“Yes.”
“A text.”
“Yes.”
“A Google search, even.”
“Yes.”
“And she didn’t.”
“Evidently not.”
“When you asked the defendant whether she had been to Londis, what did she say?”
“She admitted it.”
“Admitted? Or just answered honestly?”
“Well, she previously led me to believe she hadn’t been anywhere—”
“In her first interview, she gave you an extremely brief account of her evening, which did not revolve around going to get Calpol.”
“She omitted it entirely,” Keysha says smoothly.
“But as soon as she was asked, she told you?”
“Yes.”
“Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to take you to the Google search. It was exactly this: Calpol plus overdose.”
“Yes.”
“Detective Sergeant, if I wanted to know the limits of how much Calpol to give a baby, what might I google? I might google Calpol plus dosage limits. I might google Calpol instruction leaflet. But I might also google Calpol plus overdose.”
Keysha says nothing, merely stands and stares at the barrister. Then she folds her arms, very slowly.
“Witness is not a Google search engine expert,” Ellen says.
“Nothing further,” Harriet says.
Ellen stands up. Reexamination. The last-chance saloon to rescue the witness from things admitted in cross-examination.
“Detective, what might a criminal google if they were searching for ways to give a baby too much Calpol—a lethal dose?”
“Witness is not an expert,” Harriet says, leaping to her feet. Her cheeks are flushed. “You just said that yourself,” she says to Ellen, looking childlike, hurt almost.
“Please refrain from asking the witness to comment on what criminals might google,” the judge remarks benignly.
Keysha has said nothing, but the damage is done.
35
Martha
Let’s go for a walk or something,” Scott says to me in the foyer at lunchtime. His body language is off: his gaze downward, a hand to his throat. “I can’t deal with any more of this shit.”
Ethan is standing in the foyer, looking at us. No doubt he has views on the damning evidence, but I don’t want to hear them.
“Okay,” I say to Scott, last night’s conversation forgotten, subsumed into the swamp.
So what if we disagree about what happened to our daughter? It won’t change anything, after all.
We stand on the steps together in the blazing heat. “It’s too hard to listen to,” he says. “Like watching a car crash.” He runs a hand through his hair.
I think about what he said about Layla deserving better. He won’t unpick the events of the night of out of respect for her. Somewhere, something quiet and soft and optimistic swells in my chest. He is a good person. A better person than me, maybe.
“There isn’t even an accusation of a Calpol overdose,” I say quietly, unable to stop myself from going over it.
“I know. It doesn’t make any sense. They’re trying to establish evidence of a motive, I guess. That she was looking for ways to . . .”
I tune him out.
A couple of years ago, Becky and I met up one Sunday for a walk. It was early spring, and Marc had moved out a few months before. The weather was just beginning to warm up, and Becky was wearing a striped T-shirt. She brought a hand to her face to gather her hair—it was windy—and I saw her knuckles were grazed.
“Been fighting?” I said with a small laugh.
“Only with walls,” she said.
“Walls?”
“Marc and I had a row. He wanted to switch our weekends around because of a curry with the lads when he wouldn’t switch with me so I could come to London with you.”
“You punched a wall?”
“I felt like an idiot, afterward,” she said ruefully. “I did wait until he’d gone before I did it.”
“Jesus,” I said. I’d laughed it off with her at the time but, now, I think: Would I have ever done that?
No. I wouldn’t.
Was it normal? I didn’t know. That edge of hers, that temper.
I open my mouth to talk to Scott. But then he turns to me, and his blond hair catches the sun, and here we are, together, on the steps, and all I can think is: He looks so much like Layla. Strawberry blond. The slightly turned-down mouth. The wide-set eyes.
The look of sadness that crossed both of their features sometimes.
* * *
—
Scott heads back inside but I stay out on the steps, telling him I want five more minutes. I walk back to the seafront, my phone in my hand. I think about Marc’s lack of alibi, about Theresa’s testimony in which she wondered if Becky was alone, about Becky leaving Layla as she walked to Londis, and suddenly I know what I’m going to do.
My fingers find Marc’s contact details on my phone and then I’m calling him before I can stop it. I shouldn’t be. It is probably a crime. We are witnesses on opposing sides of a murder trial.
“You have no alibi,” I say when he answers.
“Martha?” he says.
“You have no alibi,” I say.
“For that night?” he says.
“Of course, for that night.”
“God, Martha,” he says. “I was at home.”
“Did you go and help Becky? Were you there? Did you go over there when she was out?” I say, the words rushing out. “Are you letting her take the rap?”
“No,” he says.
“Theresa said Becky didn’t sound like she was alone.”
“Well, she was alone,” Marc says. “Nobody came over. I won’t listen to these questions, Martha. I’ve been asked too many times.” His voice is tight.
“By who?” I say.
And then, to my surprise, he hangs straight up, without answering me. Without explaining at all.
It is only later that I consider the very specific language he used. Came over. Nobody came over.
A word he would only use if he had been there himself.
36
Becky
Early evening, Wednesday, October 25
Can I play, though?” Xander says.
“Yes, yes,” I say impatiently. I am looking after Layla until Friday, and it’s only Wednesday evening. Martha left for Kos this afternoon. Scott was supposed to be coming back tomorrow but has decided to stay two nights at a really useful developers’ conference. Thanks, Scott. No, no—you booze away, don’t mind me. I wouldn’t mind, really, except he didn’t ask. He merely told me. As though I was the help. His text pinged in as I was unloading the shopping from Sainsbury’s.
I drafted text after text in response: Well, yes, actually, I do rather mind, and I think your crying daughter does, too, one said.
Or maybe: Sure, my overtime rates are £500/hour.
In the end, I sent them all to Marc, wordlessly. He rang me immediately, his voice deliciously low and amused. He didn’t know what I was talking about. I tried to ignore the way that voice made me feel, tried not to look at the goose bumps that appeared on my arms.
“You gone mad, Samuel?” he said.
“I was going mad at you so I don’t go mad at Scott,” I said.
There was a pause.
“Ah,” he said, after a few seconds, no doubt replaying the text messages in his mind and working it all out. “I see. Jesus, Sam. They’re playing you.”
“He’s a dick,” I said.
“Yes. What’s he doing? They can’t both be away? For another night? She’s only eight weeks old.”
“Maybe he’s sleeping around,” I said. I didn’t mean to say it. It just slipped out, mindless speculati
on with no basis.
Marc paused. It was awkward.
God, why did I say that, after what I did to him?
“I doubt Scott gets around much,” Marc said.
I was grateful for his gentle humor. That humor carried me through years of ovulation kits, of pregnancy tests, bought needlessly and used before my period was even due. Once, Marc used one, too, just to cheer me up. “There,” he’d said. “We’re both not pregnant.”
“No,” I said into the phone then, with a small smile. “I doubt Scott does.”
“I was thinking I might say something to them,” he said to me. “About this arrangement. If you’d like me to—if you feel you can’t?”
“No, Marc,” I said. “No, don’t do that.”
“Her crying is annoying me, and I’m not even experiencing it,” he said. “Maybe she’s unwell.”
“She’s not unwell. She’s just . . .”
“I could come over. I can get babies to stop crying.”
“No, you could get Xander to stop crying, but I’m learning he was a pretty easy baby.”
“I bet I could,” Marc said.
I remembered him holding Layla one evening at Martha’s. “She’s seriously loud,” he’d said to me, over the crying. “Why won’t she stop?”
I hmmed, instead of saying anything, and said good night.
Layla is crying in her bouncy chair. I jiggle it with my foot while I unpack Xander’s lunch box, removing a blackening banana skin, but it does nothing to stop the crying.
“How long have I got?” Xander says, hanging around the doorframe of the kitchen.
“One hour,” I say to him.
“You cut my hour short on Monday, by five minutes,” he says. “Remember?”
“Did I?” I say vaguely. Layla’s tears escalate, so I reach to get her out of the bouncer. I cast about for her blanket to swaddle her, something that occasionally soothes her.
“Yes! Because we were late for swimming? And then when we got back, it was too late, because we had to have the oven chips?”
“Right, right,” I say. Children are so strange. The detail of it! Oven chips.
“One hour five minutes,” he says, looking at me.
He always used to be so eager to help me, to please. This exacting, relentless questioning is new. Perhaps he will grow up to be one of those combative journalists on TV. I shudder.
“Fine,” I say, disposing of a crust from his lunch box into the bin and holding Layla close to me. “You should eat it all, you know. Crusts, too.”
Layla is still crying, her face turning purple. “Stop shouting,” I say. “There’s nothing to be angry about.”
As Xander goes to leave the kitchen, he turns to me. “I wish she wasn’t crying,” he says.
“Me too. It’s loud,” I snap.
“No. I just mean, I wish she wasn’t sad.”
My eyes fill with tears. Like, here he is. My boy. My boy whom I’ve known and loved for nine years. I stretch my arm out to him, and he comes over, briefly, and leans his body against mine in an imitation of a cuddle.
Layla continues to scream, one navy-blue eye making fleeting contact with mine until she looks away again. She looks just like Martha.
“One hour, five minutes,” I say as Xander leaves the kitchen.
I set Layla down on the kitchen floor, even though it is tiled and cold. The bouncy chair doesn’t work. Holding her doesn’t work. She can lie there, swaddled, just for a moment. I’m ashamed that I feel angry. I feel angry with her.
I boil the kettle to cover her screams.
37
Martha
It’s time for the medical experts. The people who weren’t there at the time, but have views on what happened on that night, because my baby’s body is merely evidence to them. A specimen, a slab of muscles and bones and blood.
There are two experts, one for the prosecution and one for the defense, paid hundreds of pounds each. Their words are expensive. I look across at Becky in the dock. She knows what happened, either through her own actions or because she knows what she didn’t do. I contemplate her. After a few seconds, she must sense me looking, because she looks straight back. Our eyes meet. Neither of us smiles. Neither of us looks away, either. We just look at each other, holding each other’s gaze, for a few seconds.
Scott clears his throat next to me—a soft, familiar uh ah—and he moves his hand to my knee. I stop looking at Becky and look down at his hand instead. I place mine on it and wonder whose Layla’s would have grown to look more like. Scott’s hands are small and square, with neat, rounded fingernails. Mine are long. “Piano player’s hands,” Mum always used to say, even though I was rubbish at music.
Scott and I met at a dinner party, which is far too grand a term for what it really was. He was heartbroken, recently abandoned by an ex, and spent much of the evening talking about her. “There was just no warning, you know?” he kept saying to me. Somehow, the friendly counseling I offered became something more and I remember thinking, one night, at age twenty-three: God, you will do.
I didn’t think like that when he proposed. He makes me happy, I thought, picturing his freckled nose, the calm way he embarked upon tasks. He believed in equality, did half the housework, if not more. He never shouted at me, always asked me pleasantly how my day was. Yes. We were happy. We turned our mobile phones off every Wednesday evening—“hump day” we called it—and cooked together. I’d fry the meat while he chopped the onions. The dishes got more elaborate—two courses, three—and the conversations deeper, less formal, as we lost self-consciousness, absorbed in the cooking. Every Thursday morning, I felt as though I had taken a holiday.
But then, two weeks after the wedding, the day we got back from our Sardinian honeymoon, I woke in the night and remembered that thought I’d once had: You’ll do. I stared across at Scott in horror. His form was exactly the same. The same sleeping position. How could I have thought such a thing? I suppressed it, pushing it downward like compacting soil.
It’s funny how a single thought can come to define something—a marriage, a baby—but it has. You’ll do. And now, even though years have passed, and what it was then isn’t what it is now, I still repeat that phrase to myself, often, in the shower, or late at night when he’s away. You’ll do.
Did I mean it? Were we doomed from the start, or did I once love him fully, completely? I don’t have a clue. In the haze of what’s happened since, and the grief, I find I don’t know. But we were three, and now we are two: He is everything I have.
“The prosecution calls Julia Todd,” Ellen says.
Scott shifts on the seat—he’s tall, with long legs, and the public gallery is cramped—and we watch the consultant pediatric and perinatal pathologist make her way to the witness box. The courtroom is hushed.
The pathologist.
The postmortem.
The autopsy.
I grit my teeth and stay sitting. I have to be here. I have to find out the truth.
For Layla.
38
Julia Todd
Afternoon, Thursday, November 2
People were always surprised by what Julia did. She had stopped telling people, at parties and events. “Housewife,” she sometimes said, letting Jim talk about his work in the library instead.
She spent her mornings writing up reports and her afternoons dissecting young babies. That was the truth of it. But how do you tell somebody that at a wine-tasting event? It shocked people. It was, she thought, because she was fat and old and wore glasses. How dare she enjoy gardening, Merlot, reading the Telegraph, and the clean slice of a knife down the center of a corpse?
She approached the metal table where that afternoon’s baby was laid out for her.
She checked the record sheet. Layla. Layla’s skin was a pale gray, translucent. Entirely normal, though Julia spen
t so much time with dead people that living people sometimes seemed unusually flushed and warm to her. The flutter of a pulse, the steady rising of a chest: how unusual, how animal, she sometimes thought.
She checked the ID and hospital number, then removed the white Babygro. She put it on the other long, spare metal bench. The babies always seemed so small on the bench, like putting them in a huge bed, but Julia rather thought the notion of tiny beds in a morgue would be much more depressing somehow.
Julia could see immediately that Layla was typical, but she checked anyway, for low-set ears, hernias. Abnormalities. She measured limbs. She worked quickly, but accurately, getting into the rhythm of her afternoon, like going swimming or riding a horse.
It was an odd case, she had learned when reading the notes that morning. The baby brought to A&E by ambulance, found by her aunt, moonlighting as her nanny. Off the record, the consultant, Amanda, had told Julia she had a bad gut feeling about her. Amanda was always having bad gut feelings, though—one of life’s overthinkers—so Julia didn’t pay too much attention to that. She started checking over the body for injuries, hoping to find none. She supposed she was hoping for sudden infant death syndrome: a death for no reason at all. Tough on the parents, but the best outcome of a bad bunch, like trying to pick the best way to get food poisoning.
She deliberately hadn’t checked the scans. She liked to look at the body first, the primary source, and then the secondary sources, to see if she agreed with them. There was no substitute for a body.
She took a couple of steps back and looked at her. Not just in case she had missed something global in her careful, detailed inspection, but also because she wanted one last look at her as a baby, as a person, before she irrevocably changed her.
She turned her over. But what was that, on the back of her earlobe? A bluish tinge. She looked at it from this way and that, then noted it. It could be a birthmark. Or it could be an injury. It was unusual to find a bruise on non-bony soft tissue. And it was very suspicious: Babies couldn’t bruise their own earlobes.
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