“That must have been hard.”
“Not really. I knew his hostility came from a deeply troubled place, so really, I felt sorry for him.”
Sorry for Stuart, sorry for me, thought Tabitha.
“A deeply troubled place?” she asked.
“Yes. Once he—” She stopped.
“Yes?”
“He was very heated. I’m afraid I had spoken words that perhaps were not wise. I said something along the lines of his version of God being rather angry and unyielding, and he laughed and said he was damned whatever he did now.”
A murmur ran through the court. The reporters were scribbling away furiously. Tabitha glanced up and saw Laura leaning forward, her face in a thin line and her eyes shining oddly in her drawn face.
“Damned,” she said. “He told you that?”
“You have to remember it was in the heat of the moment,” said Mel. “But yes. He said he was damned for what he had done.”
Tabitha felt a bit giddy. A few minutes earlier the vicar had told the court that she, Tabitha, had said she was beyond hope and forgiveness, and now she was saying that Stuart had also said as much. As if the two of them were in the same pit of despair and self-hatred.
“Why would he say that?”
“Perhaps he was thinking of what he did to you all those years ago.”
Once again, Tabitha didn’t know if what Mel was saying helped or damaged her case. Probably neither, but this sunshiny woman had brought a darkness into the courtroom, as if the trial was no longer just about murder but about sin and depravity.
“Thank you. I don’t have anything else to ask you,” she said.
Sixty-Four
Tabitha could hardly bear to look at Andy when he gave his evidence, standing in the dock in his cheap, badly fitting suit, newly shaved, looking like he wanted to be somewhere else. On several occasions the judge told him to speak up.
But it didn’t really matter that he mumbled and looked shifty. His evidence was solid enough. Tabitha knew exactly what he was going to say, but she was still dismayed by it.
He told the jury—although he didn’t look in their direction, but down at his feet or sometimes at the woman sitting beneath the judge’s bench—who he was, how long he had lived in Okeham (all his life), what he did and how he knew Tabitha. He described the work they had been doing on her house, and he grew more confident as he talked about joinery and damp courses and leaking gutters. He talked about how he had been working up the road that day at Ken Turner’s house, though Ken hadn’t been there, and had gone to Tabitha’s when he’d finished, at about half past four.
“Sunset was at fifteen fifty-three that day,” said Simon Brockbank. “So it would have been dark, I presume?”
“Yes,” said Andy. Dark, cold and sleety; filthy weather. His voice became a mumble as he told the court how Tabitha hadn’t answered the door at first and when she had, she had been odd.
“In what sense odd?”
“Not herself,” said Andy and when Simon Brockbank waited, he added, “Maybe she’d been crying, or something. Her eyes were bloodshot. Not herself.”
Again, he cast his wild look at Tabitha. She wanted to smile at him but her lips were stiff.
“And then what happened?”
“I went inside. I wanted to talk to her about the work we’d planned. We were going to lay floorboards. But she wasn’t right in herself,” he said uselessly. “I thought she was ill maybe.”
“And then?”
“Then I went out the back door to get the wood.”
“Where was the wood kept?”
“Shed,” muttered Andy.
“In the shed at the back of the house, is that right?”
“Yeah.”
“But did anything happen before you went out there?”
“She said not to go.”
“Can you speak up, please?”
“She said not to go out there.”
“She said not to go out there,” repeated Simon Brockbank. “I see. And what was her manner when she said this?”
“How do you mean?”
“Did she say it calmly?”
“No.”
“So how did she say it?”
“She shouted it.”
“I’m sorry. Please can you say that more clearly?”
“I said, she shouted it. Like she was in a panic.”
“But you went anyway.”
“Yes.”
So it went on. His faltering words, the barrister’s fluent ones, back and forth. The body. The blood. The staring eyes in Stuart’s dead face. What Tabitha had done, had said, how she had seemed almost drunk with the horror. How he had called emergency services. Tabitha had lain on the sofa with blood on her face.
“Did she say anything?”
“She was kind of gabbling stuff. Like she was in pain.”
Tabitha shielded her face with her hand. She felt eyes on her. They were imagining her smeared in blood and wild. She was imagining herself.
At last it was over and it was her turn. She stood up and faced Andy. Their gazes locked.
“Sorry about all this,” she said.
Andy half smiled. For a moment his face was handsome again. She didn’t know what to ask him. In the silence she could hear Simon Brockbank tapping his pen on the table: tick, tick, tick.
“Do you think I killed him?” she asked.
Beside her, Michaela let out a loud groan. “You promised never to ask that again,” she said, in a voice loud enough for everyone to hear.
Andy stared at Tabitha, horrified. In that brief moment Tabitha understood that he did. And she knew that everyone else in the court also understood.
“Oh,” she said.
“I mean, of course I didn’t think . . . you’re my friend. It’s just . . . look, I don’t think you would hurt a fly unless . . . well, unless you weren’t yourself.”
He was saying other things, about how the body was in her house and that was strange, but that didn’t mean . . . Tabitha couldn’t hear properly for the roaring in her ears. The room was going in and out of focus.
She whirled round toward Simon Brockbank and Elinor Ackroyd, though their faces weren’t properly in focus, just bland circles of discreet pleasure.
“You fuckers,” she shouted, so loudly the words ripped at her throat. “He was pretty much the only
