Today was the first day of the trial. I was taken by police van to the back of the Old Bailey, where I was escorted inside with my hands locked in front of me and a blanket over my head. I felt the crowd around us and saw the flashbulbs bounce off the rain-slicked pavement. A woman shouted, ‘Repent or die,’ and I presume it was meant for me. Once inside, the blanket and handcuffs were removed and I was led through what felt like miles of labyrinthine corridors which seemed to be underground. We stopped at the bottom of a flight of stairs, at the top of which was a shut door. The guard went in front of me and I followed. It took me a minute to realise we had made it into the courtroom as we walked up and through the door. The light was bright and there was a cacophony of noise from the many people who were there. But I soon saw that I was in the dock, as Xander had told me I would be, a long box which ran across the back of the courtroom. He had also told me time and time again that because V and I were being tried together she would sit in the dock with me, which meant we would be sharing not just the emotion of the room but the physicality of it. It was a delicious thought which had kept me awake at night, as if the whole of the British legal system had been designed for this moment alone.
The guard indicated for me to sit, so I did and he sat down next to me. Xander turned from his table at the front and nodded at me, his absurd wig bobbing into his eyes. I knew that V was somewhere in the building, probably not even that far away. I was about to see her and at that moment I would have given my freedom for just one glimpse.
She arrived a few minutes later via a door which meant she had to walk through the body of the court to reach our box. I felt a surge from the people in the room, as if everyone was as drawn to her as I was. A female guard ushered her into our space, but at the other end of the dock, sitting next to her as my guard had done, as if they knew it would be impossible for us to be alone and not touch in such a confined space. V was carrying a cardboard cup which brought with it the scent of coffee. I knew it would contain a skinny latte; we’d drunk enough of those together over the years and, for some reason, this memory almost seemed worse than all the others. It seemed so carefree and innocent compared to where we were now and I couldn’t understand why it was proving so difficult to return to. I looked over at V, desperate for her to glance over even for a second, but she refused to return my stare, her pursed lips sipping from the white plastic lid.
She was dressed in a black skirt and jacket, with a white shirt underneath. Her hair was tied into a low ponytail and she didn’t look like she was wearing make-up. But the eagle was round her neck, which made me relax slightly. She kept her eyes in front of her and her expression neutral, but I could see the twitch at the corner of her mouth and the drag in her cheeks. I was worried by how pale she was, almost Kaitlyn-colour, and she had lost a substantial amount of weight so she was verging on being too thin.
‘Don’t do anything stupid,’ had been Xander’s last words to me. ‘You have to seem like the sane, stable one. You can be upset, you can fight your corner, but do not do anything to arouse interest. It is imperative we direct the attention towards Verity.’
I looked at the jury as they filed in, but they were no different from a group of people you might see in a train carriage or walking down the street. They varied in age, gender, ethnicity, weight, height. They all glanced at me and then round me to get a glimpse of V, before looking away again quickly. For all I knew one of them could have enjoyed drowning kittens in their spare time, or going to church, or swimming. None of them looked as intelligent as V and me and it seemed absurd that they should be deciding our futures. Although I had to check that thought. We were deciding our futures. We had engineered this. We were playing the game and they were just coming along for the ride.
There would be people I knew sitting in the rows in front of us but they felt like a bogeyman, as if by not looking at them I could somehow make them go away. When I lived with my mother there were monsters in the corner of my room only I could see, hidden by the cobwebs and filth which clung to our walls. I came to an agreement with those monsters. If I agreed never to look straight at them they agreed not to eat me. It lessened the terror a bit.
I looked anyway. Elaine and Barry were there and they both smiled in a low, depressing way. Colin and Suzi were in front of V, both shrunken and thinned, like pruned trees. Suzi was leaning across Colin to talk to a man who looked so like Angus he could only be his brother and, next to him, were Angus’s parents, whom I remembered from the wedding.
It struck me then that this was in fact like a wedding, bride’s family on one side, groom’s on the other. And that made me feel better. I looked again at V but she was still staring straight ahead. I wished I could tell her that this was our conjoining, our true beginning, the end of our ultimate Crave, but the start of something more wonderful. A normal, bog-standard wedding was never going to be right for us. This was a much better way of cementing our union.
‘All rise for Justice Smithson,’ said a loud voice and the room moved as an elderly man in a flowing red robe with a greying, powdered wig on his head climbed the steps to the altar. Xander had been very pleased by Justice Smithson; ‘old school’, he’d called him, which was apparently a good thing. When Justice Smithson sat we all copied him and he looked down on us like he enjoyed his job. His eyes rested on me and then I followed them to V.
There is so much empty time in court, so many hours pass in which nothing is really said or established. I find myself looking at the dust which collects between the glass and the wood of the enclosure they have put V and me into. I try not to look over at her too much and she never looks towards me. But there are moments when something is said and I feel the pull between us like a wire, feel us reaching and straining for each other.
People stand, people sit, the judge nods and the barristers speak to the jury. The jury frequently looks over to V and me; I can feel their eyes on us and I know they have no idea what to think because they are such ordinary people, puffed out by life. The charges seem so large: murder for me and accessory to murder for V. And I know the jury is so far from being able to make these sorts of decisions about us. They seem like nothing more than children being told bedtime stories when Xander and Petra speak to them and I am not sure they even listen to the details. I see them yawn and rub their eyes sometimes; one of the young men looked hungover a few days ago.
And sometimes I hardly blame them because so many stories have been told in here it is hard to grab hold of what they mean. Sometimes even the witnesses change their minds halfway through as the questions switch between Xander and Petra. Angus’s brother, Frederick, told us that they had all liked Verity and had never seen Angus so happy. But he also said that sometimes it had seemed too much, that maybe you could say he was almost under her spell, that it was a lot of money to leave to someone you had known for such a short time.
I hate the thought of V having Angus’s money. I think we should burn it. I think we should fill his stupid show-off house with notes and set fire to it, watch it dissolve into the air like the nothing it is.