Hope you don’t mind me doing the full Cinderella on your flat.
My way of saying thank you, for all of it.
You don’t need to thank us – but thank you, I sent back.
When Kit got home, very late, with a sagging satchel of essays to be marked, he interpreted the tidying as a peace offering on my part for bringing Beth into our flat, and I didn’t correct him.
Chapter 28
LAURA
20 May 2000
I would have been easy to track down in those days. Langrishe is an unusual name; I have never chanced across another Langrishe. When the letter came, a jaunty diagonal on the tatty doormat, I knew what it was at once; not just its origin, although the prison frank told me he was now in Wormwood Scrubs, but its contents. He could have only one reason to write. He had written on – oh, irony – lined, yellow legal paper.
Dear Laura,
I write this in my cell at Wormwood Scrubs. Next door there’s a serial child rapist. Last week he threatened a female warden’s life with a razorblade embedded into an old toothbrush handle. This is my life now. These are the kind of men you have condemned me to live with. The only thing keeping me going, apart from Antonia and my family on the outside, is that I know I do not deserve to be here, and that I will doubtless be released when my name is cleared.
Why, Laura? I am still at a loss as to why you lied in the witness box at my trial. You know that you did not hear my accuser say no. I know you know it. You might have fooled the jury, you might even have persuaded my accuser you were telling the truth; but you and I know. How do you live with yourself?
You will have heard by now that we are appealing the verdict. I am confident that before long we will meet again in a court of law, and this time my counsel will expose you. Isn’t it better to do the decent thing now, to contact the police, or any of my representatives, and correct your testimony rather than have it happen in court? Of course there will be repercussions for you. But wherever they send you cannot be as bleak as where I find myself now.
I will keep writing to you. If I write to you enough – and I have time on my hands – I believe the gravity of what you have done will sink in. I saw you in Cornwall and I saw you in court. I recognise passion and principle when I see it, and I am sorry that these qualities have guided you to the wrong conclusion. But your conscience must be pricking and I make no apology for exploiting that. So please, please: take back your lies and give me back my freedom.
Yours,
Jamie Balcombe
I thudded on to the stairs so hard my hipbones hurt. The arrogance of the man hit me first; that he had the audacity to talk in terms of things we both knew, when I had been there, when I had seen it. In the confident tone of his letter I sensed again that knife-edge charm. I thought then that he must be in breach of at least one law, to write to a witness. I looked into it later that week, making furtive, expensive phone-box calls to witness care and the probation service, and found that this kind of thing happens a lot more often than you’d think. Writing to a witness is only a crime if there is intimidation, and he was too clever to threaten me outright. He must have known that I was too scared of exposure to take it to the authorities, anyway. Checking outgoing post, I learned, is a random process, and they’re looking for breaches of security – drugs, or escape – rather than talking about the case. I suppose if they censored every convict who protested his innocence, the letters would dry up pretty quickly. Maybe if I had kept all the letters, their frequency and volume might have added up to some kind of harassment or intimidation, but all I wanted then was to get rid of them before Kit could see them.
Back then, I could easily differentiate between Jamie being right, which he technically was, and his righteousness, which I didn’t believe he was entitled to.
I opened the street door and left it on the latch. Tiptoeing in bare feet across the filthy pavements of Clapham Common Southside, I put the letter in a public wastebin, wedging it between an empty Starbucks cup and a newspaper. All weekend, I felt its presence in the street outside. I didn’t relax until the Tuesday morning, when the refuse lorry came at dawn. I watched from my balcony as the men in overalls tipped one bin after another into the dustcart. I convinced myself that I saw the yellow paper, bright as a lie, churning over and over in the rubbish as the maw of the refuse lorry chomped down on the indigestible truth.
Chapter 29
KIT
19 March 2015
After the viral video debacle, I need a gesture, something to appease Laura. The equivalent of coming home with champagne and flowers, the romantic flair I have so often been told I’m sorely lacking. Darren’s film captured my two distinguishing features. The first, my Chile ’91 T-shirt, is now rolled tightly into a side pocket of my rucksack, where it will stay until I go back to London. The second, the ginger beard, makes me instantly recognisable even in this Viking country. Getting rid of it is the best way I can think of to regain my anonymity. That’s how I find myself in Me Time, the Princess Celeste’s on-board beauty parlour. It’s a terrifying, unportholed room that smells of female hair and alien chemicals. There’s a single sink with a shower attachment and one of those dips for your neck that looks like an executioner’s block. An old lady with diamonds on her fingers and orthopaedic shoes on her feet flicks through Hello! magazine under an old-fashioned space-helmet hairdryer.