No Further Questions

by Gillian McAllister

  ‘Please don’t do any research. It’s not good for you.’

  ‘Sorry?’ I say sharply.

  ‘No more research. It’s time to … we need to … we need to accept it.’

  ‘Why do you care if I research it or not?’

  ‘I just don’t think it’s good for you …’ He pauses, and looks at me sympathetically, as if I were a mad person. ‘Listen, anyway. At the land, I’ve been working on—’

  ‘Can you not? Can you just not? I don’t even really like fruit, actually.’ The words are out of my mouth before I can stop them, and I see Scott’s face fall. ‘I’ve been pretending to,’ I add spitefully.

  It’s the truth, but it’s not the time to tell it. It’s not about the fruit. I know that. It’s about what he said. We need to accept it. But how can we? How can we ever?

  ‘Okay,’ he says. His tone is so measured, always controlled. ‘Whatever.’ It’s not dismissive. It’s weary. Sad, even.

  ‘Sorry,’ I say. He must think me a diva. Who rejects presents from their spouse, after years and years of receiving them silently, complicitly? ‘I just … I didn’t want to tell you.’

  He walks past me, pulling his shoes out of the hall cupboard. ‘Don’t worry,’ he says wearily. ‘I’m going anyway.’ He reaches towards me, just slightly. But when I don’t take his hand, he lets it drop to his side. He lingers for just a second, looking at me. ‘Love you,’ he says softly, so quietly I have to strain to hear it.

  ‘Same,’ I say back.

  I’m blinded, momentarily, by a memory of wandering the streets of Verona with him, queueing up to see the Juliet balcony with dripping ice creams clenched in our hands. He laughingly licked the wafer cone of mine, and I swatted him away. We were happy. We were. Perhaps it is just grief, my mind marinating in negativity, affecting everything, colouring it black.

  ‘I mean it,’ I say to him.

  He gives me a quick, warm smile, and then the door closes softly behind him, leaving the flat in silence.

  He texted me the day after the dinner party at which we first met. It was nice chatting, he said. It really helped. And so it went. It wasn’t so much the beginning of a relationship as a general moulding together. I had just started teaching, in my NQ year. He had been a teacher, too, for two years, but had just left to do a Masters in programming. We used to work together, in my kitchen and his, late into the night. I liked the way he worked. The calm, quiet tidiness. The single desk lamp. Muzak that he found on streaming sites. We were study buddies, best friends, and then more. There was no moment. It was inevitable, like the quiet, calm movement of the tide up the beach.

  Staring now as I walk into our bedroom and run my fingers over his rows of neatly hung shirts, I wonder: Shouldn’t it be … something more? The kind of something that Becky and Marc had. The thoughts rise up but, methodically, I push them back down again. They will not come in here. They are not welcome.

  He hasn’t brought a single piece of fruit back from his land recently. I pause at the window, watching his car headlights as he drives away into the twilight. Is he really going there? Who knows? I can’t ask him. It would be barbed and loaded. But he’s been there more and more. Perhaps he’s just sitting, on his land, not tending the vegetables, not doing anything. Just sitting, letting them die.

  I go and get my notepad and look at it.

  Marc. He would do anything for Becky. Give her an alibi. Cover up a murder. He would help her, in her hour of need. Maybe he hated our arrangement. Maybe he got frustrated with Layla himself, and her constant crying. He was temperamental, too. Quick to anger. Maybe he resented Layla. They had wanted another child. Maybe it’s that: plain old jealousy. Maybe all of it, put together, tipped him over the edge.

  I go for a drive. My muscle memory takes me naturally to Becky’s. How many times have I driven here? Hundreds, it must be, over the years. Thousands. The car idles as I stop outside Becky’s. The night is warm and I wind down the window to let in the air. It’s clear here, not salty like the gritty sea air near my flat, but fresh and soft against my shoulders.

  I rest my head against the seat and survey the house. It sits empty, now, virtually since the night of, the black windows ghoulish-looking in the darkening evening. Becky and Xander left, like evacuees, to separate locations. He to Marc. She, home, to Mum and Dad. I stare at the garden gate, the three steps up to Becky’s front door, then my gaze trails upwards to the bedroom window.

  That’s where it happened. Up in that room, the furthest on the left.

  I get out of my car, pulling my jacket around me.

  I stand on the pavement and look at the window. What happened in there? Only Becky and Layla know for certain.

  Layla.

  She was small when born: just six pounds, dead on, as if maybe she intended to be an exacting person – my favourite kind. Her arms would for ever be disappearing up the sleeves of her Babygros. It frustrated me. I was trying to mould her to a fixed world, like, This is how we do things, we wear our sleeves down to our wrists. But she had other ideas. Once, when her hand had disappeared up again, she reached out and grasped my finger through the fabric, and looked at me. It felt warm and deliberate, that clutch of hers.

  I try to remember those moments, standing here, now, outside the spot where she died. I try to forget the moments when I was bored, or frustrated. There were so many of them. That time, on a coach, when she vomited up all of the milk it had taken me three hours to express. The times when she just wanted to be held. The love I felt for her hid behind it all – like a stunning view from a house, appreciated at first, and then ignored. The main emotions I felt had been frustration, boredom and guilt. My nipples hurt, until I stopped breastfeeding, and then they dribbled milk in my bra, leaving impressions like pale inkblots. The love somehow did not come to the forefront like it should have. Perhaps I needed time. I don’t know.

  How could Scott have left her? Anger rises up through me, but I try to suppress it. How could I have left her?

  Whatever happened with Becky, it wouldn’t have happened if I had been there. I would never have slept until 8.00 a.m. like Becky did. If I had loved my baby more – if the love had been more prominent, like a spice in a dish that overwhelms everything else – I wouldn’t have been able to leave her, would I? I would not have gone to Kos. I would not have begrudged the impact she had on my life. I would not have been frustrated by her tears and her dirty nappies and the insatiable hunger of those early days, those cluster feeds. If I had been a better mother. If I had loved her better.

  ‘You have to be here,’ my reliable gap-year student, Ami, said to me on the phone one day in mid-October. ‘A property’s come up.’ She was still getting the emails, even though she was ex-acting CEO of Stop Gap and now at Warwick University studying history. ‘I called up about it.’

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘There’s a premises,’ she said. ‘It’s just come up. There’s a viewing this weekend. You can buy it with the grant. It has – Jesus. It has, like, forty rooms.’

  ‘How much is it?’

  She gave me a number. We could afford it.

  I was standing in the bedroom, a hand dangling into Layla’s Moses basket. Only, instead of seeing her navy-blue eyes, I saw the other children’s. Slim cheeks, with little hollows. Big brown eyes.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘An old hotel. The government owns it. They’ll sell it to us. They were keen, on the phone. I pretended to be you.’

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘Right next to the fish market. You’d hardly have to move. But you should see it. Martha, you should see it.’

  A few moments later, she sent me a photograph. It wasn’t the venue that did it; it was her dedication. Nineteen, a fresher at university, and there she was overseeing commercial property purchases for me. Stepping in as CEO. Let alone the rest.

  ‘Can I just do it remotely?’ I said.

  ‘Well, no, it’s fine. I could go. In my reading week. It’s just …
’

  ‘God, no. Don’t do that.’

  Could I go, and see it, secure it, buy it? Get someone in to fit it out?

  ‘You need to be there to sign. You have to physically sign the deeds.’

  Shit. The signatures. Of course.

  I stared out of the window, not looking at Layla. I could go for two nights. Just two. Sign for the premises. Make sure everything was okay. Get it sorted, then hire someone once I was back home. Somebody who could oversee it properly, once the premises were sorted.

  ‘There’s already interest in it. Because it’s at such a discount.’

  It would be fine. It was five hours away. She had been good for Becky last week. Quiet, apparently. My breasts ached, but that was my problem, not hers. I’d set it up, secure it, and be back before she knew I had gone. It would be fine. It was the right thing to do. She was fine, and they … those children weren’t.

  Layla’s eyes met mine and a slow smile spread across her features. Her first ever smile. My baby. She’d be safe and warm, here, with Becky. And I would go to help them. The other children. They needed me. They had nobody for them. That’s what I thought then. Looking back, now, I don’t recognize that Martha, that decision I made. Layla needed me more than anybody could. Because I was her mother.

  But if it had never happened, if she had lived, I know I would never be thinking these thoughts. I would have been helping the children in Kos, and would have returned to my own family. It would have been lauded, that I set up a charity and raised my child.

  Hindsight.

  ‘Let me ask Becky,’ I said.

  I flew out to see the premises. I signed the document early, my signature a familiar scrawl. The date was stamped next to it: 27/10.

  It is the day she was found dead. The day she was declared dead in A&E, even though she died on the twenty-sixth. Her death certificate, and that dated signature, all bound up together.

  Evidence of their own. That I cared about other children more than my own.

  My focus shifts back to Becky’s house again. To the window of the room in which it happened.

  Somebody knows the truth, I find myself thinking. Becky or Marc or Becky’s neighbour …

  I picture each scenario.

  Marc, letting himself into her house, snuffing out my baby’s life so callously, just like that.

  Becky, accidentally killing my child, and asking for help.

  The images before me, the theories in my mind, are all wrong. Or are they? Maybe almost all of them are absurd … but maybe one of them is correct. I just need to find the right one.

  The barrister will sort it, I tell myself.

  But I know I’m going to confront Marc again. I have to. And then, if not Marc … Becky. Even though it is illegal. Even though it isn’t right.

  I have to do it.

  For Layla.

  The bed is already warm from Scott’s body by the time I get into it, much, much later.

  43

  Judge Christopher Matthews, QC

  Christopher takes a wander down to the beach. It will be Thursday tomorrow. The trial will end early next week. It will be a long jury deliberation, he thinks. All that medical evidence.

  He hates long deliberations. He can’t settle to reading anything new, waiting for a jury to return a verdict. Other judges begin new cases, but not him. He waits like a caged lion pacing its cell. The jury often send questions, or notes asking for a majority direction, and every time one comes through he hopes it will be the verdict and he will be able to move on, and start his next case.

  Sometimes, they take days and days; over a week, once.

  He can’t imagine how Becky, the defendant, feels.

  The prosecution has been sure of itself, moving through the waters of the case like a cruise ship, determined in its direction. The defence has been trying to stop it, to manoeuvre it, but it has been as ineffectual as a person tugging on a rope, trying to get a 200,000-tonne ship to change course. He feels sorry for Ms Smith, the defence barrister. She is good, but she doesn’t have anything to work with. Maybe there’ll be a last-minute miracle, like in the movies.

  He doubts it.

  He decided, last night in bed when he couldn’t sleep, that she had probably done it. They almost always have, after all. She should just say she rolled over on to the baby in her sleep. She’d get off.

  Why doesn’t she? Indeed.

  He pauses for thought. This is strange. He is sure she’s smart. Maybe she did it in some other way. Or maybe it really was someone else, somehow.

  But she doesn’t look guilty. She just doesn’t.

  He sits on his favourite wide, flat rock and watches the sea turn itself over. As always, his mind roams to Sadie, and the events just before she left him. She now lives in a tiny flat, in Hove, quite near to the defendant, actually. She didn’t take the dog with her. She never even comes to see him.

  He and Sadie divorced eighteen months ago. Irreconcilable differences. The usual. He was distant. He didn’t care about her job, only his.

  He picks a pebble up and throws it into the surf. Then he brings his mobile phone out – an old, second-hand thing – and scrolls down to her number. Something about this case has got under his skin. He thinks it is the sisters. The way they look at each other all the time across the courtroom. The fact that the mother, Martha, is there at all, watching proceedings, clearly hoping for a not guilty verdict.

  The love, he guesses. That’s what it is.

  They all loved each other, until they were splintered apart.

  THURSDAY

  * * *

  Defence

  44

  Martha

  ‘Martha—’ the reporter says.

  I turn and see her familiar face. Her curly hair is clipped back. She has a larger microphone, I think, and she thrusts it towards me more confidently, as though I might be about to speak, today, when I haven’t all week.

  ‘Have you ever asked your sister whether she did it?’

  It’s time for the defence.

  ‘The defence calls Marc Burrows,’ Harriet says.

  There is no defence speech. No pacing barrister like on the television, posing thoughtfully like a catwalk model. Instead, there’s a shuffling of papers, a clearing of the judge’s throat, and then Marc enters the witness box. Just like that. We’ve gone from prosecution to defence, the wind has changed direction, the interval is over. And here we are. Marc. Finally, his evidence will be examined, scrutinized.

  We might find an answer.

  And, if we don’t, then afterwards … I am going to find him.

  We saw him out in the foyer, waiting for his turn in the witness box. We didn’t greet him. We know not to interfere with witnesses, despite my earlier call to Marc, despite my plans, but there’s no Crown Prosecution Service leaflet on what happens when every single witness is somebody you know.

  Neighbours.

  Acquaintances.

  Friends of friends.

  Relatives.

  When the key defence witness is your ex-brother-in-law. When the defendant over there – already in the dock as we enter the court – is your sister.

  ‘I do solemnly and sincerely and truly declare and affirm that the evidence I shall give shall be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth,’ Marc says.

  I close my eyes against his words. I had forgotten his easy manner, his simple, straightforward gaze.

  He dips his head a little, then raises it, and looks directly at Becky.

  Ex-lovers: one in the witness box, one in the dock.

  ‘Mr Burrows,’ Harriet says, ‘could you explain how you know the defendant?’

  ‘I am her ex-partner.’

  ‘When you’re ready, please tell us in your own words what you remember about the night of the 26th of October.’

  Goosebumps appear on my arms.

  This is it.

  45

  Marc Burrows

  7.00 p.m., Thursday 26 October


  It was ingenious. The television power cable was long enough to stretch out into the hallway, and he had balanced the screen on the bottom step of the stairs, facing him. He had reluctantly agreed to lay this carpet out of hours, but he hadn’t checked the fixtures. His stomach dropped when he saw the schedule on Sky Sports – plenty of action in the European leagues – and he considered cancelling. But what a decision showing up had turned out to be. It took ninety minutes to fit a carpet. He had a perfect view of the football. And he was being paid to bloody watch it.

  His phone beeped at seven o’clock just as the underlay was down and Real Sociedad had scored. He paused, hands on his hips, standing in the centre of the room, to watch the replay. Decent finish, but where was the marking?

  He turned away from the television and got out his phone. Becky.

  Jesus, I’m worried about Layla. And me!

  This baby situation. It was madness. Utter madness. Martha was taking advantage of Becky, and Layla was a nightmare. Total nightmare baby. He couldn’t understand why Becky put up with it.

  He had spoken to her yesterday about it, and he thought he’d heard something a bit desperate in her voice. She wasn’t usually like that. She was resilient. She’d stuck it out for years with those wankers at the television studio. She was caustic, often, even dangerously full of rage at times, but never desperate, not recently. The last time he’d seen her this way was when they were trying for a second baby. What began as a preference slowly morphed into something essential, one he had been unable to make happen. They were ruled by a twenty-eight-day cycle of hope and despair. Perhaps if he held her closer, after, his skin on hers, he had once thought … perhaps if he imagined sperm meeting egg … perhaps, then, it would happen for them. But it never had.