Chapter 48
Police interviews take up the bulk of the day.
The prosecution plays videos taken of each of the girls being interviewed by police officers, Eliza co-operative, eager to answer questions.
Isobel less so. She looks disengaged and bored on the screen, her dark hair lank and greasy; disengaged and bored in court as well.
Matthew struggles throughout to focus on what’s said. He stares hard at the screen from the start, not wanting to look anywhere else in the courtroom in case Gill is here and is glaring at him. Shame at his loss of control is eating away at him inside.
The police questions build a narrative, but it’s one that he’s worked out already from the evidence that the prosecution have presented.
Any hope he had that he might start to divine a more detailed defence from Isobel are dashed as she says ‘No comment’ in a monotonous tone to each of the questions that’s put to her.
Initially, the police seem immune to Eliza’s charm. Every time she tries to suggest that she’s been the innocent victim of Isobel as well as Christian they shoot it down, pointing out the times that Sasha witnessed her being nasty to the girl.
‘You were the driving force in this, weren’t you?’
‘I was not.’
Where she is clear and unassailable is on the point that she was not told of Christian’s heart condition by Christian’s father or mother, or by anyone else.
She had no idea that there was anything wrong with the girl at all.
She accepts that sometimes what she said to Christian might have been less than kind, but she had no intention of causing her any significant harm.
One statement stands out. ‘I’ll never forgive myself for what’s happened.
If I’d had any idea that Christian suffered from this heart condition, I’d have stopped Isobel from doing everything that she did.
I don’t know why I didn’t stop it as it was – I could tell that Christian was finding it distressing.
But you know how it is . . . you get caught up in things.
You want your friends to approve of you. ’
As the interview builds to its finale, Eliza stays firm.
She did not pick up the knife.
She did not shout threats or run at Christian.
It was all Isobel. Isobel was the person who threatened Christian right at the end. Isobel was the one who put Christian in fear of her life.
Isobel is the one guilty of her murder.
Eliza seems so plausible. The police officers have clearly done their best to resist her wholesome appearance, but they’ve obviously taken to her as well. Matthew picks up on a big difference in tone between how they speak to her and to Isobel.
Isobel may have replied ‘No comment’ to every question that’s asked of her, but the next witness, who appears near the end of the afternoon when all the videos of the police interviews have been played, has a great deal to say.
She’s tall, brunette, elegant, wearing a cashmere jumper and a tweed skirt, a string of pearls peeking out from under the white cotton frill of her blouse collar.
There’s a ripple of shock in the court as she gives her name, shaking her hair back off her face almost with a gesture of defiance.
‘Fiona Smyth,’ she says. ‘Isobel’s mother.’
Isobel’s mother is a witness for the prosecution?
The jury are glancing around at each other trying to make sense of this.
Eliza is biting her lip, an expression of distress on her face.
Isobel hides behind her hair. It’s impossible to tell what emotion she’s feeling, although by the hunch of her shoulders, Matthew reckons she’s upset. How could she not be?
‘Thank you for agreeing to give evidence, Mrs Smyth. I appreciate that this is difficult for you.’
The woman sighs. Then she raises her chin. ‘It’s my duty,’ she says. ‘I love my daughter, but a child is dead. What kind of mother would I be if I ignored another mother’s pain?’
A sob from the public gallery where Christian’s mother is sitting.
She’s clutching a tissue, her nose red. Sitting very close to her is Christian’s father, staring intently at Fiona Smyth.
It looks as if he’s trying to smile at her, although the strain he must be under is making it look more like a grimace.
‘Please can you tell the court about your family situation, Mrs Smyth?’ Mr Alexander says.
She nods. ‘It’s very difficult. I am what’s known as a single mum. My marriage to Isobel’s father broke down about seven years ago, partly I think down to Isobel’s behaviour, and I’ve struggled to bring her up on my own ever since.’
‘You said partly down to Isobel’s behaviour – what did you mean by that?’
‘She was constantly in trouble at school. I had to keep going into meetings about how she was behaving towards other girls in her class. There were many allegations of bullying. She’d been such a sweet little girl, but the older she got, the worse she became.
Mind you, I’m sure that she was copying what she saw her father doing at home. ’
‘Can you expand on that?’
A loud sigh. She pauses to dab at her eyes with a small white handkerchief she’s clutching in her right hand. ‘This is very hard to talk about,’ she says again. ‘As well as being a single mum, I’m also the victim of domestic abuse. He was deeply unkind to me throughout our marriage.’
‘I appreciate that it’s difficult, but could you tell the court about that in a little more detail?’
‘May I sit down?’ Fiona says, turning to the judge. ‘I’m feeling a little faint.’ The judge nods.
Matthew’s hands are clenched on his lap.
There’s nothing this woman is saying that’s intrinsically wrong, in fact, more the opposite, but everything in him is rebelling at the prospect of listening to her speak.
Every time she opens her mouth it’s like a snake hissing.
It makes no sense to him at all. She looks perfectly nice. Dresses like Rosalind.
He couldn’t dislike her more.
‘My ex-husband is a bully,’ she says once she’s sitting down in the witness box. ‘He delights in undermining me and making me look like a fool. There is nothing he likes more than pushing me to my absolute limit, only happy when he’s made me cry.’
‘And you think that this had an effect on Isobel?’
‘Yes, definitely. It’s what every meeting at the school said. That she kept teasing and teasing people until they couldn’t take any more.’
Isobel is so hunched over that Matthew can barely see her head over the top of the dock. For the first time since the case started, he feels intensely sorry for her. It must feel terrible to have her mother there, giving evidence against her in this way.
The litany of Isobel’s sins continues, honey dripping from this woman’s smiling mouth. An exclusion here, a suspension there, the school from which she was told to remove Isobel because of a complete breakdown of a friendship group.
‘Did there come a time when you were introduced to Isobel’s most recent friendship group, Eliza, Sasha and Christian?’ Mr Alexander says.
‘I was, yes. They came round to my house for tea one exeat weekend.’
‘An exeat weekend?’
‘Although St Jude’s is a boarding school, the children are allowed to come home at the weekend if they so choose. Isobel didn’t choose to come home very often, but on this occasion, she brought her friends round too.’
‘Can you tell the court where you were living at the time?’
‘Where I’m still living. In Barnton,’ she says.
Matthew knows it well, a genteel area in the north of Edinburgh on the way out up north. Not a difficult commute to school – Isobel had no need to be boarding as far as living close to school was concerned. The thought has clearly occurred to Mr Alexander as well.
‘So Isobel boarded by desire, not because she lived too far away to be able to get into school?’
‘Yes, that’s right. It was more convenient for all concerned,’ Fiona says. ‘Especially after the divorce. It’s so difficult when you’re on your own . . .’ her voice fades out.
‘Tell us about the visit that Isobel made with her friends.’
‘There was something off about it from the start . . .’
Matthew does his best to listen to what she’s telling the court, a complicated story about who got to sit where when she drove them out to Cramond for tea by the sea, tempers lost and feelings hurt.
‘I felt that Christian was very vulnerable,’ she continues, ‘that was what I thought. She clearly hero-worshipped Isobel.’ A look here at the jury as if to say no, she didn’t understand it either. ‘And I became very uncomfortable with how unkind the girls were to her.’
‘Unkind in what way?’
‘They kept teasing her. They seemed to have a nickname for her – Dead Girl Walking. I remember it because it seemed such a strange name to call a friend. I didn’t understand at all, although I do now, of course.’
‘Do you remember who you heard saying that to Christian?’
A long silence. ‘I think Sasha. Maybe Eliza.’ Another silence, longer this time. She starts to cry. ‘Definitely Isobel.’