The Coincidence (The Trial Trilogy)

by David B Lyons

  What didn’t leave her, and she was beginning to realise never would for the rest of her life, was the monotony of prison. ‘Boredom,’ she had come to tell anyone who would listen, ‘was the real price convicts paid for their crimes.’

  Although the ‘Joy is Innocent’ campaign had filled many of her weeks and months with some sort of ambition, she was tired and impatient with the lack of progress the campaign was making.

  Her lawyers had lauded the efforts of her supporters, but told Joy in no uncertain terms that the courts weren’t going to move any quicker for her just because her campaign was earning the attention of the tabloid newspapers. She wasn’t entitled to an appeal. And certainly wasn’t guaranteed one.

  ‘An appeal in your case would take so long, Joy, you’d be quicker finding new evidence that’d turn the screw on a retrial,’ her lawyer told her. ‘With the backing and support you have, you could pile the pressure on the system.’

  And then he left, never to be seen by Joy again. His time was well and truly up on this case. He had worked with Joy from the early days of her arrest, and was kind, considerate and always professional as he guided her through her original trial. But ultimately, he lost, and she eventually lost him less than a year into her sentence because he just couldn’t afford the years it would take to force an appeal through. He knew the system better than anyone; knew he’d be throwing away years of his promising career if he was stay with this case. He said he’d do the best he could, but Joy hadn’t seen nor heard from him for months and she began to realise it was up to her and Christy to get herself out of this mess. Besides, she was never convinced that lawyer truly felt she was innocent anyway. Not like Christy does.

  So, with no husband coming to the prison to visit her, and no lawyer now filling her in on her legal rights, Joy only had one hope of a visit – albeit a distant hope, given her father’s ill-health. But one day, about ten months in, when she was wiping down the tables in the canteen, Mathilda crept up behind her.

  ‘You got a visitor today, Joy,’ she said. ‘It’s your daddy.’

  He looked aged, as if he was fading into a sepia photograph. But he smiled when he saw his tiny daughter walking towards him – the first time she’d seen him genuinely smile since her mother had passed.

  They spoke about her case, about her new-found theory that Lavinia may have played a part. Her father entertained the idea, but ultimately didn’t seem positive that Joy was likely to turn this mess around. He swore as he held her stare that he believed her innocence, but the inconsistency in his breathing, coupled with the fact that he couldn’t maintain his focus on what she was saying for very long, confirmed to Joy that he wasn’t up for the fight. She knew she couldn’t rely on him to help her.

  ‘Do what you can, kid,’ he said. Then he gave her another hug and hobbled his way over to the front desk where Joy watched him struggle to sit into a wheelchair before being pushed out of the prison by a stranger dressed in purple scrubs.

  She was saddened to see her father in such ill-health, but a visit was a visit and she skipped her way back to Elm House, the promise of a smile on her lips. The smile, however, didn’t last long, not with somebody lurking around the corner.

  ‘You child-killing bitch,’ Marian snarled at her. Marian was one of Nancy’s cohorts – small but stocky; wide shoulders and thick arms. Joy backed up against the concrete wall and tried to steady her breathing as Marian inched her ugly mug nearer hers. ‘You’re lucky. If you didn’t have Christy Jabefemi by your side most of the time, you’d be in a wheelchair much like I saw your daddy getting into one back at the visitor’s hall.’

  Then Marian snapped her teeth shut, just inches from Joy’s face, and went on her way. The intimidation shook Joy, but by the time she got back to Elm House, everything seemed just as normal as it had been the day before: Christy’s Crazies existing alongside Nancy’s Cohorts.

  She dropped by Christy’s cell; not to inform her that she’d just been intimidated by Marian Crosby on the landing below them, but to chat – as if they hadn’t spent the last eight months since Joy got out of isolation chatting pretty much every hour they were allowed out of their cells.

  ‘They say a gal on Maple House took her life last night.’

  ‘Really?’ Joy asked, her mouth popping open.

  ‘Yep. Used her bed sheets to tie the noose. Ya know, e’rtime I hear of a prisoner hanging, I immediately think they were murdered.’

  ‘Murdered?’

  ‘It’s just so easy. I’ve heard it done befo’. Ya tie the noose, visit the prisoner when they asleep, put the noose around their neck and pull as hard as ya can. But ya gotta get that noose up the top o’ the neck, not the bottom, not the middle. The very top. It’s not a strangling. It’s a hanging. Folk hang from here,’ she said, positioning her hand around the edge of her jawline, ‘not here,’ she said, lowering to the centre of her neck.’

  ‘So, you think somebody killed her?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know… I don’t know what’s going on in Maple House,’ Christy said. ‘I’m just sayin’ e’rtime I hear of a hanging in prisons, I get a little suspish, ya know whaddam sayin’?’

  ‘Who was she?’

  ‘Chick called Audrey. Audrey Murray. Only twenty-eight, that’s what I heard. She was in doin’ two year for drug dealin’. Now why you wanna go kill yoself when you only in for a couple years?’

  Joy shrugged.

  ‘Maybe she didn’t enjoy living in the outside world as much as she didn’t like living in this inside world.’

  ‘Or maybe, maybe she was just off her head… drugs can do that.’

  ‘Wouldn’t know,’ Joy says, perching herself on the bed next to Christy.

  ‘You too squeaky clean t’ever do drugs, Joy?’

  Joy puffed out a laugh.

  ‘Guess so.’

  ‘Never sniffled a line o’ coke ya whole life?’

  Joy shook her curls.

  ‘Weed. Ya smoked some dope, right?’

  ‘Haven’t actually. I took my first drag of a cigarette when I was fifteen and it choked me so much I swore I’d never smoke again… and I haven’t. Wouldn’t touch one. What about you?’

  ‘Me?’ Christy said, cackling that husky laugh of hers. ‘Do I look like I do drugs?’

  Joy stared into Christy’s bloodshot eyes, then tilted her head slightly, like a puppy dog.

  ‘Yes!’

  Christy fell back on to the bed, cackling.

  ‘Yo right. Yo right. I do a lot of drugs outside,’ she said, sitting back up. ‘Meth. Girl, I love and hate me some meth in equal measure.’

  ‘Meth.’ Joy shivered. ‘Why?’

  ‘Transforms you. It transforms me anyway. I transform from feeling suicidal just like Audrey Murray, Lord Jesus rest her soul, to making me feel like I can’t get enough o’ this life.’

  ‘Really? Like an antidepressant?’ Joy asked.

  Christy put her arm around Joy and squeezed her.

  ‘S’more than that. It’s like an alternative world. A world that makes me feel closer to Jesus.’

  She intrigued Joy by regaling her greatest hits of misdemeanours she had experienced since she first discovered the effects of methamphetamine some fifteen years prior. And why, whilst she loves being under the influence of the drug, she hates the come down, and constantly has to battle in her mind between living the high of the chemicals coursing through her veins against the low of the aftermath. A big negative, Christy informed Joy, of constantly chasing the high was the fact that it was expensive. And that’s why Christy became a thief. She needed money to fund her habit. Which is what kept landing her ass back inside Mountjoy Prison. But while Christy was surviving well inside by using the legal substitute for meth, Desoxyn – which she had administered each day by a medic – she knew that as soon as she was a free woman again, the first thing she’d do was rob somebody so that she could afford the buzz of the real thing.

  ‘I normally suffer in prison. Even with the Desoxyn the
y give me in here,’ Christy said. ‘But you girl, havin’ you in here with me, you really helping me survive. Hey… I guess you ma new drug.’

  They both cackled; Joy by now having adopted the almost uniformed prison cackle that she found most intimidating in other prisoners when she first arrived.

  And it was at the loudest of Joy’s laughing, through eyes that were watering, that she saw him appear in the cell’s doorway.

  ‘Aidan!’ she squealed.

  ❖

  Delia brings a balled fist to her mouth and yawns into it.

  Trials have always been exhausting for her. Not physically, of course – all she does is sit, whether at the trial itself or back here in her dimly lit office. Her exhaustion is purely mental. She once read that there are so many variables to consider when examining a trial of any magnitude, that the muscle strain required to consider them all is the equivalent, to the brain, of running a marathon.

  What Delia finds most exhausting of all when judging is the required batting away of her gut. ‘Instinct is most annoying for a judge,’ she has often repeated over the years. She has had to train herself to not allow her thinking to be clouded in any way by her gut. And yet despite twenty years as a judge – thirty-three years in the judicial system wholly – she still hasn’t mastered it.

  She uses a technique she read about in a book that details decision-making, called Mind Fuck. It involves her scrutinizing every minute detail of a witness’s testimony or piece of evidence and then filtering it all into two separate pockets within her brain; one pocket for details of the trial that affect her emotionally. And the other pocket for parts of the trial that fit within proper legal parameters.

  The main reason she was yawing into her fist was down to the fact that Sandra Gleeson’s testimony was straining this filtering process. Delia definitely noted a slice of solace in the former detective who had spent just over ninety minutes on the stand that afternoon. She could empathise with Sandra when she was complaining of working within the restraints of a fractured system. And because of that, her gut kept screaming that this was a credible witness and must be taken seriously.

  After Delia had re-awoken her tired, old computer – following her usual routine of staring around her desk, soaking in the smile of her husband as he wrapped his arm around Callum – the first sentence she typed into her notes was, ‘I believe Sandra Gleeson.’ But Delia also believed that statement, strong as it looked typed at the top of a blank Word document, held no real significance when considered inside the legal parameters of the system in which she worked. It made absolutely no difference whether or not she believed the witness, because belief without proof is almost akin to redundant in judicial terms. It never matters what a judge or a jury believe, it only matters what can be proven to them.

  ‘What did Sandra Gleeson’s testimony prove?’ Delia mutters to herself, while dipping her chin into her neck so she can stare down the length of her robe. Delia often does this; speaks to herself, during a deliberation. She believes her outer voice controls her inner voice, as if it refrains her from going outside the lines of her filtering process.

  She pauses, and then begins to slowly tip-tap her fingernail against the mouse before she shoots back upright and begins to type.

  She proved that when searching for CCTV footage, the investigators were ONLY looking for Joy.

  She sits back in her chair and sighs, swiping her glasses up from the bridge of her nose and combing them back into her hair.

  ‘She said there was over five thousand hours’ worth of footage searched in the aftermath of the bodies being found… wow!’ Delia says to herself. Then she presses the balls of her palms into her eyes and swings ever so subtly from side to side in her chair. ‘Five thousand hours….’

  This was eye-opening for Delia, even though, right this second, she had her eyes closed. The fact that five thousand hours’ worth of CCTV footage had been viewed by investigators was never raised during the original trial. In fact, all that was ever spoken about during that original trial were three seconds out of those five thousand hours. Three measly seconds that end before you can even whisper the question, ‘Is that Joy Stapleton?’ to yourself. Three seconds that only show the back of a woman in a pink hoodie walking by a lone, large bungalow owned by a paranoid couple who had a camera installed that peers out onto their modest front lawn. Investigators combed the whole area at the foot of the Dublin mountains looking for CCTV footage – from main roads and private companies – in the aftermath of the boys’ bodies being found. One police officer noticed a residential camera during a round of routine questioning and footage from the night in question was requested from the owners of the bungalow. Everything had been stored digitally and so the police received the night-long footage almost immediately.

  ‘Three seconds out of five thousand,’ Delia says, sitting back upright. She stretches her fingers, all the while staring around her desk in further thought, filing away her gut instinct as best she could. She likes Sandra Gleeson. Trusts Sandra Gleeson. Can empathise with Sandra Gleeson. But she has to keep reminding herself that none of that matters.

  ‘If they were only looking for Joy in all of that footage,’ she whispers, ‘then what did they miss?’

  She washes a hand over her face, then slaps that same hand to the top of her desk.

  ‘C’mon, Delia,’ she says to herself. ‘Think!’

  Her mind wanders to Gerd Bracken; only because it would fascinate her to know what he would have made of Sandra Gleeson’s testimony. He probably doesn’t realise how much of an impact her time on the stand has had on the judge. He’ll likely have thought Sandra did a good job for him, and that it certainly opened up a crack of doubt. But there’s no way he’d have imagined Judge Delia would be so conflicted by what his witness had to say.

  Jonathan Ryan, Delia feels, will probably be thinking Sandra’s testimony didn’t hurt him as he had likely feared it would. Yes, she raised doubt on the legitimacy of the original investigation. But he’ll be secretly buoyed by the fact that he held firm in his cross examination. He went balls-out, shocking everybody in the courtroom by asking whether or not she felt the woman in the CCTV footage was or wasn’t Joy Stapleton.

  But Sandra, to her credit, held firm – and gave as good a non-answer as she possibly could. The way Sandra tackled that question only reaffirmed to Delia that Sandra was both a worthy and a trustworthy witness. She was willing to criticise the manner in which the police scrutinized all of the CCTV footage. But she wasn’t willing to criticise the footage itself.

  ‘Everything comes down to those three seconds,’ Delia mutters to herself. Though what she was saying wasn’t much of a revelation to her. Even when she answered Eddie Taunton’s question in that interview all those years ago, Delia had said exactly that.

  ‘The whole entire trial, when you consider it fully, really came down to the CCTV footage,’ she had said in the most formal way possible, all suited for her interview in a John Rocha single breasted jacket, complimented by a frilled blouse that bustled together at the collar to form a bow. ‘As you know, Mr Taunton, coincident cases are largely problematic for a judge and jury. But when all is taken into consideration, such as the fact that the pink hooded top in the footage has distinguishable features and is the only one believed to be owned by anyone in Ireland. When you consider the fact that this footage was recorded the night before the boys were reported missing, in a neighbourhood not too far from where the bodies were eventually found. And when you consider that nobody ever came forward to say “That was me in that footage. You can mark me out of your enquiries.” Taking all of these coincidences into consideration, Mr Taunton, I didn’t feel the defence could rely on coincidence as their argument.’

  ‘So, in your professional opinion, the jury got the Stapleton case right?’ Taunton asked her.

  ‘I’m certain they did, Sir.’

  She couldn’t have envisaged, of course, that interview answer would eventually lead to her presiding
over the retrial of Joy Stapleton some eight years later.

  She begins to tap her finger nail against her mouse again, running through her head whether or not she would answer that question the same way if she were asked it in an interview today; and was beginning to admit to herself that Sandra Gleeson’s testimony this afternoon would probably halt her from being so confident in her initial judgement.

  She wiggles her mouse, to locate the icon on her screen, then drags it to a folder on her desktop. The computer pauses before flashing an image of a neatly mowed garden at night onto the screen. As white digits tick away in the bottom right corner, a figure walks through the shot, shielded to the waist by a small garden wall – a tiny figure, head down and smothered by a pink hood.

  Delia pauses the footage with the figure in the centre of the shot, then inches her nose closer to the screen. She examines the red band around the waist of the hooded top and what appears to be a red string bouncing up from the woman’s chest; the exact same trimmings that are on Joy Stapleton’s unique hooded top.

  A loud ping distracts her from her thoughts, and then a box begins to flash in the top corner of her screen.

  An email. From a sender whose address she isn’t quite familiar with.

  She drags her icon towards the box and clicks on it. And then the computer groans before it flashes another video image on to the screen. Delia presses at the play button and stares at the footage, her eyes widening.

  ‘Oh my… oh my… Oh my fucking God!’ she screams. Unusual for Delia. She can’t stand swearing. Can never understand why anybody would ever have any use for it, not when there is an infinite amount of words they could use. Her breathing grows in sharpness. Then she stands up and swipes a heavy slap towards the screen of her computer monitor, knocking over her cups of pens and her framed photograph. The frame skids across the desk and falls to the floor. She can hear the glass of the frame smash over the strange grunting sound huffing from her computer’s speakers. ‘Who the fuck?’ Delia says, stretching for her mouse, so she can switch the video off. ‘Who the fuck sent me this?’