Apple Tree Yard

by Louise Doughty

  For a few minutes, Ms Bonnard takes him round and around, prodding him all the while for a bit more detail about his anxieties concerning your mental state. She is only asking him to repeat himself but is hoping, I think, that the more Witness G’s concerns are repeated, the deeper they will lodge in the jury’s mind. Eventually, she sits, Robert declines the opportunity to question Witness G on my behalf, and the judge looks to Mrs Price. It comes as no surprise to anyone when she gets to her feet again.

  ‘Witness G,’ she begins, slowly, reasonably. ‘Now, we already know I’m not allowed to use your name for obvious reasons…’ she says, ‘and I appreciate there is a limit on the information you can give the court about yourself, but can you just tell us a little about your background?’

  ‘Certainly,’ he replies, ‘I am able to say that I spent a period of time in the armed forces, in operations that involved overseas travel, before moving to being based domestically. I am coming towards the end of my service now. I have been in charge of training and assessing at my current level for a period of eight years.’

  ‘You’re not a psychiatrist, are you?’

  ‘No, I have obviously received extensive training in…’

  ‘But you’re not a trained psychiatrist in the medical sense, you don’t have a doctorate of any sort?’

  ‘No, that is correct.’

  ‘You’re not a member of the British Institute of Psychology or any other of the accredited organisations?’

  ‘No, I’m not.’

  ‘What I mean is, and I hope you’ll forgive me as this isn’t a criticism, the only psychological training you have had is relevant to whether a man or a woman can lie to his or her family or work colleagues, whether they could maintain the deceit. In short, what I’m getting at is, you would not consider yourself, nor are you, qualified to pronounce on whether or not Mr Costley has any sort of personality disorder as recognised by the legal diagnostic guides available to this court.’

  There is the briefest of silences from the witness box. ‘It is true that I do not have any of the qualifications you have mentioned.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Mrs Price looks at the judge, ‘No further questions, My Lord.’

  The judge turns to Witness G, ‘Thank you, you are free to go. I am obliged to give you the warning that I give every witness about not discussing this case with anybody.’

  We all listen in silence as Witness G descends the few wooden steps from the witness box – his tread sounds heavy to me, yes, over six foot as I thought. I imagine him out in the corridor at the Old Bailey, walking casually down the wide stone staircase, exiting on to the street, and the people who pass him merely thinking, if they think of him at all, that he is a police officer or a solicitor or businessman. What does that kind of job make you if not a fantasist – a robot? Isn’t it to your credit, Mark Costley, that they didn’t want you? You never lied to me, not outright. It is human nature to let people think we are something more glamorous than we are. I let you believe that I am one of the nation’s top geneticists, when actually I am a moderately successful scientist who is now coasting on past research, doing the odd bit of examining or consultancy. I haven’t been at the coalface for years.

  *

  That night, for the first time since the trial began, I dream about it. I don’t dream about the arid courtroom or about you, there is no graphic nightmare about Craddock’s murder, no visions of a bloodied corpse pursuing me with outstretched arms. Instead, I dream about a place in the Old Bailey that I have never been.

  Earlier that day, we had started late because one of the jurors was stuck on a delayed train. The message had been relayed to us just before we were taken up, so the dock officers turned around to return me to the cell and as we took the few steps down the corridor, the elderly black man with white hair behind the counter called out, ‘Ask her if she wants a hot drink.’

  I called out in reply, ‘I’d love a cup of tea,’ although I didn’t want one really. Waiting for it would pass time; drinking it pass a little more.

  ‘Sit her by the kitchen area,’ he said to the dock officers and to my surprise and delight, I was not returned to my cell but taken and sat down outside the small, functional room where our meals are heated in a microwave. One of the dock officers left but the other perched on a table across from the doorway to keep an eye on me. It wasn’t procedure for me to be allowed to sit here, clearly, but they had decided I wasn’t the type to make a mad dash into the kitchen in search of a knife, although there was nothing but plastic cutlery in there anyway. The nice Caribbean man walked past into the kitchen and emerged with two cups of tea in plastic mugs. He put one down in front of me and I lifted it and took a sip. It was pleasingly hot. He sat on the chair next to me and I got the feeling that if it had been appropriate, he would have said something like, ‘What’s a nice lady like you doing in a place like this?’ Instead, he said, ‘You’re a educated woman.’ He pronounced it heducated, a heducated woman. That was what my Fenland grandparents did, my mother’s parents that I lost touch with after her death, add ‘h’s in front of a lot of words that began with vowels. ‘Have you ever had the tour?’

  I wasn’t sure what he meant, but then I realised he was talking about the building, the Old Bailey, the historic side rather than the modern bit we are in, the old courtrooms that always appear in the television dramas. I shook my head.

  He shook his head in response, as if he was saddened and sorry that I hadn’t. ‘You know, they do tours of the old bits. You should do it some time. Lots of people do.’ As I took a sip of the hot tea from the plastic mug, I lowered my head to hide a small smile at the thought that, when my trial is over, I might want to come back here for a day trip, for fun.

  He shook his head again. ‘Very hinteresting, I tell you, so much history in this place.’ He makes a slurping noise as he drinks from his own cup, sieving the tea through air in order to cool it. ‘The old courtrooms here, they are so small, you can understand why they needed new ones.’

  And then he told me about Dead Man’s Walk.

  *

  And that night, I dream about Dead Man’s Walk, and in my dream, I am able to picture it exactly, just from his description, even though I have never been there. It is at the back of the building in an alleyway that is now disused. The Old Bailey has a lot of disused parts, I learn – there is even a bit of Roman wall somewhere. Dead Man’s Walk has existed for centuries and presumably it was once made of stone. The nice Caribbean security man told me that nowadays – he can’t believe it but it’s true – it’s covered in white rectangular tiles, like the inside of a public lavatory. You stand at the beginning, he said…

  In my dream, I stand at the beginning of Dead Man’s Walk. Before me is a series of archways, each one successively smaller than the other. I walk towards them. The first archway with its white tiles is only just tall enough for me to walk through without bending, and so narrow that my shoulders skim it. But the next archway is lower and narrower still, then the next, and the next… until I am having to crouch and slip sideways through smaller and smaller arches… but however small and low the arches get, I am able to slip through, which is horrible, because they never end…

  The nice guard told me that the idea of the smaller and smaller arches was that as condemned prisoners walked to the gallows at the end of the alleyway, they tended to panic – ‘Can you blame them, the gallows at the end of it?’ – and the smaller and smaller spaces were to give them less and less room to escape. But the logic of this seems bizarre, or perhaps just sadistic, for what is more likely to make a condemned man panic, as he walks to his death than the arches closing in on him, more and more, getting smaller and smaller, with the knowledge that the final arch will be a coffin.

  There is no coffin in my dream, no gallows, no baying crowd. There is only one arch after another, and each one I squeeze through, I find it impossible to believe that I will be able to get through another, smaller one, but each time I do. It never ends. That
’s all there is to my dream, a series of sensations as I squeeze through each smaller and smaller arch, no blood or violence, but a pressing, mounting sense of horror with each successively smaller arch. I wake from the dream with my chest heaving, sweat plastering my hair across my face, to find I am in a cell, in prison.

  20

  The jury may not know it, but I know because Robert has told me – and you, Mark Costley, must know it too. The prosecution witnesses so far have been largely immaterial: the only one that matters is their expert psychologist, and the only fact that matters is whether or not you are suffering from a personality disorder that means you can avail yourself of the defence of diminished responsibility. The jury still has its collective head full of 999 calls and debates about dilute blood, so I imagine they feel no real sense of anticipation over the delay that occurs the day after my dream. The prosecution expert witness, a psychiatrist called Dr Sanderson, has to interview you in prison and do a psychological assessment. All it means to the jury is they get a day off.

  *

  It is a Wednesday morning. When I left Holloway Prison that morning, it was overcast, but within ten minutes of being inside the Old Bailey, I have lost all sense of what the weather or the world might be doing outside. It could be brilliant hot sunshine or a blizzard out there in the normal world, but the climate is always the same in here; every day electric-lit, muggy, close. It strikes me as I climb the concrete steps from the cell area up to the court that I am not so much experiencing this trial as embedded in it. Already, the routine is so known, so intimate to me, that my pre-trial days seem lost in the distant past. I can scarcely believe that once upon a time I had a home, a husband, a career and grown-up children who weren’t in touch as much as I would have liked them to be. The normal business of making coffee and toast in my kitchen seems like a distant dream. I try to picture the physical comforts of home, as I mount those concrete steps, the deep pile of the dark green carpet on our stairs, the smooth wood of the oak banister beneath my hand. Walking up the stairs in my own home…

  You are in the dock already. The police officers are on their feet talking softly to each other – DI Cleveland is standing by his chair, hitching his trousers, bending slightly and smiling at something one of his junior colleagues has said. He folds his arms a lot when he’s standing, I’ve noticed that, holding them high up, as if his size means he feels a little clumsy unless his arms are safely tucked away. Mrs Price’s junior, the young man who swings in his chair, is offering Robert a Murray Mint from the large packet he is taking round the legal teams.

  I can’t see Ms Bonnard though, and that is unusual. Normally she is all ready, waiting for proceedings to commence with an air of diligent impatience. After a few minutes, she bustles in, clutching a file of papers to her chest, ignores the others and crosses the court to where her own junior sits, another young man. They have a quick, urgent conversation, then leave the court together. After a few minutes more, she is back. Following behind her are a man and woman I later discover to be the defence psychological experts. Unlike other witnesses, they are allowed to sit in the court while the prosecution psychologist gives his evidence – it will be their job to contradict it later. They seat themselves behind defence counsel, in the same row as the lawyers from the Crown Prosecution Service. While we wait for the judge, Ms Bonnard keeps turning back and whispering to them.

  The door to the judge’s chambers opens. ‘All rise,’ calls the usher as the judge processes in, and we do, oh we do.

  The judge gives his customary nod, we all bow and sit, and the usher is already heading out of the court to fetch the jury when Ms Bonnard gets to her feet. ‘My Lord…’ she says, just a little bit too loudly. The usher pauses halfway across the court. The judge frowns over his glasses. Everyone looks at this young woman who has seemed so poised and confident so far. She has her back to me but from the way her elbows protrude I can see that she is grasping the lapels of her cloak with both hands. She clears her throat; she has a plea of some sort to make. The judge looks at her and gives her his normal indulgent smile but it has a slightly fixed quality – something is coming that he won’t like.

  ‘My Lord,’ she says, ‘before the jury is brought in, I’m sorry to say that we may have a further delay and it’s difficult for me to tell the court exactly how long that delay might be.’

  The judge glances conspicuously at the clock just beneath the rail along the front of the public gallery.

  ‘I’m afraid the problem is, My Lord, Dr Sanderson’s report. You see it would appear that the printer in the building here is, after all, not working. This means that although I received the report by email at 7 a.m. this morning, I was already on my way here and I have, as yet, only had the opportunity to read it on my phone while on the train and as your Lordship knows it is twenty-eight pages long…’

  She dries to a halt. The judge merely stares at her.

  ‘My Lord, I really do feel that I will not be providing my client with full and adequate representation unless I have had the opportunity to read the report in detail, in hard copy, annotate it where necessary and discuss it with him. There are parts of the report that we find contentious and some, indeed, which go to the very heart of our defence. I would not be suggesting any further delay were it not a matter of the utmost importance.’

  The judge sighs. ‘Is it really not possible to provide Ms Bonnard with a photocopy?’ He looks around the courtroom with a tight little smile, as if this question is addressed to anyone who might happen to have a copy, including the usher and those in the public gallery, and he really cannot understand why someone cannot help him out. I feel an inappropriate but reflexive desire to raise my hand, like the teacher’s pet that I am, even though I don’t, of course, have a copy of the report either. Nor does Robert.

  ‘My Lord, I understand there is another printer in the other room and it may be possible to get it printed but I will have to re-read it in its entirety. I do appreciate that this is a most annoying delay and had I received the report before I left the house this morning I would of course have printed it out at home and digested it in hard copy during my journey.’

  The judge leans forward. ‘My understanding was that the report was emailed to everybody by midnight last night?’ The smile is getting tighter and tighter.

  ‘That may be the case, My Lord, but my Internet connection went down overnight and I was unable to access my email until I was on the train.’

  The judge sighs again, purses his lips. I suddenly see how bad-tempered he might be on a Sunday at home when the roast potatoes are ready before the lamb joint. He looks at the clock again. ‘I will call a recess until 11 a.m. Will that give you sufficient time, Ms Bonnard?’

  She bows her head briefly. ‘Thank you, My Lord, it will certainly give me sufficient time to print out and scan the report as quickly as possible. I may, however, need additional time to consult with my client.’

  Robert has his face turned to one side and his arm is resting across the back of his chair. I see him frown.

  ‘How much time?’ The judge pronounces the monosyllables slowly.

  ‘My Lord, I would respectfully suggest that it might perhaps be best if the jury were released until after lunch, 2 p.m.’

  The judge stares at her briefly, then says to the air in front of him, ‘Jury please…’

  Robert glances back at me, still frowning. The usher goes outside and fetches the jury in. As they cross the court to their seats, a young man the back of the procession pauses to open his rucksack and the judge says, with a tinge of impatience, ‘Do please take your seat, sir, I can promise you it will not be for long.’

  They sit, and the judge says, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, a legal matter has arisen that requires some time to resolve. As I have already told you, it is your job here to judge the evidence, it is mine to judge matters of law. What this means, in effect, is that you get a break and I do not.’

  The jury all break into relieved smiles at the realisation t
hat the judge has, quite unexpectedly, made a joke.

  ‘As a result, we will not now require your attendance until after the lunch break. You are free to go until 2 p.m.’

  That is it. They are ushered out. I wonder that the judge does not apologise for their unnecessary journeys that morning but suppose that might undermine his authority. Jokes may be dispensed from on high; apologies may not.

  ‘Be upstanding in court,’ the usher barks.

  We all rise, bow to the judge as he departs.

  Ms Bonnard turns to you, my co-defendant, where you stand in the dock and says, ‘I’m coming down to see you straight away.’ I’m a little confused. Wasn’t getting the report printed the immediate problem? Your defence team gather papers and folders and leave the court in a flurry.

  DI Cleveland turns back to look at his colleagues by the door and raises his eyebrows, then wanders over to the prosecution table. Mrs Price turns to him as he approaches and raises her hands. ‘They’re playing for time,’ she says. Then, lowering her voice only slightly, she adds, ‘Internet connection my arse.’

  Robert is still sitting with one arm along the chair, his expression thoughtful. Beside him, his junior sits in her chair, silent.

  *

  Dr Sanderson fills me with fear the minute he enters the court. He has a heavy face, like a bulldog and fluffy grey hair. He seems deeply unimpressed to be there, although I presume he is being paid. He stands in the dock and Mrs Price takes him through his psychological assessment of you during which, in summary, he asserts that there is no chance whatsoever that you are suffering from a personality disorder. He cites your good behaviour while you are on remand, your lack of a previous psychiatric history and solid work record. Most damning of all, he asserts that you are what he calls, ‘an unreliable historian’, and as evidence of that, he cites the calculated way in which you have pursued your interest in extra-marital sex. In other words, you are a liar. You are not mad, or disturbed, or suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder or a borderline or anti-social personality disorder. You’re just a liar.