1998
The courtroom in the Old Bailey was stuffed to the rafters with a roiling mix of legal arguments, rhetoric and latent violence. The dark-panelled walls seemed to push in on the inhabitants, sliding them in towards each other, the ceiling pressed down flat on top of them, stifling them, compressing the air until it was heady with the might of justice.
Laurel sat in the dock, her chin level with the balustrade around it. Her chair was perched on a wooden block, which had been purposely and hurriedly made over the weekend when it was discovered that she would not be able to see over and into the courtroom otherwise.
She wore a plain white shirt and her school tie. Her hair was brushed back from her face in a simple ponytail. Her eyes were big and round, staring straight ahead, focused away from the gallery above her, to her right. There sat Debbie and Rob Swann, holding hands, flanked by a bristling and tear-stained Joanna. Their faces were grey, washed out. Debbie’s chest rose and fell quickly with her rapid breathing. Rob’s lips were drawn tightly together, dark shadows under his eyes.
Along the wall opposite Laurel were the press. Amongst them sat the courtroom artist, his eyes fixed on her, committing every detail of the scene to memory, to be scratched down as soon as he left the courtroom. He would draw her image as if blocked by her barrister, his wig concealing the detail of her face. Because her identity was shielded. She was no longer Laurel Bowman. She was Child X.
Mr Justice Follett entered with mistral force, his red robes swept back behind him as he sat, his face stern and heavy with duty. As he spoke, the journalists hunched forward with their pens raised, nibs at the ready. Counsel for the prosecution spoke first, addressing the jury of seven women and five men, who still seemed stunned to find themselves here in this courtroom. They averted their eyes from the huddled shape of Laurel in the dock. Several jurors held crumpled tissues in their hands, looking desperately up at Debbie and Rob Swann as they heard what had happened to their daughter.
The learned counsel spoke at length in his opening speech, reeling in the jury and the others packed into the courtroom like reams of nets packed and jiving with the silvery skin of fish. He spoke of wickedness, of pure and unadulterated violence. He spoke of cruelty and torture and the desperate cries of a mother when she realised that her child was missing. Of little Kirstie, and how she did not deserve her fate. How her end was all the more shocking, perpetrated as it was by someone who should still be innocent, beyond the realm of such atrocities.
How was it? he pondered aloud. How was it that such depravity could exist in one so young? Was it a sign of our times? An indication that this new generation had bewilderingly embraced unfathomable violence? Had exposure to violence on television and film meant that the mind of a ten-year-old child could become addled, tainted with poison, until she could no longer see straight, could no longer discern the difference between right and wrong? Or was that all an illusion? Was that merely a puff, an excuse? Here, Counsel paused and half-turned behind him, towards the occupants of the gallery straining to follow his words.
Or was it, instead, that Child X was very simply, very plainly, wicked?
Wasn’t that the most likely explanation? Because how could one quantify the effect of violent films or games on a brain? Scientists grappled with this problem on a daily basis, and perhaps the equation was within our grasp in the course of our lifetime. But not today. Not as Child X sat in this courtroom. Only she could explain the dark forces that must have been at work inside her when she decided to kidnap Kirstie and take her by the hand down onto the canal path. Only she knew why she had beaten and tortured her. Only she knew those secret places where her thoughts lay within her, tangled like weeds.
It is not, he said, for us to try and understand. It is necessary only to agree that she is indeed guilty. That she, with malice aforethought, did take the life of Kirstie Swann. A chilling and abominable intention indeed. One that very few of us in this world will ever be able to understand. Even she – and here he pointed at Laurel, her head dipped low – even she does not accept the evil inside of her. She claims to be not guilty. She says she did not kill Kirstie and yet she offers no other explanation for the little girl’s death. She suggests it was a mistake, but she will not tell us in what way. After this explanation – counsel’s disdain for it was clear – she is silent. She will not be drawn on that afternoon. That beautiful summer’s day when a child’s innocent life was cruelly, and violently, robbed from her.
Counsel reached the end of his speech, his voice hoarse from the passion with which he had spoken. Laurel’s head remained bent. She avoided the laser stare of Joanna Denton, the slow hot tears of Debbie Swann. She stared down at her hands in her lap, feeling her buttocks numb beneath her, her expression frozen. She had been sitting on her hard chair in the dock for four hours.
Tomorrow her barrister would begin her defence.
Laurel did not listen as the judge explained this to her at the end of the day.
She had not been listening for hours.