Cath Staincliffe - The Kindest Thing

‘Not as such.’

‘But you inferred that he was desperate to commit suicide?’

Her tone riles me and I feel a tide of anger mounting beneath my fear. ‘He had said, ‘‘Tomorrow.’’ I knew what he meant.’

‘Did you check? Did you ask him outright?’

‘No.’ My blood boils.

‘You just chose to interpret it that way.’

‘Why?’ I yell, knowing as I do that this is folly. ‘Why the hell would I want to do that? I wanted him to live.’

In the aftershock there is a deep silence. Briony Webber doesn’t reply but pauses, gives a tight smile of forgiveness before she sallies forth. ‘I put it to you that you knew full well what you were doing. That you believed your husband had a right to die and that you supported him to the hilt.’

‘No!’ My face is hot, my composure lost.

‘And that when the medicine failed to work as quickly as you expected, you had the plastic bag at hand to complete what you had started. Is that not the case?’

‘I didn’t know what I was doing.’ I force down my fickle temper, mute my tone.

‘I say you did. And having carried out your promise to the bitter end, you then made every attempt to cover your tracks, did you not?’

‘Yes.’ I can hardly say otherwise.

‘You hid the evidence. You lied to your family, then to the police. I put it to you that had you been incapable of responsible thought, as my learned friend suggests, you would not have then had the wherewithal to maintain this fabric of lies. You knew exactly what you were doing when you fed those drugs to your husband, when you selected that plastic bag and held it over his face until he suffocated. When you hid the evidence.’

‘No. I was wrong. I was so mixed up.’

‘Ms Shelley, you were able to withstand hours of questioning with little evident distress. How do you account for that?’

I wear it well, I want to say, but simply shake my head. The more I say the more she will devour me.

‘Only when the evidence against you became overwhelming, when you were told that your own daughter was a witness for the prosecution, did you even admit to any complicity in Mr Draper’s death. I suggest your change of tack was simply a tactic to try to save your own skin.’

Of course it bloody was, you daft bitch. What else could I do? There is no other defence they will let me make. ‘I’m telling the truth,’ my voice rings out, a tremor of rage in it.

‘Now, when it suits. But we have heard different versions of events. You lied in order to acquire the drugs in the first place, you lied to your own children, to Neil’s parents, you lied time and again. If you lied then, how do we know you are not lying now? Lying to the court, lying to this jury. There is precious little in what we have heard to suggest you are a credible witness.’

I look directly across at the jury, feeling miserable, bullied. ‘I’m telling the truth,’ I say to them.

Mousy drops her gaze, most of the others look away but some people meet my eye in that moment: the Cook and Dolly. And that humanity helps ground me.

Miss Webber finally drops me, a dog tired of its chewing slipper. She leaves them with the accusation ‘liar’ pervading the air. This is the word stamped on each of her bullets, carved on the shafts of her arrows, engraved on her knuckle dusters. Say it enough times and it will gather weight, gain credence.

A shaft of light, pale golden sunshine, gains admittance through the large window high in the walls and floods the ceiling. My neck is fused with tension. I can smell my own terror, a sharp musk.

There is a brief pause while Mr Latimer confers with Ms Gleason. From the gallery Jane smiles at me, an open, warm smile. The worst is over. Is it? I bite my tongue and suck in my cheeks.

Mr Latimer calls my neighbour Pauline Corby. There was never any love lost between us, though relations were more or less civil until the hammer incident. My defence team think this distance will give her testimony clout, as it were. This is no fawning friend or loyal relative but a mere acquaintance who can tell it like it is, no punches barred. And Pauline Corby does her stuff. Particularly when Mr Latimer asks her about my aggression.

‘She was like a mad woman. Completely off her rocker. I thought we should get the police, have her sectioned.’

‘And when later you heard that there were suspicious circumstances surrounding Neil Draper’s death, what did you think?’

‘I wasn’t surprised. I’d already said as much to Barry’ – Barry is a short, fair Londoner with all the social graces of a wasp – ‘ ‘‘The woman’s not safe. She’ll swing for somebody.’’’

Hah! A hundred years ago I would have swung for this. Women standing here, men too, would have been taken from here to the gallows at Strangeways prison. That please you, Neil? A little historical perspective? My skin feels clammy as though the ghosts are with me now pat-a-caking my arms and cheeks, grinning slyly with black, bloated tongues and blood-red eyes.

If they find me guilty how will I bear it?

‘Was her behaviour out of the ordinary, different from normal?’

‘Oh, yes. She was like a different person. She was just crazy.’

‘And apart from this incident did the situation return to normal?’

‘Hardly. She was always wandering about the garden at night, going out to her conservatory.’

Workshop, Pauline. Workshop.

‘The security light would come on and wake us up. I don’t think she ever slept after that. We didn’t know what to do.’

Miss Webber thanks Mr Latimer and approaches the witness box.

‘Mrs Corby. It’s true, is it not, that you have had previous problems with your neighbours and their children?’

‘Some.’

‘Could you give us an example?’

‘Well, the son Adam, he damaged the car. We had to ask for money to get it fixed.’

Adam, stoned, had found it amusing to walk over the Corbys’ Golf. The dents in the roof cost a small fortune to repair. ‘It’s only a car,’ Adam had protested, when Neil and I had hauled him into the kitchen to sort it out. ‘It’s not like I barbecued the cat or something.’

‘Anything else?’ Miss Webber asks.

‘We had to complain about the noise sometimes. Loud music going on half the night.’

‘And wasn’t this incident simply one more confrontation in the series?’

‘No,’ Pauline says stoutly. ‘This was different. She threatened me with a hammer. She was abusive.’

‘Did she raise the hammer?’

‘A little.’ She sounds defensive, unsure. ‘She was off her head.’

‘You’re a housewife, Mrs Corby?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Do you think that qualifies you to assess someone’s mental health?’

‘Maybe not,’ she says bluntly. ‘But I was a psychiatric nurse before I got married and I reckon that does.’

Oh, bless you, Mrs Corby.

There’s a moment’s silence, then the court erupts with laughter. Dolly cackles and Hilda and Flo giggle and Alice whoops. Even Miss Webber has the grace to smile and gives up on Pauline before she digs a deeper hole.

The judge decides we will break for lunch. I realize, with a swirl of vertigo, that by the end of the day my trial will be over. There is only Don Petty, my shrink, to give evidence and then there will be the closing speeches. As the jury file out, I watch them go, the Callow Youth hunched but any attempt at looking cool compromised by his gait – he bounces on his toes like a kid as he walks. Flo has to help Hilda up. I see them as lifelong friends, like Jane and me. But they met for the first time last week, selected at random. The Sailor wears the same clothes again. It strikes me that I have never heard any of these people speak. They are silent in the court, eyes and ears. Once out of the room their chatter will flow, conversation and anecdotes with which they oil the lunches and coffee breaks, the times they wait for the call of the ushers, the partings at the end of the day.