No Further Questions

by Gillian McAllister

  I didn’t ask her to leave in order to be dramatic, or to make a point. That was just the first day that I had that glass-spilling-over feeling. I was at full capacity and had room for no more.

  She raised her hands in a kind of surrender, and turned to leave, but just before she did, she jerked her head, trying to look into Layla’s nursery, I thought. The door was closed.

  As she walked down the corridor, I said I would be in touch. But I haven’t been, because then the slow, creaking wheels of the justice system had begun to turn, and my relationship with Becky had ceased being about sisters discovering a childhood teddy, or sharing a takeaway together, or a series of jokey text messages. It had become something beyond itself, expanding from just us, and being invaded by bigger concepts: justice, evidence, guilt. We were no longer sisters, instead a witness and a defendant.

  Contact was prohibited, and so that was the last time we spoke.

  Please believe me. Would she say that if she were innocent? Or guilty? I sit down on the floor next to the cot and pick up Flappy. I close my eyes. Please believe me. Why not I’m so sorry, Martha? Was it the shock of being under suspicion, or something more? It was all about Becky. That’s the thing. The thing I try to forget. Things have always revolved around Becky. Especially now.

  But being selfish doesn’t mean she’s guilty.

  I reach up and take out the notepad and pen I kept by the breastfeeding chair. Those early days of motherhood felt like I had become the CEO of a vast, sprawling company with no training, and I had been for ever making lists of things to buy, and what needed to go in the washing with the muslin cloths, and how much tummy time I needed to start introducing.

  I have always been hard-working, effortlessly organized. My binders at school and university were colour-coded, alphabetized by topic, practice papers printed out on the first day of term and filed in the back of a lever arch file, ready for exam season. Becky used to think it was hilarious, but then I became a teacher, and every single one of my colleagues was like it, too. I spent my summers reorganizing my classroom displays, and Becky helped sometimes. ‘If you’re going to be anal about it, you may as well make them look pretty,’ she’d said once, joining me with sugar paper, glitter pens and glue.

  But motherhood took even me by surprise. Owning a charity, having been a teacher for years … and yet nothing could have prepared me. Keeping a small human fed, clean and happy was the biggest undertaking of my life.

  It’s impossible to explain the juggernaut of motherhood to anybody who hasn’t been there: the vast reorientation that takes place in the labour suite and never really rights itself again or, rather, doesn’t need to. Even Scott, he didn’t matter, not up against Layla. He was her co-creator, with me, but at her conception we ceased to matter. We passed the gauntlet to the next generation, but – and it was a surprise to me – it happened willingly, happily.

  I remember the first night we had started trying. Scott had made a lasagne – I loved to watch him cook. He was methodical and calm, one saucepan discarded and placed in the waiting dishwasher immediately. His layers of pasta and sauce and Bolognese were careful and neat. I had looked around our flat, after we had eaten: half a bottle of wine left on the driftwood table, but nothing else. I looked at it and thought: After all these years, I still love spending the evening with you. His shirt was rolled up to the elbows, and I walked across to him. He immediately hugged me, as he always did, always would. Never moody, never highly strung, never petty. Always ready to hold me.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if there was someone else here, just over there?’ I had said lightly. ‘Somebody to look after. Somebody to …’ I didn’t finish the sentence. Somebody to bind us together. It would have sounded wrong.

  He didn’t say anything, but his eyes were bright as he looked at me. ‘Yes?’ he said. ‘Go on.’

  ‘A tiny little someone,’ I said softly.

  And he’d nodded.

  It was simple to him. He was following the formula to life. Buy a flat, get married, have a baby. It was all instinct, all correct – none of Marc and Becky’s chaos – and there was nothing wrong with that. Perhaps it had been just right.

  We threw the condoms away and made love while the dishwasher rumbled in the background. I went to get a glass of water in the kitchen, later, and looked at it, our tidy kitchen, our life together, the underfloor heating warm under my bare feet, and felt totally and completely safe. I wanted our baby to feel that way, too. I was ready for it. To bring someone else into our lives, and to make them feel safe. I hoped they would have Scott’s calm manner, his still mind.

  I draw a dark, navy-blue swirl across the top of the page now, in the nursery. I was always making lists at work, too. Lists that led me to leave Layla with Becky. What had I been thinking? How could I? Scott tried to talk to me about it, a few months ago. The circumstances were unusual, he said. My job at Stop Gap, the charity, hadn’t been a normal one. I had stared silently into my dinner.

  It won’t bring her back, this list. But it might help me. I lean my head against the wall. I stare out of the window and look at the way the Brighton street lights flare up into the sky and I write at the top of the pad:

  In order to recover, I need to understand it.

  I google the definition of murder and write it out on the next, clean, smooth piece of paper:

  Murder is committed where a person of sound mind and discretion unlawfully kills … with intent to kill or cause grievous bodily harm.

  I stare at the piece of paper. I think the defence’s case is that Layla’s death is unexplained. Natural causes, or an accident. No murder, just tragedy.

  On the left, I write:

  An accident?

  Underneath the list, I draw a line. On it, I write down Layla’s bedtime. Only Becky, Scott and I know it, her routine. I start there. It’s as good a place as any. It won’t bring her back, but it might bring me peace.

  Above the timeline, I write:

  The night in question.

  6

  Judge Christopher Matthews, QC

  Christopher lets himself into his seafront town house alone. It smells empty. Cold, too, despite the late summer heatwave. The cleaner has been – he has never met her, but he imagines her to be petite and ruthless – and the wooden floor gleams as he sets his red robing bag down on it. The dog walker has been, too, and Rumpole emerges, the sound of his claws on the tiles like clinking marbles.

  ‘Alright,’ Christopher says to him, as if he is a housemate or child.

  Rumpole stops and looks at him seriously, then turns his head to look sideways, pointedly, at his bowl.

  For the first time in years, Christopher feels unsettled by a case. He shivers in his cold kitchen and rubs the dog’s head.

  It is a baby case. Is that why it feels eerie? He supposes so. An eight-week-old, found unresponsive in the morning. Of course that is chilling. Of course it is.

  Not to mention the rest. Two sisters, ripped apart by the justice system. An ad hoc nannying arrangement, gone horribly wrong.

  No, that isn’t why, he realizes, as he looks out on to his back garden. That isn’t why he feels spooked and strange.

  It is the cause of death.

  Smothering.

  Even the word is sinister. The images it brings to mind.

  ‘Horrible, isn’t it, Rumpole?’ he says.

  Layla had been found unresponsive in the morning, and had been in the sole care of the defendant, Becky, for the entire previous evening. There had been no witnesses.

  It is cut and dried, surely.

  The experts were in agreement that the baby had died in the evening – between 8.00 p.m. and 9.30 p.m. The 999 call was made at eight o’clock the next morning. The delay doesn’t look good, Christopher thinks.

  That said, the police hadn’t suspected murder for a whole week. Cot death, they’d thought, until the post-mortem showed smothering. No, not smothering, he corrects himself. Asphyxiation. There is a subtle difference. Oft
en, asphyxiation means smothering, but not always. Sometimes, it is an accident. She could have rolled over. Become tangled up in her blankets. Something he hopes for. Natural causes. The only possible defence, he thinks.

  ‘We’ll have to see, won’t we?’ he says.

  Rumpole looks back at him, cocking his head.

  Sadie bought them the dog. Completely out of nowhere, when they were forty-five, and still in love, he supposes. He arrived home from a case about one prisoner encouraging another to hang himself, his gut still in knots from it, and there was Sadie, her slim ankles tucked up underneath her, her legs tanned from the summer, a Labrador sitting upright, primly, next to her as if they were in a waiting room.

  ‘He was abandoned,’ she said immediately. Apologetically, he thought.

  He studied the dog. Blond fur, eyes rimmed with dark brown. The dog considered him, too.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ he said to Sadie. A sentence he bitterly regrets.

  He pours himself a glass of water now from a bottle in the fridge. He should read the submissions, later tonight. There is something in Becky Blackwater’s past they want him to consider. He hopes it isn’t something bad. Something even worse than what is playing out in front of him.

  He’s never seen an aunt accused before. Had Becky done it? He holds the glass up to the light and looks at its cloudy contents. It is a hard-water area. Sadie had always said it made her hair fluffy. He had never said it didn’t. That her hair looked just fine. It was dark, no greys until she was in her late forties, and it shone with glimmers of light when she turned her head. Why hadn’t he told her how beautiful she was?

  Is Becky guilty? Hmm. She’d been the only person there that night. And eight-week-olds weren’t mobile enough to have accidents. What other explanation can there be? He hopes for one, though. Some tragic explanation he can’t quite think of at the moment.

  Her lawyer is under pressure, though: he can tell. He sips the water again. Sometimes, the lawyers look tense like that when their clients are innocent, and they know it. But sometimes they just look like that when they’ve had a run of bad luck, tough cases. It’s hard to tell.

  Well, what will be will be, he tells himself. The jury will sort it. He reveres them, these lay people who are summonsed, who give up their time for justice, who listen carefully and – pretty much always – return the right result, even when faced with the most complex of legal concepts.

  He finishes the glass and gets the file out of his briefcase. Rumpole places his head on his lap, and Christopher shifts comfortably; content.

  Now. Yes. To Becky’s history. He sets the papers on the arm of the sofa and begins to leaf through them. As he does, his hands still. He reads the words again and again.

  Oh, God, he thinks to himself. Oh, God.

  Now, that changes things.

  TUESDAY

  * * *

  7

  Martha

  I sometimes dream of Becky. Nothing much happens, I’m just watching her, as though my brain is trying to hang on to her features, to memorize her, so she doesn’t slip away. Her arched eyebrows. Her bottom lip, slightly bigger than her top. The crooked incisors. Those Bambi lashes.

  Pulling the laces of my trainers tight still gives me a kind of Pavlovian pleasure, even though all of my last three hundred morning runs have been bleak. It only takes five minutes to get down on to the seafront and the air seems to expand as I arrive. They are digging up the ground, near the marina, and I slow as I negotiate pedestrians on a temporary walkway, joining throngs of commuters in my leggings and T-shirt.

  After a few minutes, I escape and run behind the beach huts.

  Do they wonder how I could leave her? The lawyers didn’t question me on it. Perhaps it is too delicate, or perhaps it is irrelevant. Either way, I appreciate it.

  In a funny sort of way, it was a morning run just over two years ago that led me to leave her, though she wasn’t born yet. Scott and I were in Kos, on an all-inclusive break during the school holidays, when I first saw the refugees, though such a word does not do them justice at all. Nobody expected them. It was the very beginning of the crisis.

  They arrived on the inflatable boats – as flimsy as our Li-lo that we used to float around on, drinking cocktails. Wet toddlers, their hair smeared against their scalps, curling and cow-licking like a newborn’s. A boy with one trainer on, one trainer missing. A woman, baby at her breast, whimpering into a headscarf so that the baby wouldn’t see. A life vest, bobbing in the water, its owner unknown.

  We were there right as it happened, right as it hit the newspapers and social media. Scott held my hand when I got back to our hotel, and didn’t complain when, out to dinner, my eyes strayed to the sea, to the beach, again and again.

  ‘They must be exhausted,’ I said to Scott over prawns.

  ‘Of course,’ he said, the subtext a sad but stoic: What can you do? It was his response to almost everything. During extreme turbulence, he would calmly say, ‘Well, we can’t do anything about it,’ as though that made it less frightening. As though he was fine with disaster, with destruction, with death.

  ‘What must your life be like – to get on a ship like that? No, not a ship … a raft, pretty much. You must have to be so … desperate.’ Their bodies flitted into my mind. The life vest. The missing trainer, bobbing alone somewhere in the sea. It was too much.

  ‘Can we go down? And help?’ I said.

  He nodded immediately, never minding how he spent his free time, wanting only – it seemed – to please me.

  We helped out for the rest of our holiday, taking parcels from the Red Cross centre to a refugee camp. I handed over cheap fleece blankets, canned goods, plasters and bandages. I gave them to anybody who would take them. Scott didn’t mind. He never once said he wanted to be back by the pool, eating unlimited food and reading books.

  The Greek government put the refugees up in an old, abandoned airport. Anybody could go in, and I did, while Scott was showering one night. I sneaked over there, after an all-you-can-eat dinner at our hotel, a warm paper bag in my hand.

  The noise and the heat of it struck me first. Worse than a dormitory. Strung-up sheets were makeshift curtains, held together with pink clothes pegs. The signs were still up: TERMINAL 1. TERMINAL 2. DUTY FREE. Plate-glass windows had shattered, leaving shards that somebody from the Red Cross was sweeping up. How could this be? How could we walk away from this and return to our sunloungers?

  I sat on a wooden chair, not wanting to stand and stare any more, and then I saw it: a dark eye. It blinked, then locked on to mine. I smiled. Could he see both of my eyes, or just one? I crept closer to the curtain, the wooden chair squeaking on the floor.

  A little hand emerged from between two curtains, the fingers curling around a pegged-up sheet. The hand retreated, after a second, leaving dirty marks behind it. I sat on a rickety wooden chair and watched. Then the brown eye again, peering out at me from between two grubby sheets.

  He revealed himself, and there he was, a little boy, maybe two – he was so thin it was hard to tell. The other hand – dark with dirt, tidemarks of it across the back of his hand – was in his mouth, sucking on his index and third fingers. His feet were bare, slapping on the linoleum floor as he moved unsteadily towards me. Those brown eyes on me, on mine.

  And then the thoughts came. I could leave here, leave Kos, finish my holiday, forget these children. I could read about them in the newspapers and donate to Save the Children and do all the right things – above and beyond the right things, even – that anyone might have expected of me. But that grubby hand in his mouth. His skinny little legs that should have been fat with rolls of flesh. Where were his parents? He was alone, behind that curtain, advancing towards a perfect stranger.

  No. I couldn’t. I couldn’t buy The Big Issue and drink Fairtrade coffee and leave it at that. I couldn’t. Those dark eyes. Those little hands. I could not leave them.

  We played for a few minutes – peekaboo – until a woman in a h
eadscarf came to collect him. Her arms were slim and toned and the veins on her hands stood out in the heat. She scooped him up and took him back behind their curtains. I saw as she disappeared behind the sheet that it contained a bench, an old airport bench. Exactly the sort Scott and I would sit on in a few days’ time as we waited to board our flight home.

  I left, making my way back to our hotel which sat at the top of a hill, away from the beaches and the life vests and the children. I arrived back at our hotel room half an hour later. Scott was asleep on the bed, in his towel.

  I sat down carefully next to him. He opened his eyes immediately, a smile already on his face. That was one of the things I loved most about him: he was always – unfailingly – pleased to see me.

  ‘You’ve been sleeping,’ I said. ‘I’ve been to see the children.’

  ‘I was sleeping to forget them,’ he said. He rolled over on to his side and pulled me towards him. ‘How can we think about going home?’

  ‘I know,’ I murmured, lying next to him. I closed my eyes. Of all the people on the planet, here I was, lying next to the man who felt the same as me.

  I returned just under seven weeks later, my registered charity set up. Scott paid for it with his bonus. ‘My gift to you,’ he said shyly over dinner one night. ‘No. Not gift. My—’ he stammered. ‘Our joint venture. For the greater good.’

  I clinked my glass against his and didn’t think I could love him any more than I did then.

  The local Greek authority let me have the old building the fish market used to operate from before the recession. They didn’t seem to care who took it. It was cool, and dark, but the smell: oh my!

  I scrubbed it. Cleaned the walls during the last week of the summer holidays. I would set something up – something helpful – and be home by September, I told myself. I returned a few months later, pregnant with Layla. Stop Gap had grown from a tiny start-up to an established charity with a budget and a business bank account. The children lined up every morning for lessons, for food, for a go on an iPad. We had to turn half of them away most days.