Chapter 40
The woman in the stand looks as if she hasn’t slept for a week.
Her skin is so pale it’s translucent, a blue vein pulsing on her temple.
Her lips are chapped, her nose rubbed red raw.
Matthew can tell she’s tried to dress for court, but the jumper is too big, the collar too stiff, a child dressed in her mother’s clothes.
Her voice is quiet as she gives her name, affirms. No Bible for her.
When she explains that she’s Christian’s mother, Matthew understands.
God wasn’t there when her daughter died.
He’s on edge watching her, his nerves tight as wires.
His weekend’s activities have soothed him, to an extent, but he certainly didn’t get enough sleep.
Besides, he’s on high alert now. He knows what this woman is.
The blonde woman – Gill, he knows her name now; Gill – she doesn’t look too comfortable either as they watch the woman being impaled on the advocate depute’s questions.
Not that he’s making a point of searching out Gill’s attention, after the way that he ran off in North Berwick.
And not that the questions are that searching.
Matthew has a feeling that the woman has mostly been brought in to show the human face of Christian’s loss.
About time, too. The dead girl has reduced to an abstraction, an idea slowly fading from view, a word repeated over and over again that loses its meaning.
Christian’s no abstract to Marianne Shaw. The loss of the girl pulsates off her. Maybe too much so? He’s not sure. Hard to calibrate how someone should react to the loss of their child. In such terrible circumstances, too.
She takes the court through Christian’s childhood, the disease that so nearly killed her when she was little, the steps that they had to take to keep her alive after the infection led to myocarditis.
The lasting damage to her heart. The constant fear under which Marianne lived that each birthday would be Christian’s last. The fact that by sixteen, her condition had finally started to seem stable.
Matthew takes careful notes. He’s trying to keep an open mind about Marianne’s credibility, but Dominic’s suspicions linger.
He goes back to the photographs of Christian’s heart from the autopsy, tries to remind himself of what the pathologist said.
There’s something nagging at him about it, though he can’t put his finger on it.
Not right now. He switches his attention back to the witness.
‘I didn’t want her to go to boarding school.
I felt very strongly about it. But she insisted.
Her father wanted it, too. She just wanted a normal life.
I stood firm till she turned sixteen. Then I gave in.
The doctors agreed it would be all right, so long as she was careful.
Took her medication. Sixth form – it’s a time to be more grown up.
Independent. She knew how to look after herself, at least I thought so.
We were pleased when she said that she wanted to bring some friends home that October half-term.
’ A sob, a hand held to her heart. ‘We thought she was settling in. But the friends she brought were these girls. Isobel and Eliza. That Sasha, too. We thought they’d look after her, the way friends do.
’ She pulls her shoulders back, rallies herself. ‘We couldn’t have been more wrong.’
‘Did you tell them specifically that Christian had a heart condition?’ Mr Alexander says.
Marianne shakes her head. Her eyes are brimming with tears – Matthew can see that even from this distance. If she’s acting, she’s doing it well. ‘Not in so many words. I did speak to them the morning that they left, after the drama in the chapel.’
‘What did you say?’
‘That they needed to be more careful with her. This kind of behaviour might be all right for them, but Christian wasn’t like that. She wasn’t tough. She was very sensitive. It might make her ill.’
‘Do you remember specifically to whom you said this?’
A stricken look, a shake of the head. ‘I’ve been wracking my brains trying to remember which of them was there.
But I don’t know. They might both have been there, it might only have been one of them.
I was in shock about the whole thing. Sasha wasn’t there – I think she’d left already, her mum arranged a taxi to pick her up first thing.
But whether it was one or the other or both . . . I don’t know. I’m sorry.’
‘How did Christian seem when she got back to school? During the following months?’
‘She was very withdrawn. I tried and tried to get her to talk to me, but she wouldn’t. Peter – her father – he said I needed to leave her alone. Individuation, he called it. She was working out who she was on her own, now that she’d left home. He said it was perfectly normal.’
‘What did you think of it?’
‘I thought she was unhappy. But she said she was fine. She wouldn’t talk to me.
I said to her that she didn’t need to go back.
That we’d get her back into her old school, she could live back at home with me.
With her dogs. But she was clear that she wanted to keep going to that school. I should have insisted . . .’
Isobel’s advocate doesn’t cross-examine.
There’s no need. The woman is suffering as it is, and her evidence can’t be clarified much further.
It’s obviously important that she told one or the other of the girls to lay off, but it’s clear she can’t remember exactly which, and it won’t do Isobel any good if she changes her mind and says that on second thoughts, it wasn’t the blonde one that she spoke to.
The thought creeps into Matthew’s mind that given their striking difference in appearance, she should perhaps have a better idea.
Then he rejects it. He’d struggle to tell any of Daisy’s friends apart.
They all dress the same, wear their hair in the same way.
He muddles names and backstories all the time.
He hasn’t suffered any major trauma like this, either.
Something feels off, nonetheless. He wants to believe her, but there’s something that doesn’t feel right.
The atmosphere changes when Christian’s father comes to the stand.
He means business, from the starched collar of his white shirt to the shiny tips of his black Oxfords.
His face might look as if it’s more at home in a checked shirt and hunting jacket, all red cheeks and weather-beaten nose, but his hair is carefully slicked down and he gives his name in a clipped tone that shows far more control than his wife.
‘You would have been happy for your daughter to go to boarding school some years earlier, is that right?’
‘Yes. It’s a family tradition. I went from the age of eight, myself, and it was the making of me – I learned resilience, how to rely on myself. Self-discipline. All those attributes.’
‘Your wife wasn’t keen?’
A grim laugh. ‘If I’m honest, I thought she mollycoddled Christian.
I thought our daughter was fitter than Marianne would accept.
It caused some terrible rows between us.
But the doctors agreed with Marianne – they didn’t think that she was up to going away from home.
Not until sixth form, and that was only when Christian put her foot down herself about it. ’
‘How did you feel about that?’
Peter shakes his head. ‘I was delighted,’ he says. ‘So proud of her. But now? I’ll never forgive myself. If I hadn’t insisted . . . I should have worked it out from the moment that those girls stayed at our house, that our daughter wasn’t safe at that school. But I trusted them to look after her.’
‘You trusted who? The girls?’ Mr Alexander says.
‘No,’ Peter Shaw says, briskly moving on without expanding further.
‘I trusted the school. After I reported to them what had happened in our house, the violation against our hospitality, I would have assumed that they would have taken stringent measures against those girls. But no. We are taking further action as far as that is concerned.’
Matthew understands this. The other jurors might think it’s a dry response, that it reduces Peter to a one-dimensional figure, interested only in pounds and pence.
But Matthew would do exactly the same. The only language these schools speak is one of money, the impact on the bottom line.
Like hospital management boards. Or insurance companies.
Organisations that never admit any liability, show any weakness.
Litigation is the only weapon that effects change. Especially when someone dies.
It’s probably why Isobel and Eliza weren’t expelled after that disastrous half-term visit to the Highlands. The school didn’t want to lose their fees.
‘Could you tell the court about what you deemed the violation to your hospitality?’
‘Certainly.’ He proceeds to outline the state in which the chapel was found the day after the girls arrived, the stench of blood and guts, the desecration to the altar. Most of what he says the court has already been told by Sasha.
‘This was all terrible,’ Peter Shaw says. ‘That chapel has been in my family for generations. Nothing like this has ever happened there. The place was wrecked.’
Matthew looks over at the girls in the dock. He’s struggling to picture it, the grimness of the scene. Surely not that pretty blonde girl, with the pink cheeks. The incongruity is striking.
‘Did you speak to either or both of the girls the following morning after the state of the chapel was discovered?’
‘I did, yes,’ the witness says. ‘I spoke to that one. Isobel.’ He points straight at her, saying her name with such force that she looks up, a shocked expression on her face, the first sign of emotion that Matthew has seen from her since the trial began.
‘I told her in specific terms that Christian might seem like any other girl, that she was strong. But that if they kept on like this, they’d kill her. Her heart wouldn’t take it.’
The man’s head lowers. He swallows, his Adam’s apple moving up and down.
For a moment he’s quiet, looking at the floor, or something far beyond.
Then he brings his focus back to the jury.
‘I thought that it might help. I thought it might waken some compassion in these girls. But now I understand it’s as if I loaded a gun and put it straight into her hand. ’
‘You’re lying,’ Isobel shouts across the courtroom. ‘You’re lying. You never said anything!’
‘Silence!’ the judge says. Her words cut like steel.
A commotion in the dock as the girl seems to be trying to climb out of it, perhaps to get to the witness. The security guards have soon dealt with her, though, restraining her by the arms as they drag her down to the cells.
‘Court will adjourn for a brief period. Back in fifteen minutes, please.’ The judge stands and walks out of court.
Back in the jury room, there’s a lot of strong feeling.
Marianne’s demeanour has convinced everyone, it seems. They’re united in their dislike of Isobel, too.
Matthew’s not saying anything, though he understands their emotion.
But the research he carried out online at the weekend is on his mind.
Strange how the internet favours Isobel so.
They haven’t been sitting in court through this, though.
Not like the jury. They don’t like her one bit.
‘She’s looked aggressive the whole way through,’ Jasmine says. ‘I’ve been waiting for her to blow, if I’m honest. She certainly isn’t helping herself.’
More murmurs of assent. The room is quiet for a moment, as if thinking about Isobel’s various iniquities.
‘Her own advocate doesn’t seem to be defending her,’ Russell says. ‘That’s what I can’t get my head round. Why aren’t they putting forward a defence?’
‘Maybe there’s nothing for them to say,’ Neil says. ‘Maybe she did it, and everybody knows it.’
Everybody knows. The phrase cuts through Matthew’s thoughts.
Everybody knows. Everybody thinks the same.
Since when was he everybody? The conversation he had with Dominic comes into his mind.
He remembers the suspicion he’s feeling towards Marianne, takes a step back mentally.
Maybe he needs to stop following the herd.