A. When the trial was over and I knew that this girl was dead because of me, I had to find out. Everything I’ve ever done went up in flames.
Q. Like what? Like defending people by subverting others? Your life work and bogus idealism? Same thing as defending the innocent?
A. I never cared about innocence or guilt. I wanted to win and it’s easier to do it working with the wicked. Truth has all these inhibitions, lies don’t. I used my left-wing, anti-authority liberal credentials to feather my nest quickest and win, win, win, no matter what harm and who got hurt. I’m a sham, a complete sham.
Q. So what’s different? Why can’t you go on being a sham?
A. Because I’ve lost sight of everything about me which might have been decent. Because I know I can’t ever do it again and there’s nothing else I can do. Because I could never look at myself in the mirror and feel proud of what I was unless I was dressed in my best. And now, even in my finest finery, I can’t bear to look at all. I see her.
Q. But it was Boyd who tortured your daughter, wasn’t it?
A. I fetched the axe. I always fetch the axe. Or the nails, or the scissors. The murderer’s little helper.
Q. Speak up. The jury needs to hear you. Say it again.
A. I can’t live with it. I want to kill myself before it kills me.
Peter read this portion of the transcript while sitting in a bus shelter. He could see a bus shelter was a good place to be, a sort of spiritual home for a soul in transit. The shelter faced a half lively sea caught between moods. It was a grey mid morning with a sky that seemed at first perfectly colourless until he looked more closely, and then it was everything from pink to black, and the sea itself a spectrum of colours from creamy white through brown to blue, graded by constant movement into fractions of colours. The waves, almost too lazy to be as cross as they looked, approached the shingled shore with fake aggression, and then when they broke into foam, nibbled at the shingle, withdrew as if sated or defeated and then came back, starved and curious, looking for somewhere to go. Waves with parents, pulling them back into the deep and saying, you are too young yet. Come home.
He was piecing it together. He would never know when Marianne Shearer had written this, or when the copies had been added to the transcripts that had been sent from Ms Shearer’s chambers to himself, long before her death, and to Thomas Noble the day after she died. Whatever happened, it had always been there to be found by anyone who looked. She had wanted them to know, later rather than sooner, deprived them of anything else and then, in case no one looked at all, sent him a reminder. He would have got there without her. He had almost finished his reading.
She had been kinder to him with the copy sent by post via the Lover, which ended with a postscript. She had added to his version a longer recitation which she would certainly have interrupted if it had come from a witness hostile to her cause, or anyone who stood in the way of winning.
I don’t know why, Peter, believe me.
I can’t do anything straightforward. I was reading through the transcript (for the tenth time), and I thought I’d continue it. Why couldn’t I just write it down?
I was thinking of her before that trial, and there she was, as silly and small and malleable as me, the self I hated. This is crap. I was looking for her, thought I recognised her, got a detective, costly, but so easy. It’s all about birth certificates. I did it to prove I was wrong, but then, horrors, I found out I was right. I got as far as finding out that Angel Joyce was adopted, one of two.
So silly Angel it was. NB, I hoped it was the other one, Henrietta, because she survived. I found out all about her, too. What she does etc. I wish I had a sister like that.
I knew what I had done, and to whom, by the time Henrietta Joyce sent me the post-mortem report. Thank her for underlining it.
I had delivered my daughter to suicide and granted her tormentor the freedom to do the same to someone else.
The shame makes me squirm; it’s like I’ve drunk the acid I’ve been pouring down other throats all these years. Got to stop myself doing any more harm.
They were right, all those mothers. It’s not the same if it’s yours. As if all the others weren’t somebody’s child too.
Tell me I’ve still got style.
Peter got up and walked against the wind as far as the next shelter. People said hello and he said it back. He admired her lack of self-pity. He had been acting as interlocutor, again, between Henrietta Joyce, her parents and the law. It was a role he had wanted, in case she needed him, which he doubted she did. You are always too late, Peter: you always get there too late. You’re a post-hoc thinker, a lawyer, not a doer.
He was being a doer, now. He was waiting for a white van to take him back to London. The loose ends were unravelling and ravelling again, like unpicked knitting wool about to be made into a new garment. He had enjoyed the learning of new facts, like how, thirty-odd years ago, an original birth certificate was superseded by another in the case of children adopted at birth. The first, with the mother’s name, remained in the archives of the agency of adoption, and the one created by the adoption order remained with the parents. Birth certificates were unalterable, but you could have two; one you saw and one you did not know about. No one need know the birth-mother’s name, not then, neither daughters – nor sons – or substituted parents. It could stay secret.
He had been afraid that Hen had known all along.
She didn’t know. She could not have known, could she?
The van arrived.
January 17
‘Pray stand for Her Majesty’s Coroner.’
All stood.
The Sergeant bowed. They all bowed as the Deputy Coroner for the county ambled in like the best man at a shotgun wedding, determined to make things easy. Not much of a crowd, witnesses only; therefore the usual pall of worry attendant on any sudden death but without the sharper, more unpredictable overtones of grief. The Coroner had served this court for twenty-five years and detested wastage of effort when there were no relatives to mollify. After all, the deceased was not local.
Thomas Noble imagined that as he grew older, all the funerals and all the inquests might meld together in one, long memory with only occasional highlights. He could write a style guide to funerals and inquests, including how to show the necessary respect, what to wear, etc. He was keeping his powder dry for the next one that would surely have a better attendance than this miserable gathering. The ambience and decor of this room was familiar, dressed as it was in the same, anonymous style, but he was slightly off familiar territory here and he felt conspicuous. Acting as moral support for the new clients, grateful for the mercy of working for nice people, although why Marianne Shearer had left a will – hidden along with a laptop, a phone and various other invaluable sundries in the back room of a Ukrainian dressmaker – leaving the bulk of her estate to Mr and Mrs Joyce, was a tad beyond his comprehension. Conscience was a strange thing. A client was a client; one did one’s best.
Tut, tut. He supposed the powers that were had scoured the length and breadth of the land to find a living relative willing to own Rick Boyd. Perhaps the absence of same was his problem. Either the man had never had loving arms around him or perhaps he had hacked them all off, long since. That handshake of his alone would do it; he could see Boyd shaking off a whole arm and eating it. The two Joyces stood so close they could have been formed from the same substance. Unlike himself, they had authority in this room; they were local, and therefore beyond reproach. The Coroner nodded towards them like an old friend; everyone nodded to one another.