I Know What I Saw

38 Thursday

They charged me with murder. Jan left. Now I’m here in a police cell, knowing only that there’s an emergency bail hearing tomorrow, Friday, at Southwark Crown Court.

I have only been here for a few hours and already the cell is crushing me. If I sit down too long, the walls begin to reverberate, and there is a humming from the lights, or from something else, that I can’t shake. It buzzes deep into my skin and under my flesh so that I have to stand every few seconds to shrug it off. Thankfully there is other noise. I can hear men and women talking, their jocularity slamming hard against this doom that I am in. Murder.

When they processed me, they gave me a form asking me whether I felt suicidal. ‘Of course I do. I’m also highly claustrophobic,’ I wrote. Now, when I look back, I don’t know why I did that. I thought, idiotically, that they would take pity on me and think again about their bail decision. As if they might just say, we can’t keep him here, he’s claustrophobic. Let him, the murderer, go.

Somebody brings me a meal boated in plastic. I eat even though I’m not hungry because I always eat whenever there is food. I eat as much of it as I can and save whatever is dry in my pockets. The food is hot and smells plasticky, like Wotsits.

A vision comes to me of Rory and me tracking through an overgrown patch of scrub grass somewhere, a packet of Wotsits each in our hands. I remember it had been sunny after a morning full of showers. We were walking slowly through a park, picking a path through long grass. I began to wade on ahead, running slightly, cutting swathes through the damp grass. I was an explorer, preparing the way for the others in the expedition. But when I looked around, Rory was gone. My heart dipped for a second and I marched back again, retracing the flattened grass. At first, I thought he’d vanished and so I began to panic. But then I saw him right there on the grass, crouched down and sobbing. I went and knelt next to him. I remember the feel of the long, wet grass on my knees, the impressions they made afterwards. There were tracks down his cheeks.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Wotsits,’ he said through shudders of breath. And there they were, scattered along the grass, wet, soggy. There was orange stain on his hands. ‘They’re all ruined,’ he said. Rory, so bright for his age, so old for his years, was at that moment no more and no less than he was. Six.

I took his empty packet and tipped half of mine into his.

‘But they’re yours,’ he said between gulps.

‘I’m not that hungry,’ I said, pulling him up to his feet.

The lights go low when the night sets in. Ten-thirty, the information sheet said. A signifier of the end of a day in a room without windows. I lie down eventually on the bench and pull the blanket over my head. The mattress is thin but this isn’t the worst bed I have had in my life. The bed isn’t the problem. When I am out, even when my clothes are wet and stuffed full of newspaper and there is ice under my head, I can still manage some sleep. All I need is the knowledge that the baggage of my life is scattered behind me in tiny mounds, as if from holes in my pockets.

But here, there is nowhere to cast the debris away. If I don’t get bail tomorrow, I could be in prison for a year before my trial. The idea of being in a gaol with bars and guards makes me feel faint. My palms are clammy and my heart pounds in my chest. I think for the fourth time this evening that I am going to have a heart attack. It’s the same feeling I had when I was locked in the police car. My breath is shallow and is coming out too fast.

It passes. And as soon as it does and my breathing becomes level again, desperation gives way to relief, which itself gives way to a different desperation. I know I can survive the night, but I can’t do a year without giving up something of my head. But more than that, if it was twenty years? I’d be dead in two. Less.

They have taken away my belt (Seb’s belt) and my laces (Seb’s brogues). They think that I can string myself up by my shoelaces. I laugh at the thought of that but then I begin to choke because I know that if it could be done, I might consider it. And if it could be done, I would find the way.

I lay my head back on the mattress and begin to breathe as rhythmically as I can, counting the in breath and the out. It helps. I feel as if I am putting a blanket over the mouth of my thoughts, muffling them, snuffing them out like sputtering candles.

I shut my eyes and take myself to Grace and that night. The flames are licking the walls and a record plays. The music is warm, cossetting, unless that is the fire inflecting the music with heat. The crescendo begins its journey, meandering and climbing through the first minutes of introduction. And then.

My eyes snap open.

An officer is at the door. He’s checking to see if I am alive because of what I put on that stupid form.

‘I’m fine!’ I say. ‘Just let me sleep, for God’s sake.’

‘Can’t, mate. Have to check you every hour,’ he says, and leaves.

And that is how it is for the next eight hours.

By the time I am being shaken out of my cell, I have had an hour’s sleep at most. I rinse my face in a small steel sink and then I am in a van off to court. When I arrive, I am put into another cell from where I can hear other prisoners shouting and banging on the doors. If you believe what they’re saying, we are in a place where all the staff are cunts.

At nine-thirty I’m cuffed to a guard who walks me down the corridor. I see Jan’s face before she sees mine and even though it has been only a few hours, I am so grateful to see her that tears collect in my eyes.

‘Jan,’ I say, and sit while the cuffs are unlocked. She is wearing another tired black suit but the sky-blue shirt underneath it lifts her.

‘Xander,’ she says, waiting till the guard leaves. ‘Okay, we might not have long, so let me say what I need to. We are dealing with your bail position today. Because you have been charged with murder, your bail is not like normal bail. You don’t have a right to bail. It’s kind of the other way around. The burden is on us to show that there is no significant risk that you would cause injury to anyone.’

‘Okay,’ I say. ‘That’s good, isn’t it?’

‘Not really, Xander. They don’t often bail people in murder cases because the fact of the murder is a good basis for saying there is a risk you could cause harm on the logic that if you did it once—’

‘But I didn’t do it once!’ I say, hearing my voice become sharp. ‘I can’t be locked up, Jan. I haven’t got the head for it. I can’t.’

‘I know, Xander. But the fact is that the prosecution are objecting to bail on those grounds. They say you are a risk.’

I feel defeated.

‘Look,’ she continues. ‘I will do my best, but what I wanted to know was whether there was any way you could offer a surety or security?’

Some of the words she is saying filter into my consciousness but others do not. I can’t believe I am going to prison. I won’t be able to do this is all that I can think right now, and that thought preoccupies me, forcing everything else out.

‘Sorry, what?’ I say, sensing that there is some information that she wants from me.

‘Money. Can you offer any money to help with bail, or maybe you know anyone who can?’

I think of Seb, but I can’t ask him for more than he’s already done. I shake my head.

It is nearly three o’clock before my case is called. I am brought in through some underground passages, cuffed again to a guard. I walk with her as she chirps brightly to me about something in the news and it hits me that my face is going to be in the papers. My blood begins to run cold in my veins and my palms begin to dampen. We emerge in the well of the court in the dock. I look around for the press but there is nothing happening in the court that feels urgent. Some people in wigs and gowns are chatting casually to one another. The judge’s bench is empty. I catch Jan’s eye and she waves at me.

A woman in a crumpled gown stands and announces the judge, and people rise and fall as he enters from the back and sits in the red chair. The courtroom is bland and tired and everyone in here seems the same. The atmosphere is more municipal than I expected.

By the time I manage to master my anxiety well enough to hear what is being said, we are midway into my hearing. The prosecutor is on her feet addressing the judge casually, almost bored.

‘The Crown oppose bail, Your Honour. This is a serious charge. The Crown say that Mr Shute is likely to fail to answer his bail. He is of no fixed abode and due to the nature and seriousness of the offence, he is likely to abscond.’

When she sits down, Jan gets straight to her feet. She attacks the room with confidence, her northern vowels softening in the process.

‘In my submission, Your Honour, there is no significant risk that he would cause injury to another person. Firstly, Mr Shute has no previous convictions for violence at all. Secondly, he denies this offence completely and cannot be considered violent on account of the allegation alone. Thirdly, Mr Shute has been bailed by the police on a number of occasions pre-charge, and answered his police bail every time. We argue that he can be considered as having a satisfactory bail address if the police have allowed him to be bailed there before.’ She sits down.

The conviction with which she has spoken fills me suddenly with hope. But it seems so minimal, what she has said. Should there be more to my freedom than these few words?

The prosecutor gets slowly to her feet and consults someone behind her. I look and see that it’s Conway. He’s here in court. My heart sinks.

‘The officer informs me, Your Honour, that Mr Shute, although not convicted of any offences of violence in the past, has been recently arrested in connection with an offence of serious violence. A middle-aged man was stabbed in the neck and left for dead, essentially.’

Jan looks round to me with her eyebrows raised high. There is anger and confusion on her face. She mutters something to the judge about further instructions and comes to the back of the court where I am gesticulating at her.

‘What is this, Xander?’ she says in a heavy whisper.

‘The stabbing. Squire. They can’t use that, can they?’ I say.

‘Why not? And why didn’t you think of mentioning this to me?’

‘Because,’ I whisper back, ‘they dropped it.’

‘Dropped it?’

‘Yes. They said NFA.’

She makes a note of this on her pad and returns to her place.

‘Thank you, Your Honour. My understanding is that the stabbing that the Crown is alluding to with reference to Mr Squire was NFA’d by the police. In the circumstances it is completely improper for the Crown to attempt to influence your decision by that means. If there was evidence, they would have charged him. The fact that they didn’t charge him, if anything proves that there was no evidence against my client. And finally, Your Honour, if Mr Shute was a danger and he did murder this victim, what we can be sure of is that he hasn’t presented a danger to anybody since that time, nearly thirty years ago.’

The judge looks at me and then at the two lawyers.

‘I’m going to rise to consider my decision,’ he says, and leaves to the refrain of ‘All rise’.