House of Correction

by French, Nicci

  ‘So what does it mean?’ she whispered, with her lips actually touching Michaela’s ear.

  Michaela shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Just ask that guy.’

  ‘Finally,’ said Elinor Ackroyd, ‘I have one more question. Dr Belfy, you have supervised all the evidence connected with the crime scene. Have you found evidence of anybody else’s presence. I mean beyond the victim, Tabitha Hardy, and Andrew Kane, who found the body.’

  Belfy turned to the jury before answering. ‘No,’ he said, in a louder voice than before. ‘None whatever.’

  ‘Thank you for your help,’ said Ackroyd, sitting down.

  Tabitha stood up with that familiar lurching feeling. She looked down at her notes. She had written two words: ‘prints’ and ‘blood’. It didn’t seem like very much.

  ‘Is it surprising that my prints and traces and whatever were all over the place? I mean, it was where I lived.’

  ‘There were prints on the plastic sheeting he was wrapped in,’ he said.

  Belfy raised his eyebrows as he answered and gave a little nod towards the jury. It made Tabitha want to shout at him or hit him.

  ‘Andy and I found the body. We pulled the sheet off him.’

  ‘Ms Hardy,’ said Judge Munday severely, ‘you’re meant to be asking questions, not making statements.’

  ‘All right,’ said Tabitha. ‘Er… like, could the prints be there because Andy and I pulled the sheet off to see if he was still alive?’

  ‘That would be one possibility,’ said Belfy. ‘Not the most likely one in my professional opinion.’

  ‘You’re not here to give your opinion,’ said Tabitha.

  ‘Yes, he is,’ Judge Munday interrupted. She turned to the jury. ‘Dr Belfy is absolutely entitled, in response to cross-examination, to offer his opinion, where relevant. Continue, Ms Hardy.’

  Tabitha was so flustered by this that she couldn’t think of what to say. She looked down at her notes.

  ‘Blood,’ she said.

  ‘What?’ said Dr Belfy.

  ‘There was blood on the plastic sheet,’ said Tabitha. ‘And there were footprints going back into the house. And there was blood on the sofa in the living room. Anywhere else?’

  ‘There was blood on your clothes,’ said Dr Belfy.

  ‘And on Andy’s clothes. Because of finding the body.’ She realised that wasn’t a question. ‘That’s right, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Anywhere else?’

  ‘There were traces on the floor.’

  ‘Those were the footprints, right?’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘Stuart Rees had his throat cut, right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Tabitha turned to the jury. ‘I’m sorry, this is going to sound really gross. But I can’t think of a non-gross way to ask it.’ She turned back to Belfy. ‘There are arteries in the neck, aren’t there?’

  ‘The carotid arteries, yes.’

  ‘And if they were cut, wouldn’t they make a mess everywhere? I mean all over the floor and on the walls etcetera, etcetera.’

  ‘But they didn’t.’

  ‘But didn’t you think that was weird?’

  ‘I just describe the scene as I find it.’

  ‘It didn’t trouble you?’

  ‘No.’

  Tabitha felt she’d hit a brick wall. A question occurred to her and she asked it without considering whether it was a good idea.

  ‘Did you find the murder weapon?’

  ‘It hasn’t yet been found.’

  ‘Does that seem strange?’

  ‘You had plenty of time to dispose of it.’

  Tabitha felt like she’d been struck. ‘Me? Did you say that I had plenty of time?’

  ‘The murderer, I should say.’

  ‘At what point did you decide that I did it?’

  ‘I merely assess the evidence,’ Belfy said stiffly.

  ‘Were you thinking that right from the beginning? As you were going through the evidence? Were you fitting everything around that idea?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yeah, right,’ said Tabitha loudly and sarcastically.

  ‘Careful, Ms Hardy,’ said Judge Munday.

  Tabitha looked down at Michaela’s notes and tried to formulate a question.

  ‘Could you tell me about the sheet?’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The sheet the body was found in.’

  Belfy thought for a moment, for the first time seeming at a loss.

  ‘It was a heavy-duty piece of plastic sheeting.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘There’s a label attached. It says “Reynolds Brown”. And underneath it says…’ Tabitha picked up the notes and read out: ‘FRC569332.’

  ‘I’ll take your word for it,’ said Belfy.

  ‘What do you mean, you’ll take my word for it? That’s supposed to be your job. You’re meant to check things like that.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘I’m sorry, is there a question?’

  ‘My friend, Michaela, did what you should have done. She googled it. Reynolds Brown is a furniture company. And the FRC thing is a reference number. So she phoned them up. This sheeting was used to wrap a sofa.’

  As Tabitha paused to give Dr Belfy a chance to react, Simon Brockbank stood up. He spoke warily.

  ‘I’m sorry but the defence can’t just spring undisclosed evidence on a witness.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said Tabitha. ‘This is evidence that this guy wrote his report about. I’m just asking him about it.’

  Judge Munday waved her hand wearily.

  ‘Just continue, Ms Hardy, but please call him Dr Belfy and not “this guy”. It’s just a matter of courtesy. And please, at some point, ask a question.’

  ‘All right. As I said, Michaela rang up the company, which is what you should have done. She quoted the reference number. The sofa was delivered on the seventeenth of December to Cliff House in Okeham. Do you recognise that address?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s Stuart Rees’s home address. Does that seem interesting to you?’

  Belfy coughed and when he answered it was in such a low voice that the judge had to ask him to speak up.

  ‘I can’t really comment on that.’

  ‘But you didn’t find that out? Yes or no?’

  ‘No, but I don’t really—’

  ‘What else didn’t you check up on?’

  ‘That’s an insulting question.’

  ‘You know what I think?’ said Tabitha.

  There was a pause.

  ‘That’s not really a fair question,’ said Judge Munday.

  ‘Sorry, it was like a preparation for a question. What I think is that you just assumed it was me and that you didn’t look at anything that went against it. Is that fair?’

  ‘No. It isn’t fair.’

  ‘That’s all I’ve got to say,’ said Tabitha, sitting down with the feeling that there must have been more, that she should have pressed harder.

  Elinor Ackroyd started to get up but Brockbank put his hand on her shoulder, preventing her. He stood up instead and stepped forward.

  ‘Just one more question,’ he said. ‘Tabitha Hardy has been trying to confuse things and throw dust into the faces of the jury. So can I just make something clear in case the jury have forgotten it? Did your investigation find evidence of anyone else at the crime scene?’

  ‘No.’

  As Brockbank sat down, Tabitha leaped up.

  ‘Since we’re all asking just one more question, I’ll ask one: was it even a crime scene?’

  Dr Belfy looked utterly confused. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Tabitha and sat down.

  It was left to Judge Munday to tell him that he could go. As he passed Tabitha, he gave her a look of pure loathing. She forced herself to smile back
at him.

  SIXTY-SIX

  ‘No no no no. Please no. Oh Christ. Don’t let this be happening.’

  The voice filled the courtoom, slurred and guttural, and it went on and on, words and nasty sounds grinding out into the silence. It sounded like the voice of a hellishly drunken man, florid and abandoned, shouting at the voices in his head. But it wasn’t a man.

  Tabitha propped her head on one hand and closed her eyes and wanted to disappear. She knew if she looked up she would see everyone staring at her in horror. She had almost no memory of her first interview at the police station, just dark fragments: the stickiness of the table where she rested her head, the look on the face of the police officer that was both polite and triumphant. She had gone through the transcript, of course, and she had it in front of her now, but she hadn’t understood the damage it could do her. Just the sound of her voice was bad enough. Now she saw why the prosecution had been so insistent that the recording be played. To read her saying: ‘What have I done?’ was one thing; it could be the straightforward question of an innocent woman finding herself being questioned by the police. To hear her howling it like a beast at bay was quite another.

  Someone was asking her about her movements during 21 December and she was saying ‘fuck off’ repeatedly. The duty solicitor was reminding her that she was allowed to remain silent and she was telling him to fuck off as well.

  ‘Where were you all day, Tabitha?’ a voice asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’ The words slid into each other, barely comprehensible. ‘I don’t know anything.’

  ‘Do you have any idea of how the body of Stuart Rees came to be in your property?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Did you see him?’

  ‘Blood,’ she said. ‘I was covered in his blood.’

  ‘Did you kill him, Ms Hardy?’

  And the duty solicitor was urgently telling her not to answer and her voice was saying she couldn’t remember anything.

  ‘You mean you can’t remember if you killed him?’

  ‘I just want this to be over.’

  ‘Please try to answer our questions, Tabitha.’

  ‘Sorry. I’m sorry.’

  ‘What are you sorry about, Tabitha?’ asked a female voice that oozed with sympathy. Tabitha couldn’t remember a women being there as well.

  ‘Everything. Every fucking thing. I’m just tired. So tired.’

  And the woman said, still in the same concerned voice, that of course she must be tired and that once she had told them what she had done, then she could rest.

  The voice said something incomprehensible. Tabitha opened her eyes briefly to look at the transcript. ‘How can I escape?’

  She closed her eyes again.

  ‘Can you repeat that, Tabitha?’ said the man.

  ‘No. I can’t do this anymore. I can’t. I have to go home. Please let me go home.’

  * * *

  At last there was silence. The voice had stopped. Tabitha opened her eyes. She looked round to see Michaela’s troubled face. She looked across at the jury and they gazed back at her. She turned slightly to where the reporters were crowded onto their benches and then to the judge, who looked like a carved effigy on her raised bench.

  She stood up, keeping a hand on the table because she wasn’t sure her legs would hold her. She cleared her throat.

  ‘That,’ she said in a raspy voice, ‘is called depression. It’s called trauma.’

  With no warning, she felt her spirits lift. Everyone had listened to her howling out like a beast. She had heard herself, but she was still here. She hadn’t died of shame. She stood up straighter.

  ‘Depression is an illness,’ she said and her voice rang out. ‘I was ill. And the body of a man I had once known was found in my outhouse. It was terrifying.’

  Simon Brockbank was bouncing his pen again: marking the seconds. Time was passing and outside the year and the world were going on without her.

  Tabitha fixed her eyes on Judge Munday. ‘It wasn’t a confession. It was just human distress.’

  * * *

  Then it was over. The case for the prosecution had been made, the court was adjourned until the following morning and Tabitha was led out. She was taken straight to the van, briefly seeing the blue sky and feeling summer on her skin, and driven back to her cell whose walls were sweaty in the heat. She sat on her bed and buried her head in her hands and tried to gather her thoughts into some kind of coherence.

  How had she done? She supposed she had done pretty well, if doing well meant bringing to harsh light how hostile the village was to her; if it meant smearing everyone, making them all seem suspicious and dishonest and acting in bad faith. She felt like she had lifted a stone on Okeham, so that the pretty little village by the sea where visitors came to eat ice creams and stand at the spot Coleridge had once stood, where everyone knew each other and helped each other, was revealed as a place crawling with petty resentments, jealousy and malice.

  A thought came to her that felt like a physical blow. Her head rang with it. It was Stuart who had done that to the community, who had turned people into their worst versions of themselves. That was what he did: he saw people’s weaknesses and exploited them. He had done it to Rob Coombe, to Mel, to Owen Mallon. He’d done it to his wife and to his own son. He’d done it to her all those years ago, recognising the power he could have over a lonely, prickly teenager.

  She was glad he was dead.

  She sat with that thought for several minutes, still enclosed in the darkness of her cupped hands. Did that mean that she had killed him after all? Listening to herself being interviewed at the police station, her unhinged words, she had felt briefly certain that for all her success in weakening the case against her, she was the killer.

  Abruptly, she stood up. No. No, she wouldn’t have killed Stuart because she hadn’t understood until after he was dead how much damage he had done to her. And she wouldn’t have killed Stuart because she wasn’t a killer.

  She walked back and forth in her cell; three steps one way, three the other. She knew that she had chipped away at the case against her. But it wasn’t enough, because she had played the CCTV over and over in her head, and she knew what even the prosecution seemed ignorant of: no one else could have been there. So no one else could have done it. And if it was no one else, that left her.

  * * *

  The door of her cell was locked. She dutifully ate her cheese sandwich, the white bread sticking to her teeth. She undressed and stared down at her strong, pale, hairy legs and her white stomach with the large mole just above the belly button. Her feet looked too big for her body. She remembered how when she had first arrived at Crow Grange she had been struck by the pallor of the women prisoners: now she was one of them. She washed vigorously, cleaned her teeth, pulled on her night things and climbed into bed, where she curled under the scratchy blanket and looked up at the ceiling that was veined with dirt.

  Her case for the defence started tomorrow. She went through the names of people who would take the stand after she had given evidence: Shona (and she grimaced to herself at what the fifteen-year-old Tabitha would have thought of Shona, one of the in-crowd who used to whisper about her bad haircut and her temper, being her character witness); then Sam McBride and, last of all, Luke, who she still felt guilty about calling. She knew that it was a paltry list of witnesses who at best would muddy the waters a bit more.

  She turned on her side to stare at the wall. There was a rusty smear a few inches from her face that looked like blood. She rolled the other way, pulled her knees up. She could hear someone laughing, but it wasn’t a happy sound. It made the hairs on the back of her neck bristle. She tried not to hear the sound of her own slurred and horrifying voice, but it boomed and jeered inside her. ‘How can I escape?’ she had shouted.

  Sleep when it came was shallow and fitful, full of chaotic fragments of dreams. And then suddenly she was wide awake, sitting upright in bed and holding onto the memory that had som
ehow found her and now mustn’t escape. She swung her legs out of bed, stood up and turned on the light. She dug her notebook out from her pile of papers and found a free space on its scrawled and crossed-out pages, where she wrote down what she remembered, a little scrap gleaming in the mud. She wrote a name underneath and circled it several times. Her hands were shaking with hope: how could she have missed it? How could everyone?

  Shona, Sam and Luke would still appear for the defence – but there was someone else, someone crucial, that she needed to call as a witness.

  PART THREE Defence

  SIXTY-SEVEN

  When Tabitha first found herself in the witness box, even though she had only walked a few steps across the courtroom, it all felt completely different. Now she was looking straight across at the jury. Judge Munday was to her right, above her; Michaela was seated to her left, below her, staring up at her with a frown. She’s probably even more nervous than I am, Tabitha thought to herself. She can’t pass me a note, can’t whisper in my ear.

  The atmosphere was different too. There was a new tension, an air of expectancy. The public gallery and the press box were both full. People were leaning towards her, waiting for something; something dramatic.

  She affirmed, stumbling over the words, even though she had heard witnesses say them several times before. Then, just as she started to speak, Judge Munday interrupted her.

  ‘I need to tell you, Ms Hardy, that you are now appearing as a witness. That means what it says. You are only to report what you have personally witnessed, not what other people have told you.’

  Tabitha thought for a moment. She was finding this unexpectedly confusing.

  ‘But if someone tells me something, then aren’t I witnessing what they’re telling me?’

  ‘Just give your account,’ said Judge Munday. ‘I’ll determine what’s admissible. Just try and keep it relevant.’ She gave a kind of faint sigh. ‘And decent.’

  Tabitha took a tissue from her pocket and blew her nose. It was as much to steady her nerves as anything else. She had been lying awake in her cell for most of the night, occasionally thinking of something she ought to say and then thinking she ought to get up and write it down. But she never did and now she was having trouble remembering anything.