She dropped her voice as Carol Kent came our way.
‘Mr Polglase says that’s fine,’ Kent told us. ‘Keep your phone switched on, and don’t wander out of signal.’
‘Thanks.’ Kit stood to leave.
The voice over the public address system was as Cornish as tin mines and pasties, long Rs raking in longer Os.
‘Crown versus Balcombe, Court Room One.’
‘I’m offski,’ said the reporter. ‘Talk later.’ She slammed the aerial back into the body of the telephone and followed the Balcombes through the double doors. She was followed by another journalist with a geometric bob, a Press Association card on a lanyard around her neck.
Seconds later, the place was deserted, only us, a few court staff and a little blue butterfly flitting around the foliage. The usher from earlier looked at us and frowned. I felt suddenly under scrutiny. The atrium seemed to shrink around us.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ I said.
‘You’ve changed your tune.’
‘Do you want to go or not?’
‘All right, keep your hair on.’
We’d never spoken to each other like that before.
The pretty bit of Truro town centre doesn’t extend far; within an hour we were already retracing our steps around the lanes. We wandered into the cathedral, pottered in bookshops and an art gallery. There was a museum but we decided to save that for if it rained. Lunch, in a pub at the bottom of the hill, was a baked potato, prawns swimming in mayonnaise and a half-pint each of a local ale called Bilgewater that tasted nicer than it sounded.
‘I wish I knew what was being said in there,’ I told Kit, grinding pepper over my plate.
‘Well, you can’t. That’s the whole point of your testimony. That it needs to stand independently of the complainant’s version. Otherwise it’s worthless.’
I pushed my food away. ‘I’m too tense to eat. What if our testimony isn’t enough to put him away?’
‘You’re acting like the whole thing’s on you. I’ve told you, there’s a whole team of people who’ve been building a case for months. I wonder what forensics they’ll have.’
We’d been through this before, too. It was an effort to keep my voice even. ‘There might not be any forensics. It’s just a case of who you believe.’
Kit shook his head. ‘Words are just so . . . flimsy, aren’t they? Like, you’re always telling me I’m too binary. That I only think in black and white.’ It was true: I nodded. ‘But in this case, we’re asking everyone to think that way and there’s no evidence for any of it apart from words. How can you possibly secure a safe conviction that way?’
‘What else is there?’ I asked.
He couldn’t answer, just looked pensive and took another inch off his drink. ‘We did a pretend trial in sixth-form,’ he said after a while. ‘I had to give evidence. A hypothetical drug-trafficking case. I was bricking it even then just getting up, even when it was all fake and in the common room.’
‘I didn’t know that!’ We were still at the point where new stories were both delightful – there is still so much to discover about you! – and an affront – why didn’t I know this about you before?
‘I take it Mac was the defendant.’
Kit’s face flickered in a memory, then he laughed. ‘Actually, he was the judge.’
‘Fucking hell!’
‘Our teacher had a sense of humour,’ he conceded. ‘Anyway, the point was, that once I actually did it, all the nerves went away, because I just said my thing, and that was all there was to it.’
I knew he was right, but it couldn’t still the nerves that took away my appetite for food but gave me a thirst. If we hadn’t been waiting for Kit’s phone to ring, I could have sunk three pints. Fat raindrops hit the windows like stones.
‘Museum it is, then,’ I said.
But the museum was closed for the afternoon. We went back to the pub and played a game of pool on an uneven table. (I won, obviously: despite months of playing against me, Kit had yet to internalise the mathematics of trajectory and ricochet. Where I saw sport, he still saw applied projectile physics. He had a terrible poker face; you could always see the next move coming a whole minute before he picked up the cue.)
We wound up our game when we could no longer ignore the local teens looking longingly at the baize.
‘It’s three o’clock,’ I said. ‘She’s probably in the witness box right now.’
‘If they needed us back, they’d have called us by now. Let’s go back to the hotel.’ We handed over our cues.
‘What are we going to do in a hotel room all afternoon?’ I whinged, as I pulled on my coat. Kit smiled.
‘God, things aren’t that bad, are they?’
They weren’t that bad, but even half a pint of beer hits hard on an empty stomach, so I just lay there making the usual noises while Kit went heedlessly through the usual motions. He finished in double time and was asleep in seconds, the release of orgasm a traceless Mickey Finn. I knew it would be an hour at least until he woke up. Outside, the rain had stopped and the rooftops of Truro glistened in the sun.
The clock said quarter past four. An idea came to me and I was back in my clothes before I could change my mind, out of the door and following the magnet pull to the courthouse on top of the hill.
Chapter 12
LAURA
8 May 2000