How could Scott have left her? Anger rises through me, but I try to suppress it. How could I have left her?
Whatever happened with Becky, it wouldn’t have happened if I had been there. I would never have slept until 8:00 A.M. like Becky did. If I had loved my baby more—if the love had been more prominent, like a spice in a dish that overwhelms everything else—I wouldn’t have been able to leave her, would I? I would not have gone to Kos.
I would not have begrudged the impact she had on my life. I would not have been frustrated by her tears and her dirty nappies and the insatiable hunger of those early days, those cluster feeds. If I had been a better mother. If I had loved her better.
“You have to be here,” my reliable gap-year student, Ami, said to me on the phone one day in mid-October. “A property’s come up.” She was still getting the emails, even though she was ex-acting-CEO of Stop Gap and now at Warwick University studying history. “I called up about it.”
“What?” I said.
“There’s a premises,” she said. “It’s just come up. There’s a viewing this weekend. You can buy it with the grant. It has—Jesus. It has, like, forty rooms.”
“How much is it?”
She gave me a number. We could afford it.
I was standing in the bedroom, a hand dangling into Layla’s Moses basket. Only, instead of seeing her navy-blue eyes, I saw the other children’s. Slim cheeks, with little hollows. Big brown eyes.
“What is it?”
“An old hotel. The government owns it. They’ll sell it to us. They were keen, on the phone. I pretended to be you.”
“Where is it?”
“Right next to the fish market. You’d hardly have to move. But you should see it. Martha, you should see it.”
A few moments later, she sent me a photograph. It wasn’t the venue that did it; it was her dedication. Nineteen, a fresher at university, and there she was overseeing commercial property purchases for me. Stepping in as CEO. Let alone the rest.
“Can I just do it remotely?” I said.
“Well, no, it’s fine. I could go. In my reading week. It’s just . . .”
“God, no. Don’t do that.”
Could I go, and see it, secure it, buy it? Get someone in to fit it out?
“You need to be there to sign. You have to physically sign the deeds.”
Shit. The signatures. Of course.
I stared out of the window, not looking at Layla. I could go for two nights. Just two. Sign for the premises. Make sure everything was okay. Get it sorted, then hire someone once I was back home. Somebody who could oversee it properly, once the premises were sorted.
“There’s already interest in it. Because it’s at such a discount.”
It would be fine. It was five hours away. She had been good for Becky last week. Quiet, apparently. My breasts ached, but that was my problem, not hers. I’d set it up, secure it, and be back before she knew I had gone. It would be fine. It was the right thing to do. She was fine, and they . . . those children weren’t.
Layla’s eyes met mine and a slow smile spread across her features. Her first ever smile. My baby. She’d be safe and warm, here, with Becky. And I would go to help them. The other children. They needed me. They had nobody for them. That’s what I thought then. Looking back, now, I don’t recognize that Martha, that decision I made. Layla needed me more than anybody could. Because I was her mother.
But if it had never happened, if she had lived, I know I would never be thinking these thoughts. I would have been helping the children in Kos, and would have returned to my own family. It would have been lauded, that I set up a charity and raised my child.
Hindsight.
“Let me ask Becky,” I said.
I flew out to see the premises. I signed the document early, my signature a familiar scrawl. The date was stamped next to it: 10/27.
It is the day she was found dead. The day she was declared dead in A&E, even though she died on the twenty-sixth. Her death certificate, and that dated signature, all bound up together.
Evidence of their own. That I cared about other children more than my own.
My focus shifts back to Becky’s house again. To the window of the room in which it happened.
Somebody knows the truth, I find myself thinking. Becky or Marc or Becky’s neighbor . . .
I picture each scenario.
Marc, letting himself into her house, snuffing out my baby’s life so callously, just like that.
Becky, accidentally killing my child, and asking for help. The images before me, the theories in my mind, are all wrong. Or are they? Maybe almost all of them are absurd . . . but maybe one of them is correct. I just need to find the right one.
The barrister will sort it, I tell myself.
But I know I’m going to confront Marc again. I have to. And then, if not Marc . . . Becky. Even though it is illegal. Even though it isn’t right.
I have to do it.
For Layla.
The bed is already warm from Scott’s body by the time I get into it, much, much later.
43
Judge Christopher Matthews, QC
Christopher takes a wander down to the beach. It will be Thursday tomorrow. The trial will end early next week. It will be a long jury deliberation, he thinks. All that medical evidence.
He hates long deliberations. He can’t settle to reading anything new, waiting for a jury to return a verdict. Other judges begin new cases, but not him. He waits like a caged lion pacing its cell. The jury often send questions, or notes asking for a majority direction, and every time one comes through, he hopes it will be the verdict and he will be able to move on and start his next case.
Sometimes, they take days and days, over a week, once.
He can’t imagine how Becky, the defendant, feels.
The prosecution has been sure of itself, moving through the waters of the case like a cruise ship, determined in its direction. The defense has been trying to stop it, to maneuver it, but it has been as ineffectual as a person tugging on a rope, trying to get a 200,000-ton ship to change course. He feels sorry for Ms. Smith, the defense barrister. She is good, but she doesn’t have anything to work with. Maybe there’ll be a last-minute miracle, like in the movies.
He doubts it.
He decided, last night in bed when he couldn’t sleep, that she had probably done it. They almost always have, after all. She should just say she rolled over onto the baby in her sleep. She’d get off.
Why doesn’t she? Indeed.
He pauses for thought. This is strange. He is sure she’s smart. Maybe she did it in some other way. Or maybe it really was someone else, somehow.
But she doesn’t look guilty. She just doesn’t.
He sits on his favorite wide, flat rock and watches the sea turn itself over. As always, his mind roams to Sadie, and the events just before she left him. She now lives in a tiny flat, in Hove, quite near to the defendant, actually. She didn’t take the dog with her. She never even comes to see him.
He and Sadie divorced eighteen months ago. Irreconcilable differences. The usual. He was distant. He didn’t care about her job, only his.
He picks a pebble up and throws it into the surf. Then he brings his mobile phone out—an old, secondhand thing—and scrolls down to her number. Something about this case has got under his skin. He thinks it is the sisters. The way they look at each other all the time across the courtroom. The fact that the mother, Martha, is there at all, watching proceedings, clearly hoping for a not guilty verdict.
The love, he guesses. That’s what it is.
They all loved each other, until they were splintered apart.
thursday
DEFENSE
44
Martha
Martha—” the reporter says.
I turn and see her familiar face. Her cu
rly hair is clipped back. She has a larger microphone, I think, and she thrusts it toward me more confidently, as though I might be about to speak, today, when I haven’t all week.
“Have you ever asked your sister whether she did it?”
* * *
—
It’s time for the defense.
“The defense calls Marc Burrows,” Harriet says.
There is no defense speech. No pacing barrister like on the television, posing thoughtfully like a catwalk model. Instead, there’s a shuffling of papers, a clearing of the judge’s throat, and then Marc enters the witness box. Just like that. We’ve gone from prosecution to defense, the wind has changed direction, the interval is over. And here we are. Marc. Finally, his evidence will be examined, scrutinized.
We might find an answer.
And, if we don’t, then afterward . . . I am going to find him.
We saw him out in the foyer, waiting for his turn in the witness box. We didn’t greet him. We know not to interfere with witnesses, despite my earlier call to Marc, despite my plans, but there’s no Crown Prosecution Service leaflet on what happens when every single witness is somebody you know.
Neighbors.
Acquaintances.
Friends of friends.
Relatives.
When the key defense witness is your ex-brother-in-law.
When the defendant over there—already in the dock as we enter the court—is your sister.
“I do solemnly and sincerely and truly declare and affirm that the evidence I shall give shall be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” Marc says.
I close my eyes against his words. I had forgotten his easy manner, his simple, straightforward gaze.
He dips his head a little, then raises it, and looks directly at Becky.
Ex-lovers: one in the witness box, one in the dock.
“Mr. Burrows,” Harriet says, “could you explain how you know the defendant?”
“I am her ex-partner.”
“When you’re ready, please tell us in your own words what you remember about the night of the twenty-sixth of October.”
Goose bumps appear on my arms.
This is it.
45
Marc Burrows
7:00 p.m., Thursday, October 26
It was ingenious. The television power cable was long enough to stretch out into the hallway, and he had balanced the screen on the bottom step of the stairs, facing him. He had reluctantly agreed to lay this carpet out of hours, but he hadn’t checked the fixtures. His stomach dropped when he saw the schedule on Sky Sports—plenty of action in the European leagues—and he considered canceling. But what a decision showing up had turned out to be. It took ninety minutes to fit a carpet. He had a perfect view of the football. And he was being paid to bloody watch it.
His phone beeped at seven o’clock just as the underlay was down and Real Sociedad had scored. He paused, hands on his hips, standing in the center of the room, to watch the replay. Decent finish, but where was the marking?
He turned away from the television and got out his phone. Becky.
Jesus, I’m worried about Layla. And me!
This baby situation. It was madness. Utter madness. Martha was taking advantage of Becky, and Layla was a nightmare. Total nightmare baby. He couldn’t understand why Becky put up with it.
He had spoken to her yesterday about it, and he thought he’d heard something a bit desperate in her voice. She wasn’t usually like that. She was resilient. She’d stuck it out for years with those wankers at the television studio. She was caustic, often, even dangerously full of rage at times, but never desperate, not recently. The last time he’d seen her this way was when they were trying for a second baby. What began as a preference slowly morphed into something essential, one he had been unable to make happen. They were ruled by a twenty-eight-day cycle of hope and despair. Perhaps if he held her closer, after, his skin on hers, he had once thought . . . perhaps if he imagined sperm meeting egg . . . perhaps then, it would happen for them. But it never had.
They weren’t just robbed of a chance to conceive. They were robbed of the full potential of a life. How they wanted to make silly faces at a new baby. To teach a second child to walk, and talk, and run. To develop new inside jokes about a second person. But nothing would materialize, no matter how hard they tried. There was nothing. They were creating nothing, month after month.
And then she had slept with somebody else. The oldest trick in the book, though he couldn’t say he blamed her, not really.
She had confessed immediately. Came home, walked in the door one cold November day, and said, “I slept with somebody else last night.”
Her dispassionate tone shocked him almost as much as her words. He wondered, at first, if it was a result of the drinking. That had been steadily increasing, hardly any days without a glass of red, the clink of the recycling getting louder and louder each week.
But it wasn’t. He watched her lower her handbag. It made a thudding sound as it hit the floor.
“Who?” he found himself saying, though he didn’t care who it was.
“Carl from work. And no, I wasn’t drunk.”
“I thought you were staying with Jenny.”
She met his eyes then, and her gaze wasn’t pleading, or contrite, or anything, really. There was a challenge in it. Let’s address it, the face said.
He thought of all the times recently when he’d avoided talking about their relationship. Their recent meal out at a steakhouse, without Xander, where Marc played on his phone for the entire meal. Rolling away from her in bed one morning because Super Sunday was on and he couldn’t be bothered to go down and press pause, come back and have sex. The courses he did on the internet, late at night, instead of joining her in bed. Something had settled between them, widening the more they ignored it, until it became too big to cross. They had become lazy about their own relationship, and that idleness had killed it. It had been amazing how easy it had been to fall out of love. It took hardly any effort at all.
“I see,” he had said quietly.
“Should I go?” she had asked.
“Do what you want,” he’d replied.
Those four words sealed it. There was to be no reconciliation, no recovery, no intimacy, physical or otherwise. He moved out on the first of December. She’d already had half a bottle of wine by the time he’d packed his things. He saw Xander the next day, and the one after that—Becky had always been reasonable about shared residency—but it wasn’t the same. Of course it wasn’t. They were broken: a broken home. She’d left him no choice.
He typed a text now, standing in the living room.
It always feels worse at the time. I still have a list from when Xander was small. Here it is. Feed. Change. Burp. Fart. Tired. Dirty nappy. Cold. Hot. Lonely. Teething. Pain. Overstimulated. Understimulated. Ill. No Reason. xx
It was halftime, so he googled it, then texted again.
Internet says if crying for no reason: sucking, swaddling, music, white noise, fresh air, bath, motion, massage. Take a break. You didn’t ask for this, Samuel, when you took it on. I know that. xx
She didn’t reply to him, so he got the carpet out of his van. He wished he’d brought a beer, now. Could’ve made an evening out of it. Still. It was all right, he had the second half to look forward to. Perhaps he could pop out and get a beer later.
The second half had just started, and right as he was stretching the carpet—the worst fucking part—his phone rang, with the ringtone he’d set just for Becky. The lilt of it still made something open up in his chest.
“All right?” he said. “Still crying?”
“Yeah, she just won’t stop,” Becky said.
Marc put the carpet stretcher down, reached over, and switched the television off. The football players disappeared.
“It will get better. And you can give her back,” he said. “Soon.”
She didn’t respond to that. If she were here, she would be looking at him, head tilted, eyes to him. Yeah, right, her expression would be saying.
“Have you fed her—loads? She’s definitely not hungry?” he said.
“No,” Becky said. “She’s not hungry. Definitely not.”
“Where is she?”
“Inside. I’m in the garden. Having a break.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Babies can handle being upset. She won’t remember.”
“I’m not,” she said. “Honest. I’m not. It’s just—ugh.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I can come over. I’m doing a fitting but I’m almost finished.”
“No. God, no need for that. Don’t,” she said hurriedly. “But will you be there? I don’t know. Just be on the end of a phone.”
Should he go? He thought about it. He could pack his stuff up. Surprise her. Go to help.
“You know I will, Samuel,” Marc said. God, it hurt him, remembering those nights, when Xander was just a baby and they would have to stifle their laughter into the pillows in the bedroom. Becky always lay on the top of the duvet, on her belly.
“Look how much the mattress dips on your side compared to mine,” she had said to him on one such night.
“Thanks,” he’d said. “I’m huge.”
The Good Sister Page 21
