The Perfect Girl

MONDAY MORNING
SAM

The judge didn’t accept Zoe’s Special Reasons plea.

He found against Zoe, he stated, because he simply didn’t believe that she would have been monitoring what she drank that night. No matter that we’d explained that she was a conscientious person, a good student, that she’d had a piano competition the following day. We might not have convinced him anyway, but Eva Bell and her friend’s testimony, which so strongly contradicted Zoe’s claim that Jack Bell had spiked her drink, certainly put the knife in Zoe’s back, and twisted it too.

Zoe stood up in the courtroom as the judge spoke to her.

‘I find,’ he said, looking at her over a pair of reading glasses, ‘that as you were only fourteen years old on the night of the party, there was no reason for you to monitor closely how much alcohol you were able to drink before driving, because you were not legally able to drive a motor vehicle. I find that you did drink freely during the course of that evening and that you don’t actually know how much you had to drink. Therefore, regrettably, I find that whilst you might not have known exactly how much you had to drink, you knew you were too drunk to drive that car.’

He sentenced her to an eighteen-month detention and training order. It meant that she would serve nine months. I felt that wasn’t too bad in the circumstances, but her family would never get the satisfaction of proving that Zoe had only done what she did because she was unwittingly drunk. She met nobody’s eye as they took her down.

My goodbye to her mother was muted and painful. Tessa was there too, because I remember them standing together outside court looking desolate. Zoe had no other supporters with her that day.

It took me a while to get the trial out of my system. I felt a sense of failure in some ways, because I wondered whether I should have insisted more on a simple Guilty plea at the first hearing. It could have resulted in a more lenient sentence. In the end, we took a legal gamble and lost, and Zoe paid the price. I wondered if she took any satisfaction afterwards from knowing that she did, at least, tell the truth, or whether it was a regret or, worse, something to resent.

It wasn’t until two years later, after I’d moved to Bristol to broaden my criminal practice experience, that I ran into Tessa by chance. We recognised each other immediately, and met for coffee the following week. Things developed from there. Until we reached last night.

Now, as I watch Tessa ease her VW into the Monday morning traffic outside my apartment, on her way to find out how and why her sister is dead, it’s clear to me that things might just become very complicated indeed.