Trust me. This is the truth now.
I look out at the cars, the people, the blurred beige and grey, open the glove box and push the letter inside. This new grief might be heavy and cruel, but this new sense of responsibility is worse, heavier; a dread no longer silvery but black and thick like cooling tar. I used to think that people whose lives were stuck in limbo carried on only because it was easier. Easier than giving up. Easier than stopping. But now I know it’s because there’s no alternative, no escape. That the tide will come, and all you can do is stay afloat. And wait for it to turn.
I fold up the smaller piece of paper and push it into my jeans pocket. Open the car door and get out. Face those smooth stone walls and high windows.
Because I can’t put it off any longer either.
*
I try not to look at the receptionist who checks my ID, or at my unsteady hands as I put my phone and bag inside a locker, or at the guard as I walk through the metal detector and consent to a rub-down search. The secure waiting area is upstairs, and I sit down, keep my eyes trained on the neutral carpet. Maybe no one knows who I am anyway, or who I’m here to see.
Ross’s sentencing was big news. It was televised. I watched it alone, in the dark, while reporters banged on my door. The judge’s voice reminded me of Mum’s: high and hectoring, inviting neither opinion nor dissent.
Mr Ross Iain MacAuley, a jury has found you guilty by majority verdict of the callous murder of your wife, Ellice MacAuley. After subjecting her to months, perhaps years, of physical and mental abuse, you decided and then planned, motivated in part perhaps by the realisation that she was intending to leave you, to murder her and pass it off as an accident at sea. I find that showed significant premeditation and cold-headedness. I also find that you believed you would profit financially from her death. You pled not guilty. You have shown no remorse. Against these aggravating factors, I find little in the way of mitigation. Therefore, I feel I must pass a sentence of life imprisonment, with a punishment part of fifteen years for the murder of Ellice MacAuley, and three years for attempting to defeat the ends of justice.
The reporters have stopped hounding me now. The trial, the conviction, have already been all but forgotten. And Rafiq was wrong. No one has made any connection between us and the two twelve-year-old girls found at Granton Harbour in 1998. And no one has mentioned the murder–suicide at 36 Westeryk Road, except as macabre coincidence.
I catch the eye of an old man with yellow whiskers, and when he grins, I look away. The intermittent bang of vending machines turns my headache into a dull throb.
A guard opens a door, beckons us all with a half-arsed finger. ‘Twelve,’ he says to me as I pass him inside the doorway. I find the table, sit down, clasp my fingers together. I don’t want to see him. I never wanted to have to see him again. And yet.
The prisoners file in. I feel Ross before I see him: a trickle of cold against my spine, a flutter in my heart. He stops next to the table, long enough that I have to look up. He looks great. His hair is short. His eyes are no longer bloodshot, the skin beneath them clear. On the day he took the stand, the flesh beneath his cheekbones was sunken, dark with stubble. He was charming, passionate, credible. He cried. Though I’d felt his stare throughout most of the trial, that day he never glanced in my direction once.
‘Hello, Cat,’ he says, and his smile is warm, unsure. ‘It’s good to see you. I didn’t think I would.’ The last is a question, but I refuse to answer it, not yet. I need to be in control of this whole conversation; I can’t let any bit of him in until I’ve made my choice.
He sits down, keeps his smile. When he stretches out his legs, I cross mine at the ankles under the seat of my chair. But when he clears his throat, I make myself look at him. If I can’t do that, I’m screwed before I’ve even started.
‘Why are you here?’ His gaze is too intense. Peat-brown eyes flecked with silver.
I close mine, and they sting. Because I’ve been grieving for him too, I can’t pretend I haven’t. ‘I don’t know yet.’
He leans closer. Close enough that I can smell him. ‘I want – I need – you to know how sorry I am about what happened that night …’ He swallows, and his throat clicks. ‘I’m so sorry that I hurt you, Cat. I’ve thought about it every day, and I don’t blame you for what you said at the trial, I don’t blame you for anything. I promise you I don’t.’
Because I am the main reason he’s here. I am why there was so little in the way of mitigation. I was the Crown’s best witness, and the most damning part of my testimony was not what I’d found or heard, not even the oxycodone and diazepam that they found in my wine glass and my blood – but the fact that Ross and I had been having sex. I endured the telling of that truth, even the snide cross-examination of it by Ross’s QC and then the wider, snider world, because it was so damning. So much of the prosecution’s case was circumstantial: El’s letter, Ross’s false statements, the physical finds, the mobile phone data, camera footage, even the turning up of a will that Ross knew nothing about, in which El left
