Chapter 52
They break for lunch. Matthew reckons everyone will feel better for getting their blood sugar back up.
He certainly will. He’s feeling distinctly wobbly, the rash bringing his mood down, exacerbating the tiredness he’s already feeling from such a bad night’s sleep.
He doesn’t want to hang around with the other jurors, though.
The moment they were out of the court door he could tell what way it was going, the sympathy that they all have for Eliza, the condemnation for Isobel.
He doesn’t like it, the way that everyone seems to have made up their minds already.
He’s not sure what could change their minds, either.
To be fair, Isobel isn’t helping herself at all, the moody outbursts and outbreaks of anger only serving to compound the impression that’s been given of the girl.
She doesn’t look entirely stable. A psychiatrist said at the very start that she was fit to plead, but other than the cross-examination of the psychiatrist, her mental health has hardly been brought into it. Matthew can’t understand it.
He leaves the court building and heads left. He’s going to go back to the Devil’s Advocate. The mood he’s in can only be sated by a cheeseburger, chips, the full works. It’s not just that, though. He can’t explain it, but he’s got a strong sense that Gill is waiting for him there.
Sure enough, as he walks in through the door, he sees her. She’s sitting at a table for two in the narrow corridor to the left of the bar, facing outwards as if waiting for him. He raises a hand in greeting before joining her.
‘I thought I’d see you here,’ she says. It’s as if the strangeness of their last meeting has never happened. Any animosity he might have felt has disappeared in the face of the alienation he feels from the rest of the jury.
‘How’s it going?’ she says.
It’s on a knife edge. He knows what his legal responsibility is. He shouldn’t speak to her about this. He shouldn’t even be in the same room as her, let alone sitting opposite her preparing to divulge the secret workings of the court to her. But at the same time . . .
‘I don’t know whether I should tell you this or not,’ she says before he can say anything else. He looks at her in surprise – he’s not the only one going through a moral dilemma.
‘What?’
‘The delay this morning, before the jury were called in. There was a legal argument. Well, rather, Isobel and her advocate were having an argument.’
‘What about?’
She takes a deep breath, as if she’s decided upon something momentous.
‘It was about a psychiatric report. Isobel’s advocate said that she had finally been sent a psychiatric report that called into question Isobel’s sanity at the time this was happening.
She wanted to put in a defence statement to say that Isobel had diminished responsibility at the time of the offence because she was suffering from a psychotic breakdown. ’
‘I mean, I have wondered, given some of her outbursts,’ Matthew says.
‘But neither the advocate depute nor Eliza’s advocate were happy about this.
Nor the judge. They all said that it was being done far too late in the day.
At which point Isobel started yelling. The judge let her speak.
She said that she didn’t agree, that she hadn’t been mad at the time and that she wasn’t mad now.
She didn’t want her advocate to run this as a defence and if the woman insisted on it she’d represent herself. ’
‘So that’s what ended up happening?’
‘That’s what happened. After considering it, the judge said that given there was no dispute that she was fit to plead now, it meant that she was fit to give instructions and that if she didn’t want to argue that she was suffering from diminished responsibility at the time of the alleged murder, that was a matter for her. ’
A long pause. Matthew tries to digest what he’s been told.
‘I’m really worried,’ Gill says. ‘I don’t think the girl is well. But no one is looking out for her. It’s like she’s all on her own.’
Matthew looks at her. A long, steady gaze while he assesses what she’s said, weighs it up against his own misgivings.
Sure, Isobel might be fit to plead now, but given her whole-hearted belief in the supernatural cause of everything that happened, can it really be said that she wasn’t suffering from some delusions at the time of Christian’s death?
‘At the least, diminished responsibility should be put as an option to the jury. That’s what I think,’ Gill says. ‘That’s why I’m talking to you.’
‘What do you expect me to do about it?’
A waiter comes over to the table at that point with a glass of wine. It’s clearly intended for Gill but Matthew picks it up, drains it. It seems the only answer right now.
‘I don’t know if you know this, but a jury can find whatever verdict it wants. You know that the decision never needs to be justified. It can’t ever be discussed.’
‘I had heard that, yes,’ he says with caution.
‘So you can save her. If you want to.’
Without another word, he gets up and walks out. His head is spinning. Not just from the wine.
He walks around the Old Town for the rest of the lunch break in the hope that the fresh air will bring him some clarity.
He should report Gill, he knows it – this is jury interference on a grand scale.
But at the same time, he can see that her concern is coming from the right place.
It chimes with his fears, that Isobel is being set up in some way, too conveniently the fall guy for this whole set-up.
Coupled with his uncertainties about Marianne, his doubts about whether there was truly anything wrong with Christian in the first place . . . he’s not sure what to think.
It’s only when he gets back to the door of the High Court that he remembers he hasn’t eaten.
The wine is vinegar in his stomach, no solace to him any more now that the temporary buzz has faded.
He burps as he stands in the queue for security, acid reflux adding to his skin condition misery.
He learnt about pathetic fallacy at school, when they were studying Macbeth, the weather tying in with the narrative mood.
Matthew is the weather of the court right now, the misery of the proceedings playing out on his skin and in his toxic guts.
He just wants it to end. He doesn’t want to walk this line any longer between doing the right thing and behaving in a way that’s legally correct.
He knows what his old college tutor would tell him to do – obey the rules, regardless of the consequences.
Regardless of the rightness of the rules, either.
His not to wonder why, his but to cast a verdict according to the evidence or .
. . well, not die. But worry forever whether he did the right thing.
Gill shouldn’t have told him. But he’s glad she did.
The evidence trails along in the afternoon.
It’s a team of character references for Eliza, a beauty parade of the great and good, evidently friends of her family who’ve agreed to do them a favour.
Two advocates – Queen’s Counsels, no less – and an MSP, her family vicar, her Guide leader and the headteacher of her prep school, a prestigious establishment in the north of Edinburgh.
Eliza was the last person they would have expected to see in court like this.
She was a model of perfection, someone held up as an example to the younger children both in school and in her Sunday School as well.
She headed up Guides with aplomb, earning so many badges she ran out of room on the sleeves of her tunic to display them all.
At the end of all this, the glorious finale, up stands a woman in tweed, her face pale and drawn, wringing her hands in the witness box. Eliza’s mother. They’ve saved the best till last.
Matthew needs to stop being so cynical. He’s doing his best. But his teeth are on edge. Perhaps driven by hunger, his temper is frayed almost to breaking point. The more perfect that he’s told Eliza is, the less he believes it. But perhaps this woman will change his mind.
‘She’s not always been the perfect daughter,’ the woman starts. He sits up, takes note. Finally someone is talking about the girl as if she’s a real human being. ‘But I can’t blame her for it. It’s that girl who destroyed her.’ She points a shaking hand straight at Isobel.
Matthew slumps back in his seat. So much for a more objective take.
The evidence carries them no further forward.
All she does is go over old ground. Eliza was wonderful until Isobel joined the school.
Thereafter her behaviour became more problematic.
She’s sure it’s because Isobel was a toxic influence, and she regrets the day that she ever let Eliza board and therefore be out of the reach of her own influence.
‘Girls need their mothers,’ she says. ‘It’s a fact. I blame myself for letting them talk me into it.’
‘Who?’ Miss Brodie says. She’s struggled to get a word in edgeways through the tide of saccharine bile that’s poured from the woman’s lips.
‘Eliza. And her father.’ The woman points to the man who’s been sitting in court throughout, stolid in his grey jacket. He stays expressionless.
At least Matthew now knows who he is.
‘He said I smothered her, but if she’d stayed at home, she wouldn’t be facing a murder charge now.
’ The woman breaks into hysterical weeping, a hanky over her face, though Matthew can’t shake the feeling that she’s peeking out of one side of it, careful to check that her emotional outburst is having the desired effect on the court.