by Vicary, Tim
49. New Client
‘KATHRYN WALTERS?’ Sarah said. ‘I’m not sure I can do it. I prosecuted David Kidd, remember? For the murder of her daughter.’
‘Yes, I know. That’s why she asked for you, apparently. She wants you and no one else.’ Lucy Parsons laughed, a cheerful, encouraging sound. As Kathryn’s solicitor, she was ringing to ask if Sarah would defend her client in court. ‘Heaven knows why, but you seem to have this effect on some people, Sarah. They trust you. It seems you were nice to her during David Kidd’s trial, and she thinks you’re the best there is.’
‘Even though I lost?’ Sarah answered wonderingly. ‘Surely it’s partly my fault that all this has happened.’
‘She doesn’t see it that way,’ Lucy assured her. ‘She blames the police, not you. And she thinks you’ll be able to defend her better because you know so much about the background.’
‘Well, I’m flattered, Luce, and intrigued. But I’ll have to check with the judge first, to see if he thinks there’s a conflict of interest. If he doesn’t, I’d be happy to do it, of course.’
Sarah put down the phone and leaned back in her chair, thinking. In the months since David Kidd’s acquittal many things had happened. Her career had begun to pick up; she had been involved in several high profile cases. Her husband had got the job at the school in Harrogate, and seemed absorbed by the new challenge. Emily had been to Cambridge for an interview, and been offered a place to study environmental science if she got two As and a B in her A levels. And her son Simon had a new girlfriend, Lorraine, a shy girl who seemed so terrified of Sarah that she’d scarcely uttered ten words on the two occasions they’d met so far.
But for all this time Kathryn Walters had been in prison on remand, charged with murder. Sarah had never quite forgotten her; David Kidd’s prosecution had been her first notable failure, and the results that had flowed from it made everything worse. Just like Terry Bateson, she wished she could put things right, and this unexpected request to be Kathryn’s defence counsel gave her the opportunity. She contacted the judge who was listed for the case, and was relieved when he made no objection. But as she sat reading through the brief which Lucy sent over, her sense of relief and excitement drained away, to be replaced by a burden that pressed on her brows like a migraine.
The prosecution case was stronger than she had expected. If she took on Kathryn’s defence and lost, Sarah realised miserably, then she’d feel doubly depressed: for failing to convict Kidd in the first place, and then for failing to defend his victim.
For victim was what Kathryn Walters was, whichever way she looked at it. Even if she had killed David Kidd, she’d only done it to avenge her daughter’s murder; and if she hadn’t, well ... the injustice was ten times worse. Sarah began to jot down a few phrases for a speech in mitigation, then stopped as she realised what she was doing. Her task was get Kathryn Walters acquitted, not to minimise her sentence out of pity. Not yet, anyway. Though it might come to that in the end.
When she met Kathryn in prison her sense of pity increased. The woman looked thin, grey, diminished. Her body, once trim and muscled by regular visits to the gym, had begun to sag; her mind, previously kept sharp by the demands of running a business, seemed dull and blunted. Sarah had come equipped with a pad of vital questions, but to her surprise, the answers were vague, hesitant, rambling. Several times Kathryn stayed silent, as though she had not heard the question at all.
‘Your defence is, simply, that you didn’t do it, you weren’t there. So why did you give a false alibi?’
‘That was my husband, it was his idea. I panicked, I suppose, and went along with it.’
‘Not the best decision by either of you. The trouble is, the prosecution will use it to imply that your husband knew you were guilty. Or at least, that he thought you were capable of murder. Is that what he thought?’
‘He may have done, I don’t know. He was probably just trying to help me.’
‘Then they’ll bring up your motive: your words outside the court, and your arrest with your husband’s shotgun.’ Sarah frowned, remembering her earlier interview with Kathryn in the police station. ‘You’ll have to be careful what you say about that. If you tell the court what you told me that night, it can only help the prosecution.’
‘That I went there to kill him, you mean?’
‘Yes. You can’t afford to say that, Kathryn. Even if it’s true. Is that still how you feel?’
‘Am I glad he’s dead, you mean?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well ... I always thought I would be, until it happened. But now that I’ve had time to sit here for months and think about it - think about nothing else, really - it doesn’t help.’ She sighed, looking down at her hands. ‘Nothing brings Shelley back. All I think about is her.’
‘Yes, of course.’ Watching, Sarah remembered those terrible moments when she’d believed her own daughter was dead. Every second of that time was still vivid to her. She still had dreams about it from which she awoke trembling, tearful, afraid. Occasionally she crept out of bed at three or four in the morning, to listen outside Emily’s door and check she was still breathing. All that for a child who hadn’t died. How much worse it must be to grieve for a child that had.
‘But how do you feel about David?’ she asked gently, after a moment’s silence.
‘Him? Oh ...’ Kathryn shook her head, as though distracted by an irrelevance. ‘Well, he deserved punishment, of course he did. But you failed to get it for him, didn’t you? I don’t mean just you on your own; I mean the police and the jury as well. The whole rotten system. So ...’
So I killed him myself, Sarah thought. Is that what she’s going to say? If she says that I can’t defend her. Not on a not guilty plea. It’s best to make that clear now. Then if she does confess I can make a strong plea in mitigation.
She waited, and the moment passed.
‘So now he’s dead,’ Kathryn continued wearily, ‘and of course I’m glad he can’t harm anyone else’s daughter. But it doesn’t make me happy, if that’s what you mean. How can it? Shelley’s still dead and I’m locked up in here. The damage he’s done doesn’t end.’
‘Did you kill him, Kathryn?’
Lucy Parsons looked at Sarah in surprise. This was not a question she, or any barrister, usually asked: not as bluntly as this, anyhow. Normally if a defendant decided to plead not guilty, their barrister would argue the case accordingly, however tenuous or incredible that defence might appear. It was a useful convention, because criminal barristers regularly found themselves defending clients who they were virtually certain were guilty; but so long as the client hadn’t actually admitted that guilt, the barrister’s duty was to suspend judgement and defend the case as instructed, whatever her own opinion. Judgement was for jurors, not lawyers.
Now Sarah had deliberately broken the convention. If she was going to take this case, she had decided, she wanted to believe in it.
Kathryn met her eyes. She appeared to be thinking, weighing things up. But she didn’t give the impression of lying. ‘No,’ she said at last. ‘I didn’t. I had my chance, and I failed.’
That’s another thing it would be better not to say in court, Sarah thought. She nodded slightly, accepting Kathryn’s assurance, but wondering about the cautious, almost balanced way it had been given. There was something strange here, which wasn’t quite clear. Maybe it would become clear later. She turned to the evidence.
‘Did you know David Kidd had that car? The Lotus Elise?’
‘Yes, of course. He drove Shelley to our house in it once. To show off, no doubt.’
‘And this drainage tank in the woods. You knew that was there, I suppose?’
‘Of course I did. I used to take the dogs for walks in those woods. Lots of people knew it was there.’
Kathryn thought about saying more, but decided not to. In her mind she saw again, as so often over the past few months, the images of two little girls, sodden, filthy, and exhausted, their clothes drip
ping, their hair hanging in rats’ tails, on that terrible day when Shelley had saved Miranda from drowning. That was when Kathryn had first learned about the pit, and she had regarded it with horror ever after, avoiding it herself and forbidding her daughters to go there; but it was a story she didn’t want to tell her lawyers, because she guessed what they would make of it. This barrister, Sarah Newby, had children of her own; she would know how strong childhood impressions could be. If she heard that story she would realise how powerful an impression the drainage pit must have made upon Miranda, as a place so nearly associated with her own death - a place where a body could so easily drown under black, filthy water, far from any possible help. And with luck, never be found.
Kathryn didn’t want Sarah Newby, or anyone else, to think about Miranda just now. Like the lapwing feigning injury in the fields, she was still trying to draw attention further away from her nest, until finally she could escape, sure that her chick would never be found. But she knew that at any moment her deception might fail, and she would face a terrible choice. To see her daughter devoured by the jaws of justice, or to throw herself in front of them instead.
That was why she had chosen Sarah Newby to defend her. Not because she thought she was the best barrister in the world - she had failed, after all, to get David Kidd convicted - but because Sarah had defended her own son in court before, so Kathryn thought she would understand, better than most, how much a mother would do to save her child.
But it had not come to that yet, and Kathryn hoped it never would. If Sarah could save her from the clutches of Will Churchill, she might never have to mention Miranda at all.
‘The police found partial footprints near the tank, matching the tread pattern of a pair of your trainers,’ Sarah continued. ‘And they have this forensic report saying the mud on your trainers matched that of the soil in the woods.’
‘So?’ Kathryn smiled faintly. ‘I often went for walks in those woods. Just not near that tank, that’s all.’
‘And you don’t know anyone else who has trainers like that?’
‘No.’ It was the first direct lie. Kathryn met Sarah’s gaze and found she could hold it quite well. She’d had practice, after all, with the police.
Sarah nodded. ‘Well, there must be thousands of people with trainers like that - possibly millions. Lucy will check, get the exact figure from the manufacturers. Now, what about this other point they’re going to focus on - the rohypnol David Kidd was drugged with. It doesn’t help that a couple of packets are unaccounted for in your pharmacy, does it? It’s circumstantial, of course, like all of this stuff, but ...’
‘Yes, well, I’ve been thinking about that.’ Kathryn interrupted with, for once, a trace of eagerness. Here at last was a trail which led away from Miranda. ‘You see, in the months after Shelley’s death, as you’ll imagine, it wasn’t easy at work. I took some time off, and even when I was there, I wandered round like a ghost. My partner, Cheryl, did what she could, but she has troubles of her own: her grand-daughter’s autistic, so she had to help there. So we hired a young locum. Neither of us liked him much, but he was the best we could get. And, well, there were several complaints from the girls in the shop, and when Cheryl rang round the places he’d worked before it was the same story. So ...’
‘You’re suggesting he may have stolen the rohypnol for use as a date rape drug?’
‘It’s possible, yes. From the way he behaved and what the girls said.’
‘Did you tell the police this?’
‘Yes. They weren’t interested.’
‘Well, that’s useful, at least.’ Sarah made a note. ‘The other main detail is this hair bobble of yours, that was found under some leaves near the tank. It had your hairs on it - they’ve established that by DNA. That’s the only thing that puts you indisputably near the scene of the crime. How do you account for that?’
‘I don’t.’
‘Not at all? It’s the one thing that’s likely to convict you.’
‘Then the police must have put it there themselves. That’s the only possibility, isn’t it?’
Sarah’d had the same thought herself, when first reviewing the papers; and the fact that DCI Will Churchill was in charge of this case increased the possibility considerably. But there was a deep gulf between suspicion and proof. She sighed. ‘Yes, but it’s going to be hard to convince a jury of that. Let’s go through exactly how it could have happened, shall we? When did the police first visit your house?’
For the next half hour they went through this in detail, Sarah making extensive notes. The police had searched Kathryn’s house and the pharmacy as well, and she wanted to know the names of all the officers involved, and exactly where each of them had been, as far as Kathryn could remember. It was a difficult business, because she had not seen everything that had happened, but Sarah had a sense that Kathryn was being more helpful than before - perhaps too helpful, at times, claiming to remember details that she couldn’t easily have known. Nevertheless, she wrote it all down: if her client was being a little creative with the truth now it didn’t matter; she could weed out the bits the jury were least likely to believe before she challenged Will Churchill in court.
Kathryn, watching, was pleased. The more her lawyers accepted the possibility of police corruption, the better. It was of course quite plausible that the hair bobble had indeed been planted at the crime scene by the police; she’d seen enough of DCI Will Churchill to believe him capable of anything. But there was another, equally plausible explanation, which Kathryn was trying to hide. Since they had been teenagers both of her daughters had regularly borrowed not only each other’s clothes but hers too. They would wear any top, shoes or jacket that took their fancy, as if clothes were something owned in common, rather than individually. On the day after the shotgun incident, for example, Miranda had wandered in from a walk wearing an old wax jacket of her mother’s. The more Kathryn thought about it, the more she realized how many things were stuffed in the pockets of that jacket - tissues, coins, gloves, dog biscuits, wisps of hay. A hair bobble too, perhaps. Kathryn could remember several occasions, on a windy walk with the dogs, when she’d pulled her hair back in a ponytail to keep it from blowing in her eyes. Whereas Miranda, of course, had cut her hair so short after the trial that she’d have had no use for such a thing.
So what if Miranda had put her hand in her pocket for something - a tissue, say, or a glove, or a biscuit for the dog - and the hair bobble, with Kathryn’s hair on it, had dropped out? It could have happened any day, of course; but what if Miranda had been wearing that coat on the day David died? Or perhaps she had visited the tank a day or two earlier, on one of her walks with the dog. Either way, it would explain why the bobble was there.
Her lawyers, however, concentrated single-mindedly on the other explanation - that the police had put it there - and the more they explored this possibility, the more Kathryn came to believe in it herself. After all, if Miranda had so clever, so determined as to do this thing, surely she would have been careful not to make a mistake. She had made no other mistake, as far Kathryn could see - her alibi was perfect, there were no clues, no traces other than these inconclusive footprints. And in the absence of the real murderer this policeman, this DCI Churchill, had every reason to suspect her, Kathryn, and every incentive, too, to go that little bit further to provide proof of her guilt.
Sarah, reviewing her notes at the end of the interview, was convinced that the detective had done exactly that. She’d seen how he behaved in David Kidd’s trial with the shopkeeper Patel, stretching the evidence in the way he wanted; and before that with her own son, interviewing him in a police car in defiance of all regulations and then trying to present his words in court as a spontaneous confession. But how to challenge it; that was another matter.
Rising at the end of the interview, she gave Kathryn a tight, determined smile. ‘Very well, Mrs Walters, I think we’ve reviewed all the evidence. But this is the key to it, certainly. If we can shake them on this ha
ir bobble, all the rest is circumstantial. So if anything else comes to mind, for goodness’ sake let me know.’
‘I will, of course. Do you think we have a chance?’
Sarah considered, knowing how her final words, after an interview like this, could echo in a client’s mind, late into the lonely night. ‘Yes, we have a chance, certainly. But I’d be lying if I said it was going to be easy. A lot will depend on the impression you make on the witness stand. If the jury believe you’re just an innocent victim of this whole affair, then they’re more likely to turn their suspicions on the police.’
‘So I should be careful what I say, you mean?’
‘Yes.’ Sarah studied Kathryn thoughtfully. The woman looked pale, gaunt, and anxious. ‘Careful, but not too careful, if that makes sense. Think about what they’re likely to ask you, and how you’ll reply, and then ... tell the truth, as genuinely as you can.’
‘I’ll try.’
‘Good. I’ll see you in court then. And don’t worry. I’ll be doing my best.’
She smiled encouragingly, but on the way home, the interview echoed in her mind just as her words, perhaps, echoed in Kathryn’s. There had been something not quite right about it which she couldn’t quite put her finger on. Kathryn had maintained her innocence quite firmly, and yet ... there was something that didn’t quite fit. It was a sense, familiar to her from less reputable clients, that the whole truth was not being told; that their conversation only dealt with what was on the surface of the woman’s mind, that things more momentous by far were going on beneath.
She frowned, sat back in her chair, and wondered.
50. Wisconsin
THE LONG months before the trial had been a torment for Miranda. When she had first heard the news of her mother’s arrest she had been distraught. It was not what she had imagined would happen, at all. The body should have remained buried in that tank for months, years even, until it dissolved into mush; instead, just as her nightmare on the plane had foretold, David’s corpse had crawled out, pallid, bloated, relentless, to threaten her family again. And she had certainly not expected her mother to be arrested. I’ll have to go back, she thought; I did this, I’ll have to sort it out.
