The Lies You Told

by Harriet Tyce

  “How did Mr. Taylor make these recommendations to you?” Edward asks.

  “He’d talk to me at the end of lessons. Sometimes he’d find me in my classroom or we would have a chat in the corridor.”

  “At what sort of times would these conversations occur?”

  “During the school day. Until the time we had tea in the staff room after school had finished. That was the first time.”

  “Can you tell the court about what happened there? What was the date, do you recall?”

  “Of course I recall,” Freya says, her voice cracking for the first time. “It was the day I lost my virginity. I think I’d remember that, don’t you?”

  Edward Kayode pauses for a moment, giving Freya a chance to compose herself.

  “You’ve said you remember the date—what was it?”

  “It was June of last year, that’s the first time that we met outside school hours. The sixteenth of June.”

  “In your own words, can you tell the court what happened?”

  The date relates to the first count of the indictment. They met outside the school gates by chance, Freya says. Jeremy had given her a copy of a book, Fanny Hill. The prosecutor picks up a sealed plastic bag containing a book and asks for it to be handed to her—she looks at it and nods.

  Returning to the evidence, she says that Jeremy asked her what she had thought of his latest book recommendation. Freya had found it very full-on.

  “What do you mean by that?” Edward asks. Freya’s sangfroid has finally cracked, her cheeks bright pink. She picks up the glass of water that has been provided for her and drinks from it, swallowing loudly. My fists are clenched with the tension as Freya tries to calm herself to get to the most difficult part.

  “I mean it’s rude,” she says. “Really rude.” She seems to be gathering strength from somewhere. “I mean, obviously you see stuff on the internet all the time. You can’t escape it. Boys send it, you see on your phone. Hardcore, whatever. But the fact that he had recommended this book to me, the way it describes sex. It felt really personal. Like he was trying to tell me something.”

  “What kind of thing?”

  Every member of the jury is watching the girl intently. Freya pauses, the flush back up her neck, her cheeks blotched with red. “I began to wonder if he was trying to tell me he liked me.”

  “Liked you in what way?”

  “In a… a sex kind of way. If he fancied me.”

  She returns to the chance meeting. She had left school a little late, she said, because she had been trying to finish off some geography coursework in a rush. As she went through the gates, she ran into Jeremy. He was coming back in, explaining that he had left something behind. He asked her about the book and she had blushed and said it was rude, but after he pressured her a little more, she’d admitted that she’d liked it. She went into school with him as he collected what he needed, and they found that the building was deserted. He took her into the staff room and made her a cup of tea, and then he asked her to show him her favorite passage from the book. She had balked at that, so he took the book from her and found what he said was his favorite passage before reading it aloud to her.

  After he had finished reading it, he asked her if she wanted him to do to her what had been described in the passage. She wasn’t exactly keen but wasn’t reluctant, either. She allowed him to kiss her, undress her, give her oral sex (after some hesitation, she says she enjoyed it) after which they had full intercourse. He had worn a condom and his actions were all very gentle.

  Freya’s voice is becoming quieter and quieter as she recounts this, and the judge has to ask her to speak up on more than one occasion, her voice kind but firm. I’m trying not to react, but I feel her embarrassment. I’m trying not to imagine Robin in her place. I look over at the jury to try and read their reactions—their faces are neutral, as if they’re trying to make it easier for the girl, too. There’s a huge disconnect between Freya’s harsh appearance, the don’t-fuck-with-me eye makeup, and the tremor in her voice, which is audible to the whole court. When she gets to the end of this part, the judge orders the court to rise for a twenty-minute break, and the relief on the girl’s face is evident as she leaves the courtroom with the representative from Witness Support.

  “She’s coming over better than I thought,” Barbara says, “but I don’t think we’ll have too much of a problem rattling her. This is all too pat—textbook grooming. She’s obviously been reading blogs online.”

  I nod. It is pat. But that could also be because it’s true. I push the thought out of my head—this isn’t how I should be thinking.

  “Go and check on Jeremy,” Barbara says. “See what he has to say so far.”

  I go back to the dock. The security officer lets me into the custody section at the back of the court house where Jeremy is sitting before court resumes. He is pale, his jaw set.

  “Are you OK?”

  “It’s just so upsetting to hear,” he says. “I did my absolute best for that girl. And she’s twisting it all to get at me. Talking about those books, it’s ridiculous.”

  “You didn’t give them to her,” I say.

  “There’s an internet full of proper porn,” he says. “Why on earth would I be falling back on a load of old overwritten erotica to seduce a teenager? It doesn’t make sense.”

  He has a point, I think. “I suppose not.” Before I can say anything more, I feel my phone vibrate in my suit pocket. “Sorry, I should just check…”

  It’s a message from Nicole. Daisy is still unconscious, it says. Toxicology tests pending. Overdose suspected.

  I take a sharp intake of breath at the word overdose.

  “Is everything all right?”

  I look up, slightly surprised that despite the stress he’s facing, he’s noticed my concern. I hesitate for a moment before answering his question.

  “It’s one of my daughter’s friends,” I say. “She fell ill on Friday night—she’s been unconscious since then. It looks like she might have taken an overdose.”

  “That’s awful,” he says.

  “You’ve enough on your plate. I shouldn’t be talking about it.”

  “This is serious, though,” he says. “I understand how worried you must be.” He pauses for a moment. “Your daughter goes to Ashams, doesn’t she?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “Year Six?”

  “Yes.”

  He pauses again, carries on. “Look, I probably shouldn’t say anything. It’s just gossip, I don’t know anything concrete. But one does hear things… I’m still in touch with teachers from my school. We talk about things.”

  “What things?” I say, sharply.

  “It’s very competitive, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, that’s what I’m told.”

  “And places are incredibly hard to come by?”

  “Yes. That’s certainly the impression I’ve been given.”

  There’s a long pause. “What I heard… and, look…

  I don’t know if this is true. I heard that they have problems all the way through. The parents are incredibly pushy and even though the school does its best with the kids, they can’t protect them from everything.”

  I feel a spurt of alarm. “I’d say that’s fair—I’ve found the staff very good so far. The parents, well, that’s a different story. But we’re settling in a bit better now,” I say.

  “Well, that’s good.” Another pause. “Look, that wasn’t all. It’s just… I was talking to someone about it just the other week. It had stuck in my head that your daughter is there.” He is looking worried now.

  “And?” I try to sound calm but my hands are starting to shake.

  “I didn’t think anything of it at the time,” he says. “Accidents happen. But now there’s another one…”

  “Another what?”

  “Another child in hospital,” he says.

  “Who was the other one?”

  “It was last year,” he says. “I don’t know exa
ctly what happened, but—”

  He’s interrupted by the security guard. “Time to get back into court, sir.”

  I have to leave, but I need to hear the end.

  “What? What happened?” I hiss at him.

  Jeremy stands up, straightens his tie, ready to go back into the courtroom.

  “She died,” he says. “I don’t know how, but she died.”

  A chill runs through me. I walk back into court, following Jeremy. His words in my ears.

  Fear lodged cold in my throat.

  36

  The next part of Freya’s evidence is a blur. Slowly, I come back into the room. She recounts the other two occasions on which she alleges she and Jeremy had sex; once in an empty classroom, the other back in the staff room after hours. She felt special being singled out, she loved talking about books to him. He suggested Fifty Shades of Grey to her as a more modern book that she might enjoy. They messaged each other in the vein of the two main characters. He had even tried to persuade Freya to send some photographs of herself posing naked to him, although she had refused.

  Now I’m fully engaged. I’m swinging away from my sympathy toward Freya. After all, if there’s one thing I’m familiar with, it’s the contents of Freya’s social media and messaging accounts. And there is no trace of these exchanges anywhere. The prosecutor, Edward, is clearly aware of this too.

  “By what means did you message each other?” he asks, after she has described an exchange that has left the jury pinch-lipped.

  “We used an app called Viber,” she says. “I had it installed on my iPad.”

  “Are you able to show the court these messages?”

  She looks down, shakes her head.

  “I’m sorry, I’ll need you to speak your answer,” Edward says.

  “No,” she says. “I can’t show the court. The app was on my iPad, not on anything else, and I lost my device last summer.”

  “What do you mean by lost it?”

  “I must have left it at school or on the bus. I couldn’t find it. Also, we only ever did secret chats.”

  “Can you tell the court what a secret chat is?”

  “It deletes all the messages as soon as they are read. Jeremy—Mr. Taylor—he was really strict about it. We couldn’t message in any other way.”

  Freya looks over at the dock to where Jeremy is sitting. I turn around to see that he does not meet Freya’s gaze, his head lowered. It startles me when Freya calls him Mr. Taylor. It makes her sound so young. I look around the courtroom, wondering where her parents are sitting. If it were Robin, I’d be going spare watching my daughter having to deal with this. If it were Robin, I’d want to kill Jeremy with my bare hands. At least she’s safe at school right now. As Freya should have been…

  “Did you communicate by any other means?” Edward asks.

  “No. Only like that. And the occasional email about homework via school. But there was nothing in them—they were just normal.”

  “How did you email?”

  “On my laptop computer.”

  “Were there any messages on your phone?”

  “No. It’s just a basic Nokia, not a smartphone. He wouldn’t text me on it, though, because he didn’t want to leave an electronic trail. That’s what he called it.”

  “I’d like to clarify this for the court—you had a laptop computer, a mobile telephone and an iPad, is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Isn’t it unusual that you would have an old Nokia rather than a smartphone?”

  “You tell my mother that!” There’s a ripple of laughter around the court, a break in the tension. Even Freya smiles. “I used to have an iPhone, but I broke it too many times. My mum said I’d have to make do with the Nokia until I proved to her I could look after it. I was about to get a new phone when I lost the iPad.”

  “When do you say that you lost the iPad?”

  “Last summer.”

  “And you didn’t try and download the communication app Viber onto your laptop?”

  “He told me not to. He said it was safer only having it on one device.”

  Edward shuffles through his paperwork. “Did anything happen to the phone and laptop?”

  “The police took them away. I don’t have them any more. My mum got me another Nokia because she was so cross about it all.”

  Edward signals that he has finished this line of questioning, and the court rises for lunch. We eat sandwiches in the canteen. Jeremy is tense, but Barbara is relaxed.

  “Don’t worry,” she says. “This is genuinely at the worst it can be for you. Once I start cross-examining it will all be fine. And the jury aren’t looking impressed. Don’t you agree, Sadie?”

  “It’s true,” I say. “I don’t think they liked the suggestion that she’d lost the iPad at all. Or this self-destructing message service. All a bit too convenient.”

  Jeremy nods. He looks at least partly reassured.

  “I’m going to tear this whole story down, Jeremy,” Barbara says. “You have my word. We are not letting her get away with it.”

  I leave a little before the others to go to the loo. The teenage girls are standing in a cluster in the corridor. They’ve hung on to see all of Freya’s evidence. As I pass by the group they stop talking, starting again as soon as I’ve turned toward the bathroom.

  “She’s such a liar,” one of them says. I stop walking, unable to resist the temptation of eavesdropping. “I know she’d shagged at least three people before she says this happened.”

  “You don’t know that, though,” another one says. “That was just gossip.”

  “It wasn’t just gossip. Emma told me. Her brother knows the boys.”

  “Emma gossips all the time. She’s always making things up.”

  “I can’t believe you’re standing up for Freya. Look at what she’s done to Mr. Taylor.”

  The other girl is having none of it. “What about ‘I believe her’? You’re always going on about that. We’re meant to believe the victim. You’re only standing up for him because you fancy him.”

  “I do not.”

  “You do so. And it’s disgusting. He’s way older than you.”

  This last remark is said at high volume and is met with incoherent shouts, sounds of rapid movement. A scuffle seems to be breaking out amongst the girls, heading ever closer to where I’m standing listening. I put my head down and walk on, my mind whirring.

  Once we’re back in court, before the judge returns, I get my phone out and text Nicole to ask if there’s any news. Nothing, comes the answer almost immediately. I’m so worried. I’m going to drop in at the hospital this afternoon on the way to pick up Pippa. Do you want me to collect Robin?

  I turn to Barbara. “Are you going to need me after court?”

  “No. I just want to make sure that you’ve gone through all the messages that we have with a fine-tooth comb.”

  “I think I’ve put everything down in that document I gave you. There is nothing about Jeremy, or to him. No corroborating evidence. It seems almost incredible that there would be nothing. I don’t buy this iPad story.”

  “Neither do I,” Barbara says. “And by the time I’ve finished cross-examining, neither will anyone else in this court.”

  I message Nicole back. If you wouldn’t mind taking Robin back to yours, that would be great. I won’t be late, pressing send just as Her Honor Judge Chynoweth comes back into court.

  Edward seems invigorated by the short break, bounding up to his feet as soon as it’s time for him to start the examination again. Freya does not look so cheerful. Her makeup is still mostly in situ, but there are smudges around her eyes, as if she’s forgotten the mask she’s wearing and rubbed her eyes, smearing the eyeliner. She looks tired, drooping as she stands. The judge notices this too and asks if she would like to sit down as she gives her evidence, but she shakes her head.

  Edward begins again. “You’ve described those three occasions when you were intimate with the defendant and a series
of very personal messages that you exchanged. You’ve said the last of those incidents took place in the first week of July, just before the end of term.”

  He pauses and Freya nods, says yes.

  “Did you have any discussions with the defendant about the continuation of the relationship into the summer holidays?”

  “Yes,” Freya says. “I thought it was going to keep going. I wanted to go to his flat.”

  “And did you see him in the holidays at all?”

  “Only once.” Freya is looking upset now, her shoulders hunched.

  “Can you tell the court about that occasion?”

  She bows her head before taking a deep breath. “We had been messaging lots, the first week of the holidays. He said we should arrange a date to meet up soon. We had to be careful, but we would make it work. Then I lost my iPad. I couldn’t find it anywhere. So I couldn’t message him.”

  “Did you try and get in touch with him by other means?”

  Another long pause. Another deep breath. “Yes,” Freya says. “I did. I went to his flat.”

  “Had the defendant given you his address?”

  “No, I found it,” Freya says, her voice low.

  “You found it?”

  “The last time we… I was with him, he went to the loo to flush away the condom. He left his wallet on the desk. I took a photo of his driving license. So I had his address.” Her voice is very strained at this point.

  “Why did you take a photo of his driving license?” Edward says.

  “Because it had his photo on it. I wanted to have that. And I guess I wanted his address. Just in case.” She straightens herself up. “I didn’t mean to do it, but I couldn’t help myself.”

  “And did you do anything with that address?”

  “Yes. I went there. I wanted to ask if I could have his phone number so I could message him now that I’d lost my iPad. My mum was really cross, and she wasn’t going to let me get another one, and so I couldn’t use the app any more.”

  “Let’s return to the day you went to his address. Was he there?”

  Freya pauses. “He was there. But he was really angry with me for coming round. He said it was stupid and immature of me. So I left.” Freya sounds cross, as if the memory is still raw.