‘Being normal. Ordinary.’ It was blissful, almost as if she was floating. She tried to hold the sensation, her own special drug blocking out the reality of the unreal.
He squeezed the hand holding his arm against his body, rehearsing what he was going to say, not wanting to break her mood with the wrong word. ‘It’s a good feeling. I’d forgotten it.’
She squeezed back. ‘Were you angry at me?’
‘When?’
‘At the beginning, when I said I didn’t want you: that I wanted a
QC.’
‘No. That was professionaclass="underline" your choice.’
‘Can you always be impartial, like that?’
‘It’s an essential of the job.’
‘Are you impartial now?’ She looked intently sideways at him.
He wasn’t sure how to answer: wasn’t sure what she even meant by the question. ‘I’m not going to abandon you: leave you by yourself.’
She looked away and walked without speaking for several moments. ‘Thank you, for what you did then. At the trial I mean. I haven’t thanked you before, have I?’
‘You haven’t seen my fee yet,’ he said, trying for lightness.
‘Did you always believe me?’
Truth or lie? Truth, Mason had dictated: no other way, blunt truth in fact. ‘Of course not, not at first. It was too absurd.’
‘What did you think was going to happen?’
Keep to the truth. ‘That the judge would stop the trial. Order the jury to return a verdict on mental incapacity.’
‘Which would have achieved what you wanted all along?’
‘Yes.’
‘Sneaky bastard!’
She actually laughed, the first time he’d ever seen her do that – the first time since they’d met that she’d ever had the slightest cause, he supposed – and Hall came close to faltering. ‘I thought it was the best outcome. The only outcome.’ And still might be, he thought, worriedly.
‘The television is saying that you’re famous now. In demand.’ She veered off the path, on to the grass, to avoid a rapidly approaching track-suited jogger.
‘We’ll see.’ Bert Feltham hadn’t been happy at his continuing to delay a response to the offered briefs: the total, as of the previous evening, stood at twelve.
They walked unspeaking again, in the general direction of a display of oaks, bowed and gnarled by age.
‘They were there hundreds of years before we were born and they’ll be there after we die,’ she said.
The remark unsettled him. He said, ‘But in between we have a life,’ and at once regretted the remark.
‘Do we?’ She turned away from the tree-line, towards the clinic. To have gone around the coppice the other way would have taken the refuge out of sight. ‘Do you know what I thought, on the day it happened? Before it happened: before Jane? I remember thinking that I was the happiest, luckiest, most contented woman in the world…’ She snorted an empty laugh. ‘… Can you believe that?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you believe Rebecca in court? That he was going to divorce me and take Emily away?’
‘I thought we were trying to forget things, just for a moment.’
‘We can’t, can we?’
Honesty, he reminded himself. ‘Not for very long.’
‘So what’s the answer?’
‘She was performing: wanting the jury to make a comparison. She couldn’t be challenged.’
‘Still not an answer.’
‘I can’t give you one. If I’d had anything to challenge her with, I would have done.’
He followed her lead again, accepting they were returning to the clinic. He waited for her to lead the conversation, too.
‘Did Gerald do it?’ she demanded, abruptly.
Gently to warn her might lessen the shock, according to the psychiatrist. ‘There are a lot of things that don’t add up: things the police would have investigated, if they’d known.’
‘Do you believe I wasn’t involved.’
‘Yes.’
‘Can you prove it to her?’
‘If it’s based on the remark I think it is, yes.’
‘What if it isn’t?’
‘Then at least I’ll know where to go on looking.’
‘Why is she letting me alone, now?’
‘Because of what happened in the chapel?’ he suggested.
‘Wouldn’t it be…?’ Jennifer began, then stopped.
‘Yes,’ he agreed, not needing her to finish.
Jane wasn’t there the following morning. Of all the setbacks and reversals Jeremy Hall attempted to anticipate – accepting as he tried to forearm himself there were too many unknowns possibly to insure against – he’d never imagined that when he came to argue Jane’s possession with legal objectivity she wouldn’t be there to argue back.
Cox had declared Jennifer fit for the ordeal and all of them – Hall, Dawson and Julian Mason – were startled by the visibly obvious recovery. It was not so much physical although her face, still free of make-up, had for the first time in weeks a glow about it and her freshly washed hair still hung with the flow of expensive, if long past, attention. It was more in Jennifer’s demeanour. The apathy had lessened – lessened, not gone completely – to give way to something Hall held back from identifying as an eagerness for the confrontation.
Jeremy Hall was frightened, far more apprehensive than he had been entering the Old Bailey that first day to argue ghostly possession as a murder defence to a hostile, God-fearing judge. The desperation of the whole idea, which had seemed reasonable, even logical, in those adrenalin-exploding first hours of their anything’s-possible escape from hospital now seemed preposterously absurd.
Jennifer’s words the previous night – normal, ordinary – echoed in his mind. Which Hall acknowledged to be his difficulty. For two days – three because to begin with night had merged into new day and new day into night – he’d been normal and ordinary, a lawyer immersed in the normal and ordinary defence of a client. So immersed, inconceivable though it now was for him to concede, that he’d dismissed from conscious thought who that client was and the circumstances and to whom he would be presenting her defence. He’d lapsed – relaxed – into becoming ordinarily normal. Which nothing was. Or could be. He had to step back into the supernatural, into the unknown and the unpredictable, unable to judge anything by the safe and logically enshrined rules and process of law.
And now he was being off-balanced before he’d started.
‘I reached her,’ argued Dawson, hopefully. ‘She prayed. Renounced evil.’
‘She didn’t come afterwards. Not at all during the night,’ agreed Jennifer, just as hopefully, eager for omens.
‘She was devout, before she died,’ accepted Hall, although less convinced. ‘Incredibly so. But I can’t imagine it could have been this easy.’
‘You hadn’t tried God before,’ reminded the priest, critically.
‘We hardly had the opportunity!’ protested the barrister. ‘We were arguing a murder charge.’
‘What do we do?’ demanded Mason, delighted at Jennifer’s very obvious mental recovery although secretly disappointed there wouldn’t be more to take to its exaggerated limit his participation and the honour-awarding thesis that would come from it.
‘We wait,’ decided Hall.
‘For how long?’ asked the priest.
‘As long as it takes.’
Mason was about to protest the glib near-cliche but stopped at the thought of how it might sound to Jennifer. Instead he said, ‘Yes. We wait.’
Which they did. Every day Jennifer attended services in the chapel and underwent analysis, sometimes under hypnosis, with Julian Mason, who even – dangerously – invited Jane to join them. Jeremy Hall read and re-read everything he’d assembled, actually glad of the opportunity the delay gave him to search for something that incriminated Jennifer that he might have missed. And found nothing.
His solitary walks with Jennifer in the clinic grounds, each evening, grew longer – the building not needing to be in view any more – and afterwards the four of them ate together, sometimes joined by Cox. And Jennifer did eat, hungrily, and the priest boasted his knowledge of the wine list, showing off in front of a beautiful woman.