No Further Questions

by Gillian McAllister

  ‘But Becky would admit that, wouldn’t she? If she said she’d co-slept with Layla, or she’d found Layla tangled up or something, then she wouldn’t have been tried.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say. I close my eyes and pray for it to have been an accident. I’ve lost my daughter. I don’t want to lose my sister, too. ‘They might say it’s—’

  ‘What?’ His tone is soft. He is not being harsh. Or, at least, he does not mean to be.

  ‘They might say that they don’t know,’ I say desperately.

  ‘Science is science. That’s what they’ll say. Somebody did it.’

  The words thrum through me.

  Somebody did it. Just as I had thought earlier on. What if somebody had been there that night? And not Becky?

  Something fires up in my mind. Becky left Layla alone. What if something had happened while Becky was at Londis at 7.45 p.m.? The times check out. Layla died between eight and nine thirty. It could have been somebody else.

  ‘Somebody killed her,’ Scott says softly, unaware of my mind racing. ‘We know that. Even if the verdict is not guilty, we still know that. Babies don’t die from asphyxiation for no reason, Marth.’

  I can’t handle that. Not guilty, but no explanation either. No. I will trust in the system. Somehow, somehow, we are going to find out what happened.

  ‘I was away. From her. I was away,’ I say, the saliva clogging my throat like a viscous syrup.

  ‘So was I.’ His voice is anguished, too. ‘It was me who should have been there. Not you.’

  ‘We both should have been there,’ I say tightly.

  ‘But you only went because you knew it was only one night – that I’d be back for the second night. And I wasn’t. I just didn’t come back to her.’

  ‘It’s different for you,’ I say, wondering if I truly believe that. If I am simply caught up with the narrative surrounding the case. I draw a deep breath. No. I’m not. ‘I was her mother,’ I say to him. And that is what I believe. My role in our family was senior to his. However unfair that is. However sexist.

  ‘That’s bullshit,’ he says. ‘It was both of us. It was me.’

  And now I see his anger for what it is. He wants to feel like he is fighting back. Ethan is smoking. Mum is with Becky, in private, mothering her. And Scott is getting angry.

  And here we are: the culpable parents. The parents who were not there. We’re not in the dock, but we should be.

  Marc hasn’t been allowed in the public gallery, because he will be a defence witness, later in the week, and he has Xander, so I am surprised to see him walk into the foyer. The day outside, through the windows, has a faintly autumnal feel, as though the light outside has been heavily filtered through a grey curtain.

  Becky emerges from her meeting room, flanked, as ever, by her legal team: she is expecting Marc. She crosses the foyer to him, reaches for his arm, her fingertips just touching it. It’s impossible to read the expression on her face. He nods at her, smiling shyly, and follows her across the foyer to the room.

  The things that must go on behind those doors. I watch them, still walking closely together like a couple, arms almost brushing, and I cannot help but remember the reason for their separation. What she did to Marc. It is not evidence; it is not admissible, but it is the truth. I put it out of my mind. I can’t think about that now. Besides, I am sure the court will come to it. They ransack your personal life, your history, your mistakes, when you are accused of a crime. They will come to it.

  ‘He did these courses on the internet,’ she told me, two Christmases ago, twenty-five days after they had broken up. ‘FutureLearn, they were called, and they were the end of us.’

  I’d been contemplating getting pregnant for some time. Sort of. In my own way, taking literal years to reach a decision: the Martha way of life. Some decisions were merely made for me, in the end.

  Marc had moved out on the first of December. Becky had joked she was having a bottle of wine for every day of Advent, but her voice sounded strangled as she said it.

  ‘Why?’ I said. We were in Mum and Dad’s living room. Christmas-stocking bunting was strung across the fireplace and Elf was playing in the background. My socked feet were flung over the arm of the sofa, mulled wine in my hand. Would I give up the wine for nine months, and the peace for ever? I wasn’t sure. I rested my hand on my stomach and tried to imagine it full and pregnant, little realizing that the beginnings of my baby were already curled up inside me.

  Becky shrugged. ‘I think by the time you’ve done twenty FutureLearn courses your marriage might be over.’

  She was sitting cross-legged on the floor, in front of the television, with her back to it. She often sat in that spot, like a cat; she said the pipes crossed and there was a warm patch. She was always so cold. She was picking at the skin around her fingernails.

  ‘Forensic profiling. Beginners’ Mandarin. Hedge funds. You know?’

  ‘Right. That’s … not like him,’ I had said. Marc had always seemed to me to like simple things. He would always eat the same packet of cheese and onion crisps during half-time in the football. Every single Saturday, match day, he would check in, on Facebook, writing: Fingers crossed!

  ‘No. He got kind of obsessed,’ Becky said.

  ‘I see.’

  ‘By the time – I don’t know. By the time I emerged from the early years of motherhood it was too late.’ She shrugged.

  It seemed a strange gesture, twenty-five days after her marriage had ended, but she was like this. Prickly, sometimes.

  ‘It’s hard. Having a baby, I guess. Wasn’t Marc … wasn’t he good, though?’

  Becky gaze locked on to mine. ‘They can only do so much,’ she said. ‘It’s the women who suffer. It’s always the women.’

  ‘Is it?’ I said.

  ‘Of course it is. We try to reach equality, but we never fucking will. Breastfeeding. Labour. It’s all us.’

  ‘You were a kid yourself, anyway,’ I said, trying to talk her down. ‘Besides all of that.’

  ‘Yep. We limped on for seven years. Almost eight. But think about that. It wasn’t that we were too young or whatever. We didn’t stop having sex – we were always so good at sex.’ She gave a little laugh, a sort of puff of air out of the side of her mouth; a half-smile. ‘It was just the good old-fashioned daily slog of parenting that did it. Isn’t that fucked up?’ She stopped picking at her fingernails and raised her head to look at me.

  ‘Not really,’ I said. ‘You’re pretty textbook.’

  ‘Cheers to that,’ Becky said. Even there, on the floor at Mum’s, a single mother in a Christmas jumper, she looked cool. She looked directly at me. ‘So I slept with someone else,’ she said. ‘That was the real nail in the coffin. After the FutureLearn, obviously.’

  Becky. A dishonest cheat. I never thought she would be unfaithful. Could she surprise me in other ways, too? How dark did her personality go?

  ‘I … oh,’ I said. ‘God … when?’

  ‘Five weeks ago. I told him – Marc. I couldn’t live with myself.’

  ‘Where was it?’ I said.

  ‘Where?’ she said, looking at me with a sudden look of distaste. ‘At his.’

  I blinked, imagining affairs to be seedy things, taking place in alleyways and across office desks.

  ‘So you went to his.’

  She waved her hand again, then went back to chewing her nails. ‘It wasn’t what it sounds like,’ she said. ‘Not like that.’

  ‘How was it, then?’

  ‘If you must know, we were shit at getting pregnant and even shitter at being married,’ she snapped.

  She didn’t say any more than that. I wish she had. But she had all these barriers up all the time. Humour was one. Barbed comments were another. Underneath that – occasionally glimpsed – was soft, yielding Becky. But she was hard to find.

  I sigh now as I think back to their marriage. How she and Marc used to be. Their obvious sex life. ‘I’m going to bed, and you’re coming with m
e,’ Becky had said, tugging on Marc’s hand, only two summers back. Their desire to spend all their time together; Becky following him to his carpet-fitting appointments, sitting on kitchen counters and in the next room, just talking to him. So different from me and Scott.

  The most Scott has ever done is bring me fruit and vegetables from his patch of land. A bunch of fresh broccoli. A punnet of strawberries, grown by him. He means well. It’s just … practical. That’s all. Love, for Scott, is cooking a meal, changing a light bulb, buying me a book I’ve expressed an interest in. He makes my life run seamlessly, and I loved that once. So capable and calm. He made me ham sandwiches every morning after his paternity leave, cutting them into bite-sized pieces so I could eat them one-handed. He didn’t leave a flamboyant, loving note, as Marc might. But there was love there. There was love for me. I try to remind myself of it now.

  He is at his grandfather’s land so much, lately. Too much. Three hours one night recently, until long after dark. He’s bringing home no produce. I don’t know what he’s doing.

  I snap back to reality, and return to the memory of Becky in our parents’ living room. My mind was reeling from the shock of her confession.

  ‘Who was it, anyway?’ I asked.

  She would answer me on this. Becky dealt in facts just fine. It was feelings she didn’t like.

  ‘Bloke from television. Absolute wanker, as you can imagine,’ she said.

  ‘After work?’

  ‘Early Christmas party, yeah. November party. Went back to his.’ So she was on self-destruct.

  ‘Oh, Becky,’ I said.

  She just shrugged again, her eyes misty.

  But, since then, she and Marc have never instructed solicitors to divorce them, and they have never quite moved into hostility, either. He sits too close to her at the family barbecues he still attends, laughs too loudly at her sardonic jokes.

  Now, in the court foyer, Marc holds the door to the meeting room for Becky, and she throws him a look.

  It’s a look I’ve seen them exchange before; one they’ve never stopped sharing. A kind of mutual understanding. Their eyes scrunch up at the corners. Each of them, perhaps, is in sharp focus to the other, the backgrounds blurred around them.

  I wonder how Marc’s coping with Xander.

  I wonder how Becky’s coping without Xander.

  I want to keep looking at them, as they gaze at each other, walking into the meeting room together, oblivious to me, but they close the door behind them.

  It’s another neighbour’s turn next. Theresa, my sister’s neighbour since for ever, is about to take the stand. I have known her – in a sort of once-removed way – for years. She’s probably more similar to me than to Becky. She has a serious, quiet way of talking. She goes for a run twice a day, extremely early in the morning and late at night. So late that, even in the summer, while Becky and I have been scoffing takeaways, I have seen the street lights catching her reflective running gear. Illuminated and then in darkness. Illuminated and then in darkness.

  She and her husband have no children, but they have three dogs. A huge one, a medium-sized one and a little one. Becky and I called them the Three Bears.

  I’ve only ever observed her from a distance. From afar, she is statuesque, looks like an athlete, pounding the streets. Up close, she looks different. Doesn’t everybody? Don’t we? And now, here she is, a witness.

  She has been observing us, too. And she is about to tell us what she has seen.

  22

  Theresa Williams

  9.10 p.m., Thursday 26 October

  Ian was away, in Bratislava, at some stag do. No, go, go, she had said, smiling broadly. Let him see the strippers. Let him drink himself unconscious. If you tried to control them, they played away. Hadn’t she learnt that lesson once?

  She faced the fridge, the chilled air bringing goosebumps out across her arms and legs – she was in a vest top and pants, the heating turned up as high as could be – and scooped a dollop of Marmite with her breadstick. It was disgustingly rich, the Marmite tarry in her mouth. She almost felt self-conscious, as if, even though she was alone, people might be able to look in on this private moment of hers.

  She vowed to make this her last breadstick, putting the Marmite back in the cupboard. She drank a glass of water poured from the jug she kept in the fridge.

  She checked her phone, standing in the living room, her bare feet on the old tiles she had restored last summer.

  Ian hadn’t texted her. She checked WhatsApp and scrolled to his name. Last seen: 21.05. Five minutes ago. He could have texted. Perhaps he was … no. She wouldn’t go there again. This wasn’t then. This was now. That’s what the counsellor said they had to say to themselves. He was sorry, after all. If they wanted to move on, they had to actually move on. Ian had seemed especially keen on that approach, in the counselling. Somehow, it had become her fault.

  No. She was just in a bad mood tonight. Too much time alone, too many carbs. She would sleep it off.

  She went to lock up. She didn’t like locking up when Ian was away. Their old Victorian house seemed to loom larger, somehow. She would never admit it, but she always expected to see a face, peering in through the dark glass, as she reached to turn the key.

  She took a peek. No face. She was alone.

  As she turned the keys in the door, she heard it. A strangled shout. ‘Shut up! Just shut up!’ she thought she heard.

  Really? she asked herself. Surely not.

  Her stomach clenched anyway; the anxiety of being alone. It was Becky, she thought. It seemed to come from the left. Becky was by far her loudest neighbour – since she had complained about the reggae-playing neighbours, anyway. Becky played rap music at weird times; she seemed to work from home. Theresa heard occasional hoots of laughter when her ex-husband, Marc, came over. That was so weird.

  They were so friendly, still. She didn’t understand it. Sometimes, she thought her fantasy man might be based on Marc. That openness, the way he looked at Becky, the way they laughed … Theresa hadn’t complained yet, about the noise they made, though she might soon.

  Maybe he was over there now. She cocked an ear. Maybe they were arguing.

  Even if Becky was shouting at something else, would she shout like that if she was totally alone? Theresa thought not. Those sorts of outbursts were for one thing only: sympathy. She listened again.

  Was that … she could hear something. A faint murmur. She stayed completely still. No. She must have imagined it.

  She stepped away from the door, but the keys were still swinging, and she held them so they were silenced.

  The noise came again. ‘Oh honestly, if you don’t shut the fuck up, I’ll—’

  That was definitely Becky. But that was where it ended. The shouting. The threat hung in the air. Who was it aimed at?

  She didn’t hear anything else after that. Only the sound of wind in the trees, a hooting wood pigeon outside, her own breathing.

  She didn’t think about that uttered shout for days afterwards. Until the police came. And then she remembered it and – oh God. The significance of it. It made goosebumps appear all over her arms and legs, just like when she had been standing in front of her fridge. When that little baby had still been alive, and she could have still stopped it, if she had known.

  23

  Martha

  I am making a scene in the public gallery, but I can’t help it. I knew it would be hard to hear Theresa’s testimony, but I didn’t anticipate this. This huge bolus in the back of my throat, this heaving feeling. My baby daughter’s last moments. Being shouted at. And the phrasing, the swearing: it is undoubtedly Becky, whatever happened afterwards. My hands shake as I reach to wipe the tears away.

  ‘So that was the night of baby Layla’s death, but you had another encounter with the defendant and baby, did you not?’ Ellen says. ‘The previous day?’

  ‘Yes, I did. I don’t know the exact time.’

  ‘And what happened then?’

 
‘Becky was just getting out of the car, on her drive. Layla was in the car seat. Becky explained their arrangement to me. Layla was crying.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘A lot. Enough for me to ask if she had been fed.’

  My cheeks heat up. Had she been fed? I can’t even contemplate that. Of course Becky had fed her. My fingernails dig into my palms. She would have. She just would have. Please let her have been feeding Layla properly.

  ‘And what did the defendant say?’

  ‘Oh, she just huffed. She was a bit defensive, you know.’

  ‘But you were concerned enough to ask if the baby had been fed.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And then on this night, when you heard shouts …’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The defendant sounded … frustrated?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you consider going over?’

  ‘Well, I didn’t know. I … didn’t think. And, anyway, you can’t, can you?’

  Ellen shrugs, looking regretful. She adjusts her robes. ‘I don’t know, Ms Williams. But that’ll be all from me.’ She sits down

  Harriet rises. ‘Do you have other neighbours, Theresa?’ Her angle is clear, and she is homing in on it like a bird of prey.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘On the other side?’

  ‘Yes. It’s a row of terraces.’

  ‘How many in the row?’

  Theresa looks up, thinking. ‘Six?’

  ‘So your house is flanked on either side. And then …’ Harriet pulls out a photograph of the rows of houses.

  Our lives have become merely legal evidence. My sister’s house, exhibited. Her neighbours, witnesses.

  ‘… turn to page four of your binder, please, jury. Your house,’ she says to Theresa, ‘has three on one side, two on the other.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So are you telling me that, standing inside, and equidistant from each of your neighbours’ living rooms, you are one hundred per cent sure that the voice you heard was the defendant’s? Despite these five other houses?’