Chapter 39
They’ve been in town less than a day and the dressing room already looks as if it’s been struck by a tornado.
Every item of smart clothing Marianne possesses is on the floor.
That skirt was wrong, this pair of trousers, everything falling off her she’s lost so much weight.
Not that it fucking matters what she looks like – she really couldn’t give a shit.
But it’s not for her. It’s for Christian.
There’s no style guide for what a bereaved mother should wear on the stand at the trial of the killers of her murdered daughter.
Marianne knows the playbook well enough from the criticism made of the parents of Madeleine McCann; she’s desperately tried to work out what to look like, the right amount of pathos to put into her face, avoiding levity so as not to provoke the internet trolls waiting in the background to jump on any sign of inappropriate behaviour.
Not that she wants to laugh. Or that there’s any ambiguity in what happened.
All those fucking years she kept Christian alive, from the breastfeeding to the organic purees, the endless hospital stays, the horror when she had her first febrile convulsion as a baby.
The battles she fought to have her baby looked after the way Marianne thought she needed, never caring who she fucked off in the process.
Why did she ever let Peter persuade her to change her ways?
‘We should never have let her board,’ she says. Not for the first time. You have to let go of self-recrimination, that’s what the bereavement counsellor said. Like fuck she’s going to let it go. The guilt she feels will kill her, if she can’t kill someone else first.
Peter sighs. ‘We’ve been through this,’ he says. ‘You know what the consultant said. She wanted the independence.’
‘She should have been at home. With me. I wouldn’t have let this happen to her. I told you.’ Tears spring up in her eyes, the lids already swollen and red from another night without sleep. She rubs at them, irritated, mascara smearing itself across her cheeks.
She’s spent the last half-hour trying to do her make-up. What even is the point . . .
Peter’s standing behind her, his face hovering over her head in the mirror, concerned, irritated. She wants to punch it, punch him, smash every fucking thing in the room into smithereens and sit in the wreckage and howl.
‘Why aren’t you wearing the suit you wore to the funeral?’
Black. Chanel. Like some fucking mob wife. She hated that suit, only wore it because Peter asked her to, said it would look better if they made an effort. An effort? It took all the effort she had not to throw herself down on the coffin, cover herself with the dirt.
‘Left it up north. I think it’s a bit much,’ she says.
Doesn’t feel like her voice, like she’s speaking.
Clear. Not rough with sobs. The screams that are all she can hear in her head.
‘Don’t you think this is all right?’ It’s the first skirt she tried on, before working her way through the rest of the wardrobe.
Black, mid-length. White shirt, the collar open over the neck of a black jumper.
The locket her grandmother gave her with a photo of Christian in it, a lock of her hair. She never takes it off.
He puts his hand on her shoulder. ‘You’re right. Am I too smart? I could put on a tweed jacket.’
He’s in pinstripes, faint chalk mark lines on the charcoal wool. White shirt. Navy tie.
‘It’s perfect.’
Such a meaningless word. Perfect for what?
For work, for a meeting with a bank manager.
Not for standing in front of your daughter’s killers and facing them down.
She and Peter should be dressed in rags, daubed in mud, axes in hand as they run into those laughing faces and smash them in, screaming marauders as the grieving parents take their revenge.
‘I still can’t believe they haven’t let us sit in the court already,’ Peter says. They’re putting their coats on now, checking round the hall to make sure they’ve got everything. Keys, handbag, tissues. Bloody vengeance. ‘It’s been going on for a full week and we don’t know how it’s going.’
‘You know what they said. As soon as we’ve given evidence, we can sit in. We’ve got to trust them to do their jobs.’
‘I’m the only person I can trust to finish those little bitches off,’ Peter says. He grips her hand so hard she nearly cries out. ‘I want to bury them.’
She pulls him in close, hugs him for a moment.
No one understands what she’s going through, no one has any idea, what it was like to see her baby dead like that, her beautiful face stuck in so much pain.
Only Peter comes close. All thoughts of separation gone, at least for now. They’ll only get through this together.
They leave the house. Even now, Marianne is about to call out.
Bye, your dad and I won’t be long. There’s no one to hear, though, Christian’s room dark, empty of life.
She tried to go in last night when they arrived in Edinburgh from up north, couldn’t bring herself to do it.
The room’s been untouched since Christian died.
It’s a clear morning, the sky blue, the air crisp.
It would be lovely on the hills. If she were at home she could go for a run, sprint around the loch until her muscles ached and her brain was empty of everything other than the burn.
But she’s not. She’s walking to the High Court, ready to give evidence. As she has been for months.
Not long to go now.
They’re waved through security, taken to the witness room.
A middle-aged woman in a pink cardigan fusses around them with mugs of tea and plates of biscuits.
Marianne tries to smile but her face has frozen, her mouth outside of her control.
My name is Marianne Shaw, mother of a murdered child, and I will have my . . .
‘It’s time.’