by H S Chandler
‘That’s true,’ Lottie said quietly.
‘So don’t rush off. She’ll phone back if it’s serious,’ he kissed her ear gently. ‘Let me clean this up then I’ll join you. Go get the water hot,’ he said, winking as he began picking berries off the floor.
Lottie watched as Cameron swept the debris from the table and into one of the bags. He was amazing, she thought, and better than that, she felt amazing too. Also, he was right. If the case hadn’t been adjourned for a day, the childminder would just have coped. She was only phoning because she knew Lottie was at home. What harm could it do to take a shower and enjoy the moment? She was in no fit state to leave the house, or to see Daniyal, not yet anyway. She drifted to the stairs, telling herself not to look at the family photos on the walls. Zain would never find out, and what he didn’t know could never hurt him. Just as along as she was careful.
Five minutes later she was showered and getting dressed again. Cameron wandered in to join her, looking around the bedroom appreciatively.
‘This is nice,’ he said. ‘Really comfortable. Did you design it yourself?’
The sight of him naked in the doorway Zain had entered thousands of times, was a bucket of ice to her conscience. Cameron standing in the space her son ran through to kiss her good morning. Her lover in the bedroom her husband had paid for, and had decorated himself in Lottie’s favourite colours.
‘Yeah, listen, Cam. I can’t leave Danny any longer. I know I said we’d shower together but I should get going.’
‘Hey, don’t panic,’ he said, sitting on the bed and reaching a hand out for her.
‘I’m sorry. I’m just not okay with you being upstairs. Let’s go back down …’
‘Lottie,’ he said. ‘You’re freaking out. What we just did isn’t something you need to feel guilty about. I care about you.’
‘Yeah, I know. I care about you too,’ she said, pulling on trainers. ‘But it wasn’t right to leave Danny when I could have gone to get him. I’m just going to do my hair, and please don’t take this the wrong way. I really appreciate lunch, and you clearing up, but I need to speed up. Could you let yourself out? Please don’t be mad.’
‘Hey,’ he said, standing up and kissing her lightly on the cheek. ‘I’m not the kind of guy who gets mad. Not ever. You can count on me.’ She waited until she heard him click the front door shut before tidying the covers where he’d sat on her bed, then dragging a brush through her hair before running for the door herself. Bad mother, she thought. That’s what I’ve become. A bloody terrible mother, in fact. It was never going to happen again.
24
Maria sat in Queen Square park and threw crumbs at the pigeons. The tree-lined green with a horseman at its centre and a star of pathways was always busy but people rarely sat still there for long. It was more a passing-through kind of park. She saw Ruth coming from a distance, with her unmistakable bold steps and broad shoulders. Taking a seat on the same bench as Maria, Ruth stretched out her long legs and closed her eyes in the sunshine.
‘Is this casual enough for you?’ Ruth asked.
‘Almost too casual,’ Maria laughed. ‘You can look at me, you know.’
Ruth rolled her head to smile at her friend. ‘I won’t ask how you are. I was in court yesterday. I can’t imagine how it must have been dissecting your private life in public. Did you sleep?’
‘A little. I really don’t want to rehash yesterday. How are the twins?’
‘Maria, you need to talk about it. The prosecution is recalling the psychiatrist. You’re going to have to listen to more of his rubbish. I’d like to prepare you for what he’s likely to say,’ Ruth said, extending her arm halfway along the space between them, not quite daring to reach out all the way.
‘I need a friend now, not a counsellor. Let me hear about you instead. Professor Worth will say whatever he’s going to say. You can’t stop it.’
‘But you can’t react …’
‘Like I did yesterday? I know I shouldn’t have lost my temper. I seem to be doing it more often these days. I think I’m catching up on years of repressed emotions. How’s your mother?’
‘Still screaming at people out of the car window. Last weekend she deliberately dropped a box of a dozen eggs at the supermarket to see what sound it would make. Most of the time she still thinks my father’s alive. The worst of it is telling her each time that he’s dead. Seeing the look of grief on her face over and over again is tough.’
‘Thank goodness she’s got you,’ Maria smiled. ‘What about Lea and Max?’
‘They still haven’t figured out that being twins isn’t a competition. I’ve got to be honest, dropping them off at the nursery is something of a relief at the moment. They’re climbing every chair, sofa and chest of drawers they can find, and food has become a weapon. Two years is not the easiest age.’
‘Do you remember the call when you told me you were pregnant? I think I was more excited than you. That news kept me going for months.’
‘I remember hearing the change in your voice. You were so supportive when I said I’d chosen IVF. Everyone else thought I was crazy having children with no partner.’
‘Now look at you, still running the helpline while you organise a whole family on your own. I’m surprised you get a moment to yourself,’ Maria said.
‘Listen to you giving me a lecture,’ Ruth chided gently. ‘I like the new hairstyle. Does it feel strange after so long to be in control of your own life?’
‘It feels as if I just got out of prison,’ Maria said.
Ruth’s face registered the awful irony of the sentence. ‘We can still tell the court you were in contact with me,’ she said. ‘I’m the one person who can back up what you’ve said about how he treated you. The prosecution’s building its case on the basis that you’re making up how bad things were. Contemporaneous complaints would counteract that.’
‘No, they wouldn’t. If you tell the jury I was able to save up for phone credit, sneak out of the house to the shop, and make contact with you, it’ll just support the case that I was strong enough to have left him. You were the someone I could turn to. All my claims that I was completely alone in the world would be undone.’ Maria smiled. ‘It wouldn’t work and you know it. The conversations you’ve recorded are proof of what I said to you, but they’re not proof of what was actually happening. The prosecution will tell the jury that it was just the ramblings of a disturbed mind, or that I was attention seeking. They’ll twist it – I can hear Imogen Pascal’s voice right now. “So Mrs Bloxham, you leave the house to buy phone credit, but you couldn’t get yourself to a domestic violence shelter, or to a doctor? That hardly seems credible.”’ Maria was pleased with her impression of the prosecutor, but Ruth wasn’t smiling.
‘Coercive control is complex. It’s different in every single case. You were in no position to make reasoned, rational decisions. Very few victims have an understanding of how much jeopardy they’re in until it’s too late.’
‘It still boils down to my word against his, and given that he can’t speak the jury are naturally going to feel suspicious of me. James Newell still has to make a speech to the jury. I have faith in him.’
‘The prosecution gets to make a closing speech as well, and Imogen Pascal isn’t going to be kind. There has to be something more I can do,’ Ruth raged, her hands curled into fists in her lap, as large as a man’s.
Maria felt sad for her. Nothing about Ruth was delicate or feminine, neither her body nor her face. Finding a partner who didn’t judge her looks had proved impossible, and the family she’d always wanted had been elusive until she’d taken the decision to try IVF. Not that a husband was the answer to everything, God knew Maria was living proof of that, but the desire for companionship, for warmth at night, that 24-hour best friend, was a crucial part of most adults’ life plans. Ruth was no different.
‘There’s nothing you can do except watch. Let me do this on my own. I’m prepared for the consequences.’
‘Wh
at if I’m not? You reached out to me. I said I’d always be there to help.’ Ruth slapped angrily at a stray tear as Maria abandoned their agreement not to get too close to one another, sliding along the bench to take her friend’s hand.
‘Go home. Kiss the twins from me. I’ll get to meet them one day, whether it’s twenty years from now or next week.’ She gave her friend a swift hug then stood up to leave. If she only had a few days freedom left, she wanted to spend them walking and seeing the world. There would be plenty of tears to come if things went wrong.
‘I can’t let you be convicted, Maria,’ Ruth said, staring at the ground, sounding not dissimilar to a stubborn child herself.
‘Respect my wishes, Ruth. I’ve left Edward behind. Go home and enjoy your family this evening, for me. Love every minute of it.’
Maria took the opposite exit to the path Ruth chose, forcing herself to keep her head up and look at the trees and sky rather than the ground. The end of the trial was imminent. Once Professor Worth had done whatever additional damage he could, it would be down to the lawyers’ speeches, the judge’s summary of the case, then the verdict. She had waited so many months for the trial to start, it seemed impossible that it was nearing a conclusion already. After that, it was prison or freedom. Turning her face into the sun, she determined to enjoy what might be her final day outside. A gentle breeze was blowing in from the south. It was still hot but not too humid, and the birds were soaring above her. Somewhere inside her though, a clock was ticking away the hours until her fate was decided. She’d been trying not to think about incarceration, but it was looming too large now to be ignored.
In all likelihood she’d end up at Eastwood Park Prison, north of Bristol, in Falfield. A couple of months ago, she’d looked it up on a computer in the library, amused to see she could learn anything from cookery to salon services, and manicures to industrial cleaning. At least the inmates could look beautiful as they poisoned a meal for their lovers, knowing exactly how to clean up the carnage afterwards. It seemed less funny now. Walking was good. That was how she would fill her afternoon, she decided. See as much as possible, take it all in. If she was destined for a cell, she should walk while she still could.
25
Day Nine in Court.
Lottie was running late. Daniyal was completely recovered, except that he hadn’t wanted to get out of bed. His previous sickness, as far as Lottie could tell, had likely been caused by drinking orange juice followed immediately by milk. The childminder had been offish at her late arrival to collect him, but had softened when Lottie offered women’s problems as a vague excuse.
That morning, Daniyal had dressed himself in heavy jeans and a woolly jumper. Lottie had forcibly removed the winter outfit and replaced it with shorts and a T-shirt. Breakfast had been reduced to tantrums from them both. By the time Lottie had calmed him down, she should have been dropping him at the childminder’s. Having finally wrestled him into his car seat, the tears began again.
‘Danny,’ she’d said, ‘this isn’t like you. What’s the matter, sweetheart? Can you tell Mummy?’
‘Everything’s wrong,’ he’d said. ‘I want Daddy to come home.’
That had stung. Daniyal had always been more clingy with her than his father, not that parenting was a popularity contest, but it was the first time he’d needed anyone except Lottie to make him happy.
‘Daddy will be home tonight. We can have dinner together then do something fun,’ she’d said, starting the engine and trying to keep a smile on her face. She wasn’t feeling it though. The whole house had felt soiled by the time she’d returned with Daniyal the day before.
‘You won’t. It won’t be fun. You and Daddy don’t laugh. Nothing’s fun.’ He’d folded his little arms and glared out of the car window.
Lottie’s throat had constricted. Was her misery so obvious that even her three-year-old had felt it? Not just felt it, but she’d unwittingly passed it along to him, infecting him with her sadness. She’d tried to speak but found that she couldn’t. For a while in bed last night, she’d relived the scene with Cameron in the kitchen, before reverting back to what was really on her mind. She had left a sick child with the childminder rather than interrupting a sex session with a man who probably thought of himself as her lover. Was that why Daniyal was longing for his father now? Zain had been gone twenty-four hours and already her son felt the void in the house, that apparently she was too self-absorbed to notice or fill at the moment. Lottie had turned the engine off and climbed out of the driver’s seat, opening Daniyal’s door to lean in and hug him.
‘Honey, I’m so sorry. Mummy’s just been so busy. It’s no excuse. I think I got too tired. You know what it’s like when you get really, really tired and then everything goes wrong?’ Daniyal had given a grudging nod, allowing her to dab his tears with her sleeve. ‘Well, I’ve nearly finished being busy now, so we can concentrate on laughing and being a family again. How does that sound?’ She fought to keep her own tears from falling.
‘You and Daddy together? Promise?’ Daniyal persisted.
‘I promise,’ she said, hugging him extra tight.
They’d driven to the childminder’s making small talk about squirrels and daisies, but Lottie was shaken. Leaving a quiet but compliant Daniyal for the day, she’d had to pull into a lay-by to dry her guilty tears and compose herself.
What was she doing? She’d taken a risk which could have been the end of everything. Cameron had come into her home, and they’d sex on the kitchen table, the heart of their home, the centre of everything she loved. It was madness. She wanted to go straight back home, drag the table out into the garden and burn it. The problem was that she couldn’t change a single thing. Zain could never, ever find out what she’d done. She had to behave like she always did if he wasn’t going to suspect. Any lapse could mean the loss of everything she cared about. Daniyal, her home, her life. As much as she’d thought she was sick of it, right now she would do anything to turn the clock back a month. Glancing in the mirror she realised what a wreck she was. Mascara had clumped in her eyelashes and smudged. Her lipstick had bled around the edges. The hair she’d spent thirty minutes straightening was oily with sweat. And still she had to go to court. Taking a deep breath she pulled out into the traffic and followed the line of cars into the city centre. Her affair with Cameron had to end. No more excuses or giving in to lust. Daniyal was all that mattered now. She couldn’t change what she’d already done, but she could make sure it never happened again.
Outside the court building, Lottie fought her way through the crowd of protestors that seemed to be growing every day, arriving in the jury corridor with a few minutes left before she was needed. She decided to hide in the ladies toilets, using her time to delete several flirtatious texts from Cameron without answering them. He’d sent a few the previous night too. Those she’d read but not responded to. Now it was cleaner not to know what was on his mind. She didn’t want any more memories of him than she already had. Waiting until she heard the other jurors entering the courtroom, she followed at a distance, giving Cameron a vague smile as she took her seat next to him.
Professor Worth was getting settled into the witness stand for the second time, adjusting his tie before taking the oath again.
‘Thank you for coming back,’ Imogen Pascal cooed. ‘Evidence came to light during the trial that the prosecution would like you to comment on. Have you read the transcript of the defendant’s evidence?’
‘Indeed I have,’ the psychiatrist replied, slipping off his glasses and polishing them. Lottie looked to the dock where Maria Bloxham was rubbing what looked like a large scab on her left palm and paying the witness no attention at all. ‘My first comment would be that she had the opportunity to discuss self-defence with me. Had that been what was foremost in her mind, I’d have expected her to feel compelled to have shared it. In addition to that, the psychology of self-harm is complex. Often it’s a cry for attention which is why it’s so prevalent in teenage girls.’
‘Self-harm, the process itself, is often secretive and private while it’s happening. I note also that Mrs Bloxham claims her husband watched her self-injuring. That means he would had to have been able to tolerate seeing her inflict and endure pain, and do nothing about it. More than that, she suggested it was at his instigation, yet I’ve found nothing in his history that indicates such a high level of abusiveness in his personality. No previous convictions, no prior complaints from former partners, nothing but glowing references from people he worked with. Quite the opposite, in fact. I believe he used to volunteer with a charity who offered counselling and advice for self-harmers, suggesting an advanced level of empathy and concern for the condition. That seems like quite compelling evidence to me that the defendant’s version of events is skewed, to put it neutrally.’
‘Is it possible Dr Bloxham was a markedly different person in public and in private?’ Pascal asked.
‘Possible but unlikely. Most people can sustain an act for a limited period of time, but not long-term. The defendant accepts Dr Bloxham was never directly physically violent to her. It would take a monumental amount of self-control to be manipulative and cruel, as the defendant suggested, but never to cross the line into physical abuse. If the victim in this case managed that, it would be the first time I’ve encountered such highly developed psychopathy in my career, and I have to tell you, there’s not much I haven’t seen.’
‘Is it possible for one person to persuade another person to hurt themselves badly enough to risk death, even when they are unwilling, do you think?’ Pascal continued.
