“You were saying that Ms. Hardy seemed agitated?”
“Sometimes.”
“But being agitated is one thing. Another issue is whether Ms. Hardy had a propensity to violence.” Brockbank paused as if deep in thought. “Did you see any suggestion of that?”
“Yes.”
Tabitha felt a jolt of alarm. What was this?
“I was coming back from a run, running along the road near the beach, and ahead of me I saw Ms. Hardy and this local man, Robert Coombe. They were having, well . . .” He was searching for the right word.
“An altercation?” said Brockbank. “An argument?”
“I only came as it was ending. She was walking away. I had to help him.”
“Help him? Why?”
“His nose was bleeding. I had to check that it wasn’t broken.”
Brockbank turned to the jury with a theatrical expression of surprise and dismay.
Tabitha had been sitting, stunned, when Michaela leaned across and hissed in her ear, “That wasn’t in the statement.”
It was like she had woken Tabitha from a dream. She immediately called out, “What’s going on? That wasn’t in his statement. What’s going on?”
“Please,” said Judge Munday. “If you have something to say, you stand up, Mr. Brockbank will yield to you and then you can speak. In a level tone.”
“All right,” said Tabitha, standing up and taking a breath. “That wasn’t in Dr. Mallon’s statement. Is that OK?”
Judge Munday glanced sharply at Brockbank. “Is that true?”
Brockbank coughed. “Well, I, er . . .” He coughed again.
“Right,” she said. “Clear the court.”
The jury members got to their feet, gathered notebooks, pens and water bottles and trailed out of the court. The public gallery and the press gallery also emptied. Finally there was silence.
“Mr. Brockbank,” said Judge Munday. “What’s going on?”
Simon Brockbank and Elinor Ackroyd had been huddled together, whispering urgently. Now he looked round and hastily stood up.
“I’m sorry,” he said, in quite a different tone from any he had used before. “There must have been a failure of communication. Dr. Mallon was reinterviewed. Someone must have forgotten to, er . . .”
“Follow their legal responsibility to send it to the defense? Is that what you mean, Mr. Brockbank?”
“I apologize to the court,” he said, bowing his head slightly. “I’m minded to stop that entire line of examination.”
“What good’s that?” said Tabitha. “You’ve said it now. You told the jury that I got into a fight. What are you going to do? Tell them that they have to forget it because of some technicality?”
Everything about Judge Munday looked very stern, her tightened lips, her furrowed brow. And for once it wasn’t aimed at Tabitha.
“Ms. Hardy is absolutely correct. I think we’ll have to proceed. But”—and she rapped her knuckles on the desk—“if you try this one more time, there will be trouble. Do you understand?”
“Yes, My Lady.”
She turned to Tabitha.
“You’re entitled to a recess, if you want, to go over this evidence. Would you like that?”
Tabitha looked at Michaela, who shrugged. She felt shocked and jangled and she could do with a rest. But Simon Brockbank looked a bit shaken as well and Mallon was probably worrying about what had happened. Besides, she knew what he was going to say.
“We might as well go on,” she said.
When Brockbank resumed his examination, it was in a more routine tone. He established that Coombe had been bleeding and Mallon had helped to stanch the bleeding and Coombe had been shaken by the experience and no, Dr. Mallon had never seen an act of violence like that in the village before. Had it raised a concern in his mind about Ms. Hardy’s psychological state? Yes, it had.
Michaela leaned over and whispered in Tabitha’s ear:
“So what did he do? Did he call the police? Call an ambulance?”
“All right,” Tabitha whispered back. “Good. All right.”
She looked round. She realized that Judge Munday and the members of the court were looking at her. Brockbank had finished his examination. She stood up and stared straight at Dr. Mallon. He glanced away and then back at her. He looked unhappy.
“Did you call the police?” she asked.
“What?” said Mallon. “No.”
She looked down again. “Did you call an ambulance?”
“It was just a nosebleed.”
“Nosebleeds can be serious.”
“This wasn’t a serious nosebleed.”
“Did Rob Coombe tell you what had happened?”
“No.”
“Did you ask him?”
“No.”
“How long were you with him?”
“I don’t know, a couple of minutes.”
“And then you left him?”
“Yes.”
“Weren’t you worried I might come back and hit him again?”
Mallon gave the faintest of smiles but didn’t reply.
“You’ve got to give an answer.”
“I didn’t think about it.”
Tabitha couldn’t think of any more questions about this. Michaela nudged her elbow and she looked round. On her pad, Michaela had written in capital letters: “2ND INTERVIEW. WHY?” Tabitha looked questioningly at her but Michaela just nodded. Tabitha turned back to Mallon.
“Why did the police do a second interview with you?”
“You should ask them.”
Tabitha felt a moment of panic, as if she had forgotten her next line, and then suddenly she had an idea of what Michaela had meant by her note.
“Hadn’t they got enough from the first one?”
There was a moment of hesitation before Mallon answered. “They didn’t say.”
“Well, what did they say?”
“They said to tell them anything I could think of.”
“Why didn’t you tell them about the thing with Rob Coombe in the first interview?”
“I didn’t think of it.”
“Because it didn’t seem important?”
“I just didn’t think of it.”
Tabitha felt she’d run out of questions again. She picked up her notebook and flicked through it. Somewhere she had made some notes about when Mallon had come to visit her in prison. She couldn’t find them. She remembered a few sketchy details. She wasn’t sure they’d be much help.
“Were you Stuart Rees’s doctor?”
“Yes.”
“That’s kind of true and not true, isn’t it? I meant, were you Stuart Rees’s doctor when he died?”
“No.”
“Because he left you.”
“He changed doctors.”
“And was it a friendly changing of doctors?”
“It wasn’t friendly or unfriendly.”
“But he didn’t just leave. He wrote a letter of complaint, didn’t he?”
Mallon gave a nervous smile. “It’s more complicated than that.”
“You have to answer the question,” said Judge Munday.
“He did make a complaint.”
“But
