KATE
31 October 2016
Five
I lay my copy of The Times down on the clear surface of my galley kitchen and work through it methodically then do the same with the Sun, the Mirror and the Daily Mail.
Plenty on the foiled Mile End terror plot, more too on the all-consuming story of the week: a Egyptian beachside bombing. But nothing on James Whitehouse, ‘the PM’s mate caught bonking’ as the Sun described him, last week; or ‘Liv’s lover in the lift’. I double-check the tabloids, pilfered from the clerks’ office. Not one single word.
It’s bizarre how swiftly that story has sunk: buried by proper, earth-shattering news and yet its complete absence is unsettling. Something doesn’t smell right, as my mother would say. The prime minister has said that he stands by his colleague. That he has the utmost confidence in him; that this is a private matter, now resolved. But other junior ministers, caught having sex with a junior member of staff, would be hung out to dry. So what has inspired this loyalty?
It bothers me, this old boys’ favouritism, but I don’t have time to obsess. Nine o’clock on a Monday night and, just like every other night, I have a wheelie-case of documents nudging, like a loyal dog, at my heels. I scan through the notes for Blackwell, tomorrow’s hearing, at Southwark Crown Court. I’m prosecuting a recidivist sex offender who, at 2 a.m. one morning in March, abducted an eleven-year-old. His defence? He was being kind-hearted and the boy – paralytic on the four cans of the cider with which he’d plied him – is ‘a lying shit’. Sounds absolutely charming.
I work efficiently and, despite the grubbiness of the evidence, the unrelenting sadness for the child, begin to feel lighter: Graham Blackwell, a 25-stone 55-year-old, will not endear himself to the jury. Unless something goes terribly wrong, I’m unlikely not to win. And then I turn to Butler, a case of relationship rape that will prove more difficult to prove. The details swim up from the pages of notes and I realise that my eyes are blurring: fat tears that pool and swell, I can feel them teetering on my lower lashes. I swipe them with my knuckles. God, I must be exhausted. I glance at my watch. Ten-forty: relatively early for me.
I stretch, trying to energise my weary body. But I know this is less the bone-aching tiredness that comes from traipsing around the south-eastern circuit or the intellectual weariness of teasing out each legal loophole and more an emotional exhaustion that blankets me like the velvet darkness of a starless night. Here, in my quiet, rather lonely flat, I am tired of man’s inhumanity to man. Or, rather, his inhumanity to women and children. I am tired of such casual sexual violence or, as Graham Blackwell might put it, the refusal to give a shit.
Time to buck up. I can’t allow myself to wallow. It’s my job to catch out these bastards: to use my considerable powers of persuasion to do all I can to put them away. I pack up my files; slosh whisky into a tumbler; dig around in the freezer box for some fat ice cubes – I remember to make ice even though I forget to buy milk; and set my alarm for 5.30 a.m. The flat’s cold – the central heating’s on the blink and I haven’t had time to get it fixed – and I run a bath, hoping it will warm my bones and unknot my tense shoulders; will envelop me in its watery caress.
The steam rises and I submerge my limbs. It almost scalds but the relief is immediate: no one has touched me since last month’s brief, unsatisfying evening with Richard, and I feel exposed and somehow vulnerable as I take in my nakedness and note quite how thin my thighs are these days. My hips protrude like tiny islands; my stomach is concave, my breasts tight. I am dropping a cup size each decade. My face might have improved – high cheekbones; arched brows; my once-hated nose no longer kinked but straight and petite; a thirtieth birthday present to myself; the most dramatic evidence of my reinvention and success – but my body is more scrawny than lean. A bubble of self-pity wells as I remember the younger Kate and envisage an older one: a grey-haired husk of a woman as brittle and shrivelled as the beech leaves I scrunch through on my walk from the tube to my mansion flat. Desiccated.
Oh, for God’s sake. Think of something else. My mind Rolodexes through the news – Egypt; the cloying fog; the planned arrival of Syrian refugees before Christmas – then flits back to James Whitehouse and the intensity of his friendship with Tom Southern. They go back thirty years: plenty of time for secrets to be made, shared and kept. I wonder if the tabloid hacks are sniffing around for them again, truffling for a tale of class and corruption, determined to unearth some choice nuggets this time?
There’s that infamous photograph that emerged just after the prime minister was first elected, in 2010, of them both at Oxford. They’re posing on the steps of the grandest college, dressed in the uniform of their elite dining club, the Libertines: midnight-blue tails, velvet burgundy waistcoats, cream silk cravats blooming like peonies against each blemish-free face. The photo was hastily suppressed – news organisations can’t use it now – but the image persists of those preening, entitled young men. I see their smooth, smiling faces now: the faces of men who will sail through life: Eton, Oxford, parliament, government.
And then I think of the child in Blackwell, the case of tomorrow’s repeat sex offender – and how his life chances have differed; how his life has already been derailed. The paper dips in the water, and I let the soggy mass slip from my hand to the floor as I find myself ambushed by a wave of sorrow: an ache that engulfs me so entirely that I can either succumb – or suppress it. I sink deep into the bath, welcoming the oblivion of the hot, greying water as it closes over my face.