‘OK,’ he says. He reaches into his pocket for a phone, and brings up a yellow screen, thin grey lines running across it. ‘What does it look like?’ His finger is poised to make notes.
‘I don’t know. I’ve never seen it.’
‘Ah.’ He switches the phone back off, and returns it to his jacket pocket. ‘But you’re sure it exists?’
‘She told me she wrote in it.’
His face is almost completely motionless, only one eyelid flicking betrayal. I remember that he is a man who spends a great deal of his working life with liars.
‘Why would she lie about it?’
‘To impress her favourite teacher?’ He shrugs.
‘Her mother says she was always writing in it.’
‘Ah, so she knows what it looks like.’ He’s relieved.
I shake my head. ‘She never saw it either. Mel just told her that she was writing a diary.’
‘Well, then.’ He presses his lips together for a moment, then continues. ‘We’ll find it. But you have to understand that it might not help her. You do see that?’
‘Yes.’
‘She wants to plead guilty because she committed an awful crime,’ he says, quietly. ‘That’s her right, Alex. Even if we’re doing our best to reduce the time she serves.’
‘It was just an impulsive moment,’ I reply. ‘She was with me, she was angry and upset, and she did something impetuous and stupid and someone died.’
‘It wasn’t completely impetuous.’ He’s talking so softly now, that I have to lean in to hear him over the sound of the steamers and milk frothers.
‘What do you mean?’
He looks perplexed. ‘You must know, Alex. You were there.’
‘She just pushed her. If the woman hadn’t been wearing those stupid shoes, she’d have probably kept her balance. No-one could have seen that she would fall, not even Mel. And even then, a few seconds earlier and she would have fallen into the canal, and she wouldn’t have been hurt at all, probably. A second or two later, and she’d have fallen into some shrubs, and the worst that would have happened is a few scratches.’ As I say this, I feel the branches on my wrists and ankles again, poking their way in up my coat-sleeves and between my jeans and my boots. I rub my wrists to ease the phantom itching.
‘But that’s not all she did,’ he says, and looks at me in a manner which would surely be full of meaning if I had any idea what he was talking about.
‘I don’t understand.’
He takes a deep breath, and exhales. He’s gazing at me so hard that I begin to think I have milk or something on my face. I put my hand up to check.
‘Has no-one ever told you? The police, when they questioned you, they didn’t ask you if you saw the knife?’
My brain tells me my ears must be malfunctioning. ‘The knife?’
‘I’m so sorry, Alex.’ He reaches over and grabs one of my wrists. ‘She stabbed Katarina Prochazka in the back as she pushed her. In her left kidney, to be precise. And although that didn’t kill her, there’s little doubt that the blood loss from that wound contributed to her death from the head injury she received when she hit the towpath. The police never found the knife. Mel said she’d thrown it somewhere. And since she didn’t know the route she’d taken back to King’s Cross, the police didn’t manage to find it. But I suppose they didn’t need to, when they had her full confession. Are you alright?’
He starts digging about in the messenger bag for one of those miniature bricks of tissues that Lisa Meyer always has. He opens one out, and hands it to me. I haven’t noticed I’m crying till then.
5
Dear Alex,
You don’t give up, do you? I said I didn’t want the diary found, and I don’t. And it won’t be. So could you stop hassling my mum, my lawyer, and everyone else I’ve ever met? This is what the therapist here calls a boundary issue. As in, you’re overstepping my boundary.
You’re probably thinking that’s rich coming from me, right? That’s fair enough, I suppose, but you have to let this go. You’re not helping – you’re making things harder. My mum’s upset now, and Adam-the-lawyer has gone all soft-voiced, just-trying-to-help-you-Mel-don’t-make-me-the-bad-guy. It’s exhausting. My days are long enough in here without everyone adding to it.
So please, let it go.
Adam says I’ll see you in court. Are you really coming? Because you know I’m pleading guilty, don’t you? It’s not like a proper trial at all, really. It’s just, well, I don’t know what it is, exactly. It’s just the thing that happens next.
So maybe I’ll see you there.
Love, Mel
PS The fact that I put ‘love Mel’ doesn’t mean I’m not still pissed off with you.
I have many regrets about what happened in the aftermath of Luke’s death. One of them has always been about his killer’s trial. Should I have gone? Would it have made a difference if the jury had seen me in the gallery? A grieving widow. Except I wasn’t a widow. I wasn’t Luke’s wife, so there is no word to describe what I became – or rather, what Dominic Kovar rendered me.
But as I sit waiting for Mel’s sentencing hearing to begin, I am glad that I spared myself the first trial. I arrive at the court with Luke’s parents, with whom I was briefly living after I left Edinburgh. They have always been kind to me: from the beginning, when they offered to pay the rent on the Richmond flat after he died. They realised far more quickly than I did that the financial things wouldn’t wait till the emotional crisis subsided. It’s not like our landlord wasn’t sorry about what had happened, but it was a buy-to-let, and the rent we paid covered his mortgage. So he needed me to move out, even if I’d wanted to stay.
And I didn’t want to stay, because no-one should have to live on the same street as the faintly discoloured paving stone which marks the place where the person they love bled out. At first, people put flowers there, propped up against the wall, and tied to a lamp-post: limp carnations and dying roses. But the offerings don’t stop people stepping there, dropping gum and walking dogs. Treading on his blood. To them it was pavement, to me it was desecrated ground. I would have taken the paving stone if I could. I would have dug it up and marked his grave with it.
When I moved out, I headed to Edinburgh with just what I could carry, and his parents took in my things, mine and Luke’s. They boxed up our DVDs and books, our saucepans and plates, marked the boxes ‘Fragile’. They moved them into their garage in Reigate, and parked their car on the drive instead. I told them I would never need any of the stuff again, and they didn’t argue, or tell me I might change my mind later. They simply nodded, took the boxes away, and didn’t mention them again. And when I called them all those months later, from Edinburgh, to tell them what had happened, because I had to tell someone, they invited me to stay.
When I got there, his mother had made up the spare room for me, across the landing from Luke’s old bedroom. I peeked round the door that evening, and saw that the room was, as it had been when Luke was alive, a study. People in Reigate have studies. The only sign that it had once been their son’s room was a photograph on one bookshelf. He was smiling and ruffling my hair. I was laughing, and trying to move his hand. I went to pick it up, then decided to leave us there, in peace.
It was a day or two later when Luke’s mother, Alice, asked if I wanted any of my clothes from the boxes. She said she needed to sort through them, to work out what needed keeping and what she should throw away. So we ploughed through each box, emptying and re-boxing things for the charity shop. We kept one box with a few of Luke’s clothes inside, because when we opened it, it smelled so strongly of him, of lemon and basil and cleanness, that I couldn’t breathe. He could have been standing behind me. Neither of us could have thrown it away. So we closed it up and put it on a shelf next to the boxes of Christmas decorations.
After a few more days, Luke’s father, David, said that the theatre in the nearby town of Redhill was looking for a new artistic director, and that he’d suggested they ask
me. He did this in such a matter-of-fact way that I didn’t even wonder about the coincidence. It wasn’t until some weeks later, when I was helping to stuff programmes into envelopes, that I saw their names on the list of Friends and Angels. I wondered how much he’d donated.
So I went to have a look at the theatre with Alice, with no expectation of being offered the job, and then it was so small and perfect, and they were so keen, that I said yes before I’d even thought through the consequences. As we went to have coffee and a bun to celebrate my new job, Alice gave me a set of keys to what she described as ‘the granny flat’ at the end of their road, which they had bought long ago for when David’s mother became frail and unable to manage on her own. She had never set foot in the place: a flurry of minor strokes killed her in less than a week. They had rented the place out since then, and their most recent tenant had just moved up to London to ditch her commute.
Everything had fallen so neatly into place that I was beginning to wonder if Luke’s parents had missed their calling in organised crime.
* * *
My own mother offered to come to Mel’s sentencing hearing, but I told her not to worry. I would be fine with David and Alice. And when we arrived at the Old Bailey, it seemed strangely familiar: all those news broadcasts I suppose. I’d spoken to Adam twice more between our meeting and today, and he was cautious about the way the case had progressed. Mel had remained determined to plead guilty, but the Crown Prosecution Service had decided to charge her with manslaughter, rather than murder, even though she’d used a knife. Adam saw this as a victory for him and Charles Brayford: murder charges were almost automatic, if a knife had been used. But because the coroner had cited the head injury as the cause of death, the CPS had made a rare exception.
Adam was disappointed that he had come no closer to finding Mel’s diary. Asking her for it had simply ensured that she wouldn’t speak to either of her lawyers. Adam said she would tell him he was wasting her time, remove her hearing aids, and wait until he left. He offered to find her new counsel, but she ignored that too.
So neither man knew for certain what would happen at the first hearing. She did exactly what she had promised she would do, and entered a guilty plea. It was only then – for the first time in many months – that I was no longer in Charles Brayford’s sights. Whatever he had been hoping to throw at me made no difference now. She had been determined to protect me one last time.
She was remanded back to the secure unit in Edinburgh, pending her psychological evaluation. Those evaluations, Adam said, were now submitted to the judge, so her sentence could be decided. I called him the day before and asked him how long she would be imprisoned. He had no idea. I asked him to guess. Too many variables, he said.
* * *
And now, David, Alice and I are sitting outside the courtroom, waiting to go in. The courts are bustling with people, all carrying papers and briefcases, wearing suits and striding past with a visible sense of purpose. No wonder Luke felt at home in this world. I don’t ask Alice if she’s thinking about him. Neither she nor David ever ask the other what they’re thinking about. They both know the answer already. It’s always him.
I wish Lisa Meyer was here. Once Mel entered her plea, Lisa’s job was done, and I haven’t seen her since. ‘That’s a good result,’ she said, slicing away from the courts to go back to her office. ‘I hope I’ll see you another time, Alex, in happier circumstances.’ She gave me a nod, because Lisa Meyer prefers not to shake hands, as she never knows where other people’s hands have been.
I wanted to give her a hug, but the dark glint in her eye told me this would be a huge mistake. And since she could probably fell me with some lightning move if I even so much as moved towards her in a hug formation, I just said goodbye to her, awkwardly, giving her a small wave, because somehow goodbyes demand that we do something with our hands.
‘Will she come past us?’ Alice asks, suddenly.
‘I don’t know,’ I tell her. ‘They might take her in through a different door. But I don’t know.’
We fall back into silence, and after a while a clerk tells us we can go through to the public gallery, so we follow her directions onto the courtroom balcony, which is smaller than I’m expecting, and darker. It’s almost empty inside. Mel’s mother is already there, downstairs, with a man who has his arm around her shoulders. At the opposite end of the bench seating, two rows behind her, is a dark-haired, middle-aged man who must be Mel’s father. He’s alone. I hope he doesn’t see me. Or at any rate, I hope he doesn’t talk to me. I’m not surprised that he blames me for his daughter’s predicament: I blame myself. But that doesn’t mean we have anything in common.
The judge arrives and takes his seat. He places a pile of papers in front of him. When he directs the clerk to bring Mel into the courtroom, her mother straightens up, shifts out from under her friend’s arm, and slides an inch or two away from him.
Mel looks older, after all these months. She’s maybe an inch or two taller, and her hair has been cut into short feathery layers. It suits her. She clocks the gallery and gives her mother a small wave. She blanks the boyfriend, and doesn’t even look in the direction of her father. I wonder how she knew where he would be sitting, to ignore him so completely. Finally, she looks up to me, David and Alice. Her eyes flick over them, and I know she’s trying to work out who they are. She knows they can’t be my parents, because she remembers my father is dead. It takes her a second, if that, to catch on. She puts her thumbs together and arches her fingers above them to make a heart shape, which she holds as she looks at her mother again, and then at me. Her mother starts to cry.
* * *
The whole thing is over in a matter of moments. I’m an idiot for not realising there would be no courtroom drama scene: she has already been convicted, after all. It’s just her sentence that needs to be decided. The prosecution reads out a statement from Katarina’s mother and sister, in a monotonous voice. Mel doesn’t react as he drones through a paragraph about how their lives will never be the same again, and how she lit up the room just by being in it. I feel guilty for wondering if the clichés were in the original Croatian, or if they appeared in translation. His voice is like a fly stuck between a net curtain and a closed window. There is no statement from Dominic Kovar, the bereaved fiancé. Perhaps we only care when grief is visited on the innocent.
Charles Brayford, dressed in a suit which is too silvery, respectfully reminds the judge of the sheaf of papers they have submitted in advance, from Mel’s counsellors, psychologists and psychiatrists at the secure unit. The judge tells the court that he is weighing all these things in his mind as he considers the appropriate sentence, and Mel sits completely still throughout. I wonder if she can have taken her hearing aids out. I can’t see her ears through her hair, but her hands are suspiciously clenched, as if she is holding something small. She doesn’t seem to hear anything Charles Brayford says. And she doesn’t react when the judge starts talking again. He asks her to rise, and she ignores him. He asks again, and the clerk reaches over and touches her forearm. She jumps.
The judge asks, loudly and slowly, if she can hear him, and then looks around helplessly, wishing someone would suggest a solution. Mel is enjoying herself. Wrong-footing them all with her deafness, using it as a mechanism to undermine them.
He asks if anyone might be able to provide a sign-language translation for her. She replaces the aids while he’s looking the other way, at the clerk, and says slightly too loudly, which would annoy her if she knew, that she can hear him perfectly well, thank you. The judge looks flustered, and asks if she is sure. She gives him a look of such comprehensive contempt that the judge, who has presided over some of the most challenging murder cases in the past decade, according to Adam, physically blanches. The threats and rage of a hardened criminal are as nothing, it seems, in comparison with the utter scorn of a teenage girl.
He gives her a sentence of eight years. David murmurs in my ear that this means she’ll be out on l
icence in four, less the months she has already been on remand. He’s an expert on sentencing now, of course. The judge tells us he has made his decision in the light of excellent reports on Mel’s behaviour from the secure unit staff. He is mindful that her disability will make any period of incarceration more difficult for her. He is taking into account the fact that her plea has saved the court and the family of the victim from the expensive and painful process of a trial.
Her face is motionless, so I have to look to Charles Brayford and Adam to see if they’re interpreting that as good news. They’re both smiling. Charles Brayford raises one hand up to head-height. It is possible that he is considering a high five, I think. As Adam turns away to put papers in his briefcase, Brayford morphs the gesture into tidying an imaginary stray hair. I find myself wondering if Dominic Kovar’s lawyers would have done the same thing, celebrated their triumph, last year.
Mel smiles at her mother. She leaves the court without speaking, and she managed to get through the entire hearing without ever looking at either her counsel or her father. By the time we get downstairs, her father has left. Her mother is across the lobby, sitting on a bench, sobbing. I don’t want to interrupt, so I leave her to her boyfriend, who is standing awkwardly next to her, holding a small plastic cup of water which I doubt she can even see. He holds it for a little longer, and then he starts sipping it himself.
I duck into the Ladies, to feel cold water on my hot hands. When I come out, there’s a clerk looking for me. Mel would like to speak to me before she leaves, he says. She’s waiting behind the courtroom.
I follow him down one corridor, and then another. She’s waiting for me, next to a grey-haired man whose creased face suggests that he spends more time laughing than I would ever have guessed from his expression.
‘You have two minutes at the very outside. And only because you asked nicely,’ he tells her sternly. And then he pats her shoulder. ‘I’ll be listening,’ he says.
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