Chapter 53
‘That poor woman,’ Neil says as they go into the jury room for a quick break.
‘It’s terrible,’ Russell says.
‘I’d never let my child go to boarding school,’ Emma says. ‘As a mother, I think it’s our responsibility to keep our children close. Not farm them out to other people to look after.’
Matthew sits down. He doesn’t contribute to the chorus of sympathy, or judgement about parenting decisions.
It’s as if they’ve watched two different people up in the witness box, so different is his perception from the rest of the room.
They’re overflowing with empathy for Eliza and her family. She’s fooled them entirely.
He catches himself short. He’s being irrational. What Eliza and her mother said makes perfect sense, and the fact that his gut is telling him it’s not true can’t be substantiated objectively. If everyone else in the room is thinking differently, then he must be wrong.
‘It’s all very sad,’ Aisha says. Matthew nods. This is an analysis he can agree with. ‘I’m trying to stay open-minded, but it’s hard. Isobel isn’t making a great case for herself.’
He nods again. She’s not wrong in that assessment.
‘But maybe she’ll be more impressive when she comes to give evidence herself.’
‘Maybe she will,’ he says. He doesn’t add, I hope. But he’s thinking it.
Isobel cuts a forlorn figure in the witness box.
She’d kept her head down, hair in front of her face throughout Eliza’s mother’s evidence, not bothering to cross-examine, and now she stands in a way that speaks of exhaustion, bone weariness.
She’s silent for a while, as if gathering her thoughts, until finally the judge prompts her to begin.
‘Sorry, yes.’ She pushes her hair back from her face now and looks over at the jury.
Matthew can see a nose ring through her septum, three small hoops in her left ear, seven in the other, working their way from the lobe up to the top of the cartilage.
As ever she’s wearing a grey hoodie, but the sleeves are pulled up, and even from the distance she is from Matthew across the court, he can make out rough tattoos, the ink crawling up over the back of her hands and up her arms. Underneath them, very faint, white parallel lines running up her arm. Self-harm scars.
He glances along the rows of jurors. No one that young, no one with tattoos. No one remotely alternative. It’s no wonder they haven’t warmed to her. But maybe she’ll pull something out of the bag now. Maybe.
‘I don’t have very much to say,’ she begins.
‘But I want you to know that it’s not true that I hurt Christian on purpose.
I didn’t have any reason to. She was my friend.
’ A long pause, the word left hanging in the air.
A lump forms in Matthew’s throat. Friend.
Said with such sadness. ‘But I couldn’t help what the Devil told me to do. ’
Matthew looks over at the judge. Surely she’s going to intervene? But she stays silent, her face impassive, even as Isobel lists all the ways that she was told by various spirits and demons of Christian’s impending death.
‘I understand that it looked like bullying,’ she says.
‘But it was what needed to be done. I was passing on important information, that was all. I couldn’t help the way that the tarot cards fell.
I couldn’t help the Ouija board messages.
I wasn’t faking them – the planchette was moving of its own accord. ’
A hiss from Jasmine. Disbelief? Matthew remembers the way that the planchette flew at Gill. He glances at her, sitting in her usual spot at the front of the public gallery. She does not catch his eye.
‘I know that the cat and the pigeon look bad,’ she says. ‘I know exactly what it looks like, how much you’ll judge me for it. But it was what I was told to do.’
She was having visitations in dreams. Awake, too.
The Devil’s head would appear to her in the strangest of places – peering out of the froth at the top of a cappuccino, faces appearing from patterns in the wall.
Matthew tenses up at this. So much of what she says is what he’s experienced, a chill runs through him, the jeering sound from the Devil in the bathroom ringing again in his ears.
‘Some of it is established ritual,’ she says, earnest now.
‘There are books. You’ve seen the one that belonged to Sasha.
I found that very helpful. It was a bit reductive, though.
I think more sophisticated practices give better results.
I’ve tried to follow some of the rituals laid out by the Golden Dawn, but it’s difficult setting up a proper altar in a school dormitory. ’
A muffled noise from behind him. Matthew glances round. Russell is trying to stifle laughter, his face going redder and redder in the process.
Isobel looks over at him. ‘I know you think it sounds mad. That I’m mad.
I’m not, though. Magic is real. It exists.
I’ve spoken to spirits, I’ve spoken to the dead.
About the dead. I’ve spoken to Christian recently – she knows I wasn’t bullying her.
That I didn’t want her dead. I just knew she was going to die. That’s all that happened.’
She stares at them all, unblinking, unwavering in her sincerity. She appears totally sane. But what she’s saying can’t be true. Can it? Matthew has no idea what to think any more.
‘It wasn’t me who threatened Christian with a knife.
I would never do that. It was Eliza who hated her.
That’s the truth. I liked Christian. Eliza became obsessed with getting a human sacrifice – she was furious that I could see the Devil and she couldn’t.
She thought that if she gave him Christian, she’d get to talk to him too. ’
Eliza is shaking her head primly from side to side. She couldn’t look less like a devil worshipper if she tried.
Mr Alexander has no doubt. He gets up to cross-examine, irritation crackling off him.
‘You cannot seriously expect that the court will believe that you spoke to the Devil?’
‘I did, though.’
‘Or that you did not set up the Ouija board and the tarot cards so that they would give Christian the false information that she was going to die?’
‘It was true. I didn’t set it up.’ Every answer she makes is given with what seems to be total honesty. Her eyes are open, her head erect. She sounds proud, almost, as she asserts her case. ‘It’s how the cards fell. It was her fate. I can’t help that the Devil was working through me.’
Matthew feels a chill pass through him. She’s deadly serious. Or completely deluded. He thinks back to the psychiatrist who gave evidence at the beginning of the case, the fact that she was so adamant that there is nothing wrong with Isobel’s sanity.
She must be lying, then. Because the alternative is too horrific for him to contemplate. It cannot possibly be true.
On to the cat in the shed. She asserted that the fake funeral was not intended to torment Christian.
It was to ease her passage through to the afterlife.
Christian was clinging too much on to living and it was killing her soul, strange as the paradox might seem.
Isobel would have wanted Christian to do the same for her if the situation were reversed.
Same with the butchered pigeon. Isobel denied that this was animal cruelty. The pigeon was already injured – she was just putting it out of its misery, and for a greater good as well. She believed truly that she was helping Christian.
Eliza had no such desire. She was the one who brought malice to the table. She was the one who wanted to hurt Christian, to see how far they could push her physically. Eliza was the one obsessed with making Christian suffer.
Eliza was the one who seized the knife from Isobel and brandished it in Christian’s face, chasing her and screaming threats as she did.
The words are demented. Isobel, not so. She’s totally matter-of-fact, calm in her attempt to counter Mr Alexander’s questions.
The only time that she becomes agitated is when he puts it to her that she’s lying about the conversations with Christian’s mother and father. She simply won’t accept that either of them told her about their daughter’s heart condition.
‘No, they didn’t. Neither of them did. It’s not true.’
Shakes of the head around the jury. Not good to attack the bereaved parents. Isobel has not helped her case.
It’s worse still when Miss Brodie stands up to cross-examine on behalf of Eliza. Isobel is immediately hostile. The open expression disappears, replaced by scowls and frowns. She will accept no suggestion whatsoever that she was doing it all on purpose to bully Christian.
‘That’s not true. Eliza knows it. Ask your client.’
‘When you say that the planchette moved of its own volition, you’re lying there as well, aren’t you? You were making it move to the letters that spelt out DIE CHRISTIAN.’
‘I wasn’t, no. It was a spirit talking to us from the other side. Ask your client.’
Over and over again. Ask your client. Ask your client. Eliza knows the truth.
ELIZA WAS THE ONE WITH THE KNIFE.
At last the girl’s ordeal is over. As far as Matthew can see, she hasn’t won over a single heart or mind. This suspicion is confirmed when they convene in the jury room at the end of court.
‘Mad or bad,’ Neil says. ‘That’s it. Definitely dangerous to know.’
Everyone laughs. Everyone other than Matthew.
‘We can’t consider whether she’s mad, though. At least I don’t think so.’ That’s Jasmine. ‘She’s not putting it forward as a defence. She’s saying it’s true and asking us to believe her. The prosecution are saying she’s not mad, and she’s not trying to say she is.’
Matthew nods. It’s a fair summary. Encapsulates the problem in one. If the jury accepts she’s telling the truth, they’re having to accept something they will find impossible. A legal defence of insanity is not permitted them, unless the judge tells them differently at the end.
‘Which means she must be lying,’ Emma says. ‘That’s what I think, anyway. She’s lying through her back teeth. She enjoyed playing these twisted games and she wanted to see how far she could push it with Christian.’
Jasmine objects. ‘Maybe she was into bullying her. But it doesn’t mean that she wanted her dead, does it?’
‘There was that phrase they said at the start,’ Dharam says.
His voice cuts through the rest of the chatter.
Everyone turns to face him. ‘Wicked recklessness. That’s the prosecution case.
The girls didn’t need to intend to kill her for it to be murder.
This is enough, that’s the whole case. They knew that scaring her into a heart attack could kill her and they went ahead and did it anyway. ’
‘They?’ Emma says. ‘I don’t see a they in this. I just see Isobel. Don’t you agree?’
Murmurs round the table.
‘I think we should do a poll,’ she says. ‘Let’s get an idea of where people are right now. They did that on Twelve Angry Men. I watched it the other night. Everyone who thinks Isobel is guilty raise your hand.’
‘They did it anonymously,’ Matthew said. ‘They didn’t have to raise their hands.’
She turns on him. ‘Why would we need to be anonymous? Surely everyone feels the same?’
Matthew catches Dharam’s eye across the table. The other man shakes his head, a tiny movement, but enough. Matthew says nothing. He doesn’t need the warning. Now is not the time. He needs to marshal his forces, work out exactly how to approach this.
One promise he makes himself, though, on the way out of court. Whatever it takes, he is going to make this jury cast the verdict that Matthew thinks is right. Nothing less will do.
He just needs to work out exactly what that is.