The curtain is drawn tightly around Zara by an usher, secured by Velcro, which Aidan cannot resist reaching out to check. The usher glances at him, a quick, proprietary look from behind square glasses. Aidan ignores him, and keeps checking it along the length of the curtain. If he can just secure it more tightly … make sure nobody at all can see her …
‘You’ll be in the public gallery,’ the solicitor says to them. Harry’s young. Mid-thirties. He drinks matcha lattes that leave his tongue bright green. Aidan catches glimpses of it as he speaks to them in meetings and has to try very hard not to comment on it. Harry gets on especially well with Lauren, but then everyone does. They’re both fast talkers, gesticulators. Lauren invited him over for a curry she made from scratch in the summer, bought a load of chickpeas at the market – way, way too many – and Aidan sat and listened to his wife and the CPS solicitor for the evening, worrying about blurred boundaries.
Harry runs through Zara’s account with her quietly once again. He perches like a flamingo behind the box, one leg against the wall’s wood panelling.
Aidan and Lauren hover in the corner of the courtroom. ‘It should be quick,’ Lauren says. ‘I think.’ She runs a hand through her ashy blonde hair. Aidan’s wife is sometimes beautiful and sometimes less so, though he would never say that. Aidan finds her fascinating in this way. Her features are slightly irregular somewhere around the nose and mouth. She is ‘interesting to look at’, he once said while drunk, which he regretted.
‘She’ll be okay,’ he reassures her, though he doesn’t mean it, isn’t sure. How could he be?
He stares up at the windows above and wishes that they hadn’t done the right thing. That they had done the wrong thing. The easy thing. That Zara didn’t care so much. That she had seen the murder but closed her eyes and walked away. Pretended it had never happened.
4
Zara
The Old Bailey, London
Zara is sitting behind the black curtains, waiting for the questioning to begin. Although nobody will be able to see her, her cheeks are flushed. She tries to calm herself with deep breaths.
All she has to do, she tells herself, is tell the courtroom what she saw.
Except it isn’t that simple. Not at all. Zara doesn’t find anything simple, not really. She is one of life’s over-thinkers, according to the therapist.
But that night changed everything. That night is all about gut instinct, for Zara.
She reaches to take a sip of the water provided in the white plastic cup. This … this is different. Right and wrong have become mixed up.
She saw the defendant stab the victim, Jamie, while his friend looked on. She saw the blood leaving Jamie’s neck, a cascade on to the floor around him. And Zara is here because of that.
Because she knew Jamie.
She started volunteering in Islington with Waste Not as part of her anxiety recovery. ‘Look, who do you want to be?’ the therapist had said, and Zara had thought: God – who? What a liberating question.
‘I like causes,’ she had said eventually. ‘Like … the environment, and animals, supporting the underdog. I don’t know. Homeless people. I feel sorry for them.’ It had come out of nowhere, but it had felt like real, authentic Zara who was speaking. Not the one who tried to fit in at the school away weekend – thinking a million disastrous thoughts a minute, instead of cycling – but the real her. And so every other Thursday, at six o’clock in the evening, she’d head to the high street to hand out the food that a few cafés and restaurants had reserved for homeless people. She would wear a hi-vis vest, bright yellow, and carry a stiff paper bag containing hot meals, the steam gently warming her hand. At first, she had to find the homeless people – in shop doorways, in underpasses – but, after a few months, they started coming to her. That’s how she had met Jamie, and the rest of them.
And that’s how she recognized him when she saw him. When she saw what happened to him.
5
Aidan
The Old Bailey, London
Zara is almost at the end of the questioning.
She has told the jury – from behind the screen – what she saw. About the two teenage youth football team players who killed a homeless man in the bandstand during the school holidays the summer before last. She’s told the courtroom in shaking tones that she knew Jamie, the victim. About Waste Not. About the discarded roof tile the second defendant, Mal, picked up and tossed to the first defendant, Luke. Mal is charged with supplying that weapon, Luke with murder. She tells them about how Jamie lay helplessly, blood leaving his body, until he was silent.
Aidan sometimes dreams about what Zara must have seen. A bloodied man and a murderer standing in the twilight. He wakes, itchy with sweat. His stepdaughter doesn’t know how much it will affect her, later. He wishes he could take this thing she’s seen and absorb it into himself.
‘And what did you hear?’ the barrister says.
‘Not much,’ Zara says. ‘The defendants shouted something – a phrase? It was in another … another language, I … Latin, maybe? A club motto?’
‘The club’s motto is “We Stand Together”. In English,’ the barrister says icily.
‘Not that,’ she says. ‘Never mind. It was … I don’t know? A chant?’
‘A chant?’
‘They said something I didn’t understand, alright?’
‘But you can’t remember anything more about it?’
‘No.’
‘One final question,’ the defence barrister says to the curtains through a sigh. He is irritated by Zara, by her evidence.
He has a pink mark on his nose from pushing his glasses up with his knuckle, which he does every few minutes. ‘Can you talk me through the movements of the first defendant, his co-accused the second defendant, and the victim?’
‘The movements?’ Zara’s disembodied voice asks.
‘They just walked up to this sleeping, homeless man, did they? And killed him in situ?’
‘Yes. Mal passed Luke the roof tile, and he stabbed him with the point of it.’
‘And the homeless man did nothing? Perhaps he was high on drugs, or drink?’
‘No, he wasn’t,’ Zara says.
‘I see,’ the barrister says, leaving a drawn-out pause.
Aidan looks across the public gallery. There they are. Holloway FC, the Premier League team, all wearing suits and yellow or blue ties. Club colours. Some key members of the youth team are here, who feed the Premier League team. Five men. Coaches. Managers. A few younger lads, too. Rangy-looking teenagers with tanned foreheads. Aidan saw the latest Premier League match on television two nights ago. The commentators mentioned the upcoming trial, but only briefly.
Luke’s parents are here, too. Aidan has a morbid fascination with them. Their child has done something unthinkable. The parents are desperate to believe it isn’t true, not their kid. Aidan knows a watered-down version of that feeling. Doesn’t every parent? One Christmas, his daughter from his first marriage, Poppy, called him a twat because she didn’t get the £500 pair of trainers she wanted. He ate his Christmas dinner alone, heart in his feet, thinking: I messed it up. She was supposed to grow up to be nice: humble. That’s what children don’t realize. They don’t realize they are avatars of their parents. It is like Aidan has taken his heart out of his chest and has to watch it walk around outside his body. And the heart doesn’t even know. The heart wants Gucci trainers.