The Fall - By Claire McGowan

Hegarty

Hegarty didn’t often make arrests in homes that had what he could swear was a genuine Eames chair in the corner. He was a secret design freak, a fact kept well-hidden from his station mates. Sometimes on weekends he went to furniture shops, the kind of places where he could never have afforded to buy even an ash tray, and just looked and looked for hours.

‘Hello?’ The front door to the flats had been left ajar, and now he pushed the unlocked flat door open, too.

Charlotte Miller was crumpled on the sofa, wearing tracksuit bottoms and a sweatshirt that was far too big for her – Stockbridge’s, he guessed. Her eyes were red and swollen. He felt a surge of annoyance. Didn’t she know, sitting there with the door open, did she not understand about the weeping women he saw all the time, attacked, bruises on their thighs, mascara running down their faces?

‘Miss Miller? I’m DC Hegarty – remember?’

She nodded dully.

‘Can I come in?’ Her face was a mess of bruises. He could hardly look at it.

‘You are in.’ She didn’t look up.

‘You want to tell me what happened then?’ He’d seen the step on the way up.

She sighed. ‘Is there any point? Some kids threw stuff at me, and someone painted my step. I guess it doesn’t matter that much.’

‘What about this court attack? That’s an open case, you can make a statement.’

She seemed to think about it, and then shook her head back and forth very slowly. ‘I don’t remember enough.’

‘But if you told me something, we might be able to find them. It was two girls, was it? Can you think of any reason you might have been targeted – maybe something you saw at the club that didn’t seem important, or . . .’

Something in her face closed up. ‘Please. I can’t remember. I don’t want to talk about it.’ She shuddered, as if remembering. Was she afraid, was that it?

‘You have been in the wars, haven’t you.’ He looked round the flat; a week on, it was dirty and smelled stale. ‘I know today must be tough – it was today, wasn’t it?’

She still didn’t look up, but glassy tears were sliding down her face. ‘I just can’t believe it, you know. Really can’t. I’m in shock, I think.’

He hated seeing women cry. ‘Er . . . I’ll get you a tissue.’ He looked round frantically and she laughed, wiping her sleeve over her lovely, battered face. ‘I’ve used them all. None left.’

He perched awkwardly on the side of her chrome and leather sofa. It was a strange mix, this flat, the minimalist lines you’d expect from a macho twat like Stockbridge, but here and there bowls of pot pourri, flowery cushions, a pink dish on the table. Small traces of this girl in front of him. ‘Didn’t you want anyone with you, your mam or someone?’

She laughed again. ‘God, no. She’s doing my head in. I can’t stand it, you know, them all looking at me and saying, Oh, it’s ten o’clock, we were meant to be in the hairdresser’s; Oh, it’s one, you were meant to be walking down the ai-aisle . . .’ Fresh tears rolled out of her eyes and down her creamy cheeks. She even looked good when she cried, this girl. ‘Sorry. It’s the shock, I think. I’m supposed to be perfect today – that’s the thing. Do you know how much that dress cost? Four grand. And it won’t get wo-o-orn!’

Hegarty was at a loss. What did you say to a girl on what should have been her wedding day? ‘Can I make you a cup of tea or something? It’s nearly dinnertime.’ Crap, he should have said lunchtime to her.

To his surprise she wiped her face and said, ‘Yes, please. I haven’t been able to get up.’

He went to the kitchen and opened various shiny red cupboards, found her expensive tea – cotton bags! There was no teapot so he couldn’t make it proper; in the cups would have to do. ‘Got any milk?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Does it matter?’

They’d have to have it black. Any chance of biscuits? In the fridge were Yorkshire teacakes and he couldn’t help himself saying, ‘You’re from the north? Really?’

She didn’t look round. ‘My mother lives there. In the Peaks.’

‘I’m from the Lakes myself. Barrow.’ His accent came tripping through, running up like an eager dog. ‘God, you never see teacakes in the south.’

‘Have one.’ She couldn’t have been less interested.

He brought her tea and she ignored it, even though he slipped a coaster under it, a floral one he was sure had been her choice. ‘Haven’t you been eating, then?’ She was even thinner than before.

‘No. I was desperate to lose weight for today too – didn’t realise this would be the best way. To have my life ruined, I mean.’

‘You need to eat.’ He took out his phone.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Ordering a pizza.’

‘What – no! I don’t eat pizza. What—’

He held up his hand. ‘Yes, hello? Can I order a pizza – have you got a Hawaiian? Large one, please.’ He told them the address and hung up.

‘Are you serious?’

‘Girls always like Hawaiians.’

She tutted. ‘Yeah, because we’re all the same. I won’t eat it.’

But when it came she picked at one slice, then another, finally eating three, which he suspected was more than she’d had all week. His pineapple bits were lined up along the edge of the box lid, never could stand fruit on savoury food. ‘You look less peaky now.’

‘Who are you, my mother?’

‘Hope not. You said she did your head in.’ He whisked away the box and napkins, tidying the mess up efficiently. Once the pizza was finished and he’d taken a few details about the graffiti, Hegarty felt he should go. He wouldn’t be able to do much. He picked up his jacket and draped it over his shoulder. ‘Have you thought about what you’ll do? Are you going back to work?’

She winced. ‘I couldn’t. This wedding, it’s all I’ve talked about for months.’

‘You should go in,’ he said gently. ‘Try to keep things going.’

‘For when he comes back, you mean?’ For the first time she looked up.

He made a vague noise. ‘He’d want you to look after yourself, wouldn’t he?’ And she would need a job to pay legal fees.

Charlotte let out a shaky breath. ‘Maybe I’ll try to go in on Monday.’

‘Good.’ He resisted the urge to stroke her tousled hair. ‘I’ll be off. Look after yourself, Miss Miller. And you should really keep your doors locked.’

‘Please, don’t call me Miss – oooh!’ A big sob tore out of her and she put her hands up to her mouth. ‘I just realised!’ She had turned pale green, and he thought for a moment she might faint. He’d never seen a girl faint before – none of the Barrow locals would ever do something so weak – but Charlotte looked as if a wind could blow her away.

‘Easy now, sit back.’

‘It’s when you said Miss – I realised. It was meant to be Mrs today, wasn’t it? I was going to be Mrs Stockbridge.’ She barked out a short bitter laugh. ‘Everything was going to be different.’

Well, it certainly would be, but not as she’d hoped.

‘Officer? Is there any chance . . . Are you still looking into the case?’

He said nothing for a moment. ‘We still are, of course. But there’s a lot of evidence against him, you know.’ That was putting it mildly.

Her face was blank, like she couldn’t take it in.

‘You take care,’ he said again, tearing himself away from her bright hair and bruised face.

As he opened the door to leave, a man was standing in the corridor, staring at an iPhone with a map open on it. His hair was greying, and his suit must have cost more than Hegarty paid for his first car.

‘The door was open. I was looking for number three.’

‘Yeah, you’ve found it. I was just leaving.’

The two men sized each other up. Charlotte heard the voices.

‘Hello?’ Tremulous, she was coming to the door. She stared at the man as if she’d seen a ghost. ‘What are you doing here?’

The man said, ‘Well, the tickets were booked, so I thought I’d do some business, and then— Christ, what happened to your face?’

A choking sob rose up in her and her eyes glazed with tears again. ‘Oh, Daddy. It’s all ruined. Everything’s ruined.’

Hegarty shut the door on them and went home, where he played Pro-Evolution Soccer and ate an M&S Korma in front of the telly, alone in his small flat with the blare of sirens all night long.


Keisha

Keisha woke up in a strange place – her mum’s bed. Ruby had Keisha’s old room now, and she didn’t think she could stand sleeping in there with the kid’s things all round.

Her mother, so prudish, had written down what she needed from home in case anyone overheard ‘pants’ or ‘nightdress’. Mercy was on nil-by-mouth but she still asked for ‘a little something sweet’.

‘Yeah, right. Doctor said your cholesterol was through the bloody roof.’ Keisha kind of enjoyed scolding her mother like this. It made her feel maybe she was being an OK daughter after all, and it was a nice change from always being the one in the wrong. ‘They said you could have a cup of tea tomorrow. Nothing else.’

Mercy sulked. ‘So I can die of thirst then.’

‘You’ve got a drip!’ Somehow Keisha understood without being told that the drip was for liquids, so they didn’t go through your stomach, and you couldn’t puke up if you needed surgery. ‘I’ll need the key, Mum. I didn’t bring mine. Oh, shit.’ She’d just remembered again – Chris had her key. Or at least it had been in the flat, but maybe he didn’t know. If the almighty God her mother believed in existed at all, he didn’t know.

Mercy was half-asleep. ‘Language . . . In my bag . . . Don’t be making a mess now. Get Ruby up for school . . .’

Keisha wanted to say it, but didn’t. Ruby wasn’t there any more. She’d vanished, who knew where.

Back at the house she bolted the back door and went round to check all the windows. There was no reason he’d come back, was there? Maybe he knew Ruby was in care. Maybe he’d try to find her – but no, that was daft. Chris was far too lazy to try to track down a kid through the foster system, wasn’t he? She had to think that even if Ruby was gone, she was safe. She fell asleep thinking of her daughter in a snug room, all the windows locked and a burglar alarm, maybe a huge foster dad who did boxing . . .

The next day she packed up her mum’s things, the knickers bigger than T-shirts, the nightie like a sheet, her toothbrush and Bible. Some Tena Lady pads – Keisha threw them into the bag, embarrassed to think about why her mother needed incontinence pads. She was only sixty.

When she left the house to walk the short way up to the hospital, past the fancy cafés of Hampstead, she looked about her and drew up her hood. You never knew who might be around, did you?

Mercy seemed better that day; that is, she was grumpy as f*ck. ‘Tchuh, this nightie! I will be shamed, so old.’

Keisha sank into the plastic chair. ‘How was I meant to know?’

‘This nurse, she don’t give me a bath today. How can I keep decent for the doctors?’ It was true Mercy was giving off a bit of a cheesy whiff.

‘They said you could get up today. Didn’t they?’

She waved an impatient hand. ‘One say this, one say the other ting. I want to go home. Where’s my baby?’

‘I dunno. I was on hold for, like, an hour yesterday. Couldn’t get through to Sandra.’ Sandra was probably at a seminar on using people’s names a lot when you talked to them, or some shit like that.

‘You call them again. She can come home with me.’

‘Sure, sure.’ It wasn’t worth discussing now, what was going to happen with Ruby. Since Keisha had nowhere to live, would they let her move in with her mum and the kid? Then she’d have her back, in a way. But what if he came?

Her mother was rustling impatiently through the local paper, which she’d insisted Keisha bring from the gift shop. ‘Look, look. Here.’ She tapped a small notice in the back.

‘So, it’s a funeral. What about it?’

‘You will go.’

‘Me? You’re joking.’ Keisha hadn’t been in a church since she left her mother’s.

‘They will not let me go, even though I am in good health. But you must go for me – a good church family. Such a terrible thing, ah!’ She sucked at her teeth. ‘I cry when I hear it. These gangs over here, it is just as bad as Kingston when I left. That poor lady! To lose a son!’

Irritated by the suggestion that losing a son was worse than a daughter, Keisha said, ‘Who are you on about?’ She peered at the paper. Funeral service for Anthony Johnson, it said. The name rang many bells; big, heavy, dull ones. ‘You knew him?’

‘His mother, from church. Good Christian lady. This boy, not so good, but he would have come round. Ah, God, have mercy!’

Keisha remembered him, his hand halfway up that girl’s skirt. ‘I can’t go.’ What if he went? He’d gone to the court case.

She was definite: there was nothing she wanted to do less than go to a funeral, in a church, of someone whose death she maybe knew too much about, and possibly have to see the guy who’d beaten her up and given her mother a heart attack. But then Mercy had a big wheezing fit, flapping her arms and turning an even darker shade of plum, and the nurses came rushing over and gave her oxygen, and elbowed Keisha out of the way. She heard mutterings about prepping her mum for theatre.

‘What is it? What’s happening?’ She turned between them, the doctors, the nurses, these people in red and blue entirely focused on wrapping her mother up in tubes and stopping the awful choking noise.

‘Please!’ She never said please. ‘What’s going on?’

One of the nurses looked at her quickly, then away to the clipboard. ‘She might need surgery. Please, you need to let us work. Wait outside.’

As they whisked her mother’s body away down the long squeaking corridor, Keisha heard herself shouting, ‘OK, I’ll go! Mum! I’ll go to the bloody funeral!’


Charlotte

On the Sunday after the not-wedding day, Charlotte had to make her first visit to Dan in HMP Pentonville, and she was so nervous she almost vomited when she cleaned her teeth. The brandies her father had poured down her at Claridge’s the night before didn’t help. She had to get a grip. It was only Dan.

Her father hadn’t offered to go with her. He couldn’t anyway – you had to book. This was just one of many things she hadn’t known last week that she now had to. Dan was allowed more visits because he was on remand. Three times a week, they said, as if that was generous. It was a strange state to be in, since technically you were innocent, not convicted of any crime. But you were in prison, and your girlfriend – almost your wife! – had to get permission to come and see you.

God, what did you wear to visit your (innocent) fiancé in prison? She tried to put together an outfit that would make her look pretty, but not too tarty and not too well-off – she didn’t think they got many bankers in prison.

He was leaving already, her father. Stephanie wanted him back to go to an art fair, he said. He’d taken Charlotte out for dinner on what should have been her wedding night. A fancy meal was the last thing she needed, but that was him all over. Spending his money where it would be most conspicuous. Pretending he enjoyed eating liver and quails’ eggs, when she knew his favourite dinner used to be pie and chips.

He’d talked at length about how it was a disgrace that they hadn’t given him a refund on the flight, so he’d decided he might as well come. How it was lucky he’d been able to spend the morning with his broker, not a complete waste of time. Eating her rich, thick foie gras, Charlotte was too dulled to be upset. She kept thinking, Now we’d be sitting down to eat. Now we’d have the speeches.

Her father had ordered brandies and talked about the financial crisis. ‘I always said there was too little discipline in the banks. No wonder they have all these claims for stress at work. Stress! They don’t know the meaning of it. Aren’t you eating your dinner, Charlotte?’

She should tell him that if he really wanted to pass for posh it was ‘supper’, not dinner. ‘Oh, I am, just slowly.’ She tried to take a bite.

‘I’ve been thinking, now all this wedding business is knocked on the head, you might like to think about coming out East. Lots of opportunities there.’

She put down her fork. ‘Dan’s not even had his trial yet, Dad.’

‘Doesn’t hurt to plan ahead.’

Dan was always so good with her father, humouring his tetchy opinions, letting himself be lectured about wine and cars.

‘Dad, he needs a lawyer. Can you – do you know how I do it? I don’t know what to do, and the money—’

He misunderstood. Deliberately? ‘Of course he needs a lawyer. Wasn’t his father some big-shot judge? They’ll be able to help, I’m sure.’

Her dad was supposed to have been making his father-of-the-bride speech now, she thought. She’d only asked him out of tradition, and here he was urging her to leave the country, and her fiancé not a week in jail. ‘Excuse me.’ She walked through the restaurant as slowly as she could manage, then bolted into the ladies’ and threw up the brandy and pigeon and foie gras in two choking retches. She wiped her face and looked in the mirror at her swollen lip, the stitches still visible, the black and green eye, the whites bloodshot from tears. Her tongue found the gap where her tooth had been and she thought again: What’s happening to me?

Why get upset? Dan used to say. People don’t change. In so many ways her father, Jonathan Miller, was still the same man who’d shaken her off as she clung to his leg the day he left. She’d been eight, and until yesterday that had been the last time she’d cried in front of him, when he told her twenty years ago that he was moving to some place called Singapore with a Dutch broker called Stephanie, and that no, he wouldn’t be back for her birthday party. Up till now, that had been the worst day of her life.

Abandoning her efforts to find the right visiting-your-fiancé-in-prison outfit, she settled on jeans. It wasn’t as if any of it mattered.

Her stomach churning with nerves, like a combination of a job interview and performing live on stage, she made her way through the quiet Sunday streets. They had always loved Sundays, the one day where Dan would put away his spreadsheets, at least till the evening. The streets were sunny, people walking past with tennis racquets, babies in slings, the women in huge sunglasses and the men in polo shirts. What crap they talked. Jasper’s prep school. Our house is worth less than we paid. Holidays in Sardinia. That was the middle-class enclave she lived in. She’d never felt so left out of it before.

It was a short journey down to King’s Cross, then a switch to the Piccadilly Line. It was too short, really, and before long she was coming out of the tube at Caledonian Road, blinking in the bright spring light. She’d been there once before with Dan, to do a coaching session at the tennis centre up the road, but she didn’t want to think about that. She set off up the scruffier end of the road, past run-down corner shops and takeaways. How many times would she have to come here in future? Would she be getting to know that Chicken Cottage sign a bit better than she wanted?

Charlotte took deep breaths, putting one foot in front of the other. It was ironic that just a week before, she’d been worrying about the walk down the aisle. It’s easy, Dan had said, impatient with wedding talk. Just take a step, then another one. You’ll be walking to me, remember.

And now she really was walking to him, but not at all in the way she had planned.


Keisha

Keisha was cringing as she snuck into the porch. The Church of Holy Hope wasn’t a pretty stone one like you might see in the countryside, it was a huge white building with banners on the outside saying things like, Jesus Lives, Let the Lord into Your Heart, and so on. Stuff that her mother believed as truly as she believed that if you got on the train at Gospel Oak, you’d get off at Stratford. In fact, since God didn’t do planned engineering works, the route to Him was probably a lot more reliable.

Still wearing her jeans and hoody, she slid into the back seat and tried to keep her head down. No chance of that.

‘Welcome, sister!’ It was a jolly black vicar in one of those white collars. ‘Your first time joining us?’

‘I’m, er, Mercy’s daughter. You know, Mercy Collins?’

‘Sister Mercy? Ah, welcome. We heard of her illness. We are praying for her.’ He smiled wide as a banana, flashing white teeth. She could tell from his accent he was an import, reversing the way white people used to send priests out to the ignorant Africans. Now that the white people preferred to go to the pub on Sundays, they were having to get the Africans over to make up numbers. There wasn’t a single white person in the church, and Keisha felt, as usual, totally aware of her own pale skin. Sometimes she wanted to get a T-shirt that said, Yeah, I’m mixed. Stop f*cking staring.

‘Is this the funeral?’ She nodded at the host of squawking ladies in hats.

‘Yes. Such a sad day. The gangs, sister, they are killing our sons. So many of our worshippers came to London to escape violence. But now see.’

‘Oh, but I thought – did he not get into a fight? I mean, Anthony . . .’ She jerked her head vaguely at the altar, although the coffin wasn’t there yet.

The vicar shook his head from side to side. ‘There is talk. His mother, I know her well, she prayed and prayed for him to get out of the gangs, the drugs.’ He sighed at the endless waste of human life, the parade of coffins decorated in the various football strips of London. Postcode rivalry, the papers called it.

He patted her with a dry hand, and she saw with horror that he only had one. The sleeve of his other arm was empty up to the elbow. ‘Let God into your heart, my dear. Send His love to our sister Mercy.’

‘Yeah. Er, I will, yeah.’ She tried not to stare.

He bumbled off to the head of the church, and then music struck up – an R ’n’ B song, how f*cking surreal. And in came the coffin, held up by six black men. After came the women, wearing old-fashioned veils. She recognised Rachel Johnson, who’d stuck the boot into the blonde girl in the toilets. They reached the altar and set down their burden. Inside was Anthony Johnson, last seen groping a girl’s arse while wearing a cheap shiny suit. Now he was dead, his life all bled out through his throat. Keisha shuddered as the vicar invited all the ‘brothers and sisters’ to stand.

Afterwards, Keisha was trudging her way up the hill to the Royal Free again. She’d managed to slip out of the funeral without too many people shaking her hand. The vicar had collared her and made her talk to Anthony Johnson’s mother, who spoke in the same rich tones as Keisha’s own mum. ‘Mercy’s child,’ she said, pulling Keisha into a huge musty hug. ‘Pray for us, my child.’

‘Sorry for your loss,’ she muttered, thinking of the man with his flashing earring and wide smile.

Bloody hell, that had been embarrassing. All that singing and holding hands and eyes closed, begging for the soul of Anthony Johnson to ascend to heaven. When as far as Keisha could see, he’d been a lying cheating scumbag like most men. She reached the hospital and pushed in the swing doors, as if it was home to her now. She knew exactly which corridor to go down for Female Surgical. She knew exactly what bed her mother would be in, probably snoring, her huge bulk shuddering under the covers.

But she wasn’t.

Keisha’s head swivelled round and round, like some idiot on TV. Eh? Where was she? The bed was empty, the covers smoothed back as if Mercy had never been there. Her Bible and box of tissues were gone and the bedside locker had been wiped clean. For a few seconds Keisha wondered if she’d gone into the wrong ward, like a div.

A nurse in blue padded into view; it was the Irish motherly one who blessed herself every time she saw a patient. ‘Are you right there, deary?’

‘Er, where’s me mum?’

‘What’s that now, love?’

‘My mum – Mercy Collins. She was here.’ For f*ck’s sake.

The nurse stopped at the desk, huffing a little. She was about to end up on her own ward if she didn’t lay off the pies. She shuffled around the stacks of paper. ‘Now let me see, deary. Mrs Collins, was it?’

‘Yeah.’ The Mrs was a lie Mercy allowed herself. God wouldn’t want her to face the shame of being a Miss, not with a twenty-five-year-old daughter.

‘Ah, right so. She had a wee turn this morning, so they took her down to theatre.’

‘She’s in surgery? Still?’ Keisha had been gone hours.

The nurse kept peering; then she stopped and looked up at Keisha. For a second her endless chatter stopped and she said nothing; Keisha’s stomach went down like she was on a roller coaster at Thorpe Park. ‘Where is she?’

Chattery Nurse didn’t look at her. ‘I’ll just get the doctor, so.’

She left Keisha standing there in the quiet ward all alone.


Charlotte

After a week indoors, Dan was already sallow, his eyes dry and bloodshot as they brought him out. Although remand prisoners could wear their own clothes, he had on the same grey tracksuit as the other men, the rapists and thieves. The killers.

She swallowed hard.

Dan couldn’t meet her eyes. That was the most shocking thing. Unlike Charlotte, who was often shy, he’d always been able to meet anyone’s gaze. He said it was what made people trust him with millions and millions of pounds of their money. He’d been biting his nails, she saw, and there was a raw pulsing pimple on his neck. And she was such a fool, such an idiot, that despite all the hundreds of films and TV shows she’d seen with prison scenes, she still tried to jump up and hold him. They were nicer to her than they were in American dramas.

‘You’ll have to stay seated, miss.’ The guard looked like someone’s dad, soft round the middle. Charlotte caught up an hysterical shout in her throat; she really would have to calm down.

She’d always thought crime was something done by other people, a different type of person altogether. Never had it occurred to her that you could just stumble and fall, and bang into someone, and without meaning to, send their whole life flying off course. That was why Dan was here under this sickly light – because he’d fallen. That was all it took.

There was a little hutch over to the side of the room where volunteers sold tea and chocolate bars and things. It was the hot, sick smell of the burned coffee that she would never forget when she thought about what he said to her next.

For a moment she didn’t understand why he was standing there, just staring at her. ‘What the hell happened to your face?’

Of course, he didn’t know she’d been beaten up. ‘It’s nothing. I sort of – well, I sort of got attacked at the court. But it’s all right.’

He said nothing for a few seconds. ‘Because of me?’

‘I don’t know. It’s nothing, honest. Please, baby, sit down.’

‘Didn’t think you’d come today,’ Dan muttered, once he’d sat down and pushed his chair out.

She reached over the table for his hand. ‘Of course! It was the first time I was allowed, they said—’

‘I meant because of yesterday.’ His face was screwed up. ‘I kept thinking about it. It was so mad. I kept waking up, thinking I was going to be late for the church.’

‘It wasn’t your fault,’ she made herself say.

He laughed. It was a horrible sound. ‘Whose fault was it then? I’m never going to forgive myself for it. Look at your eye, for God’s sake! You look like a f*cking battered wife.’

He said it so matter-of-factly, it scared her. ‘It’ll heal, they said. It’s OK.’ She took out his post, screened at the door for any staples or sharp edges. ‘I’m sorry, baby – this came.’

Dan curled his lip at the embossed paper that announced his sacking. ‘Big surprise. They’ll want me as far away as possible now.’

‘But you worked there for years, you worked all hours. It’s not fair.’

‘You think they give a shit? They’re scared, see. Don’t want me shooting off my mouth about the things I had to do this past year, how stressed I was . . . No, they want me well out of the way.’ He leaned in close, eyes flicking round the room. ‘Listen. I’ve been expecting this. In the house, there’s a drawer.’ He was whispering. ‘In the desk. Promise me you’ll keep that stuff safe. Don’t give it to them, even if they ask.’

‘What stuff?’ She was bewildered.

‘Just promise.’

‘Well . . . OK, but it doesn’t seem fair, what they did. Is there anything we can do? Appeal? Sue them? I looked it up and there’s a chance you could even ask for bail again, if—’

‘What’s the point? I’m in prison, you may have noticed. Or did you think we were in Starbucks?’

She stared at him, hurt. ‘I don’t understand why you won’t at least try.’

‘For f*ck’s sake, there’s no point. Can you not see that?’

Charlotte blinked, trying to halt the runaway train of this conversation. ‘I know this must be hard for you—’

‘You’re not listening!’ He brought his hand down hard on the table, and the guard looked over warningly. ‘There were witnesses, and the CCTV . . . can you not see I must have done it? Everyone else sees it. Look around you.’ He was shaking badly now.

‘But you said you didn’t do it! You said you just hit him – just lightly!’

‘Charlotte.’ He lowered his voice. ‘It’s true what I said, in court. I have no f*cking idea what happened. It’s gone – black. As far as I know, I did it.’

‘But if you just tried to remember . . .’

‘Are you deaf? Jesus! I had a blackout. I’ve been having them for months, and nothing ever comes back. Bloody hell, you hadn’t a clue what was going on with me.’

She looked at her hands, afraid she might cry. ‘You never told me.’

‘Would you have listened? If it wasn’t about the wedding and wrapped up in a pink bow? All this time you’ve been in La-La-Land, all dresses and flowers and bloody sugar-coated almonds—’

‘Stop it! You could have told me.’

‘You’d never have understood. You heard the evidence – I went into the room with the guy and I came out, and next thing you know he’s got a bottle in his neck. With my prints on. I don’t know why, or how – but I have to accept I’ll go down. That evidence – how can you get round it? Ten years at least, I’m looking at.’

She flinched. ‘It won’t be like that.’

‘You want to be thirty-eight, coming up here every week? Jesus, you don’t belong here.’

She refused to look round at the room full of squealing kids, their ears pierced, smearing Wotsits on each other, and raddled women in baseball caps. ‘I’ll come as long as you’re here. I don’t care.’

He lowered his head into his hands. ‘That’s the thing. I don’t want you to.’

She gaped at him. ‘Baby!’

‘Charlotte, I . . . I can’t even start to say sorry to you for what I did. I ruined your wedding. It meant everything to you, I know.’

‘You mean everything to me!’ But as she said it she wondered how much it was even true. She’d been in a wedding fog for months now.

‘Look, I can’t understand it either, how this happened . . . I just have to accept it. But you don’t have to. I won’t ruin the next ten years for you too.’

Her eyes were overflowing with tears, stinging. ‘It’s not up to you. You can’t tell me this, you can’t say this.’

‘I’m sorry.’ He reached out for her hand; took it gently with his limp one. She felt some remnant of the warmth, the strength that had always seemed to flow out of him. ‘A week ago, I thought we’d be married by now . . .’

‘Don’t!’

‘. . . And I’d have tried my best, I’d have tried to work less – although the cost of that wedding, Jesus, had you any idea? Forty grand, Charlotte. You know how much I have to work for that?’

‘I didn’t know – you never said.’ She wiped her face on her sleeve.

‘You’ve had some bills come in already, I bet.’

‘Yes – I thought they were done automatically . . .’

‘I cancelled them. Cash-flow problems.’

Her mouth fell open. ‘But why – Dan, why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I couldn’t. See, I wanted you to have it all – I loved you, you know. I know I’m cold sometimes, and I can’t help it, but really I loved you so much.’

Past tense. Why was he using the past tense? The words were spilling out of him. ‘But the stress . . . You don’t know what it was like, the pressure, working all night, knowing we might go under. Christ, it’s almost a relief. At least I can say it now.’

‘But – but why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I couldn’t explain. You saw the papers, I suppose? What did you think of me, when you heard what that girl said we called her – a Paki bitch?’

She flinched away. ‘I didn’t believe it.’

‘Well, it’s true. I didn’t say it to her face, but I sent on the emails, I laughed . . . we bullied her. Because in that place, it’s kill or be killed. That’s the truth. And I hope you never have to understand that.’ He stood up, scraping back the chair.

‘Wait! You can’t just go! You can’t leave me . . . Dan!’

He half-turned. ‘Listen. I’m sorry, sweetheart. Really I am. But don’t come again.’