KATIE
The grey floors of the entrance hall at Cambridge Crown Court are streaked with rain. There are three people in front of me in the queue for security checks. As I stand waiting, I feel the water soaking through my cheap flat shoes.
The metal detectors sound when I walk through them.
‘I think that’s my watch, sorry,’ I say. ‘Here, look. Could I just –’
A full-chested woman in a Courts Service jumper ignores me and steps forward. ‘Arms out, please.’
She takes a hand-held black metal detector, waves it over my outstretched arms, my chest, my legs. Then she comes closer. We avert our eyes from one another while she searches my body with her hands, feeling along my collar, my waist, around the pockets of my trousers.
I see reporters I recognise from other papers overtaking me, piling into the lift, the doors behind them closing. I should be in there with them. The press gallery will be full. I shift my weight from one foot to another. Another security guard has unzipped my backpack and plucked out my make-up bag.
‘Can you open this purse for me, please?’
He does not look up as he says it. I smile, unzip the bag, try to look helpful. As he starts rooting around inside it with his two meaty fingers, I glance at my watch. A mascara topples to the floor, followed by a blister pack of headache tablets.
When I finally reach courtroom three, the press benches are packed. I’m lucky to get a seat. The barristers, in their black gowns and white collars, are already in place, and the defendants are in the dock. I examine them carefully. Both are wearing sombre, expensive-looking suits. Dark ties, combed hair and straight spines. They are flanked by bored-looking G4S security guards. One looks like he is about to fall asleep.
In the public gallery, one of the mothers is already clutching a squashed tissue, her eyes bloodshot. The fingers curled around the tissue are trembling. The father next to her is grim-faced, his hand clamped onto her knee. I think he must be the Earl, rather than the former agriculture minister. He stares at the press benches with barely concealed fury.
‘All rise.’
The judge enters in a long red gown, thick white fur at the sleeves, her wig yellowed, her spectacles black-rimmed. The clerk speaks. The walls all around us are panelled with fake wood, the light artificial. There are no windows.
‘The case before Her Ladyship is the Queen against Mr Toby Letwin and Mr Roland Bartholomew.’
Simon, from the Press Association, is in the seat in front of me. I tap him on the shoulder. ‘Have we got opening statements?’ I hiss at him. He rolls his eyes, pulls a folded piece of paper from his notebook and hands it back to me, like a schoolboy passing notes.
‘Toby Letwin, you are charged with rape contrary to section 1 of the Sexual Offences Act 1956, in that you, Toby Letwin, together with Roland Bartholomew, did on the 14th of October 2017 rape Emily Oliver at 22 Green Street in Cambridge. Do you plead guilty or not guilty?’
‘Not guilty.’
As the clerk reads out the charges, I pretend to take notes. But instead, I am searching the public gallery, looking for the detective. I am sure he will be here somewhere.
Eventually I spot him, sitting on the back row, away from the families. He is off duty, no uniform, but he has worn a suit anyway. His face does not change as the clerk speaks. But when the first defendant states his not guilty plea, his expression hardens.
The prosecution barrister stands for his opening statement. The court falls silent. We hear of a drunken night out, of words exchanged over social media about girls, about sex, about bravado. And then we hear the stuff of female nightmares – of DNA scraped from sheets and from the internal reaches of a woman’s body, of bruising, of vomit, of a neighbouring door battered late into the night. Of a barefoot stranger, a tearful appeal for help.
When the court rises, I watch the detective carefully. I slip out as quickly as I can, and try to head in his direction. For a moment, I can’t find him, and I worry he has left already. But then I see him retreating down the corridor, his footfalls echoing against the high ceilings.
‘DCI Carter?’
He stops, turns round slowly, looks me up and down.
‘Katie Wheeler, I presume,’ he says.
‘That’s me.’ I smile, pleased.
‘I had a feeling it was you, eyeballing me from the press bench.’ His tone is stern, but he looks as if he might be suppressing a smile. ‘You do realise stalking is actually a crime, don’t you?’
‘Sorry. Like I said in my message –’
‘Messages.’
‘Oh, right. Yes. Messages … um, I was hoping we could have a chat. About the background.’
He opens his mouth to speak, but stops when another reporter brushes past, shooting me a suspicious glance.
‘Look,’ he says, lowering his voice, ‘you have to go through the press office like everyone else, Katie. You know that.’
I do know that. In theory. But I have done my homework – well, I’ve asked Chris, the crime correspondent – and so I know that DCI Mark Carter is a bit old school, and therefore not averse to chatting to reporters, sometimes. And that he’s done his thirty years with the Cambridgeshire Constabulary, and is expected to retire not long after this case.
‘Please?’ I say, in a way I desperately hope is charming. ‘Just a couple of tiny questions? All embargoed until the end of the trial, obviously. And definitely, definitely off the record.’
He says nothing, but he doesn’t say no. He glances over my shoulder, at the door that says REST AREA.
‘The coffee in there is horrible,’ I add.
He laughs, rolls his eyes. ‘Fine, you win,’ he mutters. ‘Costa, round the back. Downstairs table. Fifteen minutes. Max.’
In the end, he doesn’t give away much, but it is enough to fill in some gaps. As I suspected, the police and prosecutors are incredibly nervous about this trial. The victim has already been vilified on social media, something DCI Carter believes has been led by friends of the defendants. He also thinks the boys and their wealthy families have been tacitly supporting this vile campaign against her – though it sounds like he doesn’t have proof. There are even rumours of the boys’ fathers offering substantial sums in return for any evidence against the victim.
Meanwhile, the girl has already had to have two new identities as a result of being named on the internet. She has been moved away, for her own protection, to an area where she has no family support. Something he says makes me wonder if she has made an attempt on her own life.
‘I’m trusting you to tread carefully here,’ he says firmly, jabbing a stirring stick into the remains of his coffee and swirling it around. ‘This is all for the end, and nothing came from me.’ He glances down at my notebook. ‘No quotes.’
‘I could just put “a source close to the –”’
‘No.’
He is staring down into his coffee cup. I pause, wondering if I should push my luck. After a few moments, I slide him a sealed envelope, a letter I wrote last night.
‘Is there any chance you could pass this to the victim?’
DCI Carter looks up, sees the envelope. He almost laughs.
‘Katie, I really wouldn’t hold your breath.’
‘I know. But if there is any possibility. We would love to talk to her. You know, so she can tell us her side.’
He sighs. I can tell he’s heard it all before. All the same, he takes my letter, puts it in his jacket pocket. Then he wipes his mouth.
‘Anyway. I need to get off.’
I stand up. ‘Thanks so much. Can I have your card? Your … mobile number maybe? Just in case there’s, um, anything else?’
He rolls his eyes, reaches inside his jacket, flicks out a card between two fingers. ‘Just for you.’ He fixes two pale blue eyes on me, taps the card against the table. ‘Not everyone in the bloody office. Got that?’
‘Absolutely.’ I grin. ‘Thanks.’
‘And don’t talk to me at court. I don’t w
ant the whole world on my case.’
‘Got it.’
I feel the thickness of his card in my hands. He pulls his coat off the back of his chair, swings it over his broad shoulders.
‘Thanks for talking to me,’ I hear myself babbling. ‘Really. I’m so grateful. And, you know, good luck.’
He stares at me. I wonder if I’ve said the wrong thing.
‘I just mean – I know they aren’t easy, these cases,’ I add quickly. ‘You don’t always get the right result.’
DCI Carter grimaces and rubs his palm against the back of his head, his hair flecked with grey.
‘No, Katie,’ he says. ‘You don’t.’
HELEN
It is still warm for September, the leaves on the trees still green and shimmering as I make my way across the park and through the quiet streets around Royal Hill. Rachel is sitting in the pub’s outside area at a painted wooden table, the sort that are permanently damp with beer. Strings of white fairground lights trail in a canopy overhead.
When Rachel had asked if I want to meet again today, I’d decided it wouldn’t be all that bad. I’ve nothing else planned. I wonder if I can persuade her against the pub this time, though. Perhaps we could have a glass of lemonade but then go for a walk up to the Observatory, or to shop for nursery things near the market. Something I can upcycle into an anecdote to drop into conversation with Serena and Rory when we see them for dinner this weekend.
The pub is busy. When she sees me approach, she grins and motions that she is going to the bar for us, leaving her bag to save our place. I ease myself onto the wooden bench, extract a tissue from my bag to wipe down the surface.
As I wait for Rachel to return, my eyes drift over to the antiques shop opposite. It is selling huge, old-fashioned ship lights, mounted on teak and metal tripods. Some are set out on the pavement, hand-drawn price tags on brown cord hanging around their necks. Greenwich is full of strange objects like this, from a time when ships mattered in a way that it is difficult to fathom. They are old collectors’ items these days, their tarnished bronze, copper and chrome just a fashionable design quirk. Serena has a light like this in her study, which I have admired before. I don’t think I really like them, now I look at them. They look a bit like spacecraft, their single alien eyes cocked at us from the other side of the road.
Rachel returns from the bar with an orange juice and lemonade for me and a pint of Guinness for herself.
‘Full of minerals,’ she says. Then, after seeing my expression, she adds quickly: ‘I’ll only have a few sips.’ She sets it down carelessly on the table. Foam spills out onto the already beer-soaked wood.
Clouds chase each other across the sky, the sun disappearing behind them, then appearing again. I close my eyes, feel the sunlight on my face. The warmth is dwindling now. We’ve missed the best part of the day. Still, I find myself happy to be out.
‘So, what have you been up to, hon? Apart from practising your breathing exercises.’ She sets her phone down on the table next to her pint. She sticks her little finger into the top of her Guinness and slops the finger full of froth into her mouth.
‘Oh, this and that.’
The truth is, I’ve been doing almost nothing. I’ve rattled pointlessly around the house, trying to think of jobs to do. I have sorted out all my bedroom drawers, made and frozen meals. I have read my baby books, tested the breast pump. I am painfully bored already. I’ve still got nearly three months.
I’ve tried to arrange things, but somehow it never seems to quite fit with people. None of my friends from the advertising firm I work for replied to my message asking if they fancied a coffee – despite saying how much they’d love to keep in touch. I know their lives are full of meetings, work drinks, conferences – things I stopped being invited to almost as soon as my bump started to show. Then there’s Katie, who is always busy at the newspaper. Serena is away. And I’d even considered contacting my little brother, Charlie. It would be good to use this time to try to reconnect. But then I thought about how much of a hassle it would be, getting the train all the way over to Hackney. Also, Charlie is basically nocturnal – he works as a DJ, which he insists is actually a real job – and tends to be asleep until three in the afternoon, when he goes to collect his daughter Ruby from school. The only person who always seems to be free is Rachel.
She is patting at her denim jacket now – first the breast pockets, then the hips, as if giving herself an airport security check. It takes me a moment to realise she is looking for a packet of cigarettes. She pulls out the packet, plus a plastic lighter. The lighter is adorned with a green cannabis leaf design on one side and a cartoon portrait of Bob Marley on the other. As she flicks the yellow-blue flame to life between her thumb and knuckle, she gives me a sideways glance. I try and arrange my features into a fixed expression, but even so I feel my eyes dart left and right, hoping no one from the office walks past.
‘Oh God, I know I shouldn’t,’ she says, seeing my face, waving the unlit cigarette between us. ‘Honestly, I’ve cut down loads. I’ll be off them soon, definitely. So fucking hard when you’re in a pub though, you know?’
She lights it, cupping her small fingers around the flame, then takes a deep drag before blowing a trail of smoke sideways away from me, contorting her face to one side as she does so. Even so, I lean away a little.
‘You ever smoked?’
‘No.’
She closes her eyes, nods. ‘Clever girl.’ She takes another deep inhale.
The man from the antique shop is packing up the ship lights from the pavement outside, their chrome eyelids closing. They clank against each other as he heaves them through his door. In the distance I can hear the church chimes of St Alfege’s, the rustle of the trees along the faraway edge of the park. The sun has disappeared behind a thick cloak of cloud. I pull my cardigan tighter around myself.
I watch Rachel as she smokes, eyelids down. Suddenly, she snaps her eyes open, like a doll. ‘So,’ she says. ‘Tell me more about Rory and Serena.’ She says the names Rory and Serena as if they are a single word, or the name of a TV show. ‘Well, Rory works with Daniel, like I told you,’ I begin. ‘You might have seen their new development – it’s the big glass building right on the river, past the Trafalgar Arms?’ I gesture down the hill, past the market, towards the river – pointlessly, since you can’t see it from here.
This is the development that the papers hate. A massive regeneration scheme, the demolition of loads of old social housing to make way for luxury flats. As well as the sniping about it in the Evening Standard, there have even been pieces in the Guardian and the local papers – mutterings about social cleansing, foreign money. The ‘keep London shit brigade’, as Rory calls them.
There was even talk of a protest at one stage – Lisa, the secretary, apparently saw something on Twitter or Facebook. She printed it out, placed it on Daniel’s desk, without comment. A march against gentrification, they called it. ‘Anarchists and weirdos,’ Rory had muttered. Still, they’d had to tell the client. Now, there’s more security around the site; big bull-necked blokes in black polo shirts patrol the perimeter like nightclub bouncers, walkie-talkies crackling at their hips.
‘And what about her? Serena? She’s a photographer, right?’ Rachel exhales, releasing another plume of smoke. The sun slips behind the clouds.
I frown. Did I tell Rachel that Serena was a photographer? I must have done, though I don’t remember it. ‘Yes,’ I say slowly. ‘She is. It has been a lifelong passion for her.’ I blush, realise I’m directly quoting the line from Serena’s website. Rachel won’t know that, I tell myself. ‘She has her own studio, on the other side of the park.’
Rachel nods, as if considering this. ‘And Rory. Is he excited about their baby and everything?’
The question catches me off guard – I had been concentrating on staying out of the way of her smoke. I put my glass down, unsure how to answer. Of course he’s excited about their baby. What does she mean?
&nbs
p; ‘I mean, you know,’ Rachel twirls the cigarette around in the air, ‘you were saying the other day that Daniel was being super supportive with making all the furniture, and getting really emotional at the scans and everything.’ She starts turning her lighter sideways and upright, then sideways again, like a Tetris piece that won’t fit. ‘Is he the same? Rory?’
‘I think they are both delighted.’
Rachel is gazing downwards now, into the creamy surface of her Guinness glass, tapping her cigarette rhythmically against the edge of the silver ashtray. She looks lost in thought. I wonder if she is thinking about the father of her own baby. But before I work out how to frame the question, she takes her sunglasses off and speaks, as if she has read my mind.
‘It wasn’t just a casual fuck or anything, you know.’ She tilts her chin up, squinting into the sun, so that she can look me in the eye.
‘Oh, I didn’t … I hadn’t assumed …’
‘Yeah, well,’ she says gruffly, casting her gaze down again. ‘I did love the guy. The dad. It just, you know. Didn’t work out.’
She brings her cigarette to her lips and takes another long inhale, spreads her bitten fingernails out on the table. She starts again with the lighter, tapping it onto its base, then its side, then its base again. Her eyes seem to pinken a little, her pale fingers tense.
‘Are you all right?’
‘Yeah, fine,’ she mutters. ‘Sorry.’
Unsure what to do, I place one of my hands over hers. She stares at my hand, and for a moment I wonder if the gesture was too intimate. It is the sort of thing I can misjudge. But then she looks up and smiles, her eyes looking slightly wet.
‘Cheers, Helen.’
I smile awkwardly, though I’m not sure what she is thanking me for. She doesn’t say anything more. I feel my curiosity growing like an itch, a buzzing in my ear that won’t be batted away.
‘Do you mind if I … ask what happened?’
Rachel pulls her hand out from under mine and starts fiddling with her phone.
‘Oh, you know. We met at work. I was working at a music venue. Behind the bar.’ She shrugs. ‘Anyway. We liked each other. I didn’t mean to get pregnant. Obviously. Who does, right?’ She laughs. I try to force my face to smile, even as I feel my jaw tighten, my leg start to tremble slightly under the pub table.
Greenwich Park Page 4
