“Not great.”
There was a pause.
“I feel like I should say something positive,” said Michaela.
“Don’t,” said Tabitha. “I wouldn’t believe you.”
Forty-Eight
Tabitha, sitting in the small room off the library, selected a sheet of paper from the sheaf that the librarian had given her. She unscrewed the lid of the pen and tested it on a page in her notebook to make sure it wasn’t about to run out.
She wrote her name at the top of the paper in her neatest cursive. Underneath it she wrote “Crow Grange” and beside that her prison number. On the left-hand side of the paper she wrote the date: May 11, 2019.
Then, in capital letters in the center of the page, she wrote: “DEFENSE STATEMENT.”
She paused. She had the strong urge to lie down on the floor and close her eyes. She recognized that urge, the insatiable desire to sleep away the time, a sleep that didn’t erase tiredness but added to it. She preferred burning with rage to this heavy weariness. Fight, Michaela had said. She rubbed her sore eyes.
What was her defense?
“None of the evidence against me proves that I killed Stuart Rees,” she wrote, making sure each letter was clear, each “i” dotted.
She stared at what she had written. What else? She couldn’t think of anything but she needed to add something to this single, paltry sentence.
“I intend to show that the prosecution case is built on the fact that I am an outsider in Okeham. Just because I could have done it does not mean that I did,” she wrote, just so the statement took up more space on the blank whiteness of the page.
There was nothing else. She had spent all these weeks interviewing people, looking at CCTV footage, going over the facts and the statements again and again, and all she could come up with was this.
She was about to fold the sheet of paper in two and slide it into the A5 envelope when she remembered that she should add the names of witnesses she intended to call. Her head throbbed.
“Witnesses,” she wrote. She underlined the word.
She chewed her lip. She couldn’t think of a single person. Maybe she should call someone as a character witness, but who? Her old boyfriend, who had decided he wasn’t going to see her anymore? Her employer, who she had met twice and who hadn’t replied to her letter? Her friend Jane who was living in Japan and who she hadn’t seen for three years? She thought of asking Shona—Shona who was having an affair with Rob Coombe. She thought of asking Andy—Andy who had told the police she had attempted to prevent him from discovering the body. The sense of her isolation, her loneliness, flooded into her like ice-cold water. She blinked.
“To come,” she wrote.
She folded the paper.
Forty-Nine
“What have you got there?”
“Pork pie salad,” said Dana, prodding at the mottled pink meat. “You?”
“Soya lasagna. It’s horrible.”
“It looks it.”
“Not long now,” said Tabitha. “Just keep going.” She was talking to herself as well as to Dana. Her voice seemed to come from a long way off.
Dana nodded. She was like a mole pushing its way through the earth, thought Tabitha. They both were.
After they’d eaten, they sat on Tabitha’s bed and Dana read out loud while Tabitha occasionally corrected or encouraged her. It was a fantasy novel, full of dragons and warriors and unsatisfactory magic, and her attention wandered. The sky through the window was still blue, that lovely deepening blue of evening.
They got into their nightclothes; they brushed their teeth. When she spat into the sink, Tabitha saw that her gums were bleeding. Her mouth tasted of iron. Her head ached. She hadn’t had a period since being in prison, but now she had a dull ache in her lower back. Ten days to go, she thought. Less. Terror shot through her, turning her insides watery.
She imagined walking into the courtroom, men and women in their stupid wigs, standing in the dock, all eyes on her. She had nothing to say. She had nothing.
She sat in bed with her notebook and turned the pages, looked at the map with its drawings of the boats out at sea and the tractor beside the farmhouse. And of her house with its sheds. She looked at all the names again: Shona, Andy, Rob, Terry, Luke, Owen Mallon, Mel. She thought about Laura and her pursed mouth, that sense of her suppressing the story that was coiled tightly inside.
She thought about Stuart. She thought of him in that small car all those years ago, the stale air, him pulling up her skirt, pulling down her knickers. Why had she passively let him, neither encouraging nor resisting, but limp, almost lifeless, staring out at the trees and waiting for it to be over? Why had she returned to the place where that had happened? Why, when there were so many things that made her furiously angry, had she never been angry about that until now, when like a hot ember, the fact of what he had done smoldered inside the dry tinder of her mind?
What had she done on that day of his murder?
She lay down. From far off, she could hear someone calling out for help, over and over again.
She shut her eyes tightly. Bluebells, she thought. Swallows. Floppy pink quince blossom; clean green leaves unfurling. The dark sea rolling in, tossing seaweed in hissing heaps onto the shingle. A moon. Stars. Out there.
Ten days.
“Please,” she whispered under her breath. “Please.”
Fifty
She was sitting in the library with her notebook, the contents of which she knew by heart now, even the crossings out, when Vera tottered in. Tabitha hadn’t seen her for days, maybe weeks; the women said she had gone to hospital with a chest infection. They said she was mad and getting madder. They laughed and tapped their temples with a forefinger. Vera looked ten years older, more. Her eyes were red-rimmed and her long
