The Rapunzel Act, page 9
Constance eased the plastic lid onto her pot of soup, even though it was still half-full. Then she reached past Greg and dropped it into the bin. ‘What should we do?’ she said. ‘We have a preliminary hearing next week, but we weren’t planning to say much about the TV angle.’
Greg shrugged. ‘That’s your territory,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t dream of advising you. But my experience, for what it’s worth, is that people behave differently when they think the whole world is watching them…and judging them. And I don’t just mean the little people.’
Greg finished his food and he smiled at Constance.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m keeping you from great piles of work.’
‘That’s OK. I probably haven’t been very good company. It was nice to get out though.’
‘Should I walk with you, back to the office? It’s the same direction as the Tube.’
‘No. I need a few things from the shops,’ Constance said. ‘Thanks for lunch. I’ll call you.’
Constance waited until Greg had left, before heading straight back to her office. She needed to think up how to drop into her next conversation with Judith, all the things Greg had just told her about the new TV channel. But without conceding that Judith might have been right after all and without giving away their source. She sensed this wasn’t a good time to reveal a lunch date with Greg, however informal.
15
Andy was on his way to court when the call came through. It was Phil, Graham’s assistant, who delivered the good news. ‘Calling on Graham’s behalf’, ‘pleased to offer you the job’, ‘got the green light for all our plans,’ ‘get you in for some rehearsals’. Andy processed the key messages swiftly, in accordance with his years of legal training.
Despite wanting to jump six feet in the air and whoop and shout, he settled for a more modest ‘that’s wonderful news’ before remembering himself sufficiently to ask what terms he was being offered.
‘I’ll send something across to look at,’ Phil said, ‘but I don’t think you’re going to be disappointed. Put it that way.’
‘I’ll look forward to it, then. Hm, if you’ve “got the green light” does that mean it isn’t secret any more?’
‘Wait, just a minute.’ Andy was put on hold and stepped back into a shop doorway. ‘Listen,’ Phil resumed their conversation, ‘Graham says you can tell your wife and anyone at work who needs to approve your three-month absence, on the basis that they keep it confidential too. After we announce the line-up, in the next couple of days, then you can go public. How’s that sound?’
‘Very clear. All fine, thank you.’
Andy continued his journey, his limbs carrying him forwards, his mind occupied elsewhere. Try as he might to remain focused on the job in hand – a rather nasty assault and battery charge he was prosecuting – the life-changing possibilities of what had just happened to him, were getting in the way. He should call Clare, he knew that, and tell her everything, from the first meeting with Graham to the negotiations with Phil. But the hours were likely to be a sore point. Clare wanted him around more at the moment, and this opportunity would keep him away. The only way to sell it would be as something short-term; short-term pain for long-term gain. That might work.
And then the email from Phil pinged into his inbox and he had to open it. Skipping through the preamble, he sought out the remuneration clause and his heart missed a beat. Wow! More than he had ever imagined; a year’s pay in three months. And that bonus provision was there too; a sliding scale; the more viewers he pulled in, the more he was going to get paid. They could have the family holiday that never happened last year, they could think about moving to a place with a garden, they could even contemplate some more help at home, to ease the pain of his absence. He might never have to mop up spilt Coco Pops or clean the toilet ever again.
But it wasn’t just the remuneration he would receive from Horizon, it was the doors it would open for him afterwards and for ever more. There may easily be spin-off shows or features on other programmes. He may never have to hang around police stations at night ever again.
He had a rare moment of panic. If things were going public soon, he’d have to tart up his profile on the chambers’ website. He’d been meaning to improve things for a while – a newer photograph, updating his key areas of expertise. And what about social media? Clare had persuaded him to adopt that awful photograph as his Facebook backdrop because she said he looked ‘wistful’. He’d have to delete it, and some of the ones from his most recent night out with his old school friends, and replace them with a host of wholesome family snaps.
Forcing himself to focus and relax, he scrolled back through to the top of the job-offer terms again and stared at the job title with pride and expectation. ‘Chief legal adviser and presenter - Court TV’. What a coup. What an achievement. He was heading for the big time.’
16
Judith and Constance sat opposite Debbie in a room with pale green walls at Denmow prison. Constance’s primary school had green walls. She had asked her form teacher, Miss Singh, why everything was green and she’d shrugged and said, ‘Better than purple, isn’t it, Constance?’ Since then, she’d read that green was considered soothing; Dulux advised that ‘celadon, eau de nil and mint green’ created ‘a peaceful ambiance and relieved tension’. No doubt the prison service had considered how appropriate that would be as a backdrop for prisoners’ consultations or perhaps, given the current trend for feature walls and bold colours, this was just what was left behind in the paint shop.
Debbie sat very still, her back straight, her chest hardly rising and falling, although her fingers crept up to her neck once or twice, retreating disappointed; her valuables had been packed away before her incarceration and there was no necklace this time to occupy them.
‘I hate the way she looks at us every time we arrive,’ Constance had confessed to Judith on their journey over, ‘like she thinks we’re going to tell her it was all a big mistake, and then we don’t.’
‘A mistake? What? That Rosie’s sitting at home with an intact cranium?’
Constance closed her lips tight.
‘I hadn’t noticed,’ Judith continued. ‘You’re better at that sort of thing than I am. It must be preferable that she still has hope, though? Otherwise, we’d have even more of a mountain to climb.’
Judith had been careful to watch Debbie as she entered the room today. And it was true that Debbie scrutinised each of them in turn, her eyes roving over their faces, exploring and probing. And that, by the time they were seated, that sharpness had gone.
‘Hi, Debbie. We have a court hearing tomorrow, where we are going to ask for a few things, mostly procedural. But we have some questions for you, things it would be good to clarify now, just in case. In particular, to try and work out who might be good witnesses for you and who the prosecution might want to testify against you. Is that OK?’
‘I’m not going anywhere, am I?’
Debbie hardly moved as she spoke.
‘Can we talk about the day of Rosie’s murder again?’ Judith leaned back in her chair, hoping her own movement might elicit something reciprocal from Debbie. No one liked to interview a statue.
‘But we’ve been over it so many times before,’ Debbie said.
‘You left Rosie at, what, 2pm, 2.10?’ Judith said.
‘Around then, maybe 2.15.’
‘And your training session started at 6?’
‘Yes.’
‘And it’s, what, twenty minutes on your moped from one place to the other?’
‘Depends on traffic and on where I can park the bike, but roughly that, yes.’
‘Where did you go in between?’
‘I went home. I told you before.’
‘Which is, what, fifteen minutes away?’
‘I wanted to grab some lunch, change, pick up my stuff: cones and flags. One of the girls brings the balls. It’s not easy to bring them on my bike.’
‘Didn’t Rosie offer you lunch?’
‘No.’
‘You usually start at 5pm, don’t you?’
‘I sometimes do an earlier session for kids who want to get into the team. I cancelled it that day.’
‘Why?’
‘When I arranged things with Rosie, I thought we might need to talk for longer, that I might hang around to see Ben, after school.’
‘Why was that?’
‘We were talking about what he was going to do, next year, in sixth form.’
‘So you anticipated that your session with Rosie might go on and then you would have to go straight into your 6pm training?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you have your stuff with you then, the cones and flags you just mentioned? I imagine you wouldn’t leave them on your moped.’
Debbie’s face coloured. ‘No,’ she said hotly. ‘I must have forgotten them.’
‘What clothes were you wearing when you went to visit Rosie?’
‘Nothing special, a blue tracksuit.’
‘Which you were wearing later on for training?’
‘Yes.’ Debbie huffed.
‘You didn’t change your clothes, then, when you arrived home, after all?’
‘No, I…I just didn’t. I can’t remember why now.’
Judith and Constance exchanged looks.
‘Isn’t that good enough? The police checked my clothes. They said there was nothing on them. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know that if I had battered my wife to death there might have been just a tiny bit of her blood on my clothing. Oh God!’ Debbie lay her head in her hands.
‘We only have your word that is what you were wearing earlier in the day,’ Judith said. ‘Constance, we should look at ways of corroborating that – other people who might have seen Debbie. Street cameras – that kind of thing – would be useful.’
‘But the other stuff isn’t, is it?’ Debbie looked up. ‘About leaving the kit at home.’
‘Not terrible, but it’s an anomaly and juries hate anomalies. At best it makes you look disorganised.’ Judith’s words hung in the air.
‘Oh,’ Constance said, remembering her visit to East Road. ‘Isn’t there a camera outside the front of Rosie’s house? That will help.’
‘It doesn’t work.’
‘It doesn’t work?’
‘It’s just an empty box. It did work for a few months, then Rosie got fed up with having it monitored. I don’t know why, but I could never get her to take security seriously. She thought she was…invincible, I suppose.’
‘That’s a shame then, about the camera. But there must be other ways to check. Where is your moped?’ Judith asked.
‘The police took it.’
‘Does it have any kind of tracker? That could help with times as well, couldn’t it?’
‘It’s eight years old. But you can check.’
‘And your phone is with the police too, is it?’
‘Yes.’
‘And that’s also old?’
‘It’s the latest iPhone. Ben insisted, when I was having problems with my ancient model. He took me to the Apple shop. I don’t use half the features. They got a very good deal out of me.’
‘Connie. You need to talk to Dawson and get access to Debbie’s phone. I can’t believe we haven’t had it already, now I think about it. If they give you any rubbish about there being nothing relevant on it, tell them we will apply immediately to court.’
‘Why is it so important, suddenly?’ The spark was lit momentarily in Debbie’s eyes.
‘Even I know that these new phones track your whereabouts and whether you are stationary or moving. It won’t solve the crime, but it will go a long way to corroborate what you say about the time you arrived and left and going home in the middle.’
Debbie smiled weakly. ‘Good. That sounds good.’
‘Can we take a minute to talk about your public image?’ Judith asked. ‘You were often on the front pages and not always for playing football?’
‘So what?’
‘It may be used against you, to…show that you’re not such an upstanding citizen.’
‘Do I really have to worry about any of that, when it was nothing…and years ago.’
‘It’s part of your public image.’
‘Look, I was a kid from the East End and all these doors opened for me. I wasn’t going to stand outside and watch the others go in, was I? But it was all harmless stuff.’
‘All of it?’
‘All of it.’ Debbie shifted her weight forward for the first time and sniffed loudly.
‘All right. What about on the pitch? You had a few nasty moments.’
‘I only ever had two red cards. Sure, I would take other players on, that’s how I played, but I was never reckless.’
‘What about the tackle on Craig Mosby, in the FA Cup semi-final?’ Judith looked on with astonishment, as Constance asked her question. ‘His leg was broken in two places. It almost ended his career.’
‘All right, maybe that one time. But I slipped. It wasn’t deliberate. Anyone could see that on the replay. Craig knew that too. We had a photo together, in the hospital. And it was years ago.’
‘Tell us about George Scopos?’ Judith continued.
‘He’s the West Ham owner.’ Debbie frowned before replying. ‘We…disagreed over the new hires,’ she said, ‘and he asked me to leave.’
‘So the prosecution will bring someone from the world of football, maybe him, most probably the person who liked you least. Have a think who that might be and who we could put forward to say nice things about you. We have the girls you coach now, which is great.’
‘I don’t want you bringing them into this. They’re all kids and they don’t need it.’
‘Your sentiments are very noble, but this is a murder trial. If I were you, I would accept help where it’s offered. Can we go back to Rosie’s parents now?’ Judith asked.
Debbie scowled at Judith. ‘How is any of this relevant?’ she said.
‘It’s relevant to motive. Would you rather discuss this with us now or, for the first time, in front of the jury?’
‘Her father is dead. Her mother, Elaine, and me, no, we really don’t get on. I’ve already told you that too.’
‘Yes, you called her a witch as I remember. Why didn’t you get on?’
‘They thought Rosie should have married better. She had met Prince Harry when he set up those Games, her programme covered it. That was more what Elaine wanted for her precious daughter.’
‘Did they tell you that?’
‘Rosie told me, laughed it off. When I didn’t laugh, she tried to dress it up with fancy words; her parents worried we were not compatible, we had to give them time, as I was different from other men she’d dated. But they never liked me. Her father wasn’t even going to walk her down the aisle. Point blank refused.’
‘What happened?’
‘Rosie could be very persuasive. She worked on him till he agreed.’
‘How did that make you feel?’
‘Is that what they’re going to say? That I was full of hatred and resentment since my wedding day and it all boiled over. I wasn’t that bothered, really. I was only upset because it hurt Rosie.’
‘Elaine will be a witness. What will she say?’
‘That I ruined her daughter’s life. That her husband’s heart attack was because of me, the shock of hearing about me.’
‘And what do you say to that?’
‘That I was a good husband, always, in every respect.’
‘Supportive?’
‘Yes.’
‘Loving?’
‘Yes.’
‘Interested in Rosie’s wellbeing?’
‘Yes.’
‘Faithful?’
Debbie was silent. Constance caught her breath. She would never have asked that question.
‘Were you faithful to your wife?’ Judith asked again and the room shrank in size. Did Constance imagine it or did Judith’s lips twitch at the word ‘faithful’?
Debbie stood up and crossed to the tiny window. She lay her hand against the pane, noticed her fingernail was broken and rubbed it against its neighbouring finger. ‘Not in the way you mean,’ she said.
‘There’s only one way to be unfaithful in my book.’
‘It was right at the end and we were already getting the divorce. We were together for twenty years and I never strayed, even though there was lots of temptation. I was…experimenting, enjoying some freedom again.’
‘And will the other willing participant in this celebration of liberty have anything to say publicly, do you think?’
‘No, definitely not.’
‘I hope not, for your sake.’
Debbie reached up and plucked at her hair, curling a strand around her index finger.
‘Why did you marry Rosie?’ Constance asked.
‘I loved her,’ Debbie said. ‘I loved her more than anyone else I had ever met. And I still do.’
Judith closed her note book. ‘Can you see that your declaration of love for Rosie, may be…difficult for people to accept, given your divorce and your transition?’ she asked.
‘I see that,’ Debbie said, ‘but it’s still the truth.’
‘All right. One thing we need to decide is whether or not you give evidence in your own defence, which is particularly pertinent, as you keep vetoing my recommended defence witnesses. How do you feel about that?’
‘I want to, I think. I want to be able to tell people, to tell the jury, what I just told you. If you believe me, I hope they will too.’
Debbie returned to her seat.
‘After tomorrow’s hearing, we’ll consider everything and talk to you again, though we won’t decide finally until nearer the trial. But, if you do give evidence, you have to stay calm, like you are today. Do you understand? No shouting, no swearing, no nasty comments, no sarcasm, no theatricals. Just calm and understated.’
