Concealed by forgotten, spindly, grey-green plants, she looks carefully through the holes in the leaves and into the bandstand. She can see the figures clearly. Two boys, a couple of years older than her, maybe sixteen. Not men, as she had first thought.
There is no way she can intervene. All of the old feelings rear up. Butterflies in her stomach. Cold hands. A feeling of being watched, being hunted. The old anxiety, but this time with reason. She can’t step forward. She is frozen in fear.
She can’t leave the safety of the greenhouse. She puts a hand on the mottled green windowpane, just looking. It is important, if she can’t step in, to look. It is the right thing to do, to watch, when something important is unfolding, and Zara so likes to do the right thing.
She watches it unfold, staring, unblinking, so hard her eyes become dry and painful. Something horrendous is happening, but Zara forces herself to keep staring, not glancing away for even a moment. She counts, instead. One second. Two. Three.
It’s over in ten. And nothing is ever the same again.
2
Lauren
Islington, London
October, the following year
Lauren watches Zara walk into the kitchen. She’s wearing a white blouse and a black skirt. Her legs are long now, somehow gamine, like a deer’s or an antelope’s. She seems to have grown since witnessing the crime last summer. Taller and more womanly. The way she holds herself, the things she says. ‘A Catch 22, isn’t it?’ she said the other day – her baby daughter!
Lauren considers her, now, just standing there in a patch of October sunlight. She’s so beautiful that Lauren feels pride bubbling right up through her like pink lemonade.
‘Feeling okay?’ she asks. Zara’s role in today’s trial has become part of their lives this past year. At each meeting, Zara has seemed to mature even further. Speaking up, giving opinions, organizing the family. ‘We’re at the lawyer’s at seven, remember?’ she said recently, and Lauren thought: who are you? The anxiety that has plagued Zara since she was eleven is still there, sometimes, but so is another Zara, too. A newly brave, bold girl who wants to be a proofreader – ‘I’d get to read books for a living!’ – and who won’t eat meat or buy leather. Her daughter, the almost-adult, grown so fully and so beautifully into herself that Lauren wants to call it out of an open window: I, Lauren Starling, have raised a woman!
Zara shrugs and Lauren waits. This is what they do. Zara is as circumspect as her absent father, who left before she was born. Or, rather, was never with Lauren enough to call his abandonment leaving. Lauren still marvels at how many of his traits have filtered down to her daughter, even though he never sees her, like how the moon still pulls the tides from afar.
‘I mean – it’s the right thing,’ Zara says now. Zara thinks plenty of things are the right thing. Recycling. Slow fashion. Free-range eggs. And now this, too.
‘It is absolutely the right thing,’ Lauren says to her, wondering if she sounds patronizing, as Aidan walks into the kitchen.
He paces across the tiled floor, dodging the hanging lamps they put up above the table last year. He has one hand in his hair. Shirt untucked. His body is an open bracket, taut with tension. He has wild, dark hair, still thick into his forties, and round brown glasses. He always looks slightly harassed, and more so right now.
‘But,’ Aidan says, raising his head in a sort of backwards nod at his stepdaughter, ‘you don’t have to do it. You do not. It’s not too late to say no. Say the word,’ he brandishes his mobile phone, ‘and I’ll cancel.’
‘She’ll be fine,’ Lauren says, giving him a look.
‘I hope so,’ Zara says on an exhale. ‘I’ll look back and be glad I did it. I know I will.’
On the advice of the Crown Prosecution Solicitor, Harry, an unmarked police car is waiting for them outside. ‘More anonymous,’ he had said lightly. ‘And all three of you in the back is best. Harder to distinguish her that way.’
As they file out down their front path, their neighbour does, too. ‘Nice day for October,’ he says cordially to Lauren.
She’s always liked Ray. He’s ninety-three this year and always wears the same jacket, which he repairs in small patches.
‘It’s been such good weather lately,’ she says to him. Aidan rushes past her, throwing her a look. She reluctantly gets into the car. Why can’t they chat with Ray, on a stressful day like today, to ease the tension just a little?
Aidan sits pavement side in the car, his back rigid, blocking anybody from seeing in, even though the windows are opaque with frost.
Now they’re in the car, she can’t prevent herself from thinking about it any longer. That her daughter, who she shielded from swear words on the television and ‘scenes of a distressing nature’, whose ears she covered during Radio 4 programmes about the Iraq War, was the sole witness of a homeless man being murdered by two footballers.
Today, Zara will enter the courtroom through a back door shown to them last week, and give evidence from behind a screen, known to the jury and the public only as Girl A, her identity protected by the State.
Lauren has been impressed with the justice system’s dedication since Zara gave her statement. Not a single slip-up. Zara’s identity has been protected by an injunction, redacted documents and the law. The press cannot name her and, if people leak it online, their posts are deleted, and they are arrested.
‘Scarf on,’ Aidan says as they do a slow loop behind the Old Bailey, ready to be deposited at the back entrance. ‘Face covered.’
Zara obliges, wrapping a black scarf around her head, saying nothing, her dark eyes – so like her father’s – the only visible feature, scanning the world outside.
‘Stop fussing,’ Zara says.
‘Our little fusspot,’ Lauren says affectionately, glancing at Aidan.
He gives her an indulgent, private smile, just for her.
Lauren smiles back, then turns to look at Zara. As she does so, she feels a dropping sensation in her gut, like they have just driven over a low bridge. It’s unusual for her. She is the calm one. The optimist. The it’ll be fine-er.
Lauren explores the unpleasant sensation within her. It’s similar to grief. A slow, soft, sad feeling. She looks down at Zara’s hand still in hers. It has lost all its childhood chubbiness, around the knuckles, in the past year.
No. It’s fine. It’s fine. It is high-level, and nerve-wracking, but it is fine. Nothing is going to happen. They are here, together, the sunlight on the backs of their necks. Nothing will hurt them, ruin them, destroy them. She tilts her face up to the light. It’s not possible.
3
Aidan
The Old Bailey, London
Aidan watches as Zara is led, an animal to the slaughter, into the witness box in the empty courtroom. Her eyes are downcast, head bowed, like somebody about to be executed, not cross-examined. She’s just shy, he tells himself. She’s just nervous, not properly scared.
Despite his own reassurances, Aidan is sure that this is not the right thing for Zara to be doing, but his voice has been lost in the crowd. The State does not have her best interests at heart, of that he is certain, no matter what they say. To them, she is a commodity. She has knowledge, and that knowledge is going to be extracted from her, and then she will be discarded. They have placated Aidan with promises of anonymity, with assurances that they are professionals, that what she is doing is important and right. But right for who? For them, that’s who. If she angers people, if her identity is accidentally leaked, they won’t care. They will have got everything out of her that they wanted, and they will leave Aidan and Lauren to clear up the mess. ‘Of course you think that,’ Lauren had said recently when he pointed all of this out again. ‘You’re a cynic.’ And maybe that’s true. Aidan is drawn to the negative, is forever perusing horror stories on the internet, has recently taken to binge-reading articles about leaked identities late at night. Witch hunts, public sector omnishambles. He works in IT, and has spent his days recently voraciously reading past cases instead of working.