Chapter 49
They break for tea while the witness composes herself.
Someone’s bought a pack of bourbon biscuits and they’re shared round the jurors.
Matthew can’t help himself; instead of eating it like a grown-up, he prises the top off the biscuit with his teeth, chuffed to get it off in one piece, scraping the filling off with delight.
He looks up to find Neil laughing at him.
‘That’s how I used to eat them,’ Neil says.
Matthew laughs. It loosens something in his chest that’s been tight since Isobel’s mother took the stand. Even though what she’s said so far has been fairly reasonable, not sticking the boot in too much, he still feels quite stressed that someone should be giving evidence against her own daughter.
‘I couldn’t do it,’ Jasmine says. It’s as if she’s been reading his thoughts. ‘Stand up and give evidence against my own child like this. She’s not even saying anything that bad, really. Just a bit of name calling.’
Emma shakes her head. ‘I disagree. What it shows me is how dangerous Isobel is. If even her own mother thinks she’s trouble, it means she needs to be stopped.’
From the nods around the table, it looks as if Emma’s is the view that the majority share.
Matthew can’t explain his unease. Maybe he’s wrong.
Maybe he’s projecting his irritation with Rosalind and how badly they’re getting on right now on to this blameless woman who is doing her duty, after all.
It makes a change to see a parent putting someone else’s child above their own.
‘What’s wrong with your hand?’ Aisha says.
He glances down at it. The rash has suddenly flared up again, bright red and swollen.
As he opens his mouth to reply, he’s hit by the unbearable itching again, the burning sensation that he can only calm with incessant scratching.
He doesn’t want to scratch, though. He doesn’t want to lose control in front of this room full of people, all of whom will be keeping an eye out for weakness, any sign of strange behaviour.
‘I’ve got a touch of eczema,’ he says through gritted teeth, willing his hands to behave themselves and not start clawing uncontrollably at himself. ‘I’ll just go . . .’
With every appearance of calm he saunters out of the jury room, only to walk to the gents as fast as he can.
As soon as he’s inside the cubicle he pulls up his sleeves, horrified to see that the rash has spread up both of his forearms to his upper arms and beyond.
The places where he scratched the night before are red and raw.
He pulls out the cream that he remembered to bring with him and daubs it all over himself.
It’s the strangest rash he’s ever had, weirdly unpredictable. It goes from forgotten to unbearable in the blink of an eye, triggered by he knows not what. Chocolate? The bourbon biscuit? Surely not that. It doesn’t make sense.
He can’t wait for this case to be over. Funny how only a week ago, he was desperate to be on jury duty. Now he’d do anything to escape. All the grief of it, the misery, is leaking into him, his skin no longer an impermeable barrier, broken as it is by scratch marks and suppurating blisters.
The burning has subsided now, the cream doing its job. He needs to get back into court and find out what else this woman has to say. Looking in the mirror, he wills himself into action, staring himself down.
The face in the mirror starts to laugh. But Matthew isn’t laughing.
He turns tail and he runs. Whatever might happen in court can’t be as bad as what he’s facing inside his head. Or in the mirror grimacing out at him.
He’s wrong about that. It’s worse. Fiona Smyth has come back into court fully composed and full of a story about how Isobel treated her pet hamster when she was younger, how she’d left it without food for days to see how it would survive.
‘I think she wanted to see how far she could push it,’ she says. ‘A bit like she did with me, as well. She’d needle me and needle me to see how much it would take for me to break.’
‘Did you speak to Isobel about her treatment of Christian at your house?’ Mr Alexander says, returning the evidence to the more recent past.
A little colour returns to Fiona’s cheeks. She’d grown very pale talking about the hamster. Now she looks more enlivened. ‘I did, yes. I made a point of it.’
‘Why did you think it was necessary?’
Pale again. Paler still. ‘It was seeing Isobel’s face when they were teasing Christian at tea.
She was watching her when they were calling her Dead Girl Walking, this expression on her face.
I’ll never forget it . . .’ The woman shivers, wrapping her arms around herself.
‘She was enjoying herself. The more that Christian was upset, the happier Isobel seemed. But that wasn’t the worst of it. ’
‘What was the worst of it?’ Mr Alexander prompts as the witness falls silent, seemingly lost in thought.
‘She had the same expression on her face as she did before, when she was gloating over her hamster. Little Ossie was so close to death you could see all his ribs – I got to him in the nick of time. But Isobel didn’t care that he was suffering.
She just sat there and smiled. This horrific smile. I can’t begin to describe it.’
‘That’s not true,’ Isobel cries out. The whole court starts. Matthew feels his heart jack-hammer at the unexpected exclamation. ‘You know it’s not true.’
Her voice isn’t angry though, it’s sad. Desperately sad, hopeless, someone stuck at the bottom of a well who has given up all hope of being heard.
‘Silence,’ the judge says, but she’s already quiet, her head sunk back between her hands.
Matthew glances over at Fiona, expecting to see shock on her face, an expression of distress. But to his surprise, she’s smiling, a small, secret smile like she’s won a victory in a battle that only she knows she’s fighting. Then her face falls sombre again and it’s as if he imagined it.
But for a second, he could imagine her staring down at a starving hamster and smiling, too.
‘What did you say to Isobel about Christian?’ Mr Alexander says.
Fiona closes her eyes for a moment, opens them.
‘I said that she needed to stop it. That it was one thing torturing a small mammal. But it was quite another torturing a human being like this. It was clear that the girl wasn’t able to take it.
She looked more and more ill the more that they kept on at her.
I told Isobel that if she didn’t watch out, she’d have Christian’s death on her conscience. ’
‘What did Isobel say?’
‘Nothing. She just smiled that smile.’
Eliza’s advocate doesn’t cross-examine. Another nail in Isobel’s coffin. Why hasn’t the girl just pleaded guilty? He can’t make sense of it. Some desperate hope driving her that she’d get away with it? Something might turn up? He has a feeling she’s going to be disappointed.
Miss Goodly stands up to cross-examine on Isobel’s behalf.
But before she can get a word out, Isobel starts gesticulating at her, hissing something.
Matthew can just about make out ‘Come here, please come here.’ Miss Goodly raises an eyebrow at the judge as if to ask permission and at the judge’s nod, she crosses the floor to the dock where she has a muttered conversation with Isobel.
Matthew tries to listen but it’s nearly impossible to hear anything, right until the end, when an anguished cry breaks the air.
‘There’s just no point.’ It’s Isobel, fully in tears now. ‘If I died she’d just have me burnt and throw away the ashes. She doesn’t love me. She never has.’
Her sobs ring round the court. Matthew looks over at Fiona Smyth, sitting in the witness stand as her daughter has this outburst of emotion.
The woman’s face is completely unmoved.