That evening I had finally, and with a breaking heart, come to terms with the cure for my insomnia. In the week since our move to Harringay, I hadn’t slept for more than three hours. Exhaustion, if it continued at this level, was bound to loosen my tongue in a way beyond my control. I cradled the greasy receiver between my neck and chin, a five-pound Phonecard poised at the mouth of the slot. I had been in this position for five suffocating minutes, DS Carol Kent’s business card balanced on my other palm. The card was ragged at the edges and grass-stained from Lizard Point. The Jamie Balcombe Is Innocent campaigners would doubtless have wanted me to contact them directly but Kent’s wrath seemed preferable to their glee.
I had known on hearing the verdict that Jamie’s conviction was unsafe, but I had still believed it to be just. Now I knew that Beth, too, had lied to the police, and presumably again, under oath, about how she’d travelled to the festival, and while I could see her reasoning, it didn’t chime with what I’d seen of her after the assault. In our flat, she had revealed herself to be first voyeuristic, then petulant, inconsistent and finally violent. None of these things individually undermined Jamie’s guilty verdict, but collectively, they changed everything for me. My white lie was blackened, streaked with soot. Did I still believe Jamie was guilty? Yes . . . yes. Yes, most of the time. Did I still know he was guilty? No. The conviction was unsafe.
I knew what I stood to lose by making the call. The physical consequences hung over me. Perjury. Possibly perversion of the course of justice and contempt of court. It would be prison for me if I came clean, but this was as nothing compared to the personal consequences. I would be waving away my father’s pride in me, Ling’s respect; and almost certainly my relationship with Kit. The career I so desperately wanted to build was at stake too. I couldn’t see many charities trusting a convicted perjurer with their reputations. I punched in the area code, every number a step away from the only life I’d ever wanted. And yet confession was what I would have expected, demanded, from anyone else in the same position. It was what Kit would have expected from me.
A siren shook the windows as a police car in chase forced vehicles to part where they could. As it inched past me, the long arm of the law got me in a chokehold. The muscles in my neck started to cramp and the walls of my throat closed in.
I couldn’t do it. I saw, with horrible clarity, that I wanted my life and my reputation to stay the way they were. I never knew, till that moment, how big my ego really was. I consulted my reflection in a pane of dirty glass and felt a sudden, vertiginous loss of self. It seemed that I would rather take a chance, however small, on an innocent man serving time in prison than take responsibility for lying in court.
Staring into my own dark heart like that, is it any wonder I went mad?
At home, Kit was valiantly making spaghetti on our crappy little two-ring cooker, concern peeping out from behind his smile. He’ll never look at me like that again if I tell him about the trial, I realised. I can never make that call. A strange feeling rode in on the wake of that thought; the hairs on my arms standing up in a wave, as though disturbed by a breeze, even though the air was thick with steam.
‘This is good,’ I said over supper. The pasta was slightly overcooked, the way we both liked it.
‘Thanks,’ said Kit distractedly. His eyes didn’t seem able to meet mine, but kept dropping to somewhere near my plate.
‘What?’ I set my fork down.
‘It’s just, could you stop scratching? It’s really annoying.’
I followed his gaze to my forearms and was shocked to see them latticed with red lines. ‘I didn’t even know I was doing it,’ I said, but I was suddenly aware of a low-level tickle on my skin. It felt as if I was walking through a wood in which webs trailed from every branch of every tree.
‘Have we bought a different kind of washing powder or something? Maybe you’re allergic to an ingredient or something.’ He jumped up to check the cupboard under the sink. ‘No, it’s the same one.’
Now it felt as though the branches themselves were scraping at my skin. The scratch marks were rising into welts.
‘What if it’s some kind of delayed smoke inhalation?’ I asked. ‘Or nerve damage?’ I didn’t feel right on the inside either; there was a whirring in my chest, like something was trying to drill its way out.
With his good hand, Kit tilted my chin to look at my neck, then lifted my top to examine my belly and back. ‘It must be a localised reaction to something. It’s only on your arms.’
My skin was on fire all night. When I at last dropped off, I dreamed of my mother covering insect bites with calamine lotion, and woke with tears in my eyes and blood under my fingernails. The alarm clock display jumped from 8.20 to 8.21.
‘Why didn’t you wake me up?’ I said, bursting into the sitting room where Kit was at his laptop, the modem lights glowing beside him.
‘You’re not going to work, I’ve called in sick,’ he said. ‘I’ve got you an emergency appointment at the GPs.’
‘For a bit of itching?’ I felt wired and edgy, like I’d drunk a whole pot of coffee.
He took my face in his hands. ‘Whatever this is, we’ll get through it together, ok?’
‘You do think it’s because of the fire?’ I started to shake.
‘You know I’d look after you whatever, don’t you?’ he said.
I only found out later that Kit had been awake all night looking up neuropathic itching on the internet, and coming up with a shortlist of degenerating conditions. He was as relieved as I was surprised by the GP’s brisk diagnosis.
‘You’re having a panic attack, dear,’ she said. ‘Hardly surprising given what you’ve both been through.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘This is physical.’
‘It’s psychosomatic,’ corrected the doctor. ‘The human mind’s a tricky old sod. I’m going to prescribe a steroid cream to calm your skin and some Diazepam to give you a bit of breathing space, and I’m going to refer you to a counsellor so you can nip this in the bud before it gets out of control. It’s a seven-week wait for counselling on the NHS. Can you pay to fast-track?’
All I could think of was the day’s missed work, and Kit’s hand, healing more slowly than the doctors had predicted.