Divas

by Rebecca Chance

  India went pink with pleasure.

  ‘Well, how nice to find a little party!’ David exclaimed. ‘I just dropped by to give you news about Jean—’ He looked at Lola. ‘He’s doing fantastically. Really, it’s from night to day, if you think about how unhappy he was at Desert Springs. Not that it was Desert Springs’ fault, of course, they did me the world of good, but poor Jean just wasn’t ready to come out and clean up his act at the same time! And now he’s doing so well that they let him ring me every week. He’ll be out in a fortnight, tops. Maybe even less.’

  ‘Oh, that’s great!’ Lola exclaimed, hugging David again. ‘I’m so happy for him! And you, of course!’ She tried to make her voice light as she asked: ‘Does Niels know? Have you been talking to him?’

  ‘I haven’t, but Jean has, ’ David said.‘That man scares the life out of me. In a mainly good way, but still—’ He rolled his eyes at India. ‘Jean-Marc’s brother, ’ he explained, probably thinking she might not know who they were talking about.

  ‘Oh, I met him once, ’ India said, going even pinker. ‘He’s gorgeous. But very – grumpy.’

  And he hasn’t been in touch once since we landed at Teterboro, Lola thought rather sadly. He didn’t even kiss me goodbye. I mean, he’d sorted out the helicopter and everything, which was nice of him, but then he just went on to Houston, I suppose. And I remembered him saying that the plane was going back to Milan in a couple of days, so he probably just took his meetings in Houston and then got on the jet again and went back to Milan, and back to Bellagio and the Villa Aurora as if I’d never even turned up there in the first place.

  As if we’d never had amazing sex on the plane. He gave me a ride back to New York, and he got paid for it. End of story. Who needs him, anyway?

  The doorbell rang again, and Lola went to answer it.

  ‘Thai, Japanese and Italian, ’ she said, lugging in the bags of food. ‘We couldn’t decide what to get, so we ordered a bit of everything.’

  ‘It’s the New York way!’ David said cheerfully.

  ‘David, do stay and eat with us, ’ Suzanne said, pulling up another chair to the table. ‘There’s so much food, really.’

  ‘Love to, ’ David said happily. ‘Lola, darling—’ He patted the chair on his other side. ‘Tell me everything! What’s going on with your trial? When does it start?’

  ‘In two days, ’ Lola said, sitting down.

  ‘Oh, darling—’

  ‘Sometimes I manage to forget it’s happening for hours at a time, ’ she said, trying to smile but, from David’s expression, not doing a very good job. ‘And sometimes, I don’t. Before I went to Italy – while we were waiting for Evie’s passport to come through – I had several sessions with a sort of coach Simon Poluck hired. She questions you as if she were a lawyer, and you give your testimony, and then she tells you you’re doing it all wrong and what you should be saying instead. I have to start again first thing tomorrow morning.’ She shivered. ‘It was really horrible, just going over the same thing again and again till you want to scream. And then she pretends to be the prosecution, and she’s really hostile, and you have to keep calm and not let her anger you, but it’s OK to get upset as long as I don’t get angry, because if I’m angry, the jury will think that I’m possibly a killer, because killers have bad tempers.’

  She managed a smile now, a bitter one.

  ‘I have to be careful not to get wound up by anything she says, even when she pounds the desk and storms around the room. I just have to sit there looking upset and helpless and like someone who couldn’t possibly kill anyone at all, let alone my own father.’

  Tears sprung to her eyes. Her mother jumped up and came to stand behind her, massaging her shoulders.

  David clicked his tongue.

  ‘I mean, we all have tempers, ’ he muttered. ‘And I’d be cross if someone were shouting at me, telling me I’d done something awful.’

  ‘Exactly!’

  Lola was really crying now. ‘I’m sorry—’ she stammered through her tears. ‘I’m trying to be brave, but sometimes it just gets too much. I mean, I’m freaking out at the thought of starting those sessions again, and if I hated them, the trial’s going to be a hundred times worse.’

  ‘Oh, darling—’

  Suzanne was embracing her, India was looking anxious and David was pouring her a glass of water and handing her tissues. Lola was surrounded by people who cared about her, people who didn’t think for a moment that she had killed her father.

  But Lola was incapable of being consoled. Sympathetic as they were, none of them could really help her. When she went into court, wearing one of the simple, restrained, not-too-expensive-looking dark outfits that the jury consultant had approved for her, she would sit there at the defence table all alone. Oh, Simon Poluck, and two other lawyers (one for the forensic evidence, one a medical expert) would be there with her, plus the jury consultant and the testimony coach. But none of them would be convicted if the case went against her. They’d all be paid – not the bonuses they would get if she were acquitted, but they’d still all be paid. They would all be able to walk away.

  Only she would go to prison. If Joe Scutellaro didn’t change his story after all.

  Only she would be serving twenty-five to life in a maximum-security prison, if she were convicted.

  Lola put her head down on the table and sobbed her heart out in absolute terror.

  Chapter 37

  ‘Look at her!’ Joshua Greene bellowed, as best he could in his light tenor voice. He lowered it even further for his next line, which he delivered while still pointing accusingly at Lola.

  ‘Look at her, ladies and gentlemen, ’ he insisted. ‘Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, would it? But don’t be fooled by her appearance. Before this trial is over, you will have heard clear and certain evidence that Lola Fitzgerald – this pretty, fragile girl – murdered her own father in cold blood. When he tragically slipped into a diabetic coma, her stepmother, a woman of great principle, shocked by the reports of her stepdaughter’s decadent and debauched behaviour, decided that it was time to take a stand. Courageously, she did what her husband had been wanting to do for some time, but had been too weak to act upon. She carried out his wishes in cutting off her stepdaughter financially, hoping against hope that the shock would bring this young woman to her senses. Little did she know that Lola Fitzgerald would be unable to envision a world in which her father’s money did not ease her every need.’

  Joshua Greene turned on his heel and paced away from Lola and the defendant’s table.

  ‘What did she do?’ he demanded, in a voice trembling with the magnitude of what he was about to say. ‘She came to visit her father, the father who was lying, helpless, in a coma. The father who could not raise a hand to defend himself against her. Then’ – he drew in a breath – ‘she made an excuse to send away the nurse who would have been his security. And, ladies and gentlemen, this depraved young woman took a syringe from his bedside table, and a vial of insulin from the fridge below, and injected her father with a lethal dose.’

  He swivelled dramatically, facing the jury full on.

  ‘She knew that as long as her father lived, her stepmother Carin would have control of his money. She had been told by her stepmother that access to her trust fund was blocked for the foreseeable future, in the hope that she would start to earn her own living, to build a more worthwhile life than the shallow, drug-obsessed existence she had been living up till that point. She knew that her only hope of regaining access to her father’s extensive fortune was to have his will executed, a will in which he left his beloved daughter half of everything he owned. And so, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, Lola Fitzgerald killed her own father for the most sordid, heinous motive in the world. Money.’

  Don’t react, the testimony coach had said. Whatever the prosecutor says in his opening statement, don’t react. Above all, don’t look angry. Keep your face as calm and impassive as you can. Remember, you’re innocent.r />
  Well, Lola had got one thing right. She was definitely saddened. As Joshua Greene had pronounced the words ‘beloved daughter’ with such sarcasm, such contempt, she had felt a tear begin to roll down her cheek.

  Don’t look down if you can help it, the coach had said. Lola realised that she was staring down at the table and jerked her head up again. God, it was so hard to remember everything she had said, not to be natural for a moment, in order to present an image of yourself that the jury would read as innocent.

  And she was already all too familiar with the courtroom. The waist-high wooden panelling, the faded old oil paintings of nautical scenes, the gilded inlaid words carved and painted into the marble slab behind the judge’s bench, reading ‘IN GOD WE TRUST’. The judge was different, though, a wizened little woman with a heavily lined smoker’s face and bright beady eyes, looking like a wise little dwarf in her black robe with its white collar.

  The judge intimidated Lola; she looked over at the jury instead. That was OK, apparently. Don’t be afraid of turning to look at the jury on occasion, Juliet had said. If you do, always meet their eyes otherwise you’ll seem shifty. But don’t be defiant, or angry. Remember, you’re in mourning.

  ‘You will hear, ’ Joshua Greene was saying, ‘that the defendant made sure to ask the nurse, Mr Scutellaro, all the questions she needed to ensure that she injected her father with enough insulin to kill him. You will hear that she then sent him away on an errand that even at the time seemed meaningless to him, in order to make sure she had enough time to carry out the act. You will hear—’

  Do they believe him? Lola wondered, looking at the jury. Selection of these twelve people (well, fifteen if you counted the alternates) had taken days. Joshua Greene had wanted to get as many women as possible on the jury, respectable middle-aged ones who would disapprove of everything that Lola stood for. Simon Poluck, naturally, had pushed for men, men who would find Lola so attractive that they wouldn’t be able to entertain for a moment the thought that this pretty, fragile blonde could have done something so heinous – as Joshua Greene, who seemed to have swallowed a dictionary that morning, would put it – as murder her own father for money.

  Lola didn’t see condemnation in the expressions of the jurors. Apart, perhaps, from one thin, rather drawn-looking woman in a baggy beige sweater, whose eyes narrowed ominously when they met Lola’s. They looked avid instead. Greedy for the inside scoop. Hugely curious about the window this trial would open for them onto the lives of the rich and famous. A girl in the front row was staring at Lola voraciously, assessing her black Marc Jacobs dress with its wide, Peter Pan collar, her yellow diamond earrings, her hair, which was smoothed down and drawn back into a coil at the back of her head.

  Don’t try to look poorer than you are, the jury consultant had advised. They’ll spot that straight away and they’ll be insulted. Dress well, and soberly. But no big statement handbags – nothing that cost upwards of four figures. Or you’ll see yourself on the front of the Post the next day with a big tag hanging off your handbag, with the price printed on it. For some reason, expensive handbags drive them nuts. I don’t know why, but they do.

  Further down the defendant’s table, Simon Poluck stirred, pushing his papers together in one neat stack. Joshua Greene must be reaching the end of his speech.

  ‘She’s guilty!’ he was declaiming. ‘I am sure of that, and by the end of this trial, you will be too. The evidence against her is overwhelming, ladies and gentlemen. Once you have heard it, you will be as convinced by it as the State of New York is. Once you have heard the evidence, you will have no choice but to convict Lola Fitzgerald of the worst crime there is. Patricide.’

  It was an awful word. Lola flinched and looked away, to the rows of spectators’ benches behind the prosecutors’ table. She saw Evie and Lawrence, who had promised to attend the trial as much as they could, to support Lola. And then she spotted Carin. Her stepmother, wearing a black hat with a little veil, like something out of a 1940s movie, was sitting there with a tiny smile on her face as she heard Lola accused of the crime she herself had committed. A black widow spider, at the centre of the web she had woven, enjoying tremendously the process of watching Lola be slowly eaten alive.

  Now Lola realised why she had been warned not to look angry. She ducked her gaze, not caring for a moment if she wasn’t supposed to; it was the lesser of two evils. Because right then, she had enough rage in her eyes to make the jury, if they saw it, be convinced that she was capable of anything.

  Simon Poluck had planned his strategy with the next witness very cleverly, his intention clearly being to wrong-foot the prosecution. After Joshua Greene had declared that he had finished questioning the fingerprint expert, Simon Poluck stood up, saying: ‘I have just a couple of questions for this witness, Your Honour. We are happy to stipulate that my client did indeed touch the syringe, the insulin vial and the fridge in which the latter was kept. As we will be demonstrating, my client has a perfectly innocent explanation for the fact that her fingerprints appear on these three items. My first question is simply this.’

  He swivelled to stare directly at the fingerprint expert.

  ‘Can you confirm for us that the pattern of Ms Fitzgerald’s fingerprints on the syringe do not indicate the position in which one would hold it when one was using it for the purpose for which it is intended – i.e., you didn’t find the classic thumbprint on the plunger, or the fingers gripping the syringe as if to position it for an injection?’

  ‘Um, no, they don’t, ’ said the fingerprint expert cautiously. ‘As I said in my testimony, there is considerable blurring, but the only prints of Ms Fitzgerald which I can identify as twelve-point matches indicate that she was holding it from below.’

  ‘As you would hold a pen, for instance, if I handed it to you and asked you to hold it for a moment?’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘Thank you!’ said Simon Poluck triumphantly, looking at the jury. ‘And my second question: you found no fingerprints of Ms Fitzgerald’s at all on the sharps container in which we have been told that the syringe and vial were found?’

  ‘None whatsoever, ’ said the fingerprint expert.

  ‘How very significant, ’ Simon Poluck said, never taking his eyes off the jury. ‘How very significant.’

  Joshua Greene was on his feet, about to object, but Simon Poluck was already raising his hand and walking back to the defence table.

  ‘I have no further questions for this witness, Your Honour, ’ he was saying.

  ‘Mr Greene?’ the judge said to the ADA as the fingerprint expert stepped down off the stand. ‘I’m sensing some sort of confusion in your general vicinity. Are you calling your next witness?’

  ‘Your Honour—’ Joshua Greene, flustered, was leaning back over the prosecutor’s table now, conferring urgently with Mackesy.‘Your Honour, we were not expecting to call our next witness until tomorrow at the earliest. We have been experiencing some difficulties in contacting him – he was due to arrive in the country yesterday on a flight from Rome, but he was not on that flight. The Italian authorities have been contacted and are investigating this with extreme urgency, but he is the last name on our witness list, Your Honour, and his testimony is very important to this case—’

  ‘Who is this witness?’ the judge asked, flicking through a sheaf of papers on the desk in front of her.

  ‘Your Honour, his name is Giuseppe Scutellaro, commonly known as Joe – he is the nurse who was attending Mr Fitzgerald on the day he died – his testimony is, frankly, crucial—’

  ‘Did you know about this?’ Lola leaned over and whispered to Simon Poluck, her heart beating fast. If Joe Scutellaro wasn’t coming, what did that mean? Had he decided to go back on their deal? Was he trapped between her and Carin now, and thinking that the best plan of action was to stay in Italy and avoid testifying at all?

  ‘I heard they were having problems, ’ Simon Poluck muttered. ‘Knew Scutellaro wasn’t here as of this morning. So I sp
eeded things up to catch them off guard. It worked better anyway – made us look very confident. Like this is an open-and-shut case.’

  Just then the door at the back of the courtroom swung open and practically every head in the room turned to see if it was the missing witness, Joe Scutellaro, making a dramatic, last-minute entrance. Lola recognised the man who walked in immediately: it was Detective Garcia, followed by Detective Morgan, who remained standing by the door as Garcia bustled down the centre aisle and ducked down behind the prosecutor’s table, muttering swiftly to Serena Mackesy.

  Her face went white and she gestured to Joshua Greene to listen to what Garcia was telling her. His reaction was as intense as hers: he fired out a couple of questions at Garcia, then shook his head vehemently, as if trying to deny something he knew to be true. Serena Mackesy just sat there, shaking her own head in an unconscious echo of her boss’s mannerism.

  Garcia’s mouth downturned, he headed back down the aisle again.

  ‘Mr Greene?’ the judge prompted.

  Joshua Greene pushed back his chair slowly, reluctantly, and stood up again.

  ‘Your Honour, ’ he said. ‘I’m very sorry to say that I’ve just been informed that our witness, Giuseppe Scutellaro, was murdered last night in Rome on his way to the airport.’

  Chapter 38

  ‘Silence!’ the judge said crossly, pounding her gavel, as gasps of surprise echoed around the courtroom.

  The jury was openly gaping, like spectators at a play that had just revealed a huge twist in the plot. Lola saw, with a cynicism she couldn’t help, that their predominant emotion was enthralled enjoyment. The key witness in the prosecution case had been killed – in a foreign country, no less! How much more dramatic could things get?

  The sound of Simon Poluck’s chair shooting back as he jumped to his feet focused all eyes on him.

  ‘Your Honour, ’ he said with barely repressed triumph in his voice, ‘the prosecution’s entire case rests on the testimony of this unfortunate young man. Since he is no longer able to share his story with us’ – the delicate contempt in his tone made it quite clear what he thought of the story Joe Scutellaro had been going to tell – ‘it is clear that there is no case to answer against my client. We ask the court to dismiss all charges against her immediately and without prejudice.’