She bends down, snatches at the smashed photo frame and then immediately brings her thumb to her mouth.
‘Mother fuc—’ she just about stops herself from swearing again by filling her mouth with her thumb. She sucks on it frantically, then removes it and shakes her entire hand in the air, spraying blood to the floor.
‘Judge McCormick.’ Knuckles rattle lightly at her door.
‘Yes, Aisling?’ Delia calls out, before twisting her wrist and looking at her watch.
‘You’re due back in court now.’
‘Yes, thank you. Thank you, Aisling. Coming now,’ she says, gripping her thumb tight with her other hand.
‘Who the fuck sent me that video?’ she whispers.
‘Sorry?’
‘Oh, don’t mind me,’ she shouts back to Aisling before she strides towards the door and snatches it open, finding her assistant’s eyes furrowed on the other side of it. ‘I was talking to myself again.’
‘Judge McCormick, are you okay?’ Aisling asks.
Delia offers her assistant a fake smile.
‘Course I am. Though you couldn’t, eh… you couldn’t fetch me a plaster, could you? Cut myself on some glass.’ She holds her thumb up.
‘Ouch… eh… I’m not quite sure where we keep plasters, but I’ll take a look in the canteen. There might be a first aid box there. Meanwhile…’ Aisling stands aside and waves her hand up the hallway, in the direction of the courtrooms.
‘Yes. Yes!’ Delia says, nodding her head before she begins to stride forward as fast as she can, kicking her robe with each foot as she goes. She drops the fake smile when she turns onto the next corridor, and as soon as she does, she begins to feel her head spinning. And her stomach. She can’t be certain she’s not going to vomit. She wants to pause. Wants to catch her breath. But she knows she’s already late.
‘Who the fuck sent me that?’ she murmurs to herself. ‘Eddie Taunton. Can’t be… can it?’
She brings her hand to her forehead, her gaze fixed to the blurred black and white tiled flooring of the court’s corridors as she paces. Though she does look up in time to see the court clerk dressed in all black at the end of the corridor open a door and nod inside it. And before she reaches the clerk to offer another fake smile, Delia hears a voice bellow from behind that door.
‘All rise.’
The courtroom is packed again; everybody on their feet to welcome the decision-maker – the only person with any power over the fate of Joy Stapleton. Though Delia is beginning to wonder if she has any power at all now as she sits into her highchair. Her head is still spinning when the court clerk makes a coughing sound, prompting Delia to shake herself from her daze.
‘Sorry,’ she mutters. Then she stares down at the courtroom, glancing at Joy first, then at Bracken. She offers Jonathan Ryan an almost-friendly nose twitch. Then she flicks her eyes around the room in search of Eddie Taunton. He’s not here.
‘Mother fucker,’ she whispers to herself.
‘Sorry, Your Honour?’ a court clerk says.
‘No… No, I’m sorry. Eh…’ She rifles through the paperwork on her desk, before clawing a sheet out from the middle, smudging the top corner of it with a thumbprint of blood. Her hands begin to shake as she holds the sheet. So, she places it back down to the desk in front of her, her hands now hidden from the gallery. ‘Mr Bracken, can you, eh…’ she fake coughs and burps at the same time; vomit bubbling in the pit of stomach, ‘Call your next witness, please.’
‘My pleasure, Your Honour,’ Bracken says standing up, ‘I call to the stand, Monsieur Mathieu Dupont.’
2,371 days ago…
‘Joy!’ Mathilda shouted.
Joy jumped, holding a palm to her chest, then swivelled.
‘Sorry, Mathilda,’ she replied. ‘I know… I’m supposed to be at school. I’m heading there now.’
‘Nope. You’re not. You’re coming with me.’
‘Where?’
‘Never mind where. You’re coming with me.’
‘But I’m about five minutes late for school. I was just having a chat with—’
‘Now!’ Mathilda said. She didn’t roar it. Didn’t raise her voice. But her tone cut through. And so, Joy creased her face at Emilie – the prisoner she had been in conversation with – then left her to it to follow Mathilda’s rattling keys down the steel steps of Elm House before turning right.
‘This isn’t the way to school.’
‘I told you… you’re not going to school.’
‘But won’t I miss class?’
‘You didn’t seem that concerned when you were just hanging out at the back of the kitchen with Emilie.’
Joy held her eyes closed and sighed.
She had enrolled in school. Again. After she had spent the first four months of her sentence in isolation following her attack, she decided to do a course when all of the options of how to spend her time on a regular wing were offered to her. The menu wasn’t that detailed, in truth. Each prisoner had two basic options: work around the prison, or do a course in the education halls at the far end of the prison. The working options didn’t appeal. Joy had never worked in a kitchen before, and even when she was a housewife and a mother of two, the oven did most of the cooking for her. Gardening wasn’t to her liking either. Nor was the washing and cleaning or laundry rooms. So, she decided upon a course in creative writing at the educational facility. Her lack of confidence let her down, however, and after three months she felt she had nothing to offer the class and that was that: she wanted out. She pleaded with the Governor that if he let her out of her course early, she’d do any job at all around the prison, that she didn’t mind which one. So, he placed her in the laundry room – the least favoured role generally among the prisoners. Her disdain for that job, which was really only for three hours day, became evident much quicker than her disdain for producing creative writing did, but her frustrations didn’t matter one jot. She would serve in the laundry room for a full year before the Governor would agree to let her choose another means by which to spend her afternoons. So, when that time eventually came around, she chose school again, rather than work. This time a course in Healthy Living was the one she opted for. Not because she was desperate to lose the puppy weight she had gained during her first eighteen months inside, but because that was the course Christy was doing, and they wanted to spend as much time with each other as they possibly could. She’d only started the course a couple of weeks ago, and here she was about to miss the lesson on ripe vegetables because Mathilda was leading her around a maze of landings and through a dozen gates before they ended up deep into the bowels of the prison.
‘Never been down here before,’ Joy said looking around herself. ‘Where we going?’
‘I’ve been told to take you down here cos you got a visitor.’
‘A visitor? Me? Down here? Why?’
‘That’s a helluva lot of questions within one breath, Joy,’ Mathilda said. Then her keys stopped jangling, and she spun on her heels. ‘Ye gotta wear these.’ Mathilda unclipped a pair of handcuffs from her waist belt.
Joy clenched both fists and held her arms out, all the while staring at the yellow door they had stopped outside.
‘Who’s in there?’ she asked.
Mathilda shrugged. Then she turned away from Joy and banged at the yellow door.
‘Sir, she’s here.’
The door opened and the Governor’s large face appeared. He nodded solemnly at Joy and then stood aside. And as he did, Joy saw the piercing blue eyes of her husband for the first time in way too long. Her breathing immediately quickened and her heart thudded. The last time a prison officer told her she had a surprise visit she ended up sitting across from Conor Quinn – a young up and coming lawyer who convinced her he could land her a retrial. She was initially buoyed by his positivity. But after six meetings in the space of five months she was beginning to get irritated, rather than excited, by his visits. It seemed he rarely had an update for her when he did show up,
and she was beginning to form an eerie impression that he was meeting with her because he had a crush on her. He wasn’t the only one. Joy Stapleton had dozens of admirers, a lot of whom would write to her regularly; to detail their sexual desires. On her first Valentine’s Day in prison, Joy Stapleton received over one-hundred cards from strangers. She was actually a little peeved when, on her second Valentine’s Day, in the February just gone, that number had halved. Conor Quinn reminded her of the creepy men who wrote to her regularly. She felt he was content to just be associated with her – to spend time with Ireland’s most infamous criminal. She told him the last time she met him that he shouldn’t come back until he had made concrete progress towards a retrial. And as a result, she hadn’t heard from him for a while and was beginning to realise the inevitable – she truly was going to spend the rest of her life in this godforsaken place. Though that slow realisation didn’t depress her as much as she feared it would. She was beginning to feel that she was now a better fit in prison than she would be for the outside world. She wasn’t even sure where she would fit in out there anymore. In the real world she’d stand out as the most notorious killer in the whole of the country. In here, she’s just another criminal. She barely stands out at all. Not anymore. Not after the furore of her first arriving in Elm House. Though she was beginning to wonder if that furore would spark up again, certainly now that Stella had been brought back to Elm House. It’s not as if Stella’s arrival was a big shock – she didn’t turn up sitting at a desk without warning like her husband just had. The Governor and some of the prison officers had spoken to Joy about Stella’s likely return. Joy had told them she held no ill-feeling toward her fellow prisoner and that she wouldn’t have a problem if Stella came back to Elm House. But that wasn’t true at all. She did have a problem with it. A huge problem. Because she was in fear of Stella; in fear of having her face smashed against one of the dining room tables again.
‘You sure you’re okay with this?’ Aidan asked, reading that Joy wasn’t as comfortable as she had been letting on when Stella finally returned to the wing.
‘I’ll be fine,’ Joy said to Aidan. ‘I’ve got you, right?’
Aidan smiled at her. As he found himself doing regularly. He’d been back in Elm House just over six months now and spent most of his working hours either pacing the landing outside Joy’s cell. Or – when her door finally buzzed open in the mornings – accompanying her to and from the dining room. They shared a similar sense of humour and there was, undoubtedly, a spark between them that didn’t go unnoticed. The talk amongst prisoners was that they were riding each other. But they weren’t. Even if Joy was often day-dreaming about it.
‘What are you doing here?’ was the first thing that popped out of her mouth. Hardly welcoming; certainly not considering she had waited over a year and a half to see those blue eyes.
‘I, eh… I,’ Shay stuttered.
Then the Governor held a hand in front of Joy’s chest as she walked through the yellow door to greet her husband.
‘Uh-huh,’ the Governor said. ‘No touching.’ He sat Joy in the seat opposite Shay and chained the cuffs she was already wearing to a metal loop under the desk.
‘Why are we… why are we here?’ Joy asked the Governor while looking around herself.
The Governor stood back upright, all six foot eight inches of him, then clasped his shovel-sized hands together.
‘Mr Stapleton contacted me personally about visiting you a couple of weeks ago because he feared his celebrity status would cause somewhat a fuss in the visitor’s hall. So, we, eh, we discussed the possibility of him having a private meeting with you and… well, here we are…’
Joy continued to look around herself. The room they were in was no bigger than her cell. And it was swallowed up by two white desks; one of which they were both sitting across from each other at, their faces no more than three feet apart.
The Governor kissed his own lips, then stepped his heavy frame outside and pulled the door tight behind him, though Joy could tell he didn’t move from that spot, because she couldn’t hear the familiar sweeping of shoes off the concrete floor. She had learned most of the sounds of the prison by now.
Though it was a silence she was hearing as she stared at her husband. Joy wanted so much to be able to move her hands across the desk so she could take his hands in hers. But she wasn’t sure how he would react to that.
‘Thank you,’ she whispered, instead.
He contorted his face by squelching up his mouth, then he reached over and lightly grazed her elbow.
‘I’m sorry it’s taken so long… I just… I, eh…’
It was unlike Shay to not finish his sentences; to be uncertain of what he was trying to say. She only knew him to be the confidant football star she had met and fallen in love with. She stared into his eyes, noticing they weren’t quite as aqua as they once were. The stress of losing his two sons, coupled with his wife being sent down for two life sentences had clearly turned those blue eyes grey. He looked jaded. Aged. Far from the pinup he had once been.
‘You don’t need to explain yourself,’ Joy whispered again, because she was aware of the ears just outside the door. It was likely, she felt, that both Mathilda and the Governor were prying. Though she couldn’t blame them. The whole nation would love to be a fly on the wall for this meeting. ‘I’m glad to see you… even if…’ She lifted her arms as high as she could, which wasn’t very high at all, before the cuffs clanked against the bottom of the desk.
‘Joy,’ Shay said, as straight as he could, ‘I’ve had the same questions rolling around in my head for years now…’ She unclenched her jaw, and inched herself closer to him. ‘Hundreds of fucking questions… thousands even. And… oh, I don’t know… I just don’t know. I guess I’ve figured after all this time that this whole nightmare really only boils down to one question. And the only person who knows the answer to that question is you. So here I am… an innocent, broken man asking you to answer one question for me, so that the thousands of questions that fly around my head will finally shut the fuck up. Then maybe… just maybe…’
‘Maybe you might get some closure.’
‘Closure?’ he said out of the corner of his mouth. ‘Sleep. Let’s start with some sleep. Fuck sake, I haven’t had a full night’s sleep since the day our boys went missing… I had so many questions that day alone. But the story just kept getting worse and worse…’
‘I understand,’ Joy said, sniffling up her nose, ‘I don’t sleep either.’
Shay exhaled a stuttering breath, letting it release in grunting stages, while he bounced his knee incessantly up and down under the desk.
‘Well, we are not sleeping for different reasons,’ he said. ‘The reasons I can’t sleep is because I want an answer to a question that you know the answer to… so please, don’t compare your lack of sleep to mine.’
Joy swallowed hard. When she walked into this pokey office, she wondered in which tone Shay would speak to her. And even though she had tried to give him her best puppy dog eyes and to paint on her genuine empathy for him, she was aware she had already taken a miss-step, and as a result was getting the curt, abrupt Shay. She didn’t know what to say to him. Or even how to say it.
‘Sorry,’ she whispered. ‘This isn’t about me. I’ve missed you. I’ve missed you so much.’ Shay swayed his jaw from side-to-side. ‘Have you missed me, Shay?’
‘Jesus,’ he snapped, raising his voice, ‘how the hell am I supposed to know the answer to that? There are a thousand questions forming a queue in my head that are way ahead of that one.’
‘Shhh,’ Joy hissed over the desk at her husband, ‘they’re outside, listening.’
Shay held his eyes closed with annoyance, then got to his feet.
‘I shouldn’t have come… I should have just—’
‘Don’t go. Please don’t go,’ Joy begged, squeezing her palms together, the chains clanging against the desk. ‘I’ll shut up. I won’t talk, unless it’s to answer that
one question you have. Please. Sit down. Talk to me, Shay.’
He pressed his hands against his hips, then, after a pause, relented, sitting back down and producing another long sigh.
‘Okay… okay, just get to it, Shay,’ he said to himself, rubbing at his face.
He had stayed out of the limelight ever since Joy was arrested, despite multiple pleas for interviews. He had turned down invites from The Late Late Show on no fewer than eight occasions and had rejected without too much consideration, a one-million euro advance to write his memoirs by a giant of a publishing company. That wasn’t the only publishing deal he had been offered, but it was certainly the most lucrative one. The million-euro offer didn’t register much interest though. Money meant nothing to him. Life, it seemed, meant nothing to him. Not anymore. He was too confused and pained to think about anything other than his own confusion and pain.
‘When I’m trying to sleep at night,’ he spat out, releasing his hands from his face, ‘all I hear is that phone call you made to the police, reporting our boys missing. Just your voice on repeat, saying the same thing over and over again. And all that goes on in the forefront of my mind as you are saying these words over and over again is me thinking, is she acting?’
‘I’m not acting.’
‘Shhh,’ Shay hissed. ‘You said you wouldn’t talk.’ He steadied his breathing. ‘I mean, I can hear it… I can hear the panic in your voice. I hear the panic every time you shout, ‘My two sons have been taken!’ I hear it so loud. But I keep asking myself, ‘Is she acting panicked? Or is she genuinely panicked? Do I even know the woman I was married to at all?’ Joy opened her mouth, then relented, her eyes filling with tears. ‘But surely you couldn’t have been acting for all those years afterwards; not when we were out looking for the boys; not when we started the campaign to find them; not after their bodies were found, right? I mean you just can’t have been acting all these years…’
The Coincidence (The Trial Trilogy) Page 8