Margaret watched the judge as he flicked through the album. Seated above the court, maroon velvet drapes behind him, the oak bench in front of him. His face was professionally expressionless. She looked at the jury. They were not so practised in the art of composure. She could see what they were seeing from the paling of the skin, the hand rushing to the mouth, the eyebrows tightening in concentration. And she looked at Patrick. He was sitting swivelled round, the album resting on the seat beside him, one arm trailing along the back of the seat, one hand drumming idly on the wood.
Garda Gerry Scully, giving evidence, spoke of angles, distance, lenses used. It was almost as if he and the senior counsel were members of a camera club. He described the scene on the canal bank. His first photographs were taken before Mary’s body had been lifted out of the water. They showed, he explained, what was subsequently identified as the deceased’s head. He explained that her neck was wedged between the roots of a tree, which was growing out of the side of the canal. Margaret could imagine. The roots of the tree cradling her between them, catching her just beneath the ears and holding her up. Like one of the Arthur Rackham illustrations in the copy of Peter Pan she’d had when she was small. Trees with long fingers and wraith-like bodies. Eyes that stared from knot-holes and wisps of leaves trailing like straggling hair to the ground. When Mary had been little in New Zealand there was a series of books about two tree children called Hutu and Kawa, named after the pohutukawa, huge and graceful, growing on cliff tops, with its beautiful bright red flowers. She had loved them, the way her mother loved the Arthur Rackham pictures. And somehow Margaret liked the idea that it was a tree that had caught her, stopped her from falling to the mud and the dirt of the canal bottom. Kept her away from the thick black ooze.
Douglas moved him on to the next series of pictures. These had been taken after the water in the canal had been lowered by two feet. They showed exactly how she was lying in her shroud of black plastic, the two concrete blocks attached to her by lengths of thick blue rope. One was tied round her neck, the other round her waist. There were close-ups of the blocks and their attachments. And more close-ups of the marks on her face.
‘Now,’ said Douglas, ‘explain these to us.’
These, Scully said, had been taken when the body had been removed from the water. It had been laid out on the path that ran along beside the canal.
‘Here you can see clearly the kind of heavy tape that was used to bind the plastic bags together, and again the concrete blocks and the ropes.’
‘Finally,’ said Douglas, ‘the last set of photographs, taken where?’
‘In the morgue, prior to the post-mortem,’ replied Scully.
‘And what do they show?’
‘Bruising to her face, upper body, and thighs. They also show, particularly in the photograph labelled number twelve, that her hair has been cut.’
‘And the one labelled number thirteen, what does that show us?’
‘That her pubic hair appears to have been trimmed. It also shows a number of injuries, burns I believe they are, my lord, to her thighs.’
‘Quite, Garda Scully.’ Douglas looked again at him over the top of his glasses. ‘And finally photograph number fourteen?’
‘The area of her breasts and upper diaphragm, my lord. Lacerations and bruising, as you can see.’
Margaret looked at Patrick again. He was flicking quickly through the pages. He glanced up and around him for a moment then turned back to the splashes of colour in front of him. He had seen, she knew, many photographs like these. He had told her how, in the beginning, his stomach had turned when he had read and seen the evidence of crimes that men he was defending were alleged to have committed.
‘So, what do you do?’ she had asked him. ‘What do you do if you know they are guilty?’
‘Well,’ he replied carefully, ‘it depends on what you mean by know.’
‘Ah, come on, don’t get all philosophical with me.’
‘No, I’m not. What I mean is that your clients tell you their side of the story. You don’t make decisions as to their guilt or innocence. Only the jury can do that. Of course you have to act on whatever it is they tell you. So if they tell you something prejudicial to their case you can’t hide it.’
‘But,’ she said, ‘they don’t.’
‘No, they don’t. And, anyway, there’s far too much presumption of guilt. Just because the guards have arrested someone, brought them in, questioned them, made sure they’re denied bail, and the whole world sees this bloke with a coat over his head, handcuffed to some great lump of a policeman, they automatically assume that he’s guilty. You know, Margaret, everyone is—’
‘Yeah, yeah, entitled to a defence.’
‘But it is so. They are. And it’s my job to defend them to the utmost. Come and watch. Come and see what I do.’
So she had sat here in this same courtroom – was it on the same seat? She wasn’t sure. But she remembered the trial. The defendant was accused of murdering his wife. He had confessed to the killing, but he was pleading not guilty to murder. His defence was that he had been provoked and he had lashed out without thought or intention. She had gazed at him, trying to decide if that was true. He was small and pale. He looked malnourished, as if he had spent his whole life eating white bread and chips. When the prosecuting counsel described how his wife had died, how she had been bludgeoned to death with a heavy wrench in her kitchen, he had cried. His sobs washed around the courtroom, pitiful, painful to hear. And it had seemed a foregone conclusion that he would be found guilty. Until Patrick began to lay out the defence. She remembered the way he had done it. Witness after witness called to describe the dead woman. A bully, a nag, selfish, vain, aggressive, mean with money, sexually voracious. Margaret sat and listened. And watched the jury. Nine men and three women.
And listened to the way he dissected the evidence. Took it apart, meticulously. No murder weapon had ever been found. There was blood on the shoes of the accused, and on his trousers. But, said Patrick, he found her. He touched her. He knelt beside her to try to help her. Of course he would have blood on his clothes. And there were witnesses to say that he had been seen leaving home at his usual time to go to his job as a bus conductor. And more witnesses to say that he had seemed perfectly normal during the day.
‘And what of the confession?’ she remembered him saying to the jury. ‘Look at him, his size, his demeanour. Think of how he would feel, grief-stricken for his wife. Suffering. Terrified by his surroundings. Intimidated.’
And that was the conclusion the jury came to. She waited in the Round Hall for the verdict. She watched Patrick, walking backwards and forwards, his black gown flowing around him. She heard his laugh as he joked with his peers. From time to time he looked in her direction. Once he came and sat beside her, as if by chance, casually, his thigh pressing for a moment against hers, and slipped a piece of cardboard into her hand. The top of a cigarette packet with the words ‘I love you’ printed in black ink.
And she said to him afterwards, ‘But is there no one to speak up for the victim? For the dead woman? No one to take her side, to challenge all those witnesses?’ And he looked at her as if she didn’t understand anything at all and explained that there wasn’t, that the victim had no place in the trial.
She shifted uneasily on the hard bench. People had crammed into the public seats filling up every available space. McLoughlin had warned her that this would happen. Once the trial began to be reported, curiosity would be excited. She would need to arrive earlier and earlier every day to make sure she got her seat. She crossed and uncrossed her legs, using her elbows to move the man pushed up against her right-hand side a fraction further away. She could smell him. He was sucking extra strong mints, but they couldn’t completely hide the underlying taint of stale sweat and dirty hair.
‘Dr James Greenaway,’ the senior counsel called. Margaret watched as the forensic pathologist loped up to take the stand. One gangly arm reached round to smooth in place his long wisps of hair. He dispensed with the oath in double-quick time and perched on the chair, looking like a hare about to leap from the path of a greyhound.
‘Dr Greenaway, could you describe to me,’ Douglas began, ‘the scene on the bank of the Grand Canal on Monday the fourteenth August last?’
Greenaway began. He could have been talking about a picnic, an outing, an occasion of great happiness. He described the weather, the sun, the heat, the water, the wildlife. His melodic voice rose and fell, cushioning, softening the impact of his words. He began to describe Mary’s injuries, beginning with her head. He talked about what he had seen as he looked at her from the canal bank, and afterwards, when, under his instructions, she had been moved. Rigor mortis had not set in so this was not the difficulty it might have been. He differentiated between the damage that had been done to her before she was placed in the water and after. He commented on the work of small rodents, rats and water voles, the marks caused by the dog. Douglas moved on to the post-mortem. He described his observation of the exterior surface of the body, the marks around the wrists, caused by what appeared to be handcuffs, which had been removed before she was put in the plastic bags. There were similar marks around her ankles. Could he say whether or not the handcuffs had been on the body when she had died? Difficult to say, probably not, he thought, as the scabs that had formed were a number of days old.
‘Explain to us the nature of the marks here in photograph number thirteen.’
‘Ah yes.’ Greenaway put on his glasses. ‘There is what seems to be an extensive burning of the skin, probably by a cigarette end. The deceased appeared to have a series of moles in a line on the inside of her right thigh and it looks as if the cigarette was applied to the skin between these marks, almost like those join-the-dots pictures that children have.’
‘I see. And photograph fourteen?’
‘Slashes made with a very sharp knife or blade around the nipples on both breasts.’ He peered at the photograph for a few seconds. ‘Very sharp. Almost scalpel-like, these incisions.’
‘And do you have any suggestion as to what kind of a knife was used?’
‘Possibly a Stanley knife, or a carpet knife, something of that order.’
‘Any other marks on the body you should draw our attention to?’
‘A number of bite marks on the upper breast, stomach, inner thighs, buttocks.’
The senior counsel pressed him to move on to the results of the post-mortem.
‘Ah, yes, may I, my lord?’ Greenaway gestured to his notebook, addressing the judge, Margaret noted, as the guards had, rather than David Douglas. The pathologist flicked through it, humming softly under his breath.
‘Death,’ he said, ‘was caused by an intercranial haemorrhage, as a result of the laceration of the middle meningeal artery.’
‘And what was this caused by?’
‘Injuries were consistent with a blow, probably from a fist, to the left temple.’ Greenaway rubbed his fingers against the side of his skull.
‘And would death have been instantaneous?’
‘No.’ Dr Greenaway looked straight at the judge as he answered.
Not at all, thought Margaret, remembering the diagrams, the descriptions in her textbooks. There would have been a temporary loss of consciousness at the time of the blow, followed by a period of normal consciousness, possibly for one to two hours. Then gradual loss of consciousness again, with death resulting from increased intercranial pressure. The Glasgow scale of consciousness, she remembered, is the standard measurement. They call it the ‘talk and die’ phenomenon.
McLoughlin had told her. ‘It’s not going to be easy for you,’ he had said. ‘What you have to understand is that as far as the law is concerned nothing exists unless it is said in that courtroom. Practically every single piece of evidence, except for the very occasional exception, must be stated, described, explained, accounted for by word. And you will have to sit there and listen. Everything that happens every day is going to cause you a lot of pain – the description of your daughter’s injuries, the manner of her death, everything will be spelt out, syllable by syllable. If Fitzsimons had pleaded guilty, and we did think he would to begin with, he’d have saved us all a lot of bother, but now that he’s using Patrick Holland, God knows what will happen. Because Holland is the worst or the best, depending on where you’re standing. He’s methodical, relentless, completely ruthless.’
The senior counsel was speaking again. ‘Let’s move on, Dr Greenaway, to her other injuries.’ Margaret willed her ears to close. The man next to her was making notes. She looked at his lined pad, a leaking biro smearing words across the page. She watched the jury. They were all staring, mesmerized, at James Greenaway’s description. She looked at Patrick. He, too, was making notes, staring down at his pad. Finally she looked at Jimmy Fitzsimons. He was pale. From time to time he ran his tongue over his bottom lip and bit deep into his thumbnail. She wanted to stand up and rush to the doctor and put her hand over his mouth. Leave her alone, she wanted to shout. Don’t do this to her. This body that you describe in such beautiful, careful, fastidious detail doesn’t exist any longer. There are no longer any tissues. No longer any flesh, any blood. There are just my memories of her. Please, please, leave them alone.
But the process of revelation was relentless. The doctor was now describing the nature of the injuries to her vagina and anus.
‘Evidence of semen?’ asked Douglas.
‘Actually no. But skin was found under her fingernails which matched that of the accused.’
Margaret swallowed hard. As the prosecuting counsel sat down, Patrick stood up. He waited until the room was once again in complete silence. He looked around him. Then he began.
‘Now, Dr Greenaway, of course we all know your expertise in these matters, and of course we would not deign to question any of your findings.’ A titter of laughter rose up from the group of journalists. ‘However, Dr Greenaway, there is something in your report which I don’t think the prosecution has seen fit to bring into court. Perhaps you would like to describe to the members of the jury your findings in relation to the condition of Ms Mitchell’s cervix, which,’ and he turned smartly to his right to address the jury, ‘for the benefit of those of you with a less than encyclopaedic knowledge of the anatomy of a woman, is the neck or entrance to the womb.’
Dr Greenaway hesitated. ‘From my examination,’ he began, ‘I would say that the deceased had been pregnant at some time in the recent past.’
‘And, Dr Greenaway, how do you know this?’
‘There are physical changes,’ he said. ‘The cervix is slitlike after pregnancy. The skin around the nipples, the areola as it’s called, changes colour, darkens, as does the skin of the vulva.’
‘So, can you tell us if that child was carried to full term?’
‘I cannot,’ he said. ‘Practically speaking there are no signs, in any woman, to show this, apart from changes to the skin of the lower abdomen, “stretch marks” as they’re commonly called. There were none of these on the body of the deceased, but they do not occur in every pregnancy, so that of itself doesn’t tell us much.’
‘You said “had been” pregnant, Dr Greenaway, so she was not pregnant at the time of her death?’
‘Definitely not.’
‘And, Dr Greenaway, do you know if Mary Mitchell had any children?’
Again the hesitation. Then the answer. ‘I don’t. Not within my ambit, I’m afraid, my lord.’
Patrick turned again to face the jury. ‘Well, I do know and I can state quite categorically that Ms Mitchell had not given birth to any living child.’ He paused, and then spoke clearly and slowly. ‘Any living child at all.’
Greenaway stepped down from the stand. Patrick slumped in his seat. A hiss of interest spread around the room. Margaret looked at Jimmy, at the way he had relaxed back into his bench, the way his eyes shone as he looked across the room at the jury. She could almost hear the tune he was humming. She dropped her gaze to the knot of cotton around her wrist. Still there, frayed, but still there.