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TWENTY-THREE

FRAN

What they don’t tell you about court cases is there isn’t a whole lot of time for toilet breaks.

When you’re a very well-hydrated person, like I try to be, you find yourself needing to use the ladies’ at quite regular intervals.

However, you can’t really excuse yourself to spend a penny when you are literally the one on trial.

I spoke to Andrew about my concerns early on in the case, and he said it was the first time he had ever been asked that in his twenty-five years of being a criminal defence lawyer.

Which I thought was somewhat strange. It could be hours between breaks, and he was telling me that no one had ever asked what their loo policy was?

I thought maybe one of the boring statements, like Cecilia’s endless ramble on evidence being objective and her self-praise for guessing I’d chopped O’Neill up in his wet room, could be my chance.

That would be the perfect time to tiptoe out, go for a wee, and return before she’d finished her monologue on the lacerations.

But no, I had to stay there, legs crossed, and listen to people go and on and on about me.

I thought I had been pretty smart with covering up the murder – more so than others, but, evidently, the police had been smarter.

They had correctly guessed that I had disposed of the main husk of O’Neill’s body in the bins and the identifiable body parts in the river.

I wondered what they were doing now? Probably drifting along the seabed of the English Channel.

Meanwhile, Isla and Cecilia were catching up like old friends on a coffee date.

Cecilia said I exhibited all the telltale signs of a psychopath during the questioning – cold, manipulative and narcissistic – and that I knew how to work detectives to make myself appear the victim.

What I found more interesting was that Cecilia couldn’t even bear to look in my general direction.

She seemed composed and graceful to Isla, but pretended I wasn’t even in the box for most of her statement.

She only glanced at me for a moment when Isla asked her to confirm it was me she was talking about.

They brought up poor Beryl first, who could also barely even look in my direction, though I wondered if that was more out of the pressure than any kind of embarrassment or shame.

I saw the poor lady fight any kind of outward emotion, wrestling with herself to try and keep some poise, as Isla approached her.

The more I observed Isla in the courtroom, the more she seemed closer to a vulture than a human.

Picking on the carrion of the poor people speaking in the box, wearing them down until any defence had been pecked away.

Problem was, Beryl started out strong, saying that I was a great neighbour and there was no way I could have committed so heinous a crime. But when Isla pointed out that she had only known me for a few months, the whole thing fell apart.

Isla noted that Beryl had had her doorbell camera for two years, and it seemed rather coincidental that it was broken not forty-eight hours after O’Neill’s suspected murder.

Beryl was forced to admit that she had never seen me help O’Neill previously – and nor had I ever expressed an affinity for the man – with Beryl revealing that we’d both found him to be the strange old senex of the neighbourhood.

Isla managed to tell a quick anecdote about how she’d dated one of her neighbours when she was a graduate, only to find out he was married with family and kids up near Yorkshire. ‘You never truly know who your neighbours are,’ she said, with a sly hint of a sneer.

Andrew did his best to salvage the situation by questioning Beryl about how I walked Tony every day, and my (rather exaggerated) involvement in the community, but there was no coming back from Isla’s questioning. Everything seemed far too coincidental for me not to be guilty.

O’Neill’s carer didn’t help my cause. I was hoping that she might have outed him as a creepy old man – maybe she had been groped by him, or had walked in on him pleasuring himself to a picture of Charles Manson or something.

But instead she said that while he was a crotchety old git, he had never been verbally or physically abusive to her.

We had a quick recess, and the police led me to yet another small, dimly lit room just above the court.

Andrew came in with a cup of coffee and a sandwich for me, wiping his brow like it was halftime at a football game, psyching himself up for the next forty-five minutes.

I realised Lawyer Andrew must only be reserved for a select few moments in his career. Most of the time, I got the schlub.

Sorry, that was mean; forgive me, I am very stressed.

‘So, how is it going, coach? Good? Bad?’ I asked. I glanced down at the sandwich. ‘Oh?’

‘What is it?’ Andrew asked, puckering his brows.

‘Oh, it’s just, I don’t really like tuna,’ I mumbled. ‘But that’s beside the point, sorry, tell me how’s it going?’

‘But I asked what you wanted, and you said “anything”,’ Andrew responded, half-defensively. He wasn’t going to let this one go easily.

‘Yeah, but I just didn’t think you’d go for tuna, that’s all. I thought you’d pick something like a BLT or a ham and cheese. But not tuna. Just – I don’t care, just tell me what you think of the case so far.’

I could see Andrew wanted to argue more about the sandwich, but he abandoned the topic and pulled up the chair.

‘Too hard to tell right now,’ Andrew said, like he was analysing the opposing team’s every move.

‘Isla works the jury, that’s what she does, so even if they don’t openly realise it, she’s got you in their heads as a cold, smart, violent murderer and O’Neill as a sweet old man who wouldn’t hurt a fly. ’

‘Fantastic,’ I murmured, not quite matching Andrew’s zest and zeal. I think I was becoming a little more resigned to everything the more the trial progressed.

‘But don’t worry. We prepared for this; I have some leaked docs that will get the jury thinking about the police’s obsession on blaming this case all on you. That’s going to change things. I’m sure of it. If that doesn’t work, we can leak them to the press tomorrow.’

‘What, how?’ I stammered, but Andrew had clearly already moved on, scrawling some notes in his diary.

‘And who have they got coming up next?’ I asked as Andrew tapped his pen against his temples.

‘Urgh, well, the upside is that, despite their efforts, they still don’t have a strong motive for you.

They’re trying to suggest you had a reason, but they don’t actually know what that is, and we need to use that to support our case.

Right now, they’re just trying to convince the jury there’s a connection.

So they have a Clark something or other, friend of O’Neill.

But I can’t imagine he’s going to be much trouble,’ Andrew said indifferently, with a wave of his hand.

The world could have ended right there and then and my first primary emotion about the sudden cataclysm would have been complete, serotonin-laden relief.

‘You didn’t tell me about him,’ was all I could say, hoping it wouldn’t be too unlikely that the world might swallow me up.

‘I must have, surely? The friend, the friend of O’Neill, they went way back together. He used to be Leader of the Opposition, like, forty years ago,’ Andrew said, still jotting down notes into his diary.

‘No, no, no, I can’t…’ I stammered, launching myself up from the chair and walking towards the door, forgetting I was still technically in police custody.

The air suddenly vanished from my lungs and all the muscles in my body shrank and weakened as I clasped at my chest.

Andrew rushed over and grabbed me as I began to keel over. My back arched as I retched, dribbling saliva onto the floor.

‘Whoa whoa whoa, easy, Fran, easy,’ he said, patting and rubbing my back.

I’m not a damn horse, Andrew.

‘Do you know him? Who is this guy?’ Andrew said, as I moved from all fours to a decrepit slouch, my back against the wall. I yanked off my blazer and slid it across the floor. ‘I just assumed he was some random friend of O’Neill’s. Is he connected?’

‘O’Neill and he were part of the…organisation, thing, charity, something. Clark was the master of the whole operation, kept them all in line through fear.’

I wasn’t sure how I would muster any strength to confront Clark in court, knowing my life would be in his hands – a life that had been shaped by this man’s greed and cruelty.

Andrew’s eyes shifted from worry to confusion as he transitioned from the squat he had assumed to grab me when I’d first dropped to the floor, to a slump as he sat down next to me, both our backs leaning against the cold tiled wall.

‘Fran, I need you to be completely honest with me now. What’s going on here?’

I placed both my hands against my face, which was extraordinarily moist with sweat, so I moved them to my abdomen, where I could still feel moisture seeping through the fabric.

‘Get me some new clothes, and I can tell you everything.’

I couldn’t bear to look at him again. The very thought of him knowing that my life was in his hands was, simply put, unbeschreiblich : not just indescribable, but also some sort of unspeakable.

The amount of power that this wretch of a man now yielded over me must have made him nurse some kind of semi as he approached the witness box.

I’m sure when he’d got the call, it had all come together for him: who I was, Macleod and O’Neill, and how he was now the one who could put me away for good.

He hadn’t even had the decency to take that bronze ring off his finger.

He still wanted the world to think of him as a gracious philanthropist.