A battering on the door makes me and Laura flinch but Beth is immobile. When I open the door to the police and paramedics, my hand makes a bloodied smear on the brass knob. Outside, the emergency services have blocked Wilbraham Road. A patrol car is diagonal across the road markings. There are two ambulances either side of it, blue lights rotating in silence. One of them is now merely a hearse. I usher the paramedics in their green boiler suits downstairs to the kitchen where there might be one life left for the saving.
Laura finally peels apart from Beth, standing over her while the experts take charge. She looks like she’s wearing red evening gloves that reach up to the elbow.
‘She’s gone into shock!’ says one of them. Laura claps one hand over her mouth and begins to babble under her breath.
A third paramedic enters the kitchen and looks in alarm at Laura’s swollen face.
‘Are you Christopher Smith?’ the police constable asks me. Thickset, with rugby shoulders, he looks like the kind of boy who would have bullied me at school.
‘You don’t need to arrest me,’ I say. ‘I’ll come with you.’
He surveys the bloodbath below.
‘Oh, I think I do,’ he says. ‘Christopher Smith, I am arresting you on suspicion of murder. You do not have to say anything but it may harm your defence . . .’ I let his caution roll over me as I offer up my wrists. All my attention is on Laura, standing at the bottom of the stairs. The carmine imprint of her own hand is across her mouth; her arms cradle her belly. The look in her eyes hollows me out.
‘When?’ she asks.
When what? It takes a few seconds for me to understand what she means. That cry through the letterbox. It was Beth, warning me to shut up.
Beth didn’t tell Laura what happened on Lizard Point.
I did.
‘In Cornwall,’ I say it at last. ‘The night before you got there.’
Laura nods once, then closes her eyes as if the sight of me is more than she can bear. The handcuffs’ click reverberates through our red kitchen. I drop to my knees. My bound hands are dead weights in my lap, my wedding ring bloodied. Laura turns her back on me. As my heart comes undone, somewhere in the loss and the horror is the overdue liberty of relief.
Fourth Contact
Chapter 62
LAURA
30 September 2015
We stand side by side in front of the speckled mirror. Our reflections avoid eye contact. Like me, she’s wearing black and like mine, her clothes have clearly been chosen with care and respect. Neither of us is on trial, or not officially, but we both know that, in cases like this, it’s always the woman who is judged.
The cubicles behind us are empty, the doors ajar. This counts for privacy in court. The witness box is not the only place where you need to watch every word.
I clear my throat and the sound bounces off the tiled walls, which replicate the perfect acoustics of the lobby in miniature. Everything echoes here. The corridors ring with the institutional clatter of doors opening and closing, case files too heavy to carry wheeled around on squeaking trolleys. High ceilings catch your words and throw them back in different shapes.
Court, with its sweeping spaces and oversized rooms, plays tricks of scale. It’s deliberate, designed to remind you of your own insignificance in relation to the might of the criminal justice machine, to dampen down the dangerous, glowing power of the sworn spoken word.
Time and money are distorted, too. Justice swallows gold; to secure a man’s liberty costs of tens of thousands of pounds. In the public gallery, Sally Balcombe wears jewellery worth the price of a small London flat. Even the leather on the judge’s chair stinks of money. You can almost smell it from here.
But the toilets, as everywhere, are great levellers. Here in the ladies’ lavatory the flush is still broken and the dispenser has still run out of soap, and the locks on the doors still don’t work properly. Inefficient cisterns dribble noisily, making discreet speech impossible. If I wanted to say anything, I’d have to shout.
In the mirror, I look her up and down. Her shift dress hides her curves. I’ve got my hair, the bright long hair that was the first thing Kit loved about me, the hair that he said he could see in the dark, pulled into a schoolmarm’s bun at the nape of my neck. We both look . . . demure, I suppose is the word, although no one has ever described me that way before. We are unrecognisable as the girls from the festival: the girls who painted our bodies and faces gold to whirl and howl under the moon. Those girls are gone, both dead in their different ways.
A heavy door slams outside, making us both jump. She’s as nervous as I am, I realise. At last our reflections lock eyes, each silently asking the other the questions too big – too dangerous – to voice.
How did it come to this?
How did we get here?
How will it end?
Chapter 63
LAURA
28 September 2015
Tonight there will be a blood moon; not a solar eclipse but its inverse, the earth passing between the moon and the sun. At three o’clock in the morning, the light passing through the earth’s atmosphere will turn the moon a rusty red. There are no windows in Kit’s cell in Belmarsh. He will only be able to observe the lunar eclipse if the twelve men and women currently deliberating his case find him innocent.
‘I feel sick,’ I say to Ling.
For once she doesn’t try to reassure me; she’s all out of platitudes. ‘So do I,’ she says.
I run my wrists under the cold tap. We are in the women’s toilets at the Central Criminal Court, better known as the Old Bailey to the public and simply the Bailey to those in the legal profession – and I am beginning to feel like a professional witness.