At first, his only feeling was one of disbelief as the cell door closed behind him. Disbelief was followed by rage. Sometimes he wondered if this rage, white hot and pulsing, would attack his spleen and give him cancer, cells corrosively multiplying each time he thought about Amanda Bowe and all she had unleashed. His rage died in a sudden, exhausted splutter and, as the walls of the prison moved closer around him, he stopped demanding justice, lobbying politicians, the chaplain, the prison governor, anyone who was prepared to listen. The media, who had hung on his every word, captured his every expression, now ignored his frantic letters, his insistence that he was the victim of a miscarriage of justice. His letters to Jenna and Justin also went unanswered.
Fionn Drury visited him regularly. His solicitor was a fighter, Karl would grant him that. But his efforts to have bail set for Karl had been refused each time. The prosecution considered him a flight risk, who needed to be detained at the State’s pleasure until the date of his trial. Karl understood the judge’s decision. Of course he was a flight risk. To see Sasha once again, to reason with Nicole; the temptation to follow them to New York would be too great.
Nicole had visited him before she left for New York. He had noticed a new firmness about her mouth as she sat before him, her arms rigid by her sides, avoiding contact with her surroundings as much as possible. Her tears had dried. She needed to go home to support her mother. Teresa Moynihan was becoming confused. A diagnosis of rapid onset Alzheimer’s had been made and Nicole was determined that her mother should stay in her own home for as long as possible. Her father was floundering under the strain of looking after his business and his wife.
‘Please bring Sasha to see me before you go,’ Karl had begged her.
‘No!’ Nicole was vehement. ‘You can’t possibly want her to remember you in a place like this.’
‘I’m innocent, Nicole.’ It had been a lone cry in this wilderness of disbelief. ‘I want her to understand that terrible mistakes can happen. I won’t be found guilty. I can’t. The evidence is circumstantial. It will never stand up in court.’
‘So you keep saying.’ She had looked across the prison table and beyond him. ‘I want to believe you. But the air I breathe in Glenmoore is thick with suspicion. It will choke me if I don’t leave.’
He had drawn back from her grief and the overpowering shame he saw in her eyes.
‘I can’t even hide in my own house,’ she continued. ‘Those kids who set fire to it piss in the living-room. They’ve broken the windows and painted slogans on the walls. I’m trying to protect Sasha. She doesn’t understand why we’re living in rented rooms. I can’t send her back to school. Can you imagine the names she’d be called? My family need me and I need them.’
‘I’m your family, Nicole.’ Even as he spoke, Karl knew this was no longer true. His marriage was over. It had ended when his wife decided that the confused recollections of a frightened, heartbroken boy carried more weight than the word of her husband. ‘You’re running away and taking my daughter with you. It must be wonderful to have an escape route.’
‘Don’t you dare simplify what I’m going through.’ He had never seen her so enraged, her cheeks flaring as she leaned back as far as possible from him. She was unable to face Jenna and Justin. Guilt by association. Sasha crying at night because her father wasn’t there to read her bedtime stories. Crying because she was unable to understand why she could not sleep in her own bedroom, safe under her Dora duvet.
They talked in circles, the circle reducing a little more each time until finally only a dot remained in the middle; an atom filled with the explosive remnants of their failed marriage.
He had spoken to Sasha on the phone before they left for New York. She cried and demanded to know why he wasn’t coming with her. Nicole had taken the phone from her and ended the conversation.
Being on remand, he was allowed five phone calls a week. Apart from contacting his solicitor, he used his phone card to ring Sasha. She always broke down in tears during their conversations. Nicole told him to limit his calls. They were preventing Sasha from settling down in her new home. She confined Karl’s calls to one a week and began to make excuses when he rang. Sasha was sleeping. She was at the movies with her grandfather or on a play date with new friends she had made in school.
In his cell, he stared at mindless afternoon chat shows on television. At cookery programmes where celebrity chefs demonstrated meals that everyone would admire but never cook. The Teletubbies with their tinny voices unnerved him, yet he stared dully at them as they wriggled their plump bottoms, skipped down hills and watered talking flowers. He knew their names, Tinky Winky, Dipsy, Laa-Laa and Po. It scared him, being able to remember such information. He wondered if he was going insane. He had always imagined madness as a flailing hysteria, subdued only by restraint or drugs. Not this dulled indifference that slowed his footsteps and made even the most basic attempts at conversation impossible.
Tomorrow would be different. Karl made this promise to himself each night before he fell asleep. Tomorrow he would awake energised and deal with his situation; but within a few minutes of opening his eyes he would sink back again into the same mindless puddle.
‘You’ll come out of it,’ Fionn reassured him. ‘Shock can manifest itself in many ways and this is how it’s affecting you. Do you want to seek help from the psychiatric services?’
‘Why? No one believes I’m innocent.’
‘I do.’
‘What makes you different to everyone else?’
‘Male intuition and a first-class law degree.’
‘How can you be so intelligent yet look like you’re still too young to vote?’ Karl demanded.
‘Youth is my secret weapon.’ The solicitor smiled. ‘It disarms the opposition. It’s too late for recovery by the time they discover I’m a wolf.’
Karl began to keep a journal. When his sanity deserted him, his writings would stand as testament to the fact that he was once stable and lucid. He recorded the daily minutia of prison routine. Time had been shredded of meaning but in his journal, each entry dated, he recorded the clang and clatter of his new life. The shouting voices, the commands of prison officers, the cries and expletives of new arrivals, the intimate sounds of desperation seeking relief. He ended each entry with a doodle, the same cluster of smiley faces he used to draw for Sasha’s amusement.
He never wrote about Amanda Bowe. Never stained the pages with her name; yet she was always at the forefront of his thoughts.
‘She doesn’t forgive easily,’ Barbara Nelson had said in the throes of the search for Constance and he was still bewildered at how she had trapped him in a Kafkaesque nightmare. A nightmare that had taken everything that was precious from him. No going back, no going forward, eight months slowly, torturously sliding by as he waited for justice to be denied or delivered.
Chapter Eighteen