Tim Vicary - A Game of Proof

The house was cold, dirty, and untidy. It reminded her of the council house she and Kevin had moved into nineteen years ago, before Simon was born. Basic, battered, grimy, but a home for all that. Somewhere you could make a start. Which was what Simon had tried to do, she supposed. When he’d met her outside court he’d talked of wallpaper and new shelves and decent furniture … and now this. A half painted wall, a heap of beer cans in the corner, Loaded and GQ magazines on the floor, a mouldy curry container beside the CD player.

No wonder Jasmine hadn’t wanted to stay. They surely had something to argue about, if he asked her to live in a tip like this. But that doesn’t mean he murdered her, though.

She put the fish and chips in the oven to warm up. Then she slung the curry container into the bin with the magazines and hoovered the carpet. She found a mop, bucket and unused bottle of bleach in a cupboard, and got rid of a series of stains on the floor and worktop. Then she sat at the kitchen table, eating the fish and chips while the floor dried around her.

He is like his father Kevin, she thought. Our house in Seacroft had a chance because we both moved in together with our baby, Simon. And so Kevin expected me to start nest-building, to make it neat and tidy and a proper home. That was my role, and he had a place in it too, the wage-earner and handyman. So he played along, until the baby got too demanding and I was too boring and we were too poor, every day scrimp and save without end.

And we were both too young — he was anyway. He wanted to be out with the lads, spending his money on himself instead of me and the baby.

Now what? Sarah washed up her plate and sat in the battered, filthy armchair, staring at the video and expensive CD player underneath. Simon’s priorities. Several of the videotape covers, she saw, were quite blatantly pornographic.

Like father, like son. Kevin would have fitted in here well, she thought. The Kevin she remembered, the nineteen year old boy with the beautiful silky hard body, the best lover she’d ever had, the toughest little gamecock on the street, the most selfish bastard she’d ever shared a house with. If he’d lived alone, his house would have been a tip like this. And if I’d come later and tried to clean it up he’d have hit me; he was like that.

But he would never have killed me, surely?

In her mind she replayed the times Kevin had hit her. She remembered her fear, the sudden explosion of his anger, the sadistic pleasure in his eyes. And then it had been over: a minute or two of horror, then done. Perhaps, if he’d gone on … but he never had. His rage had died, he’d flung her contemptuously on the floor, and left. The last time, for good.

The memory frightened her. In the corner, she saw a bottle of whisky. It’s been a terrible day, she thought; I need some comfort. She found a tumbler in the kitchen and half-filled it. I came here to think, she remembered, that’s what I told Bob. What is there to think about?

Is my son a killer?

The whisky burned its way down her throat and she thought No, of course not , it can’t be true. I didn’t carry a killer in my body for nine months. Things like that can’t happen. Not to me.

It’s true his father was a sadist, but that doesn’t make him a murderer, does it?

You wouldn’t want to tell a jury about that, would you?

No. Nor would you want a jury to think about the pain and jealousy which must have consumed this violent, unpredictable youth after this exquisitely beautiful girl had lived with him, rejected him, come tantalizingly back into his life, and then rejected him all over again. That’s the oldest motive in the world.

Yes, maybe, but it’s all circumstantial. To convict him we need evidence , hard irrefutable evidence that it was really Simon who cut her throat, raped her and left her there for the insects and dogs to eat. Not someone else.

His semen was in her vagina.

Did he rape her here and then murder her later? Is that what happened?

The police think it all happened on the path by the river.

She could picture that more clearly. In her mind she saw a girl walking alone on the river path, a dark figure following a short distance behind her. Suddenly the girl saw him and tried to run — but it was too late, he knocked her down, pinned her beneath him. She fought, but he twisted her arm, and a knife blade gleamed in the moonlight, paralyzing her with fear. He shoved her in front of him into the trees, her arm twisted behind her, the knife at her throat.

And then in her imagination they were gone, mercifully hidden from sight, and she didn’t want to see what happened next, what he did to her, how long it took, how it hurt. But later in her mind she saw him come out onto the path, a black figure in the moonlight, and she tried to see his face, to see if this monster could be her son — but the face was invisible, black as the night.

Sarah shuddered, and groped for the bottle. She seldom drank much but tonight the whisky seemed essential. Could it have happened like that? The vision had seemed so real, until the crucial moment when she’d been unable to see the murderer’s face. Could the murderer have sat in this grubby armchair like me? Been in my body as a baby?

She stared at her empty glass solemnly. Then poured herself another.

In the morning she was woken by bright sunlight pouring though the bedroom curtains. She sat up, and a lump of pig iron lurched sideways inside her skull. She fell back, stunned, and for a while — a few seconds, half an hour, a week — watched the birth of the universe, from big bang to supernova, unroll behind her eyelids. Then she became urgently aware that her stomach wished to leave her body and reached the loo just in time to help it on its way. Sometime later she gazed with horror at the pale, trembling face of a sick woman in the mirror on the wall.

She hadn’t felt this bad since she was pregnant. Not even then. Slowly, taking several aeons to complete the task, she opened a bottle of paracetamol, crawled to the kitchen to whisk up an egg in warm milk, then crept upstairs on her hands and knees, and went back to sleep.

Hours later she awoke to discover that the pig iron in her head had shrunk to a musket ball behind her right eye. Cautiously, so as not to dislodge it, she sat up, swallowed some more paracetamol, and crept to the bathroom for a cold wash. By twelve o’clock she was dressed, and eighty per cent conscious. Disgusted with herself, she slung the empty whisky bottle into the bin.

So this is how I behave when I try to sort myself out. Bob would be appalled. I’m appalled. I’m a mother, a wife, a barrister. Get a grip, woman. Get out of here.

She went out to the Kawasaki in the shed. The bike gleamed comfortingly. She patted its saddle and looked around. She was not surprised by the mess; if Simon couldn’t tidy his own bedroom he was unlikely to make a fetish of an outside shed. There was a battered table under the window, a broken chair, a pile of half-empty paint tins, brushes with rock-hard heads jammed into a saucepan, some plastic chairs, several bin bags, and a pot with a brown, dead plant in it.

She picked up the bin bag which had fallen as she wheeled the bike in last night. A woolly hat dropped out, and something clattered down the side of the bike and lodged between the exhaust and the chain.

Cautiously, trying not to revive her headache, Sarah searched for it with her fingers. What was it — a coin, a metal washer perhaps? Whatever it was, if she left it there it would jam up the chain somehow and wreck the bike; that always happened with her and machines.

After several attempts the thing fell out. She picked it up and brushed off the dirt. It was a small golden ring, set with tiny stones in the shape of a snake, or an S . Sarah held it up to the light. A woman’s ring, an engagement ring perhaps. S for what?