“Exactly. I’m supposed to be representing you. You don’t tell me about your history of depression and I have to learn about it from Dr. Hartson and from reading your medical history. You don’t tell me that the murder victim sexually abused you—”
“That’s not true.”
Mora Piozzi gazed at her. She didn’t frown so much as draw her whole face into an expression of forbidding incredulity. “You were fifteen, Tabitha. He was your teacher.”
“It wasn’t like that.”
“So what was it like?”
Tabitha folded her arms round herself and looked away. Her mind was working very slowly. She couldn’t explain to herself why it was that she hadn’t mentioned to the solicitor her . . . what was the word? Not “relationship,” not “involvement,” surely not “abuse”?—her thing with Stuart. She realized now that at some level it must have occurred to her to do so. Without consciously making the decision, she had withheld the information, pushed it deep down inside her. She felt bewildered and suddenly, shockingly, scared.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“You don’t know what it was like?”
“I don’t know. I can’t say. I don’t want to talk about it. Please.”
“I’m afraid you don’t get to choose.”
“Don’t I? I thought I could just remain silent.”
The woman sighed and passed a hand in front of her face. When she looked at Tabitha again, she no longer looked angry, but distressed.
“I’m representing you,” she said. “You need to trust me. I want to help you but I can only do that if you let me. Do you understand?”
Tabitha nodded.
“You can see how this looks, can’t you?”
“How does it look?”
“Frankly, it looks bad. And the fact that you concealed relevant information makes it worse.”
“I see.”
“Let me try again. Can you tell me what happened between you and Stuart Rees when you were fifteen?”
Tabitha stared down at her hands with the bracelet of eczema round the wrists and the bitten fingernails. She felt small and soiled and didn’t want to be looked at.
“There’s not much to say. You need to understand it was a whole different life. Something that had gone and I never thought of it. That’s true,” she added, seeing the disbelief in her solicitor’s face. “When I came back and met him again, I barely recognized him, you know. It was like meeting a stranger. When I was at school, he looked normal but now he’d got properly overweight, and his hair had receded and he’d grown a beard, like he needed to compensate.”
That was the first thing she’d said to him when they had met again, two days after she had moved into her house: “You’ve grown a beard.” He had stroked his chin, as if pleasantly surprised to feel the hair growing there, and said it was easier than shaving but Laura didn’t like it. He’d said she was looking well, though his gaze had never settled on her but shifted rapidly this way and that. Then he had added how nice it was that they were neighbors, and that she must come round for tea sometime, for old times’ sake. She never had, though once Laura had left a lemon drizzle cake on her doorstep.
“What are you saying, Tabitha?”
“I’m saying that he was a different person and so was I and that’s why it wasn’t relevant. It was like it had never happened.”
“Like it had never happened?”
“Yes.”
“I’m not sure a jury would find that very convincing.”
“I don’t care. It’s true.”
“You need to care. How many times did he have sex with you?”
“Not many.”
“Once, twice, ten times, more?”
“I don’t know,” said Tabitha. She could feel herself shutting down, the lights going off one by one. “More than twice,” she made herself say.
“You never told anyone.”
“No.”
“Why?”
“It didn’t feel right. It was private.”
“Were you infatuated?”
Tabitha heard a snickering sound coming from her. She put her fist into her mouth and bit down on it.
“No,” she said eventually.
“Was he violent?”
“No.”
“Did he—?”
“No.”
“Tabitha, listen to me.”
“I’m listening.”
“Your hearing is in a week’s time.”
“I know.”
“In the light of this new information, we need to think about how to proceed.”
“You’re telling me they’re not going to throw the case out.”
Mora Piozzi looked aghast. “They certainly are not,” she said eventually. Then she continued, carefully, as if worried that Tabitha might not understand her. “It is my opinion that on the seventh of February, we have three options: you can plead not guilty, you can plead guilty to manslaughter and you can—”
“Wait,” said Tabitha.
“Yes?”
“I need to ask you something.”
“All right.”
Tabitha took a deep breath. “Do you think I did it?”
“I’m your solicitor. I’m here to represent you as best as I can.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“My job isn’t to find the truth.”
“So you won’t answer?”
“No.”
“Which means you think I might have done it?”
“It means I’m acting as your solicitor.”
“But I need my solicitor to believe in me.” To her dismay, Tabitha felt her eyes fill with thick tears. She turned her head away and blinked furiously, feeling Mora Piozzi’s steady gaze on her.
“No, Tabitha, you need your solicitor to do the best that he or she possibly can to represent you. Which is what I want to do, but I need your help.”
“I’m in trouble, aren’t I?”
“We’re only at the beginning of a long process.”
Tabitha couldn’t speak. The room was bleary through her tears. She had been counting the days until February 7, but now she understood that that was only the start of it. She thought of her cell, where the sky was just a tiny square in the concrete wall and where at night she felt she would suffocate. She thought of footsteps echoing down corridors, doors shutting, keys being turned; of howls in the darkness, eyes watching her.
“Tabitha? Did you hear what I was saying?”
“No. Sorry.”
“I was saying that you have to take things one step at a time.”
Tabitha nodded.
“The next step is the court appearance. You have to consider your options.”
“Yes, you said that. You said you thought I had three options. Not guilty. Guilty of manslaughter. And you didn’t say the third.”
“Guilty
