Someone was asking her about her movements during December 21 and she was saying “fuck off’” repeatedly. The duty solicitor was reminding her that she was allowed to remain silent and she was telling him to fuck off as well.
“Where were you all day, Tabitha?” a voice asked.
“I don’t know.” The words slid into each other, barely comprehensible. “I don’t know anything.”
“Do you have any idea of how the body of Stuart Rees came to be on your property?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you see him?”
“Blood,” she said. “I was covered in his blood.”
“Did you kill him, Ms. Hardy?”
And the duty solicitor was urgently telling her not to answer and her voice was saying she couldn’t remember anything.
“You mean you can’t remember if you killed him?”
“I just want this to be over.”
“Please try to answer our questions, Tabitha.”
“Sorry. I’m sorry.”
“What are you sorry about, Tabitha?” asked a female voice that oozed with sympathy. Tabitha couldn’t remember a woman being there as well.
“Everything. Every fucking thing. I’m just tired. So tired.”
And the woman said, still in the same concerned voice, that of course she must be tired and that once she had told them what she had done, then she could rest.
The voice said something incomprehensible. Tabitha opened her eyes briefly to look at the transcript. “How can I escape?”
She closed her eyes again.
“Can you repeat that, Tabitha?” said the man.
“No. I can’t do this anymore. I can’t. I have to go home. Please let me go home.”
At last there was silence. The voice had stopped. Tabitha opened her eyes. She looked round to see Michaela’s troubled face. She looked across at the jury and they gazed back at her. She turned slightly to where the reporters were crowded onto their benches and then to the judge, who looked like a carved effigy on her raised bench.
She stood up, keeping a hand on the table because she wasn’t sure her legs would hold her. She cleared her throat.
“That,” she said in a raspy voice, “is called depression. It’s called trauma.”
With no warning, she felt her spirits lift. Everyone had listened to her howling out like a beast. She had heard herself, but she was still here. She hadn’t died of shame. She stood up straighter.
“Depression is an illness,” she said and her voice rang out. “I was ill. And the body of a man I had once known was found in my outhouse. It was terrifying.”
Simon Brockbank was bouncing his pen again: marking the seconds. Time passing and outside the year and the world were going on without her.
Tabitha fixed her eyes on Judge Munday. “It wasn’t a confession. It was just human distress.”
Then it was over. The case for the prosecution had been made, the court was adjourned until the following morning and Tabitha was led out. She was taken straight to the van, briefly seeing the blue sky and feeling summer on her skin, and driven back to her cell whose walls were sweaty in the heat. She sat on her bed and buried her head in her hands and tried to gather her thoughts into some kind of coherence.
How had she done? She supposed she had done pretty well, if doing well meant bringing to harsh light how hostile the village was to her; if it meant smearing everyone, making them all seem suspicious and dishonest and acting in bad faith. She felt like she had lifted a stone on Okeham, so that the pretty little village by the sea where visitors came to eat ice cream and stand at the spot where Coleridge had once stood, where everyone knew each other and helped each other, was revealed as a place crawling with petty resentments, jealousy and malice.
A thought came to her that felt like a physical blow. Her head rang with it. It was Stuart who had done that to the community, who had turned people into their worst versions of themselves. That was what he did: he saw people’s weaknesses and exploited them. He had done it to Rob Coombe, to Mel, to Owen Mallon. He’d done it to his wife and to his own son. He’d done it to her all those years ago, recognizing the power he could have over a lonely, prickly teenager.
She was glad he was dead.
She sat with that thought for several minutes, still enclosed in the darkness of her cupped hands. Did that mean that she had killed him after all? Listening to herself being interviewed at the police station, her unhinged words, she had felt briefly certain that for all her success in weakening the case against her, she was the killer.
Abruptly, she stood up. No. No, she wouldn’t have killed Stuart because she hadn’t understood until after he was dead how much damage he had done to her. And she wouldn’t have killed Stuart because she wasn’t a killer.
She walked back and forth in her cell; three steps one way, three the other. She knew that she had chipped away at the case against her. But it wasn’t enough, because she had played the CCTV over and over in
