No Further Questions

by Gillian McAllister

  Those dark eyes; those little hands. So vulnerable, so desperate, that I forgot my own baby, in need of me at home.

  I wonder if she missed me, if she wondered where I had gone. If she knew that I would be back. That I was coming back to her as she died.

  Scott and I ascend the court steps together.

  ‘Ms Blackwater – what do you think happened?’ Another morning, another microphone.

  This time, I forcibly push it away: how would I know?

  ‘Where were you, Ms Blackwater?’ a male voice says.

  I can’t help but turn and look at him.

  ‘That night?’ he adds, like a prompt. Like I don’t know what he’s talking about.

  My face is scalding, and I will it to cool down, even though it only makes it worse. Scott glances at me, just briefly, his eyes full of concern. He reaches for my hand and takes it in his: we were both missing that night, he is saying with his hand, as he has said to me a hundred times before. No matter what the court says, the media, other people. We were both missing.

  I remember when I took Becky’s call. It was only afterwards – after I had attended A&E and I had seen Layla for the final time – that her words had sunk in: ‘Scott stayed an extra night.’

  I closed my eyes to it. Surely not. I had been away for two nights, and Becky was supposed to have Layla for only one of them. Scott should have been back for the second.

  But he hadn’t come back. He had simply extended his stay.

  I thought of all my preparations to leave Layla. All the things I put in place: making sure Becky was available, transferring the Moses basket over, expressing enough milk, washing enough muslin cloths, giving Becky the reflux medication, the sling, the pushchair. It had seemed like a military operation. Later, I learnt that Scott had just sent a text to Becky. One measly text. The conference was really useful: he wanted to stay an extra night. How easy it was for him.

  I try to be fair: would I ever have done the same thing? Stayed another night, because I was enjoying myself, because it was useful? No, I think miserably. I wouldn’t have.

  But it started with me: I chose to go away. And I chose not to come back until the Friday, by which time it was too late. Scott’s actions – to the media, to the lawyers, and so to me – seem incidental somehow to what happened to Layla.

  I, the mother, left her baby. It began with me.

  I look up at the building. It feels different on this, Day Two. Much like a house on the second viewing, things are coming to light that I hadn’t noticed before. The sprinkling of cigarette butts just outside the doors in two distinct clusters.

  I notice more about the lawyers, too, as I settle myself down at the very back of the public gallery. I eyeball Becky, first. She’s not looking at me.

  The prosecution and the defence are chatting as the courtroom fills up. The prosecutor has taken her glasses off, and she’s leaning in towards the defence lawyer as if they were two women in a café or a bar. Of course, I think. Of course they know each other. Of course they have countless trials at Hove Court against each other. The prosecutor is tapping her pen against the desk, faster and faster, as they chat. Harriet, the defence barrister, lets out a tiny laugh, and they stop speaking.

  I think of the timeline I made last night. It clarified nothing. Only what we already know. That Becky had Layla all evening, and that Layla died, sometime around eight or nine. My brain can’t make sense of it.

  ‘The prosecution calls Carol Richards,’ Ellen says, when the case has reopened.

  A small, mousy woman about fifty years old is brought in by an usher. She confirms her name and is sworn in.

  I settle back to listen but my eyes scan the jury, searching. What do they think? What do they think happened?

  8

  Carol Richards

  Afternoon, Friday 13 October

  Carol was preoccupied by the tea bags. Why did people find it so bloody difficult to clean up after themselves? She stared at those still-warm oozing tea bags, clustered like disgusting profiteroles on the little plate next to the staffroom kettle.

  ‘Carol,’ her colleague Alicia said, hurrying inside.

  Carol turned around quickly. Perhaps she should not, as the head teacher, be pondering the tea bags so seriously. She ought to be thinking deeply about discipline policies or oppositional defiance disorder. But one tea bag was still steaming, like a fresh dog turd, right there on the counter.

  ‘Hmm?’ she said.

  ‘Xander’s mother isn’t here again.’

  ‘Again?’ Carol said, before she could stop herself. Most unprofessional.

  ‘Phone’s off, too.’

  Carol looked at her watch: 4.00 p.m. An hour late. ‘Where’s the dad?’ she said with a sigh. What was his name? They were getting divorced, she knew, but his name escaped her.

  ‘Away with work – near Oxford. He’s coming in an hour, if she doesn’t turn up.’

  Carol looked out into the hallway. She could see Xander, a curious child, swinging his legs, the tips of his school shoes hitting the underside of the chair in front of him, jostling it slightly with each thump. Inch by inch, it moved away from him. He wasn’t sullen, exactly. She thought he might simply be anxious, shy.

  As if he could sense her looking, he darted a glance at the window to the staffroom, then looked quickly away again. He had his mother’s elegant neck.

  ‘Are you worried?’ she said simply to Alicia.

  ‘It’s … she was very sorry the first few times. They were right after she’d split up with Marc,’ Alicia said.

  Marc, that was it.

  Carol remembered the first occasion well. It had been spring, and Becky had rushed in, her cheeks flushed pink. Her expression was rueful, her words rushed and panicked, Carol had thought, while listening in, pretending to be looking at the timetable on the whiteboard out in the foyer. ‘I’m so, so sorry,’ Becky had said, dropping her usual cool exterior. Alicia had nodded, and Xander had gone to Becky.

  Becky’s head wasn’t in a good place, Alicia had explained later, which Carol thought was pretty fair. Of course not. Carol remembered those post-divorce days. She’d lost her house keys twice in the same week. It was as though her brain had simply emptied itself of normal life.

  Forgotten, Carol had said to Alicia. Becky’s first indiscretion should be forgotten. It was a one-off. And Carol had forgotten, mostly. At parents’ evening, she saw Becky across the room, wearing an artful scarf, not with Marc, yet so cordial towards him, which was interesting in itself – and recalled the incident again. But other than that, it had been forgotten, along with a handful of other parents’ indiscretions. But then it had happened again. And again.

  And now, Becky was missing for the fifth time in recent months. It couldn’t go on. Carol had to intervene, as the head, though it pained her to do so.

  ‘Next steps?’ she said brusquely now to Alicia. She mustn’t be too indecisive, get caught up in the politics of it all. She mustn’t, either, be too sympathetic, let her own experience cloud her judgement.

  The door opened, letting in a blast of cold air. And there she was. Becky, shaking raindrops off a yellow umbrella.

  ‘I’m so, so sorry,’ she said again, rushing over to Xander.

  He stood up and stepped towards her, leaning into her as she embraced him, Carol noticed. Good. She didn’t want to have to alert anyone. But she should. Her heart felt fat and full. I’m sorry, she thought. For making your single-parenting life harder. For making the burden heavier. Carol knew it well: the burden of the life led alone. Remembering to buy wrapping paper, and to get euros, and to buy rinse aid for the dishwasher … still, she got twenty-five per cent off her council tax, as an unhelpful friend once told her.

  ‘I’ve been looking after my sister’s baby, Layla, and my sister only just got back, and I didn’t have a car seat and …’ Becky was saying.

  Carol caught a scent of something on her breath. She paused. Alcohol, was it? Surely not.

  ‘Yo
ur phone was off,’ Alicia said simply.

  ‘I know – it died, and I was at my sister’s flat and we don’t have the same chargers, and she doesn’t have a landline …’

  Carol looked properly at Becky. There were myriads of solutions, it seemed to her. Borrow a neighbour’s phone. Send an email. Send a text from a website. Becky’s eyes were darting around the foyer.

  ‘Becky,’ Carol said. She tried to say it gently.

  ‘Yes?’ Becky said. She was fussing with her bag, but looked up and stilled, must have sensed Carol’s tone.

  Xander reached over and un-looped the strap. It was caught in her coat. Becky smiled at him gratefully, and he smiled back. A quick, genuine, broad smile. Carol was pleased to see that moment pass between them.

  ‘I’m afraid – this is the fifth time …’

  ‘I know. I do know.’

  ‘… he’s been left,’ Carol finished, nodding discreetly to Xander.

  ‘Yes, I know.’ Becky turned to Xander and passed him a key. ‘Go to the car,’ she said, smiling widely, falsely.

  Carol tried to suspend her judgement. Of course he would be fine in the car by himself. Perhaps Becky was trying to shield him from the conversation she knew was coming.

  ‘Becky,’ Carol said. ‘If it did happen again …’

  ‘Yes,’ Becky said.

  ‘We would have to arrange a home visit – to check everything is … well.’

  Becky let out a gasp and Carol stepped back. A charged moment passed between them. Becky’s eyes widened and she covered her mouth. Carol could tell that Becky knew she knew, that she could smell it. The alcohol.

  ‘It was wine o’clock, this afternoon, before I went to pick up Layla,’ she said. ‘Happy hour with some of the other mums.’

  ‘I see,’ Carol said.

  Becky’s lips parted. Her whole face blushed, even her forehead. ‘It’s not like that – this isn’t how it looks. There were a few of us, we went to a cocktail bar – God, that sounds seedy. It was someone’s birthday, and it was rubbish weather and we just thought we’d go and have a drink and a giggle in the middle of the day. It’d been organized for ages. I only had one. It was hours ago. It’s not – it’s not how it seems. I wasn’t – I wasn’t drunk or anything, when I collected Layla. It was nothing. Just one drink.’

  ‘This is the last warning,’ Carol said.

  9

  Martha

  ‘Thank you,’ Ellen the prosecutor says when Carol finishes speaking. ‘So tell me … you had to issue the defendant with that final warning – why?’

  I stop looking at Carol and instead look down at my hands. I had no idea. I knew Becky had forgotten Xander a few times, but I didn’t know about the most recent occasion. The sacrifices she made for me. Without telling me. That was true loyalty: suffering things without ever letting on.

  But … five times? How could that be? I close my eyes and think of Layla. I would never have not known where she was. Not even when I was away from her. Not even then. But … I admit to myself. That’s not true, is it? I hadn’t texted to check in, the night she died. I didn’t know.

  Was Becky neglectful? I examine the thought, this way and that. Maybe. Maybe. She was young, and chaotic, and sometimes selfish, yes. Perhaps she hadn’t bonded with Xander, as I worried I hadn’t bonded with Layla in those early weeks. Perhaps there really is more to Becky than I know.

  Nor did I know about the cocktail. Did I mind that she had been in charge of my daughter after a cocktail? God – did I? If this hadn’t happened, I would have thought nothing of it. A couple of glasses of wine at a barbecue, mothers marching their children back home, their tread laughingly uneven on the way home … it was just life, wasn’t it? Wine o’clock, a few too many gins, a bit of a tipsy lunch in the middle of the day. None of us are saints.

  Looking across at Becky, I try to think the best. She’s not an alcoholic. It didn’t make her late. She is just a normal woman who, like many women, might occasionally have alcohol on her breath in the late afternoon. I remember that lunchtime cocktail occasion. Becky had been looking forward to it, and look what it has become: a shameful outing, paraded in a courtroom in support of a murder conviction.

  But then … she had a cocktail, looked after my child, and forgot her own. She’d driven, too. Had she been over the limit? Why couldn’t she just abstain? If she didn’t have a problem?

  I shake my head, trying to get rid of the over-analysis.

  I picked Xander up from school myself, once, years ago. He must have been six or seven. I thought I was early, but he was still waiting for me, with a teacher – he was a conscientious sort of child; would always make sure he was where he said he would be – leaning against the lamp post outside the school. His hair had grown and lightened – it was late spring – and his limbs had lengthened and, as I pulled over and looked at him, I was struck by a thought: I was pushing thirty years old, childless, but, somewhere in the future, my children existed, as yet unknown to me. What would they look like? A loping, dark-haired, soulful child like Xander? A petite girl? I couldn’t imagine them, yet they already existed, somewhere in the future of my life. I felt the knowledge, the certainty that they were out there, and almost missed them, my children. Xander got into the car a few seconds later. We were going to the cinema.

  ‘Pick ’n’ Mix?’ he said hopefully.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ I said.

  ‘The best thing about Pic ’n’ Mix is there’s so much choice,’ he said gleefully. His enthusiasm was infectious; that childlike joy.

  Would my future son say things that would make me smile just like that? Xander smelt of earthy, crisp summer air as he reached behind me to stash his backpack on the seat, and I breathed in deeply. Afterwards, we went to Becky’s and played some computer game up in his room. I couldn’t work out the puzzles to move us from room to room, but he could. We laughed about that, together.

  I swallow hard now, in the courtroom; a mother, but childless once again, Layla’s potential having evaporated into nothing. Tears prick my eyes. Not for Layla, and not for Xander, but for Becky. Her parenting, put on the stand up there. What would my own look like?

  ‘Why did you sometimes sob when Layla cried,’ they would ask me. ‘And what led you to leave your child alone with Becky on so many occasions? Why did you prioritize other people’s children over her?’

  I wouldn’t be able to answer that, now.

  ‘It was a mistake,’ I would say. ‘It was a mistake because I believed they needed me more than she did. And it was a mistake because I believed that Layla would be safe.’

  ‘I thought forgetting a child five times was a bit beyond disorganization,’ Carol answers now, darting a look at Becky. ‘I suppose – I thought that she had a child and perhaps didn’t prioritize him.’

  ‘Neglect,’ Ellen says, her voice suddenly louder in the courtroom. ‘Was there any other evidence of this, would you say?’

  Other evidence. They were clever.

  ‘Bits and bobs. Xander was subdued, sometimes. She was evasive. Ignored letters. Once, he cried when I shouted at him.’

  I sit back in the public gallery. The chairs are hard and uncomfortable.

  ‘I didn’t get the impression he was hugely supervised, at home. He played a lot of computer games. Adult ones, I thought.’

  I had heard Becky shouting, once, through an open window as I raised a fist to knock on her door.

  ‘Give that back,’ she said, as I stood outside. ‘I can’t bloody deal with you any more.’ Her voice raised higher and higher in its pitch. ‘Xander.’

  I stepped back. I’d been calling in when I was working long hours from home setting up Stop Gap. I’d been breaking up my day, on the way back from Sainsbury’s. It was probably normal, I reasoned. A parent, during the Easter holidays, shouting at her then eight-year-old. I didn’t knock on the door, but I didn’t judge her, either. I thought hardly anything of it, until later, when I wanted to shout similarly at Layla. I got it, then. Now, I
’m not so sure.

  The two Beckies, innocent and guilty, stand before me, and I avoid the gaze of each one of them.

  ‘Nothing further,’ Ellen says.

  Harriet stands up for the defence. I’m getting into the rhythm of it now, the rhythm of the trial investigating my daughter’s death. The prosecution witness tells the story. Then the defence obliterates it. In a few days, it’ll switch, like a football team moving en masse towards the other end of the pitch to try for a goal after half-time. And with each moment that passes, we are closer to knowing.

  ‘So the defendant didn’t turn up at school a handful of times,’ Harriet says. She studies her nails, then looks directly at Carol. ‘Five times in … six months?’

  ‘A little less. Roughly once a month.’

  ‘How many other parents have done this?’

  ‘Many do it once or twice,’ Carol says. Her head doesn’t move, but her eyes flick towards Becky.

  Becky has more make-up on today. Her eyes look wide and dramatic, her cheeks pretty and pink, just like when she got married.

  I can still picture her wedding day. She’d changed into a black jumpsuit after the ceremony. ‘Why would I wear a stiff dress all day when I can wear something actually nice?’ she had said. Marc was sitting alone at the edge of the room, eating two slices of cake off a napkin. Becky came from the dance floor and went over to him, dancing moves from ‘Thriller’ in front of him. Marc’s face was creased with laughter. He waved her away, but continued to watch her dance, his eyes on her body.

  ‘Many. I see,’ Harriet says now.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And being forgetful is hardly neglect,’ Harriet says. ‘By your own admission, many parents have done it. Especially those going through marital issues, separations … working freelance, as the defendant was.’

  ‘Yes. But it’s indicative, isn’t it? Five times in as many months.’

  Harriet swallows and reaches to adjust her wig. ‘I don’t think it’s for you to comment on whether the defendant did or did not care about her child,’ she says icily. ‘Your evidence is that she was late to collect her child several times. She had a lot going on on these occasions. A separation – and then looking after a newborn. We’ve all become forgetful at busy times in our lives – haven’t we? When our minds are overloaded—’