by M. R. Carey
Yes.
She’d told Alex about the appeal more than once. He’d seemed to listen, but then treated it as new and unwelcome information every time she brought it up. Now that he’d finally got his head around the idea, she moved quickly to reassure him.
But I’ll be back in the afternoon. It’s just a few hours.
And the next day?
The same. And the day after that, probably.
The original trial had taken two weeks. The appeal would run for at least three days, with the first day and part of the second devoted to procedural submissions and arguments that were technical, abstract and complex. Any one of those quibbles could get the original conviction declared unsafe and turn the appeal into a retrial, so they had to come first. That was just how lawyers rolled, according to Levine. But it was all foreplay. The main event, barring a miracle, would start on day two, after the judge had worked through all the summary rulings.
Jess hadn’t thought about freedom for a long time. She was still getting used to being alive again. But freedom would have two big advantages: it would cut her loose from Harriet Grace, and it would mean she could go looking for Alex’s friend and his tormentor – the nice girl and the nasty girl – herself instead of having to cajole Levine into doing it for her. She’d be a better agent for Alex as a free woman than she could ever hope to be cooped up in Fellside.
So you want to leave? Alex’s tone was uncertain, almost accusing.
Yes. I think so. And you’d go with me, right? You must have come here with me in the first place. We’d still be together.
I suppose. He sounded as though he didn’t suppose at all.
Jess sat up and looked across the cell at him. He was sitting on the floor – or close enough – with his knees drawn up to his chest. Just a little kid at first glance, then on the double-take a scary optical illusion, lit up by remembered sunlight, clearly visible despite the full dark.
I wouldn’t leave you, she told him.
Alex looked at his shoes, his face studiously blank. She could see that he wasn’t convinced, but she couldn’t think of anything she could say that would reassure him. Out of ideas, she settled for a diversion.
Alex?
He looked up at her. Yes?
She held out her hand. Let’s go for a walk. I want to see the other world again. Your world.
This time leaving her body was almost effortless. Walking was easier too: she ballasted herself against the storm of thoughts by thickening the stringy limbs of her imaginary body, giving them muscle and bulk and sinew, thinking of herself as solid and weighted down. She could feel it working at once, much more quickly than the other times. She was able to hold to more of a straight line as they threaded their way through the chaos. That in itself made it less frightening.
She threw out a froth of chatter. How long had it taken him to learn to navigate the dream space? Did it scare him at first, or had he always taken it for granted? How had he found the pit?
I woke up there, he said to this last question. After they hurt me.
“They?” Jess picked up on the plural pronoun at once.
She. When I opened my eyes, I was just there, on a ledge a long way down. It took me a long time to climb out.
“And then?”
And then I was here. I was here for ages, by myself. It wasn’t too bad at first. Some of the dreams were like TV shows that I could be in. It was exciting. I’d live in one for a while, then go and find another one I liked. But I started to forget. A little bit at a time, until most of me was gone. That was when you came. Jess, you have to stop thinking so hard.
She started to ask him why, but she saw what he meant before she got a single word out. She had tried to push down her thoughts of Harriet Grace and the drug package, of Liz Earnshaw and Carol Loomis. All she’d done was suppress the words. The images were still bubbling at the bottom of her conscious thoughts.
And they were being echoed on all sides. Wherever they walked, Grace’s face loomed out of the dark in a thousand fractured reflections. Duct-taped packages crunched under their feet. The dreams they walked through had taken on the tenor and pattern of her fears.
“Are they… Is everyone dreaming this?”
I think so. But they won’t all remember. At least if we think something else, or go away. The longer we stay here, the more they’ll remember when they wake up.
They kept moving, but the desultory conversation petered out. Jess tried to make her thoughts range over a lot of different things, to keep them from coming back to the one thing that haunted her. Finally she gave up the unequal struggle. The two of them made their way back through the night world to the place where her body lay. They lingered there a while, on the doorstep of Jess’s physical self.
“Are you still worried about me going away tomorrow?” she asked Alex.
Yes. But so are you.
“Actually, I’m more worried about what happens when I come back. But you can come with me if you want to. Then you’d know I wasn’t going far and you’d know we were still going to be together.”
But I don’t know the way.
“Okay, but if we leave at the same time… if you follow me…”
She didn’t finish the thought. She was going to be taken in a van across the moors. Was it even possible for him to ride with her? Was that something ghosts could do? And if he lost his way, how would he ever find it again? There were no road signs where he lived, no maps. She realised for the first time that the entire geography of Alex’s world was made out of people. The only way he could see walls or ceilings, or trees or rivers or mountains, was if somebody else dreamed about them or remembered them.
If Jess took him away from the prison, out on to the moors, and lost him there – in a place where people mostly didn’t come – he’d be alone and functionally blind. He could be lost for ever.
“No, you’re right,” she said quickly. “Much better if you wait for me here. I’ll be back very soon.”
You promise?
“I promise, Alex.”
And will you always come back?
That gave her pause. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “If they set me free, I won’t really have any choice. But if I do get out – if I ever really get to go away from here – I promise I’ll find a way to take you with me. I won’t leave you alone again.”
The ghost stared at her wordlessly for a moment or two.
I know you won’t, he said at last. You’re my friend, Jess.
“I’ll always be your friend.”
Another silence.
I don’t think you killed me, he ventured at last, but if you did…
“If I did?”
Then I’m glad.
Jess was appalled. “Glad? Alex, why would you say that?”
Because otherwise we might not ever have met.
64
The first day of the appeal hearing was exactly what Levine had promised. Long, baffling and deadeningly dull.
There was excitement enough in getting there though. Even before they reached the outskirts of Leeds, the driver was talking on the radio and passing nuggets of news on to the two guards, Ratner and Corcoran, who were with Jess in the back of the van. “There’s protesters,” he said. “All the way along the street. They said to bring her through to the back bit. There’ll be someone waiting to open the gates for us.”
“There’d bloody better be,” Corcoran said.
When they turned on to Oxford Row, they were forced to slow to a crawl, inching their way through a dense crowd of people who hammered on the van’s armoured sides as it passed. Jess thought she recognised a few faces from her first trial. Certainly she recognised the slogans on their placards. YOU’LL BURN LATER, accompanied by a cartoon graphic of hellfire; WHAT THOU HAST DONE UNTO THE SMALLEST OF MY CHILDREN, THAT THOU HAST DONE UNTO ME; and everywhere the same photo of Alex Beech, smiling at the camera, with the bend sinister of a Christmas tree branch bisecting the background.
The van nudge
d its way through the throng in painful slow motion. Jess knew that the security windows shut out any view of the van’s inside, but the flushed, angry faces still seemed to be shouting directly into hers. She flinched back from them: she couldn’t help herself.
“Idiots everywhere,” Corcoran told her, seeing the look on her face. “Just got too much time on their hands, that’s all.” But it’s not that, Jess thought bleakly. They were angry because a child had died and the engine of justice was still spinning its wheels. She couldn’t blame them.
They turned off on to a side street but the crowd knew who was in the van and they came along too, still shouting and banging on the windows. Fifty yards down, there was a gate which led through to an enclosed area behind the courthouse. Two small wedges of uniformed policemen pushed the crowd away from the gate as it opened to admit the van and then closed again behind it. A roar of frustration and protest followed them.
In a courtyard roofed in by anti-suicide netting and razor wire, Paul Levine stood in a small patch of sunlight waiting to take her inside. In his black suit, he looked for a moment like a shadow that had lost its owner.
Jess stepped out of the van and walked straight over to him. He had his mouth open to say something – a greeting, most likely, or something about the appeal. She didn’t have time for that.
“Did you get my letter?” she asked him quickly. She hoped that the answer would just be a yes or a no, but Paul responded with a non-committal gesture. “We’ll talk inside,” he said.
Corcoran and Ratner took an arm each and hurried her away through a door marked COURT OFFICERS ONLY. They led her along echoing institutional corridors to a bare waiting room, where they sat her down. Ratner told her sternly to stay put. She unhooked a clipboard from the wall and scribbled in it, then took it away somewhere.
“Are you all right here?” Corcoran asked Jess. “Do you want a glass of water or anything? Cup of tea?”
Jess shook her head. “I’m fine,” she lied.
Footsteps sounded in the corridor. Jess turned, expectant. But it wasn’t Paul Levine; it was Brian Pritchard. He greeted Jess with a polite handshake and then turned to Corcoran.
“Can I have a word in private with my client?” he asked her.
“Have several,” Corcoran said equably. “My colleague has sneaked off for a gasp. I’ll go and breathe in her second-hand smoke for a bit. Remind myself why I quit.” She gave Jess a nod as she walked away.
“Has Paul explained what’s going to be happening today?” Pritchard asked her when they were alone. He’d sat down on the bench that ran the length of the waiting room, but Jess was too nervous and too wired to sit next to him. This was the first time they’d spoken since her original trial.
“Yes,” she said. “Today is procedural submissions.”
“Chief among which is that we don’t believe a charge of murder is applicable to a death that was never intended. There’s a chance we might make that one stick, but it’s not a very good chance.” He gave her an austere smile. “Are you sure you don’t want to sit down?”
“I’m fine as I am,” Jess said. “Thank you.”
And that was another first, she realised. She’d never used those two words to him before about anything.
“Anyway,” he went on, “assuming these wider arguments fail, which I am very much assuming – not because they have no merit but because I can see which way the land lies – then the appeal proper will start tomorrow. With that in mind, I’m going to be having a lot to say today about evidence, and the disclosure of evidence. Re-examining evidence isn’t normally part of what the appeal court does. It’s meant to restrict itself to matters of legal interpretation. But we’re going to try very hard to break that rule because we’d like – very much indeed – to call John Street back to the stand. And we believe we have a chance. So some of what I’ll be doing today will be laying down ground rules that we can use to our advantage later. I’d like to say more, but I’m frankly afraid to.”
“Afraid?” Jess echoed. “Afraid of what?”
Pritchard made an equivocal gesture, perhaps trying to take some of the sting out of the words. “Of you, Ms Moulson. The last time we spoke, you were a hostile witness, even though I was defending you.”
“That’s not true.”
“Yes, it is. You cared more about paying for your sins than about establishing what those sins actually were. My priorities ran very much the other way. But I suppose that by telling you this I’m giving you the right to choose. If you insist, I’ll unpack our whole strategy to you. I’m obliged by law and by the ethics of my profession to do so.”
Jess thought about this. “But you’d rather I didn’t know? You think that me knowing would make things worse rather than better.”
“Yes. I do think that.”
Jess shrugged. “Then I don’t insist.”
“Very good,” Pritchard said. “Excellent.”
“But… there’s one favour I’d like to ask you. Can I talk to Paul? Please?”
Pritchard pursed his lips. “Would what you have to say to him concern the appeal?”
Jess could see that there was no right answer to that question. If she said yes, Pritchard would tell her she should say what she had to say to him. If no, he’d refuse and tell her to focus on what was relevant.
So she said nothing at all, and finally he stood. “Later,” he said. “Before the end of the day. For now, let him focus on his job.”
“But I thought you were going to be the one presenting the case.”
“Oh yes, I’m the big gun.” Pritchard said this with neither arrogance nor false modesty. “Mr Levine and Ms Sackville-West are my spotter and my…” – he made a vague gesture – “… the, um, person who loads the shells, or feeds the bullets through the magazine. I’m afraid I lack the technical vocabulary. In any event, I need them to be focused. I believe you have a defocusing effect on Mr Levine. Tell me if I’m mistaken in that.”
Jess said nothing. Pritchard acknowledged her tacit admission with a nod. “I don’t judge,” he said. “Someone in your position has to use every small advantage she has. Someone in his needs to learn the exacting habit of objectivity. Good day to you, Ms Moulson, and… good luck.” He took his leave. No handshakes this time.
As soon as he was gone, Ratner and Corcoran emerged from wherever they’d been hiding and laid claim to Jess again. They led her along the corridor and through a wood-panelled door into the courtroom.
Jess’s first trial had been at the Old Bailey, which had had a cold grandeur to it. This room, by contrast, was just a box. It reminded Jess of the classrooms in her secondary school: places you inhabited temporarily but never owned or felt at home in, their divisions and the rules that applied to them worked out by other people to whom you were always beholden. Now that she thought about it, most of the rooms she’d known since she left her mother’s house had been like that.
There were three judges. Mr Justice Foulkes, whom Jess had met at her hearing, was there along with two strangers, a man and a woman. There was no jury. On a bench to her right sat two lawyers from the Crown Prosecution Service. In the corresponding position on her left, Brian Pritchard sat between Paul Levine and a very young, very attractive woman in a pinstriped dress. Ms Sackville-West, Jess presumed. Paul gave her a smile of encouragement but there was no way he could speak to her. The woman appraised her with cool interest, then looked away. Pritchard didn’t acknowledge her at all.
The public seats were more sparsely populated than Jess had expected. Only a handful of reporters with notebooks and sketch pads sat there, looking bored. Presumably the public was excluded from these preliminary submissions. At least that meant there’d be a little peace and quiet.
For the first few minutes, the three judges just talked in low voices among themselves, while everyone waited. Then one of the three – the woman – signalled to the clerk of the court. The clerk stood up and declaimed. “In the case of the Crown versus Jessica Laurel Moulso
n, this court of appeal is now in session. His Honour Mr Justice Foulkes, Her Honour Ms Justice LePlastrier and His Honour Mr Justice Macclehurst will jointly preside. The court will hear an appeal against conviction and an annexed appeal against sentencing. Prior to proceeding, counsel has requested summary review and judgement on several heads, as submitted to Your Honours in affidavits.”
“Very well, Mr Pritchard,” LePlastrier said. “Let’s speak to that.”
Brian Pritchard stood up. “Your Honours, thank you,” he said. “I believe there are a number of outstanding procedural issues relating to the handling and presentation of the prosecution’s case in my client’s trial.” He picked up a document from the desk in front of him – the top one in a sizeable pile – and held it up. “I refer you, in the first instance, to our prepared brief 1(a).”
He read aloud from the document, which soon branched into subheadings and sub-subheadings. Some clauses called on other clauses. Statutes were referred to by number and date, precedents by the names of principals in cases Jess didn’t know. The overall topic was the legal distinction between murder and manslaughter, but the arguments were so abstract and involved that it was easy to forget what murder meant. The blood had been drained out of the word.
The judges interrogated every sentence, sometimes asking Pritchard to go back three or four times to a point already covered. Jess tried to follow the arguments at first, but soon gave up. She didn’t speak this language.
After more than two hours of discussion, the judges conferred again. “Well,” LePlastrier said, “there’s a great deal of food for thought there, certainly.” She turned to the CPS lawyers. “Mr Anson, Mr Carlisle, do you have anything to add?”
The two men shook their heads, not quite in unison. “Not at this time, Your Honours,” one of them said. “We disagree, obviously, with counsel’s substantive point about motive. However, we feel that this was adequately addressed at the original trial. You have our submission. We won’t rehearse those arguments again in this courtroom unless Your Honours are minded to reopen the wider discussion of mens rea.” The judges went into a brief huddle, then declared a recess for lunch.
