The first week of the trial was, just as Paul had said it would be, a complete run through of the original trial. As Miss Revell talked them through it, all the jurors were given a large black folder with a number on the front, identical to the ones that the man and the woman sitting behind the lawyers had. Within the folders, it soon became obvious, was a complete transcript of the trial right down to copies of the original crime scene photographs. Before the prosecutor got into the meat of the case, she made a short speech about what the purpose of her presentation was. It was simple. The point of it was for me to be found guilty all over again.
I watched the jurors as they flicked through the folders. Mark, who was the closest juror to me in terms of age and size, glanced up at me a couple of times as he leafed through the pages but none of the others looked at me, concentrating instead on the contents of the folders.
“If you could turn to page three of your folders,” Miss Revell said to them, “we’ll start with the statements of those witnesses who were not called to the trial.” Within minutes, I was bored and this boredom increased tenfold over the next few days. Not because I’d heard it all before, and it wasn’t that I wasn’t interested in what was happening, it was just that Miss Revell was going through the entire folder. Page by page, line by line, almost word by word.
The court soon settled into a routine for those first few days. Miss Revell would start the day with a recap of what had been covered the day before, and then the jurors would turn to whichever page they were starting on that day. Then they were led through it like a school class being walked through a Shakespeare play, with Miss Revell playing the part of the teacher. Every so often she paused the narrative to explain one of the finer points to the jurors even though it wasn’t clear whether or not they understood it. Paul wasn’t joking when he’d told me it would be tedious. The only things that punctuated the days were the breaks for lunch and the occasional coffee break when the judge thought the jury was flagging. The public gallery, full on the first day of the trial, got emptier and emptier until by the end of the week there was no-one left. Even Andy and Jacob had found better things to do. Every evening, the judge dismissed the jury, and I was taken straight back to the prison just as Paul had told me I would be. By the time I’d had scoff at the prison, I was exhausted. They were long days, just sitting in a courtroom watching other people reading.
The worst day, or at least the worst day from my perspective, was the Thursday. This was the day that the prosecutor walked the jury through the attack on Robert. As it had done at the first trial, it sounded pretty bad. How I’d planned the whole thing right down to the last detail. What made it worse was that it was all true. The pre-meditation behind the attack on Robert was laid out to the jury with no gloss whatsoever. There was no way it could be sugar-coated, and that wasn’t the intention of the prosecutor anyway. Throughout the entire piece, I kept my head down even though I could feel the eyes of the jury on me. I looked up at Paul and Laura a couple of times, and Laura gave me a brief smile at one point, but that was the only positive thing about the whole day.
By Friday lunchtime, I’d had enough. The prosecutor had just finished describing the moment that the original jury had come back with their guilty verdict. It was about the most animated that she’d been for the entire week, and about the only time she showed any degree of showmanship. I guessed that for the rest of the week she hadn’t felt the need to, but on Friday morning, she put on an affronted air as she told the new jurors how their predecessors had found me guilty. Not only had they found me guilty, she told the new jury, but the verdict was unanimous.
“The jury from the last trial, ladies and gentlemen,” Miss Revell had said, “they came back with their verdict, their unanimous verdict, within two hours. That is how certain they were that this man,” she waved a bony finger in my general direction without looking at me. “That this man was guilty of murder.”
I spent the journey back to Norwich prison that evening deep in thought. The jury would be thinking about that last day for the entire weekend which must have been why Miss Revell had finished on what for me was a very negative note. I tried to shake myself out of it, but I couldn’t help go over it in my head. By the time I got out of the van and back into the prison, I was in a foul mood. Mr Jackson led me back to my cell without us exchanging a single word. My cellmate, Pete, was nowhere to be seen although it didn’t take me long to work that one out. To be honest, I was pleased that Pete wasn’t about. With almost an hour of social time left, I hoped that I’d have some peace and quiet. Being on display all day, consciously thinking about every movement I made or expression I wore, was exhausting. As I sat down on my bed, I saw something on the pillow. It was a postcard, picture side down with no writing on the side I could see. I picked it up and flipped it over, and my heart dropped.
I’d never been to Romania, but the postcard I was holding had the text ‘Grüße aus Rumänien’ written across it in a gothic looking font. There were four pictures on the front, one in each quadrant of the postcard, and as I looked closer at it I could see that they were hand drawn scenes of landmarks I didn’t recognise. Two of them were churches of some sort, and the other two were just random tourist areas. I flipped the card over, my heart thumping in my chest, but there was nothing written on the other side apart from the text which told me what the landmarks were. There didn’t need to be anything written on the card for me to get the message, though. It was pretty clear. Grezja knew exactly where I was.
I jumped as Pete walked into the cell, and I almost dropped the card on the floor.
“Alright mate?” Pete said in his heavy smoker’s drawl. “How did today go?” I looked at him, my eyes wide. He faltered when he saw my expression. “Er, you okay?”
“What’s this?” I took a step towards him, waving the card in his face. “Some sort of sodding joke? Who got you to put this on my pillow?” Pete took a step back toward the cell door as his gaze flicked from my face to the card and back again.
“I don’t know nothing about it, mate,” he said. “It was on your bed when I got back from scoff earlier. I left it there for you. Never even touched it, honest.” I doubted that, but it didn’t matter. I looked at Pete and saw real fear in his eyes. Realising that I was scaring him, I put my hand out, palm down.
“It’s alright mate, sorry,” I said, shaking my head. “It just put the frighteners on me, that’s all.”
“But it’s only a postcard,” Pete replied, relaxing. “That’s all it is, a postcard. There’s not even anything written on it, it’s just a bunch of old buildings.” I sat down on the bed and took a deep breath. How did he know it was pictures of buildings if he’d not touched it? I told myself that it didn’t matter, so what if he had picked it up and looked at it? It changed nothing.
“It’s a long story mate,” I sighed.
Pete sat down on his bed, and we faced each other. I held my head in my hands and thought for a few minutes. What did I have to lose by talking to him? When I finally realised that the answer to that question was absolutely nothing, I told him the full story of the visitors to my cell back at Whitemoor. The money that Robert owed and the transfer of the debt over to me. The full story took maybe ten minutes, and Pete remained silent throughout.
“What do you think?” I said when the full story was done. Pete looked at me, frowning and playing with a piece of skin on one of his nails. He took a few moments to reply.
“I think it’s bollocks,” he finally replied, his watery blue eyes staring at me. “It makes no sense. You don’t owe them anything. Just because you killed the bloke that did, that doesn’t make sense.”
My eyebrows went up before I had a chance to consider my reaction.
“I mean, just because they think you killed him,” Pete continued quickly. “I’m not saying you did, I know you didn’t because you said so. But I mean, not being funny like, you got done for killing him. That’s what they’ll think, isn’t it?”
“It’s okay, I get you,” I sighed. “It doesn’t seem to matter to them, whether I’m innocent or guilty that is.” Pete nodded as I said the word innocent, but stopped nodding when I got to the guilty word.
“Can’t you talk to them?” Pete nodded his head toward the door.
“Who? The screws?” I replied.
“Yeah,” he said. “Why not?”
“What can they do?” I thought about Mr Jackson. He might be a big lad, but I didn’t think even his size could help me with my problem.
If this gang could just walk into my cell unchallenged in a Category A prison like Whitemoor, finding me here would be a piece of cake.