5

The Trial

My legal team gave me a final pep talk a few minutes before we entered the courtroom. Don’t get angry. Don’t wave your arms around. Do look at the jury, but not too often. I had shaved and was wearing a sober blue suit.

The first morning of the first day is largely procedural. Then, in the afternoon the jury are shown police photographs of Jade’s face the morning after the incident. In lurid close-up, the varnished blue bruises around her cheekbones do make you wince a little, but then she did hit the kerb pretty hard. After that, Jade takes the stand, wearing a dark blue, sombre trouser suit. She starts giving her evidence – all of it totally believable – because she believes it. In her memory, I hit her, pure and simple. As I sit in the dock, listening to her terrifying certainty, I begin to sweat, which I know will look like guilt.

Seymour questions her all afternoon, without leaving a mark on her. Every time I glance up to the gallery, Sandra gives me a brave smile.

Next into the witness box is a young woman called Tracey Martin. Apparently she is an eye-witness and there is a bit of a swagger in her answers. The counsel for the prosecution – a shambolic-looking man with feral eyebrows and a mass of mad-professor hair – guides her gently through her evidence. Then it is Seymour’s turn. He takes her back to the beginning of her account.

“And you were getting out of your car, which was parked in the position marked on the diagram?”

She glances at the diagram. “’S right, yeh.”

“And as you got out of your car, you heard raised voices. And when you looked you saw Mr Carver and Miss Pope having an argument.”

“Yeh.”

“And what happened next?”

“Well, I hear a thump, like, and then she’s lying on the ground, and he’s, like, leaning over her.”

Seymour pauses. He shuffles his notes with a slightly distracted air.

“Did Mr Carver seem concerned?”

“Yeh…sort of.”

Their barrister shifts in his seat as if he is about to object, but then thinks better of it. My barrister ups his volume slightly.

“And what did you do next, Miss Martin?”

“I walked out of the car park…towards the shopping centre.”

“Right. Nothing else?”

“No, no, sorry, no. I did do something else…”

The prosecution team look slightly thrown.

“I, um…I texted my mate Karen that I’d just seen Lenny and Melanie having a barney in a car park.”

Someone titters quietly near the back of the courtroom. Seymour gives a sly grin and goes in for the kill.

I ought to have gone home feeling confident. He had torn Tracey Martin to shreds, exposing her as silly and unreliable. As we adjourned, my legal team clustered round to tell me we had had a good day. But it did not feel that way to me, I still felt shrouded in dread.

At home, curled in the corner of my sofa, I watched the news. Ludicrously, I was the second item, ahead of an earthquake that had killed several hundred people in Guatemala, two suicide bombs in Kabul, a lethal mudslide in the Philippines, a murder in Guildford and a possible cure for Parkinson’s disease. The report itself contained very little, just some footage of my arrival, the ITN correspondent shouting platitudes down a microphone and an artist’s impression of me standing in the dock looking extremely shifty.

I felt hunted.

Mac rang to tell me that TV News was now run by “limp-dicked wankers” and I wasn’t to let them get to me. Sandra phoned and offered to come round. I wanted to say yes but for some reason I didn’t. Shame, I suppose. She told me that she thought things had gone well for me in court and that I could face tomorrow with confidence.

“And don’t forget to breathe.”

“Don’t forget to breathe?”

“Yuh.”

“Yeh, that’d be a pretty basic error, wouldn’t it?”

“I mean it, Kevin, when you get tense you do that shallow-breathing thing, and then you get anxious.”

“That’s rubbish, I’m an actor, I’m trained, I breathe properly.”

“Only when you’re being someone else.”