Guilty One

by Lisa Ballantyne

  Daniel undid the top button of his shirt, pulled his tie off and put it in his pocket. His legs felt unsteady. It felt like walking away from Minnie for the last time. It wasn’t the first time a client had lied to him. Daniel didn’t understand why, this time, he felt so shorn.

  He stood in the ornate hall of the Central Criminal Court and looked around him. His loss was draped in a strange relief. One way or another, it was all over now.

  Daniel walked out into the swarm of journalists. It was cold and threatening to rain, but he felt the heat of the camera flashes. He was blinded by them and couldn’t see the faces that addressed him, only the foam-encased microphones that were thrust towards him.

  ‘We are pleased with the outcome of the trial; my client and his family are looking forward to the return of normal family life. Our thoughts are with the family of the victim at this difficult time.’

  Daniel pushed his way through the crowd as one of the journalists shouted: ‘How did it feel when you won? Were you surprised?’

  Daniel turned and faced the man who had addressed him, knowing that he was now too close to the camera. The emotion apparent in his face would be broadcast, and commented on, in news feeds later: ‘Nobody won today. A little boy lost his life, but we are grateful that justice has been done for my client.’

  There were more questions, but then the Stokeses came out. Madeline was recovered but brittle; Paul with a resolute turn to his lips. Daniel and the CPS solicitor were abandoned in favour of the victim’s parents.

  Daniel looked around for Irene but couldn’t see her. He started to walk towards the Tube, then saw her ahead of him. She seemed dejected, eyes to the ground.

  ‘I thought you said you were going to wait for me,’ he called, running to catch up with her.

  ‘God, there you are. I didn’t know where you’d got to.’ She brushed a strand of hair from her face.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Daniel asked as he looked into her tired eyes.

  ‘I dunno,’ she said with a strange smile. ‘I feel weird. Probably just exhausted.’

  ‘You won,’ he said.

  ‘We won,’ she said, putting a hand on his lapel. He enjoyed the weight of her hand on his chest. For a second he thought about pulling her to him, kissing her.

  He inhaled, preparing to tell her what Sebastian had told him, but stopped himself. She was the only person he wanted to tell; the only person who would understand. He would tell her, but not now; they had both been through enough for one day.

  ‘How did you get on?’ she said, motioning towards the crowd of journalists in the distance.

  ‘Fine. You know how it is – they’ve moved on to the Stokeses already.’

  Irene looked away. ‘My heart breaks for them. They have absolutely no resolution now. Their son’s dead and no one has been blamed.’

  Daniel shuddered in the damp cold, trying to shake off the memory of Sebastian’s whispered words. He put his hands in his pockets and looked up at the dark sky.

  ‘We’re a good team, though,’ she said.

  He met her eye and nodded. She put a hand on his lapel again.

  Suddenly he felt the weight of her tilt towards him. She stood on her tiptoes and kissed his lips.

  Her lips were cold. He felt the first drops of rain on his head. He was too jolted to return the kiss, but he stayed close to her, until she backed away.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, turning from him, a flush on her cheek, allowing her hair to fall over her eyes.

  He ran his hand up her neck and his thumb across her chin. He didn’t know what would happen now, but it felt significant.

  EPILOGUE

  The rain had just stopped when Daniel pulled into Brampton. He felt a rare calm settle on him. Until he reached Cumbria, the trial had been on his mind.

  He was not sure if he had ever thought Sebastian innocent. It had never mattered to him beyond the case. But now that the little boy was free and had admitted his guilt, Daniel felt responsible. He thought again about Paul and Madeline Stokes, their grief adrift without the rudder of conviction. The child needed help, but Daniel’s role in that was now over. He could only hope that the case conference members and the professionals who had been involved with Sebastian so far would realise what he needed.

  If the verdict had been different, Daniel knew that he would not feel better. His experience of secure units, juvenile detention centres and prisons had shown him that however damaged juveniles had been in the past, however desperate their problems, they would only be made worse in the places they would be sent for punishment and rehabilitation.

  Now that he was in Brampton, Sebastian seemed far away: painfully faint, like a note he had to strain to hear. It was nearly winter now, and Brampton’s trees had been blown free of their leaves. The naked trees stood stark against the sky, like lungs. He heard the rain splash against the tyres of his car as he drove into the village. He took a breath and held it, wondering what rare change would have been possible if Sebastian had known a Minnie.

  He tried to push aside thoughts of the boy. He remembered the taste of Irene’s lips from the evening before and smiled.

  He pulled up outside the farm. The yard had been tidied and the old shed had been removed. The garden had been dug and the grass at the front cut. Daniel inhaled the clean smell of the earth. The air was cold and so he took out his key and stepped inside the farmhouse, for the last time.

  It was different from before. There was almost no trace of her now. The floors were spotlessly clean and the bathroom and kitchen smelled of bleach. He had never seen the old electric cooker shining so white. He ran his forefinger along it, remembering the meals she had cooked for him: shepherd’s pie, fish and chips, roast beef and Yorkshire puddings.

  The windows had been painted. The table was clear and the fridge open and clean. He would meet Cunningham later to exchange the contracts and hand over the keys. He remembered coming to the empty house a few months before, still angry with her, aching but not acknowledging her loss – asking for all her things to be thrown away, professionally cleared. Now he wished to see the newspaper she had been reading, her jars of odd buttons, her old clothes, her vinyl records which had not to be marked with fingerprints, the animals that had shared her life while he had scorned her.

  Daniel’s throat hurt. He opened the door to the living room. It was empty: gone her old couch, gone her old-fashioned television and video recorder, gone her photographs and pictures, gone the footstool on which she would rest her thick-skinned, hard-nailed feet.

  The floorboards were scuffed from the feet of the piano, the wood darker where the body of the instrument had shaded the floor from the light. Daniel covered his eyes with both hands. I’m sorry, Mam, he whispered in the quiet empty farmhouse, his throat tight as hot tears flashed across his cheeks. Forgive me.

  Her bare feet pumped the pedals, her knees apart and the material of her skirt falling in between her thighs. She straightened her shoulders and leaned back with a laugh as she struck the keys.

  ‘When did you learn to play the piano?’ he asked her. He was lying on the couch watching her with his hands behind his head.

  ‘When I was a child. My father liked to play and he taught both us girls … and he would take us to concerts … and make us sit still with our fingers on our lips listening to his records. Some of those records in there belonged to him, and I listened to them when I was a little girl.’ Minnie leaned towards Daniel as she spoke, right hand tinkling up the keys, her left forefinger pressed against her lips. ‘Would you like me to teach you?’

  He shook his head. ‘Did your daughter play the piano?’

  She didn’t answer.

  He still didn’t understand about the little girl whose butterfly he had tried to steal, but each time he saw the butterfly he thought of her.

  ‘She could play a little,’ was all she said, and then she started to play again, loudly, so that he could feel the vibrations through the couch. It made his scalp itch. He wa
tched her, as her cheeks reddened and her eyes misted with tears. But then, like always, she threw back her head and laughed. She looked out of the window, her strong hands heavy on the keys.

  ‘Ach, come on will you now, Danny. Sit down here beside me and let me see what you can do.’

  Again he shook his head.

  ‘I heard you playing the other week, you know. You thought I was outside but I heard you try. It won’t break, you know. I can teach you how to play a tune, or you can just do your thing. It doesn’t matter. It just feels nice to make a noise sometimes. It stops the noise in your head. You’ll see. Come and sit beside me …’

  She moved over on the long piano stool, and patted the spot beside her. It was only a fortnight since he had been beaten up and run away to his mother’s. His nose still felt funny and he sniffed as he sat down beside her and looked at the keys. He could smell the damp wool of her and feel the soft cushion of her hip against his.

  ‘Do you want me to teach you a wee easy song, or do you just want to make a noise, like? Both are fine with me.’

  ‘Teach me something, then,’ he said quietly, letting his fingers fall on the keys. He listened to the lonely, hollow notes that sounded.

  ‘Right, well, if you look at the keyboard, you have your black and you have your white keys. What do you notice about the way the black keys are grouped?’

  Daniel stroked a finger across the black keys. ‘Some are in twos, some are in threes.’

  ‘God, you’re a smarty-pants, aren’t you now. Why don’t you teach me to play the bloody piano?’ She laughed and Daniel turned to smile up at her. From this angle he could see the space in her teeth: her missing tooth was on the top, near the molar.

  ‘And now listen to this.’ She reached to the right side of the piano, stretching across him so that her face was close to his. She struck the keys and then ran her fingers down the keyboard and struck the keys at the very left of the piano. ‘What do you notice about the difference in the sound?’ she said, leaning close to him, so that he could see the dark blue rings around her pale blue eyes. They were like marbles, hard and clear.

  ‘That’s low and that’s high,’ he said, pointing at either end of the piano.

  ‘Right you are, high on the right and low on the left – sure but you’re a natural. Now, we’ll try a duet.’

  She took time to show him the high keys of the piano, numbering them one, two, and three, in the order that she wanted him to play them, and then she started to play a tune at the low end of the piano. She showed him when to push down on the keys, trying to get him to use a three-finger action, but he preferred to stab with his forefinger, enjoying the chill note that he produced.

  They did that for a few minutes, with her playing the song on the left of the keyboard and elbowing him in the ribs and shouting now, now, with her strange Irish vowels, when she wanted him to play the notes she had taught him at his end. She told him the song was called ‘Heart and Soul’.

  But he tired of it, and slammed the keys with his palms. Tring tring tring, up and down. He expected anger from her. He still didn’t know her well. He looked up into her eyes, but they were wide with glee. She slammed her own palms down on the low keys, so that the grave noise chimed with his high-pitched squeals and yelps. It was a duet all the same. The noise chased Blitz from the room, and she started singing at the top of her voice, any old words and so did he, until he was hoarse and until they were half deaf and tears ran down both their cheeks with laughter.

  Then they were still, and she pressed him into her. He was tired and he allowed it. As the ringing subsided in his ears, a thought came to him sharp and clear as the high note on the piano. He liked her, and he wanted to stay. The thought resonated in his head and it made him quiet. He smoothed the ivory-coated wood of the piano, his fingers still tingling from the bashing he had given the keys.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I would first like to say a big thank you to my editor, Emma Beswetherick, for her creativity and support, and to all at Piatkus for their tireless enthusiasm.

  Several people have given their time to help my research for this book, and this was crucial in helping to make the worlds the characters inhabit more believable. I would particularly like to thank Kate Barrie, Tony Beswetherick Iain Cockbain, Jason Cubbon, Elizabeth Gray, Jacinta Jones, Eileen Leyden, John Leyden, Sarah Long, Alastair & Juliette MacDonald, Sandra Morrison, Laura Stuart, Sarah Stuart and Scott. A. Ware for their various help on everything from the legal world to regional accents, music and locations. Very special thanks to Gerry Considine for allowing me insight into the work of a criminal solicitor, and to Liz and Alan Paterson for their advice on Social Work issues.

  Writing involves spending a lot of time by yourself, but I doubt that this creative solitude would have been possible without my many friends, family and colleagues who all believed that someday this would happen even though I doubted it. I would particularly like thank: Paul Ballantyne, Russell Ballantyne, The Darroch Sisters: Mairi, Jane and Val, Marie Kobine, Helen Leyden, Allan MacLean, Julie Ramsay, Ian Thomson, Gordon Webb.

  But it is readers who complete writers, and my greatest debt is to my own early readers, without whose positive criticism, I may never have written another word: Kent & Mary Ballantyne, Rita Balneaves, Mary Fitzgerald-Peltier, Mark Kobine, Phil Mason and Elizabeth McCrone. This book would not exist without you.

  While researching the novel, I read As If, by Blake Morrison, and The Case of Mary Bell, by Gitta Sereny. I would like to thank both writers for their very different but equally insightful portraits of children on trial.

  Last, but certainly not least, a great many thanks to my wonderful agent, Nicola Barr, for her astuteness, her faith and encouragement.

  THE GUILTY ONE

  Reading Guide

  READING GROUP DISCUSSION POINTS

  * Who do you think ‘The Guilty One’ of the story is?

  * How do the two strands of the story complement each other? Do they work together successfully?

  * Who is your favourite character and why?

  * Do you think Minnie was right to do what she did?

  * Can you discuss Daniel’s resentment towards Minnie?

  * How well does the story explore the subject of fostercare and/or children in the criminal justice system?

  * What connections can you draw between the adult and the child Daniel?

  * Can you comment on the way in which the story explores the relationship between mothers and sons/adults and children?

  * Before the big reveal at the end, did you believe Sebastian to be guilty or innocent?

  * What have you taken away from the story? What do you think it is trying to say?

  AUTHOR Q & A

  Have you always wanted to be a writer?

  Yes, but not always a novelist. For many years I wrote poetry, which, as a pastime, is somewhat more sociable. I felt compelled to write long fiction because characters and their lives began to inhabit me.

  Can you tell us a little about what inspired you to write The Guilty One and whether the writing process was an easy one?

  I am always drawn to characters, and I was ‘visited’ by the characters of Minnie and Daniel. The other characters and the story of The Guilty One evolved as a result of trying to understand this fundamental relationship.

  How did it feel to get a UK publisher for your debut novel?

  I can’t describe it. Even now, months after the fact, I have trouble believing it has happened.

  After your book deal in the UK, The Guilty One then sold around the world. How did you react to this?

  Luckily I was very busy at work while all this was happening, and it helped me to distance myself from it. I still wonder if I somehow slipped into a parallel universe.

  New writers are often advised to write about what they know. Do you know a lot about criminal law and foster care in order to have written about it so authentically?

  I don’t write about what I know, but I do write ab
out what interests me, and my commitment to the characters fuels my research. In wishing to make my characters believable, I want to make the worlds they inhabit believable too – however, I am still reticent to call my representations of these worlds authentic. At best I would hope they are believable. There are few things more fun than researching fictional characters. It is like stalking your own imagination.

  Did your characters appear in your head fully formed or did they transform as the book evolved? Who is your favourite character?

  Daniel and Minnie were very vivid – right down to the smell of them – from early on. Other characters, but also the adult Daniel, evolved as the story progressed.

  Daniel is the most intriguing, and I wonder what he is up to now, but I admire Minnie’s bravery.

  Daniel has a very strong view about the ways in which society should deal with juvenile criminals. Do Daniel’s views mirror your own?

  The character of Sebastian developed almost as a construct to elucidate Daniel’s struggle with nature and nurture. The story suggests that criminals are made not born but the adult Daniel also highlights how out-of-step the UK is with much of Europe when it comes to children and criminal justice.

  Do you think it was right for Minnie to lie to Daniel?

  I think when we love people we often make choices that can be difficult to justify afterwards.

  In your opinion, who is most guilty in the story?

  Almost everyone in the story is guilty. They are all guilty in different and almost incomparable ways.

  What are you working on now?

  A story about obedience and rebellion.

  WHAT IS ON LISA BALLANTYNE’S READING LIST?

  Jonathan Franzen – Freedom (nearly finished)

  Georg Simmel – On Individuality and Social Forms (just started)

  Lionel Shriver – So Much for That (next week)

  WHAT IS ON LISA BALLANTYNE’S BOOKSELF?

  John Paul Sartre – Being and Nothingness