you’d say, I couldn’t have for so many reasons besides the logistical ones.
In the charged silence, Pritchard sighed long and loud. It was as though, after the thrill of the chase, he took no pleasure at all in the kill. “Which brings us back to your injuries,” he said. “Not caused by beating at the sheets obviously. You seem to have been up and about long before the fire spread to the bedroom, so that little piece of fiction simply isn’t tenable any more. It never was really, given the absolute absence of smoke damage to your lungs. You didn’t wake up in a room that was already on fire. That was a preposterous claim.
“But a necessary one, of course. You needed an explanation as to how your hands came to be burned, and you couldn’t really tell the truth, which was that you had an unfortunate accident while you were pouring lighter fluid on to the burning photos in Jessica Moulson’s waste-bin.”
“No,” Street said. “No, I didn’t do that.”
“Objection,” said one of the CPS lawyers – the same one as before, the poker player. “Phrased as—”
“Withdrawn,” Pritchard snapped. “Temporarily. Let’s talk about wounds, Mr Street. Yours were very consistent. Third-degree, full-thickness burns to most of your hands caused by direct exposure to flames. Extensive damage to subcutaneous tissues, destruction of nerves, complete evaporation of the subdermal fat layer. But on your right hand, you had a mark that looked like this.” He held up a photo – the same one he’d shown earlier, showing the curved red-black line on Street’s wrist.
“This is an oddity frankly. The tight, contained pattern of skin damage identifies it as a contact burn. You held your hand against something that was already very hot, and the damage was limited to the small area where that contact occurred. It’s much more superficial damage too, because when we’re taken unawares, by pain we’re not expecting, our reflexes cause us to break contact with the source of the pain very quickly.” He traced the line with his finger. “Part of a hollow circle. The rim of an object, clearly. An object of radius 28.2 centimetres, made of a substance that transmits intense heat while holding – at least temporarily – its original shape.”
Pritchard held out his hand and Paul Levine, ready and waiting, put one more photo into it. “There was such an object in Jessica Moulson’s flat,” Pritchard said quietly. “Only one. It was this.” The photo was of Jess’s wastepaper basket. “You really need to be more careful when you’re setting a fire, Mr Street.”
There was shouting.
A lot of shouting.
People were on their feet in the public gallery as though they were going to rush the witness box. Uniformed security guards ran in to block their way.
Pritchard was still declaiming, but nobody could hear the words.
John Street was crying, the whole of his face drooping and distorting like the burned side of Moulson’s.
The image on the screen now showed Porky Pig from the Looney Tunes cartoons doing his “Th-th-th-that’s all, folks!” wave. This inappropriate levity on Paul Levine’s part was seen by nobody except Jess in the last moment before she closed her eyes.
It wasn’t quite fainting. She’d fainted when she heard about Alex Beech’s death. This was different. She closed her eyes and the world went away for a while to an inaccessible distance. She was alone. As she’d been alone in the pit beyond the night world until Alex had plucked her out of the air and saved her. (Not Alex. The ghost. The ghost who wasn’t Alex.)
But this was a kind of aloneness she’d never experienced before. She wasn’t even there herself. There was just a blankness. She felt as though she’d stepped out of her own life, leaving everything she’d ever known lying behind her like a discarded skin.
If the fire was a lie, if Alex was a lie, then so was everything. She was born in that moment, her past annulled.
Nothing as pure as that could last of course. Jess knew even as she stood in that empty, anonymous place that she could never truly be wiped clean. She was Janus-faced. Her burned side watched the past and would never be able to look away from it.
A ringing in her ears brought her back to a sort of consciousness. She was hunched over, her eyes an inch from the brass rail of the dock. There was a fingerprint there, not her own, perfectly clear and distinct. It was like the footprint on Crusoe’s island. It meant she was back in a world that had people in it.
She took in a breath. Then another. After that, gradually, it got easier.
John Street was sobbing on the witness stand, hands clenched as though he was trying to bury his face in them but had frozen halfway. Paul Levine was smiling at her. What did I tell you? The woman at his side, the intern, was already tidying away the stacks of papers into arch files and cardboard boxes.