The Perfect Girl

MONDAY MORNING
SAM

In the bathroom of my flat, after ending the call with Jeanette, and feeling a coruscating dread at the thought of having to break the news to Tessa, I sit for a moment longer and remember when I was first introduced to Zoe Maisey, or Zoe Guerin as she was known then.

My first encounter with Zoe was over three years previously, when I lived in North Devon, and the introduction came in the form of a phone call from the Defence Solicitor Call Centre, because I was the solicitor on duty when she was arrested.

The call came in at nine-thirty in the morning, about eight hours after the accident had happened. They described Zoe and her situation as follows:

‘Juvenile, appropriate adult present, charge is death by careless driving, two fatalities, another critically injured, ready for interview at Barnstaple Police Station and your Duty Solicitor number is 00746387A.’

I phoned the custody suite at the police station right away, identified myself, and asked the custody sergeant to put Zoe on the phone.

‘Hello?’ she said.

I introduced myself. ‘Don’t tell the police anything about the accident,’ I said. ‘I’m on my way. I’ll be about forty-five minutes. Don’t start any interviews without me.’

And in reply she said, ‘OK,’ in a voice that sounded quiet with shock, and she had not a single question that she wanted to ask me.

I drove through the countryside to get to the police station. It was a beautiful, cold morning. I passed white frosted fields bordered by hedges that were a couple of feet thick, sturdy and sinuous at once as they partitioned off the surrounding fields, and stripped of leaves by the winter but so dense that the shadows they cast were deep horizontal bands. The blue-grey ocean, surprisingly calm, was visible here and there where clefts in the landscape revealed it, and Lundy Island was clear as day offshore, peaceful, ancient and cold.

In the custody suite in Barnstaple the sergeant handed me a charge sheet.

‘She won’t have her mother with her,’ he said. ‘She refused, even though Mum’s here. Social worker’s just arrived. She didn’t want a brief either but the social worker overruled her.’

I scanned the charge sheet. It wasn’t quite as they’d said on the phone. The charge was: ‘Death by careless driving’ but there was an addition: ‘whilst under the influence of alcohol’.

It was a shocking charge for anybody to face, but for a fourteen-year-old, whose life had been stretching out lazily before them just hours earlier, still packed with potential, it was nothing short of horrific.

‘Has she been interviewed?’

‘Not yet. Social worker just arrived.’

The police weren’t allowed to interview Zoe without an ‘appropriate adult’ present because of her age. If she’d refused to have her mother with her they would have had to wait until a social worker came on shift this morning.

The custody sergeant wore a tight black police top with a high collar and short sleeves that gripped muscular arms, and literally talked down to me from his desk, which was on a raised platform. As he spoke, he tapped efficiently at his keyboard, eyes glued to the screen of his computer monitor.

‘I’ve just had handover so I’m acquainting myself with the details, but she was brought in at about four-thirty after a couple of hours at the hospital.’

I pitied Zoe her hours in the cell. Even my clients who’d been to prison said that they hated being in police custody more than anything. There’s no routine, just four walls, a mattress on a shelf, a toilet that may or may not be properly screened, and a pair of eyes on you at all times, either directly or via the camera.

‘Why didn’t she want her mother?’ I asked him. I was wondering if this girl had been in care, or lived with her father, or was bereaved.

‘We’re not entirely sure. Best guess: ashamed.’

‘Ashamed?’

He shrugged his shoulders and spreads his hands wide, palms upward. ‘Mum’s been sitting in reception since Zoe arrived.’

There had been a lone woman sitting in reception on my arrival, with white-blonde hair and fine features. She was huddled in a corner, and shuddered when the electronic doors ushered in a cold draught with me, and met my eye with the clear gaze of somebody who’s waiting for nothing good at all to happen, and has had no sleep to speak of.

It was a common expression in the waiting rooms I frequented: at police stations, in courtrooms, nobody’s looking forward to what’s going to happen.

That nice-looking woman, who’d been shut firmly out of her daughter’s life at that moment, was my first clue that this case was going to be far from straightforward.

I had no picture in my head of Zoe before I met her. I’d had enough experience by then to know that criminality takes all kinds so you could never predict what your clients would be like, though if I’d had to hazard a guess I might have told you that the girl I was about to meet would be a mature fourteen-year-old, probably a bit rough round the edges, probably a seasoned drinker, maybe a dabbler in the local drugs scene, definitely a party girl.

The girl I met wasn’t like that. The police had taken her clothing at the hospital as evidence, so she was wearing an outfit that the A & E nurses must have had to cobble together for her: oversized grey sweatpants and a blue zipped-up fleece top. She had a dressed wound on one temple and long, white-blonde hair, a shade paler even than her mother’s, which sparkled with tiny, glittery fragments of glass from the accident.

She sat in a moulded plastic chair that was bolted to the floor, her feet were drawn up and her arms were wrapped around her knees. She looked dishevelled and very small. Her cheekbones were fine, her eyes were a bright, clear blue and her skin was as pale as the frost outside. Her hands were tucked into the sleeves of the fleece, which looked grubby on the cuffs: stains from another life that the hospital laundry hadn’t been able to get rid of.

Beside her sat a woman who wore the stoic expression of a seen-it-all social worker. She was middle-aged, with hair cropped short and sharp, and a face that was deeply grooved and greyish from what I would have guessed had been twenty cigarettes a day for twenty years. She had deposited a neat pile of gloves, hat and scarf on to the interview table.

I introduced myself to Zoe and she surprised me by standing up and offering me a timid handshake. Unfolded, she revealed herself to be of medium height and very slight, totally swamped by the borrowed clothing. She looked exceptionally fragile.

We sat down opposite one another.

It wasn’t the beginning of her nightmare – that had happened hours earlier – but it was the moment when I had to begin the delicate process of trying to help her to understand precisely how grave her situation might be.