‘No re-examination from me, Your Honour,’ said Polglase through clenched teeth. I couldn’t look in his direction. I’d gone from his star witness to his saboteur in the space of . . . I looked at the clock and was staggered to find I had only been up there for twenty-five minutes.
As I was led from the witness box, I heard the judge saying that we would break for lunch, his words warped as though bubbled through water. I was probably supposed to wait for Carol Kent outside but I fled the courtroom before the atrium could fill again. I was half expecting uniformed officers to arrest me for perjury at the door. Outside, I took deep lungfuls of air as the Truro skyline swam in and out of focus. I felt like hurling myself down the hill and into the river. Fiona Price had read my mind. She had seen what I was doing before I had. I had blown the whole thing. The only thing that had – not gone well, as such, but not been a disaster – was that Kit hadn’t seen me perjure myself. I wasn’t who he thought I was. I wasn’t who I thought I was.
Chapter 16
LAURA
9 May 2000
I was allowed into the public gallery now that I had testified. During that lonely lunch hour, though, as I paced around the drizzly courtyard, I thought seriously about not returning to court at all. But how would I explain my absence to Kit? He would know that something was wrong. So, at two o’clock, I filed behind the Balcombes into Court One. From the witness box I would have said that Jamie’s entourage filled the gallery but still they managed to arrange themselves so that the seats either side and in front of me were empty. His mother – wearing emeralds today – actually cringed whenever I moved, but this only made me sit taller and gave me a new resolve. Fronting it out like this might actually strengthen my case in the jurors’ eyes. It was the perfect bluff; who would lie in court and then put herself back under scrutiny?
Kit naturally took the secular oath. He hid his nerves with a bluster that must have looked to strangers confident, pompous, even. Like me, Kit was introduced by way of his education – a couple of jurors, including the mumsy woman and the Sikh man, actually nodded their heads in approval at the mention of his double first from Oxford – and then, like me, he recounted the events of that August morning. Nathaniel Polglase had no further questions, but Fiona Price was eager. ‘Can you take me through, once again, the seconds before Mr Balcombe departed the scene?’
Kit nodded. ‘Laura was shielding the girl, and she, that’s Laura, was in a stand-off with the defendant. He was trying to laugh it off with me, but it wasn’t very convincing; it was sort of forced laughter. He only took it seriously when Laura said we had to get the police along.’
‘Did you give him a chance to justify his departure from the scene?’ Her tone was different with Kit, free from the rhythmic, hectoring inflections that had characterised her cross-examination of me.
‘No, but he didn’t try to.’
‘I didn’t really get a feeling for the defendant’s pace in your original statement. Was he walking like a man who was trying to escape harassment?’
Kit gave it some thought. ‘He didn’t run, but he definitely picked up his pace when he saw me coming after him, and then he was swallowed up by the crowd. I followed him for a bit and then another crowd merged with us and it was hopeless.’ He looked stricken all over again at the memory.
She folded her arms underneath her gown. ‘What were you going to do if you caught up with him?’
‘Honestly? I don’t know. It was all so in the moment. I suppose I thought I’d make some kind of citizen’s arrest, although I wouldn’t have had a clue how to go about that.’
‘So. You didn’t see the intercourse?’
‘No.’ Kit’s voice was dispassionate, disconnected and utterly authoritative.
‘You barely saw the victim?’
‘That’s right.’ He could have been answering a survey, he was so collected. I’d previously criticised Kit’s ability to divide fact from emotion. Now I only envied him. Why can’t I do that, I thought at the time. I realised later there was one crucial difference; he was telling the truth.
‘And you didn’t bother to ask the defendant why he was running away?’
‘No.’
‘So essentially your testimony is just an extension of your girlfriend’s, isn’t it? You were acting on the basis of what she decided he’d done?’
‘I trust Laura’s judgement.’ said Kit evenly. Guilt wormed inside me.
Can you state, under oath,’ pressed Fiona Price, ‘that the sex was non-consensual?’
‘Of course I can’t,’ said Kit. ‘You can’t swear to something you didn’t witness.’ His smile disarmed Price into a worried frown, the first genuine expression I’d seen on her face all day. Kit had, with the counterweight of his own bold truth, undermined her with her own question. A ripple of annoyance ran through the assembled ranks of Balcombes at my side. Precious stones and expensive watches rattled as arms were folded and heads shaken. They’re going to give her hell for that, I thought.
I changed out of my dress as soon as we were back in the hotel room. Kit sat cross-legged on the bed, still in his suit, a tourist map of Cornwall spread out before him, gazing unseeing at the snaking coastline.
‘I don’t think I realised what a fucking minefield it was till I was up there in the witness box,’ he said. I didn’t know if he was referring to sexual boundaries, the criminal justice system or entering into a debate about either of those things with me. ‘I mean, when they were asking me about the way he ran off; you know, is he guilty or innocent? I’m glad we don’t have to go back again.’