Toby sits in the hospital waiting room, his hands still cold after the walk from the Tube. A huge cast-iron radiator clanks in one corner, water gurgling inside, a negligible heat emanating. The room is filled with chairs occupied by wan-faced patients, sitting obediently with crossed legs, newspapers aloft. They are all men of a certain age, a certain portly stature. Toby looks round the room and feels like a clone of a middle-aged man, a man on the cusp of old age, a man with a prostate bulging uncomfortably inside him.
He sighs and folds his newspaper, placing it across his knee. He looks up at the ceiling and shuts his eyes. Six pounds lost since his diagnosis, with twenty-two more to go if he is indeed to be operated on. Life is a slog at the moment, a trawling through treacle with a monkey on his back. And he can’t even eat the treacle.
He had once considered his job the most noble of all professions. A criminal defence solicitor. A paragon of non-judgement. A man who would counsel and provide fair and just legal advice, whatever the crime, whatever the type of defendant. He wouldn’t be one of those lawyers who would gradually get worn down, mired in the sinewy fats of their own cynicism. This would never happen to him, for the simple reason that he believed in the system so absolutely that any variation in his thinking could only indicate the most abject turnabout in his personal philosophy. And, of course, as a twenty-one-year-old law graduate, beginning his legal Articles with stars in his eyes, his philosophy was as grounded in him as his love for his parents or the memory of his home address.
Thirty years later, though, while he can remember the address of his first flat out of law school, he can’t remember the details of its rooms any more. They blur into dashes of brief memories, spasms of recollection when faced with a particular smell, or a song playing on the radio.
And as for the love he had for his parents: well, there was a narrative that ended with his representation of Laurel. His brother Gregor had decided to break all contact with him because of his continued connection with her and so had his parents. In their seventies by the time of the murder, they had not so much been shocked by the scandal involving their ten-year-old granddaughter as withered into submission. They had shrivelled behind closed curtains, their faces wrinkled tight like milk skin, their mouths set and stubborn. Toby hasn’t spoken to them in nearly twenty years. He suspects they are in a nursing home now, if they aren’t dead, and he feels nothing about it. A state of being that he experiences about most things these days.
Defending Laurel was, in Toby’s life, as seismic an event, as immaculate, as the Rapture. After the trial, all ten weeks of it, he had no longer been the same man. And he would say the same of the majority of the solicitors, social workers, policemen and women, and even Mr Justice Follett, who had all gazed down upon little Laurel as she sat in an adult dock, playing with a rubber band in her lap, her lips trembling. Her dedicated social worker had had to help her to stand to hear the jury’s verdict. When it was relayed, in a shaking voice by the foreman of the jury, that she had been found guilty, with malice aforethought, of the murder of Kirstie Swann, she had cried at last. Eyes that had been dry for the whole trial now sprang forth a well of tears; her knees buckled as she was led down to the cells.
Gregor had been at the trial although Amy hadn’t managed it. She was surviving on a cocktail of Valium and antidepressants. They had thought she would make it that morning. Toby had begged her, telling her Laurel needed to see her, needed to say goodbye to her mum. But Amy had faltered at the front door, at once nervous and resolute. ‘I can’t go through with it,’ she had said, her expression mulish. ‘I can’t have them all looking at me like that, with such hatred. It’ll break me, Gregor.’ She had clawed at her husband’s chest and he had submitted, walked on his own to the waiting car, shoulders hunched in the falling drizzle.
After the trial, when Laurel had been taken to the secure unit where she knew she would spend the next eight years, Toby had gone with his brother to a tiny, dark pub he knew, around the corner from the Crown Court. They had sat deep in a corner, nursing pints of bitter, Gregor still in his coat, collar up, shivering from tension.
‘She can’t take much more of this,’ he had said.
‘Laurel?’
‘Amy. The police say they can move us tomorrow. Somewhere nobody knows us. Give us new identities.’
Toby bit his lip, thinking over what the judge had said at the sentencing, the violence with which he had directed his remarks to Laurel as she had stared at him, uncomprehending. The shouts from the public gallery, the high fives, the heat of wrath from all those adults displayed towards a ten year old. As Laurel had left the dock, turning onto the stairs and facing the courtroom, someone had shouted from above, ‘How do you feel now, you little bitch?’
Toby shook his head. ‘If only Justice Follett hadn’t identified her,’ he said quietly. ‘If she was still Child X, you wouldn’t need to be so frightened of payback. Of revenge.’
‘People know who we are anyway,’ Gregor answered. ‘Everyone in Grassington does. There’s no way we can go back there.’
‘But you could live somewhere near Laurel,’ Toby persisted. ‘Somewhere where you can visit her. See her regularly.’
‘Our family has been destroyed because of her.’ Gregor shook his head. ‘What about Rosie?’ he said. ‘What about her life? Is she supposed to have that ruined too? It’s bad enough that we’ve lost Laurel.’
‘You haven’t lost her. She’s right here. She needs you,’ Toby said.
‘But who is she?’ Gregor avoided his brother’s eyes, staring up at the ceiling. ‘I don’t know any more. And Amy certainly doesn’t.’ He forced his eyes to meet his brother’s. ‘You should never have taken her case.’
‘How could we have trusted anyone else?’
‘It should have been someone different. Someone not part of our family. Now . . . the whole thing’s so messed up.’
‘It is messed up, Gregor. That’s exactly why I stepped in. I wanted Laurel to have the best possible chance.’
Gregor ran his hands over his face. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I just don’t know. I’m terrified of losing them too. Amy and Rosie.’
‘You won’t lose them,’ Toby said firmly. ‘But if you cut out Laurel, abandon her, that girl will have no one. She’ll be on her own in an institution. For all those years. You heard what the judge said. She’s not eligible for parole until she’s at least eighteen. It will ruin her. He may as well have given her the death penalty.’
Gregor finished his beer in one big swallow and put his glass down carefully on the table. ‘She’s already been given it, hasn’t she? What’s her life going to be now? Wherever she goes, people will know. I mean,’ he gave a bitter laugh, ‘what job’s she ever going to get? No one will want her anywhere near them. Her life is over.’ He leaned forward, fist tight around his empty pint glass. ‘Over.’
Toby pushed his half-drunk pint away, searching his brother’s face with bewildered eyes. ‘Come on, Gregor. It’s bad, I know. But we’ll get through this. Laurel’s a child! She’s your little girl. And she always will be. She needs you to help her.’ He laid a hand on Gregor’s sleeve. ‘You have to be there for her.’
Gregor jerked his arm away, his eyes glistening. ‘Don’t tell me what I have to do. What do you know about it? Look at us now. Bloody life sentences for all of us. We can’t go home. You saw what they did to our house. The graffiti . . . We can’t go anywhere without being terrified some psycho’s going to kill us. What’s left for us, Toby? Everything’s gone. Even her, even Laurel. I don’t know who she is any more. I mean . . . it’s easy for you, isn’t it? Sitting there all clever and wise. But it’s not your child, is it? It’s not your life.’ Gregor wiped his mouth, rubbing away spittle.
‘No,’ Toby had said. ‘But she is yours. And nothing’s ever going to change that.’
Gregor stared at him for a moment. ‘Fuck you,’ he said at last, pushing back his stool and leaving the pub with his head down.
‘Toby Bowman?’ The receptionist calls his name, jolting him back to the hospital waiting room. ‘You can go through now.’
That was when it happened, Toby thinks as he hefts himself to his feet. He remembers the day he saw his brother turn his back on his child, and still he feels the guilt, the terrible raw guilt, of it. That was the grenade that pulverised the sanctum of his legal citadel. He had known it was right to fight for Laurel – she, who had no one else on her side. Of all people, she needed someone – anyone – to take her case, to speak for her. But in doing so, in doing what he knew was the right thing, he had lost his brother, and his parents, forever.
Even if his niece was as innocent as the driven snow, the decision he had made that day had changed his view of the law. Suddenly, it became something not only rational but emotional. Suddenly, it was not just about due process, it was about what was right. And that had shifted his perspective. If it’s not about due process, you can’t be dispassionate, you have to take a view, and this was something that before his niece’s case Toby had been certain was wrong. Previously, he had wholly believed that the law should be an impartial master, weigh only in fact, not feeling.
This change had made him hate Laurel just a little bit. Because even if she hadn’t killed that child, he could never know the truth for sure. She was the first one to make him see, to cause the scales to fall from his eyes.
See that the law has nothing to do with the truth.
God . . . he thinks as he leaves the hospital eventually, with his prognosis tucked next to his newspaper, inside his satchel. He desperately needs a coffee to deal with his bounding, leaping thoughts.
… the law has nothing to do with the truth.