Our Kind of Cruelty by Araminta Hall (3)

My barrister, Xander Jackson, returned this document ten days ago. It might sound stupid but I’ve missed it, even felt worried about it. I’ve missed the act of writing it, almost like it is in control of the end of the story. And I’m desperate to know what happens next, where we go from here.

‘This is dynamite,’ Xander said when he handed it back to me. ‘In both a good and bad way. There’s loads we can use here, but also I think you should destroy it.’

‘No way,’ I said.

‘I thought you might say that,’ he said. ‘But if you don’t destroy it you have to absolutely promise me you’ll never show it to anyone. Our case is fucked if you do.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it makes you sound a bit unhinged.’

‘What are you talking about?’

He laughed. ‘Sorry, unhinged is probably too strong a word. I didn’t mean that. It’s just, well, some people might not entirely understand what you feel about Verity. They might misinterpret some of the things you did, like waiting outside her office and walking past her house. You know.’

‘Not really.’

Xander composed his face and leant forward, his hands clasped in front of him. ‘In all seriousness though, Mike, we’re going to plead not guilty.’

‘But I did it,’ I said. ‘I’m not denying I threw the punches. I mean, there were witnesses apart from anything else.’

‘Yes,’ Xander said. ‘But you’ve been charged with murder and I’m pretty sure we can get it reduced to manslaughter. If we plead not guilty, then the charge of manslaughter is still on the sheet and the judge can direct the jury to convict you of that rather than murder. It makes a massive difference to sentencing.’

Xander is an idiot like all the others, but an idiot my lawyer assures me we need. He is a dick-slapping show-off who might not go to the clubs George frequents, or beat up women like the men my mother chose, but he’s still an arse. I’m sure he’s married with a couple of kids, but still looks at pretty girls on the street, still allows himself the odd fumble at Christmas parties. His cheeks are ruddy and I expect he gets excited by bonfires and how to cook lamb and chopping wood, a type of person I didn’t even know existed until I went to university, but they do, I promise. He thinks he got into being a lawyer to help people and do good, and doesn’t like to admit that sometimes it gives him a hard-on defending impossible cases. And also he likes the money. But right now he is the best chance I have of getting out of here and starting my real life with V.

Initially I didn’t want to implicate V at all. But Xander had some powerful arguments. ‘Do you really think she’ll be outside the prison gates waiting for you if you’re in here for ten or more years and she gets off scot-free?’ he asked after we’d sweated out the argument in a strip-lit cell for hours and hours. I could feel the sweat pooling under my prison-issue clothes and the ants in my bloodstream were running riot.

‘A girl like that? Especially after all the media coverage? She could write a book, be the toast of the town. There’ll be loads of men queuing up to take her on dates. Besides, I think it’s damned unfair for you to take all the blame on your own. I hadn’t thought of it before I read your document, but you were clearly coerced and you have to ask yourself why she did that.’

‘It was part of the Crave,’ I said. ‘I thought I explained that. And she didn’t coerce me. I enjoyed it.’

Xander waved this away. ‘Do you know she was the sole beneficiary in Angus Metcalf’s will? That girl is a multi-millionaire now.’

I shook my head. ‘V would never do any of the things you’re suggesting for money.’

He smiled. ‘Just an added bonus then, shall we say.’

I didn’t like his tone, but there was no point in losing my temper. ‘I don’t want to shift the blame on to her.’

‘Look, there’s no doubting you threw the fatal punch. But there are so many unanswered questions, so many ways we can get the jury to question her and then start to see you in a different light. I mean, for a start, why hadn’t she told Angus you were in contact? Why didn’t she report the assault straight after it happened? Why didn’t she tell Angus as soon as he got home? Why the fuck did she ring you to warn you he was coming round that night?’

‘It wasn’t assault,’ I said, thinking back to the glorious kiss V and I had shared which still rested like velvet in my soul.

‘Exactly. So, you have to ask yourself why she’s saying that now, all of a sudden. Doesn’t it make you doubt her intentions all along?’ Xander leant forward as he spoke, his Adam’s apple bobbing and his cheeks flushed.

‘I don’t expect you to understand. It’s part of our game. I don’t want people to doubt her.’

He looked straight at me. ‘Mike, they either have to doubt you or her. We can’t go after Angus because he’s dead and juries tend to feel sorry for the victim. If they believe you did it out of jealousy it plays very badly. Murder carries a mandatory life sentence and even if we got manslaughter you’d be looking at ten to fifteen years. We can say you didn’t mean to kill him until we’re blue in the face, but they won’t believe you. You beat him up pretty badly, apart from anything else, which doesn’t look good. But if you were so distressed you lost control then maybe we can turn them towards a more lenient version of manslaughter. What if your mind was turned by Verity? If her hold over you was so strong that you thought you were doing what she wanted? Then, then we’ve got a chance.’

My mind felt fuzzy. ‘But I’ll still have to go to prison.’

‘I think that’s going to be unavoidable. But what I’m suggesting is the difference between ten and five years, maybe less. You won’t even be forty when you get out.’

‘What will happen to Verity?’ I was thinking about how I would visit the prison gym in the evening and press weights.

Xander sucked in some air, as if he really was human. ‘That’s what we need to discuss, Mike. And I need you to listen carefully and think about what’s best for both of you. It’s not going to be pretty for her either way. We’ll have to tear her apart in court a bit and all your secrets will come out. But I think we need to go further. Maybe …’ He tried to look uncomfortable, but it didn’t sit well on his smooth features. ‘Maybe she’ll have to pay for what she’s done. Literally, I mean.’

I decided on heavier weights. ‘I don’t want her upset.’

Xander sighed. ‘Come on, Mike, this is serious. This is your life we’re talking about.’ He stood and leant over the desk. ‘Bottom line, you’re going down for this and I don’t think it’s fair for you to take this all on your own. Verity might not have thrown the punch, she might not even have actually asked you to do it, but she’s as guilty as you are in some ways. Come on, she was clearly in love with you and wanted out of her marriage.’

‘I don’t understand what you’re saying.’

‘Mike,’ Xander said, his voice lowered like I would imagine him speaking to his children when they were naughty and he was being reasonable. ‘I’m duty-bound to go to the police with what you’ve told me.’

‘But I haven’t told you anything.’

He tapped my document. ‘It’s all in here. You know they’ve had Verity in for questioning a few times already?’ I shook my head. ‘They’re obviously suspicious about her involvement. If I tell them what you’ve told me I think there’s a chance she could be charged with accessory to murder.’

‘No. Absolutely not.’

‘You’ll be tried together,’ Xander said. ‘You might even get similar sentences. And think about it. When you get out you’ll have this shared experience. She won’t have been out in the world getting on with her life while you’ve been rotting away in here. You can start a new life together, put all this behind you.’

I looked at Xander and his blue eyes, which reminded me sometimes of Kaitlyn’s. He smiled slowly as his words sank in. There was something intoxicating about them. Something which demanded surrender. Which felt like stepping on to warm sand or into a proper hug. It was a part of the Crave neither of us had anticipated, but maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing. There was an undeniable beauty in the idea of V safely packed away in a cell just like mine, waiting to be taken out like a precious jewel in a few years’ time. It almost sounded romantic, like something we might tell our grandchildren.

Xander told me to expect certain aspects of our story to be leaked. He was sorry, he said, but there was nothing he could do about it. Office juniors like to gossip, he said, sighing as he stopped his hands from rubbing together. But I didn’t expect these ridiculous, bald headlines which leave out so much. I have started cutting them out and sticking them in here so that I never again forget what the world is like out there.

I also cut this article out on Saturday. It’s an opinion piece, written by someone called Helen Bell, whose name I will remember, published in the best-selling national newspaper in Britain.

IS VERITY METCALF A MODERN-DAY LADY MACBETH?

Xander looks more and more pleased with himself every time he comes to visit, bringing with him bundles of news clippings, which I’ve now stopped reading. I can’t look at one more picture of Verity with her eyes meeting the camera as the flashes pop in her over-exposed face. I know what it is costing her to hold herself together like that, how inside she will be crumbling and weakening, how all that might be left of her is a ruin.

I think of my garden sometimes. Anna said that we had to tear it all down to rebuild it and make it better and I have to believe that is right. Verity and I might appear as nothing more than rubble at this moment, but I am doing this for the best reasons. Out of this mess I am going to create something truly spectacular, something so much better than what we had.

The police have been to see me a few times about Verity. They go over and over the same questions, asking me to repeat stories about our lives so that it almost feels salacious. They ask me about the things we’ve done together, the promises we made, the connection we shared. They can’t understand why V’s tone was so friendly in the emails she sent, and they go through them line by line, asking me to show them where she is talking in our secret code. Why do you think she didn’t tell anyone about your contact, they ask again and again and I tell them it is because we are in love.

Mainly though they want to know why she rang me on the night of the murder and why, when the police arrived, she was in my arms whilst Angus lay dying on the floor at our feet. Don’t protect her, Mike, they say, sounding like Xander, she’s not worth it.

Sometimes, after these interviews, I feel guilty, not because she didn’t do all those things, but because I could never have imagined a moment in which I wasn’t laying down my life to protect V’s. But I’m starting to see that is a very simplistic way of thinking. My life belongs to V as hers does to me. We do not exist without the other and as such we can’t be parted, we can’t go off on different paths. We have to stay together, whatever that means and whatever it takes to get us there.

It’s odd to think I’m only down the road from home; Clapham to Wandsworth Prison is only a brisk half-hour walk. I can’t see anything other than sky from my small, high window, black birds circling like vultures in the grey clouds. But still I can trace the route between here and home, walking the streets so thoroughly in my mind I can almost feel that wonderful ache in my legs when I stop. There is nowhere near enough exercise given to us in here. No wonder the men all scream and shout and spit and swear. Our bodies are useless, leaving only our minds to puff and pant along. I spend hours each day exercising in my cell, even though Fat Terry says he’ll deck me if I don’t shut the fuck up. But we both know he won’t, or more accurately he can’t. His tub-of-lard stomach against my taut muscles wouldn’t stand a chance and he knows it. I don’t even bother to answer him as I dip towards the floor on my hundredth push-up or exhale my breath against the pain of razor-fast sit-ups. I cannot let my body wilt and falter. I have to look good for V in court and I have to be strong enough to save us both.

V said we had a bright future and because of that I always imagine us bathed in golden sunshine. She wanted us to work hard and earn lots of money so we could kick back and relax later on. What is the point, she used to say, of working three-quarters hard all your life and dying of a heart attack the day after you retire, when you can push yourself when you’re young and fit and have fun, then retire early and have even more. I wonder how what is happening now fits into her plans and I wonder if we will still have enough money to live the life she dreamt of when I get out. I don’t want ever to have to use a penny of Angus’s money and I doubt she would either. Thoughts like this can keep me awake at night as I spin through scenarios which see me searching for a job as I approach forty, a blackened criminal record hanging over my head.

Xander says I’m not allowed to write to her or try to contact her in any way. He says it would be very bad for my case if I so much as ask to do so and he’s made me promise not to. Instead I talk to V all the time in my head. I know she’s still angry with me for telling Angus in the way I did and she’s right to be. If I’d just waited a bit longer and let her handle it she would have known how to let him down gently and he wouldn’t have got so angry. He wouldn’t have drunk too much or attacked me and he wouldn’t have made it necessary for me to punch him so hard.

Xander calls this self-defence and he says I must not forget the facts: I was woken from sleeping, Angus was threatening and intimidating, he threw the first punch, I tried to reason with him, I never wanted to hurt him. Say it to yourself every night before you go to sleep, Xander says, remind yourself that you acted in self-defence.

I go over and over the conversation V and I had in Angus’s house the night before the incident. How I said I wished Angus didn’t exist and how she told me she wished things had worked out between us. But how she also told me to go home and wait, how she needed to be the one to tell Angus. How she was not just giving me what I wanted, but also protecting me. She knows me so well she knew I would get angry. I see now that she was trying to save me from myself and I didn’t listen to her. If only I had just understood and left when Angus said she was ill, then by now they would be on the way to divorce and V and I would be living together at home.

That thought affects me physically. It climbs inside me and burrows into my gut like a parasite, so I have to roll on to my side and clutch my stomach. Because we were so close, we were within touching distance of all we had ever wanted, and I had to ruin it.

But I am well practised in ruining things. If I am feeling weak my mind sometimes pounces, dragging me backwards through the detritus of my life. I scramble and scrap, clawing my way back up the hill, but on the way down it treats me to some fine views. Carly of course is near the top, but if I slither further I can watch myself opening the door to those social workers a thousand times, the film scratched and grainy against the pitted inside of my skull. I see myself standing back; I feel the will to protect my mother drain out of me.

She used to come and see me for the first few years I was in care. Controlled visits they were called and they all took place in a room in the home which was shut off from the rest of the house. It was painted a sickly yellow and had peeling stencils of rabbits and bears on the wall. There was a sad plastic tub of toys in one corner and a worn purple sofa running along one wall, under a shelf of books. None of the books ever changed places, their spines sagging under the weight of neglect.

She was usually sober, although she pretty much always stank of booze and fags, mixed with a lavender scent which she bought from the market and thought masked the poison which constantly oozed out of her pores. She cried quite a bit and her make-up would clump and run and make me feel sick. Her clothes were dirty in that way where you can see the grime layered and ingrained, and she smelt disgusting, a mixture of mud and fish and decay which caught you in the back of the throat. She apologised a lot, her eyes darting over my face, as if I was meant to know how to respond. She told me about where she was staying and said soon I’d be able to come back and live with her, even though we both knew it wasn’t going to happen. Or at least, I knew; maybe she deluded herself right up till the end. She asked what I’d been up to and I shrugged and told her nothing.

She came a few times to Elaine and Barry’s, sitting nervously in their front room while Elaine bustled with tea and biscuits. Her hand shook when she raised the mug to her lips and there was lipstick on her teeth which didn’t wash away when she drank. I could hardly believe it when I saw that. My mother, I realised, was the type of woman who wasn’t even lucky enough to count on tea washing away her embarrassingly applied lipstick. It felt, as I sat on Elaine’s green couch, almost the worst of all her sins against me. It felt unforgivable. It felt cruel and vindictive. It felt like a summation of everything that was wrong about her.

I have decided to grant Elaine’s application to visit me because sometimes I surprise myself with my need to see her. Maybe it’s nothing more than sentiment for me to look back fondly on those evenings with them, the drone of Fat Terry’s TV in the corner, rehashing Christmas songs in a desperate attempt to make us buy trash, in between terrible shows where inarticulate people shout at each other about who has fathered their baby. Elaine and Barry love Christmas and I spent nine very happy ones in their home before I met V. I wonder if this Christmas will be better or worse than the last one and then I can’t believe it’s only been a year since all that. How sometimes life can drag and turn and other times it speeds and shunts, propelling you forward however hard you want to stay back. About this time last year I was fucking Carly and my life.

Xander told me today that V has been formally charged with accessory to murder, although she’s been granted bail. She will have to wear an electronic tag around her delicate ankle and report to a police station once a day.

‘The things you’ve both said just don’t add up,’ he told me. ‘The tone of the emails she sent you were too affectionate for you to have been threatening her and she never reported any of your so-called harassment of her to the police. She didn’t tell anyone she knew, including Angus, about the times you met one another. She’s now saying you assaulted her the night before the murder, but she didn’t call the police or mention it until recently. And then of course there’s that phone call she made to you on the night of the murder and the fact that she was in your arms when the police found you. And you keep going on about how in love with each other you are, which just makes the police think you’re protecting her. None of it looks great for her, which is no bad thing for us.’

I presume V will spend Christmas at Steeple House, but I wonder if Suzi will have pushed the boat out as she usually does. I wonder if they’ve decked the tree and if there are lavish presents beneath it. I wonder if the turkey is ordered from the butcher’s, the cake made, the mince pies browning. I wonder if they’re lighting candles and opening the door to carol singers. I wonder if they’ll turn up for the Christmas Eve service at the chapel.

Xander said that he’s been told to expect a trial date for early January. In all likelihood it’s going to take place at the Old Bailey because of the nature of the case and the public interest. And, as he assured me, we will be tried together, sitting for the duration within touching distance of each other at the back of the courtroom.

He knows V’s barrister, Petra Gardner, and says she’s formidable. I asked if we’re on the same side, V and I, and he laughed and said no, not really. It made me feel odd, him saying that. It was nearly enough to make me tell him to stop, but I have to keep remembering how this will really be a new beginning for us. I have to hold on to the fact that we are not fighting each other and ultimately both want the same thing. We both need to look to the future.

Elaine and my mother arrived on the same day. Elaine in person and my mother courtesy of the Daily Mirror. I folded my mother in half and laid her on my bunk, but she stayed in my head as I walked down the steps towards the visiting room and Elaine. My mother was alive and the thought gave me an unexpected rush of joy which pricked at my heart and lifted me along.

Elaine had lost weight and her winter coat hung off her frame as she walked between the tables towards me.

‘Oh Mikey,’ she said, reaching over for my hands. ‘My poor boy, what have you done?’

The shock of her kindness made me start. ‘I’m sorry, Elaine.’

‘I just don’t understand. What happened?’ Her kindly face fell and swayed beneath the weight of it all.

‘It was an accident. He came to the house in the middle of the night and attacked me and I punched him in self-defence.’ Xander had schooled me so well I couldn’t remember any more what was really true and what was necessary truth, as Xander called it.

‘And now Verity’s been arrested too. It doesn’t make any sense.’ Elaine’s eyes were begging me to tell her something palatable, something she could take home to Barry like a present.

‘Verity was going to leave him to be with me.’

‘Oh, Mike. But she says you assaulted her, that you’d been hassling her.’

‘It’s very complicated.’

‘But were you two having an affair?’

‘Not an affair exactly. It was more like it never stopped between us. We’d met a few times and talked about her leaving Angus. She felt very guilty about it all.’

Elaine’s eyes were small like a mouse, but she kept them on me. ‘If that’s true then why is she saying all that stuff about you forcing your way into her house and turning up outside her work?’

I was arrested for the assault last week, a technicality really considering I am already in prison. When Xander told me what was going to happen I think I got a bit angry and shouted, although it’s hazy in my mind. He said it wasn’t ideal and asked if I could be sure I hadn’t assaulted V, which was a preposterous question. Then he asked why I thought she might be saying I had. I couldn’t answer him at the time, but I can now. I’ve worked it out. It’s another part of the Crave. My information got her arrested and so she’s throwing it back at me. She’s angry because she doesn’t yet understand what I’m doing, but really we’re just playing, we don’t mean any of this, it will all pass as everything does.

‘Mike,’ Elaine said. ‘Did she ask you to hurt Angus?’

‘It’s hard to explain.’

Elaine lowered her voice. ‘Do you think it’s possible you have a different perception than Verity of what happened?’

‘No,’ I said, remembering how our lips had met, her gasp of desire, ‘no, absolutely not.’

‘I just can’t make sense of it,’ Elaine said again. ‘Verity was always such a lovely girl. I was so fond of her.’ She squinted at me. ‘Your lawyer asked me lots of questions about your relationship. I don’t believe you planned this together.’

I looked down and felt my heat rise. I couldn’t think of a way of explaining it to Elaine. ‘It wasn’t like that. It’s not a simple case.’

They say visiting time lasts for two hours but I often hear inmates shouting from their cells about how they only get an hour and a half and their (insert a female name here) has had to travel seven hours to visit them. Elaine was my first visitor so I have no idea if the hour and a half we spent together was normal or not, but I could have done with the time being halved. In the end she gave up trying to ask me about the case and began one of the polite conversations I’d heard her have too many times with neighbours and shopkeepers. I couldn’t bear that and almost wished we could go back to talking about what I’d done. It felt like I was falling away from her eyes, as if the more she looked at me the less she could see me, so all she could think to say was how awful the fog was and what did they serve for Christmas dinner in here?

As soon as Elaine left I wished I’d been brave enough to tell her what I really thought: V had married Angus because she believed herself to be in love with him because of the pain I’d caused her with Carly. She thought I didn’t love her any more and made herself believe she was in love with Angus. It is even possible that she still doubts my love, which would explain why she is accusing me of assault: because she can’t believe I meant it when I kissed her. She didn’t want Angus dead, but she didn’t want to remain married to him and she needed my help to achieve this, help she asked for in a way only I would be able to interpret.

If only I could write to V or speak to her just once on the phone. I want to soothe her mind and lay my reassurances all over her fears. I know V inside out and I know how she works and what she thinks. She isn’t as strong as she likes to make out and she isn’t particularly sure of herself. I can’t bear to think of her out in the world by herself without me and if that means enclosing her in a concrete box for a few years, then that is the kindest thing to do. We will both be in our protective cells, and that is a comforting thought. Once the trial is over Xander says we will be allowed to write to each other and I plan to do so every day, throwing my love at her until she realises I absolutely do mean it. I will remind her how she once told Suzi she found the idea of writing letters romantic. We will have years of letters, letters we can tie together with ribbon and keep forever.

After I got back from seeing Elaine I read my mother’s article and my first thought was to set it on fire, but in the end I just threw it away. My mother, Michelle Hayes, forty-eight, now lives in Bermondsey with Darren Hatton, forty-one, and their nine-year-old daughter Kimberley. She has ‘been saved’. She regrets my upbringing, but I was a very difficult child. She thinks Verity looks like a nasty piece of work. I’m not a murderer, not her son, no. I must have been persuaded to do it somehow, there’s no way she’ll ever believe otherwise.

A photograph accompanied the article but I didn’t see any point in keeping it either because I don’t know anybody in it. I stared at it for a long time before I threw it away, but I can’t even be sure if the woman in the picture was really my mother. She was sitting on a beige leather sofa in a room with large purple flowers on the wall, in front of a window looking into a garden. The wall was bedecked with photographs in frames which spelt the word ‘LOVE’ or ‘FAMILY’. The floor was carpeted and you could see the corner of a television and a painting on the wall. She had her arm around a podgy little girl with long brown hair, wearing a Justin Bieber T-shirt. Darren was sitting on the other side of the girl with his arm against my mother’s shoulders. Darren might have always been on the large side, but my mother had definitely put on weight. You could see a roll of flab which had been exposed by her jeans, highlighted by the pink of her T-shirt. Her hair was now dyed a soft blond and her make-up looked professional, probably done for the paper. I looked at her hands cupped round Kimberley and I saw her nails were neatly filed and painted a pink which matched her T-shirt. She had a few rings on her fingers and a bracelet round her wrist. I wondered if they were all naturally mournful people or if the photographer had told them to look sad; the latter I suspect.

Even though she is now in the bin I find myself hoping that in reality she smiles more. That she has found the happiness she proclaims. Wouldn’t it be good for us both to have finally found love, to have finally found what we were unable to give to each other.

Christmas is a dismal affair in prison. There is something about seeing a line of men wearing coloured paper hats, queuing with their plastic trays for a meal you know will taste of sawdust, that makes you want to jump out of a window. And I know I wasn’t the only one to feel that way. The day had a febrile atmosphere to it, as if the tension existed in electronic waves which zoomed through the air. Men threw punches and shouted, the guards drew their weapons, a small man jumped on the metal netting between the floors and rolled around, someone got a snooker pole wrapped round his head and the blood wasn’t cleaned up properly. Terry spent the day with his hand down his trousers watching telly and I lay on my bunk and thought of V.

‘You never meet birds like that, do you,’ Terry said towards the end of the night when our cell was fogged with twisted desire.

I leant over my bunk and looked at the woman he was pointing at on the telly. She was shouting at someone, her Barbie body encased in a shimmering, sparkling suit which loved her like a second skin. Impossible, Kaitlyn-like heels were on her feet and her breasts were as round and large as two watermelons. Her hair was platinum blond and her face looked painted on, like a modern-day geisha, her ballooning lips a bright, shocking red, her eyes ringed in thick, smoky black. Her skin was the colour of yoghurt and I wasn’t sure she was human.

‘Bet she’s fucking filthy an’ all,’ Terry said, slapping his hands together and rubbing them with ever-increasing motion. ‘God, I tell you, if I got my hands on her she wouldn’t know what’d hit her. I’d give her a right good seeing-to, I would, and she’d fucking love it. Be begging for more.’ He laughed and it lapsed into his deep smoker’s cough.

‘Bet you had birds like that flocking round you with your fucking loadsa money,’ he said, but I had rolled on to my back. ‘Go on, give us a Chrissie present and tell us about them.’ I lay still. If it came to it I’d be happy to beat Terry to a sorry version of himself, but I didn’t want to. ‘Fucking killjoy,’ he said beneath me.

I read somewhere that the reason humans are so tragic is because we are only one half of a whole and most of us spend all our lives desperately searching for that missing person to make us complete. But because the universe finds it amusing to watch us suffer, most of us never meet our elusive other half because they have been born on the other side of the world. But you keep searching, not even knowing what you’re looking for, or even that you’re searching, because that is your biological imperative. And then you start to panic, because you feel this massive gaping hole inside and you know you either have to fill it or die. Some turn to drink or drugs or gambling or TV, anything really to make them forget they are hurtling through life on a lonely, never-ending path to death. Others take a more conventional route and convince themselves that the person they always dismissed as being too boring/fat/ugly/inadequate/bad in bed/smelly/violent/psychotic is actually ‘the one’. The one person in this world who will stop them slitting their wrists next New Year’s Eve. But of course they’re not, so they’re left with a life of recriminations and regrets which ends up in the same place as if they’d missed out the middle section and gone straight to the drugs, drink or TV. There is no one perfect out there, you hear people say, because for the large majority that is the truth. Your perfection is living on the edge of a mountain in Outer Mongolia and your paths are never going to cross.

Except that isn’t true of V and me. We found each other. And not just that, it wasn’t even hard. We met in the way all those other not-quite-right people meet, except we didn’t have to ignore the nagging doubt in the dusty basement of our minds. We just were, are, right. We fit together in every way and there is nothing anyone can do to change that. You could send us to America and fry us in the electric chair and still this would be our truth. Still nothing could change this fact.

Today was the first day of the trial. I was taken by police van to the back of the Old Bailey, where I was escorted inside with my hands locked in front of me and a blanket over my head. I felt the crowd around us and saw the flashbulbs bounce off the rain-slicked pavement. A woman shouted, ‘Repent or die,’ and I presume it was meant for me. Once inside, the blanket and handcuffs were removed and I was led through what felt like miles of labyrinthine corridors which seemed to be underground. We stopped at the bottom of a flight of stairs, at the top of which was a shut door. The guard went in front of me and I followed. It took me a minute to realise we had made it into the courtroom as we walked up and through the door. The light was bright and there was a cacophony of noise from the many people who were there. But I soon saw that I was in the dock, as Xander had told me I would be, a long box which ran across the back of the courtroom. He had also told me time and time again that because V and I were being tried together she would sit in the dock with me, which meant we would be sharing not just the emotion of the room but the physicality of it. It was a delicious thought which had kept me awake at night, as if the whole of the British legal system had been designed for this moment alone.

The guard indicated for me to sit, so I did and he sat down next to me. Xander turned from his table at the front and nodded at me, his absurd wig bobbing into his eyes. I knew that V was somewhere in the building, probably not even that far away. I was about to see her and at that moment I would have given my freedom for just one glimpse.

She arrived a few minutes later via a door which meant she had to walk through the body of the court to reach our box. I felt a surge from the people in the room, as if everyone was as drawn to her as I was. A female guard ushered her into our space, but at the other end of the dock, sitting next to her as my guard had done, as if they knew it would be impossible for us to be alone and not touch in such a confined space. V was carrying a cardboard cup which brought with it the scent of coffee. I knew it would contain a skinny latte; we’d drunk enough of those together over the years and, for some reason, this memory almost seemed worse than all the others. It seemed so carefree and innocent compared to where we were now and I couldn’t understand why it was proving so difficult to return to. I looked over at V, desperate for her to glance over even for a second, but she refused to return my stare, her pursed lips sipping from the white plastic lid.

She was dressed in a black skirt and jacket, with a white shirt underneath. Her hair was tied into a low ponytail and she didn’t look like she was wearing make-up. But the eagle was round her neck, which made me relax slightly. She kept her eyes in front of her and her expression neutral, but I could see the twitch at the corner of her mouth and the drag in her cheeks. I was worried by how pale she was, almost Kaitlyn-colour, and she had lost a substantial amount of weight so she was verging on being too thin.

‘Don’t do anything stupid,’ had been Xander’s last words to me. ‘You have to seem like the sane, stable one. You can be upset, you can fight your corner, but do not do anything to arouse interest. It is imperative we direct the attention towards Verity.’

I looked at the jury as they filed in, but they were no different from a group of people you might see in a train carriage or walking down the street. They varied in age, gender, ethnicity, weight, height. They all glanced at me and then round me to get a glimpse of V, before looking away again quickly. For all I knew one of them could have enjoyed drowning kittens in their spare time, or going to church, or swimming. None of them looked as intelligent as V and me and it seemed absurd that they should be deciding our futures. Although I had to check that thought. We were deciding our futures. We had engineered this. We were playing the game and they were just coming along for the ride.

There would be people I knew sitting in the rows in front of us but they felt like a bogeyman, as if by not looking at them I could somehow make them go away. When I lived with my mother there were monsters in the corner of my room only I could see, hidden by the cobwebs and filth which clung to our walls. I came to an agreement with those monsters. If I agreed never to look straight at them they agreed not to eat me. It lessened the terror a bit.

I looked anyway. Elaine and Barry were there and they both smiled in a low, depressing way. Colin and Suzi were in front of V, both shrunken and thinned, like pruned trees. Suzi was leaning across Colin to talk to a man who looked so like Angus he could only be his brother and, next to him, were Angus’s parents, whom I remembered from the wedding.

It struck me then that this was in fact like a wedding, bride’s family on one side, groom’s on the other. And that made me feel better. I looked again at V but she was still staring straight ahead. I wished I could tell her that this was our conjoining, our true beginning, the end of our ultimate Crave, but the start of something more wonderful. A normal, bog-standard wedding was never going to be right for us. This was a much better way of cementing our union.

‘All rise for Justice Smithson,’ said a loud voice and the room moved as an elderly man in a flowing red robe with a greying, powdered wig on his head climbed the steps to the altar. Xander had been very pleased by Justice Smithson; ‘old school’, he’d called him, which was apparently a good thing. When Justice Smithson sat we all copied him and he looked down on us like he enjoyed his job. His eyes rested on me and then I followed them to V.

There is so much empty time in court, so many hours pass in which nothing is really said or established. I find myself looking at the dust which collects between the glass and the wood of the enclosure they have put V and me into. I try not to look over at her too much and she never looks towards me. But there are moments when something is said and I feel the pull between us like a wire, feel us reaching and straining for each other.

People stand, people sit, the judge nods and the barristers speak to the jury. The jury frequently looks over to V and me; I can feel their eyes on us and I know they have no idea what to think because they are such ordinary people, puffed out by life. The charges seem so large: murder for me and accessory to murder for V. And I know the jury is so far from being able to make these sorts of decisions about us. They seem like nothing more than children being told bedtime stories when Xander and Petra speak to them and I am not sure they even listen to the details. I see them yawn and rub their eyes sometimes; one of the young men looked hungover a few days ago.

And sometimes I hardly blame them because so many stories have been told in here it is hard to grab hold of what they mean. Sometimes even the witnesses change their minds halfway through as the questions switch between Xander and Petra. Angus’s brother, Frederick, told us that they had all liked Verity and had never seen Angus so happy. But he also said that sometimes it had seemed too much, that maybe you could say he was almost under her spell, that it was a lot of money to leave to someone you had known for such a short time.

I hate the thought of V having Angus’s money. I think we should burn it. I think we should fill his stupid show-off house with notes and set fire to it, watch it dissolve into the air like the nothing it is.

We had to listen to the man all the papers have been quoting; he was called Gordon Sage and he was paraded in front of us to speak about the things he and V had done together when they were eighteen.

‘I must confess I found her scarily sexual,’ he said, his piggy eyes staring out of his fat, rugged face as though they could still see her naked body. ‘She had this thing for doing it outside.’ He licked his lips and I felt something rise through me so I was worried I was going to be sick on my shoes and fill the court with the acrid stench of bile.

I looked over at V but she had shut her eyes and was leaning her forehead against her hand. I turned my attention back to Gordon Sage and saw his fat fingers curving round the wood of the witness box. I imagined them inside V. ‘But then one day she got a friend to ring and say it was over, no explanation or anything. In fact we never spoke again.’

I imagined V screaming underneath his corpulent body and I knew then why she needed me to always save her from men like that. All the Gordon Sages I had peeled off her in nightclubs, all the times I had stopped them pawing her body and breathing on her neck, little droplets of spittle landing on her skin, so she would be tainted by their DNA. I would prise his fat fingers off one by one, bending them so far back each one would break and he would end up snivelling on the floor, snot dribbling from his nose.

Xander liked Gordon, or at least what he brought, as he put it. ‘They tried to call some American woman you worked with over there,’ he said when we met beneath the court after that day. ‘I’m presuming it was that girl you slept with. But she’s refused to come and the judge said he didn’t think it was relevant anyway. He actually said that he wasn’t interested in your sexual adventures.’ He laughed. ‘I thought Petra was going to burst when he said that. Good old Smithson, never disappoints.’ I couldn’t really understand what he meant, but I didn’t care, because the thought of V having to sit in the same room as Carly made my skin itch.

On other days my brain has felt overused, as if words are turning in my head and banging against the side of my brain, chipping my skull so that fragments of bone are imbedding themselves in places they shouldn’t be. I wonder now if the woman who called herself Mrs Lascelles really was my old headmistress, because nothing about her felt familiar. She could have gleaned a lot of what she told the court from any newspaper: like how my clothes were often dirty and I was small and thin for my age. But she also spoke about things I find hard to place, like my ‘violent temper’, as she put it. She said I was always starting fights and that lots of the parents complained about me. She said the other children were frightened of me, even some of the staff. Sometimes I had to be restrained, one teacher carrying my legs and one my arms, to remove me from classrooms.

Her words scratch at my head and at times I have thought I am going to remember something, but it always remains tantalisingly just beyond my reach. She didn’t blame me, she said, trying to catch my eye as she spoke. They knew there was trouble at home, but however many times they questioned me I never admitted to anything, always saying everything was fine, even when it so obviously wasn’t. They were in contact with social services, but they hadn’t known how bad it was. Naughty children are never anything more than bad parents, she said, her understanding radiating off her like a bloody halo.

But then there are others, like Sarah Cross, who felt like being reunited with an old friend. She smiled at me when she stepped into the stand and I remembered how warm she had always been, how she’d give you a hug even when she wasn’t meant to or sneak you an extra biscuit. She was rounder than she’d been when I’d known her and she had heavy bags under her eyes and a nasty cough which attacked her sometimes as she spoke.

‘You would be hard pushed to find a worse case of neglect,’ she said, ‘although undoubtedly worse things do happen to lots of children. He wasn’t sexually abused, which is always a blessing, but he hadn’t been provided with basic care, which certainly left physical and mental damage.’ On the day I let them into the flat I was ten years old and weighed five stone. I was wearing clothes for a six-year-old. Lots of my teeth were decayed and I was infested with lice.

I could feel V reaching out to me as Sarah spoke, as if she wanted to lean over and take my hand. But I kept my head down because I don’t want V to think of me like that. I have told her everything, but I don’t want her to hear it from someone else, I don’t want the knowledge to be out in the open. It taints me somehow, taints me with the infection of that time.

The court was shown photos of the flat, which I could only bear to look at peripherally. Everyone in the room was able to see the piled plates and overflowing ashtrays, the black mould on the walls, the encrusted toilet, the black sink and the bath so filled with rubbish it was unusable. The pictures weren’t lying, but what they didn’t show was how the whole flat smelt of rot and decay, how it caught the back of your throat and made your eyes water. I coughed because it was as if the pictures had released the stench, as if it had found its way back to me so that sitting in court I could taste the yeasty, sour smell of my childhood home which, towards the end, made me think about new life forms. Sometimes I wonder if the real reason I opened the door to the social services that day was not because I wanted to save myself, but because I thought something was actually going to materialise out of the atmosphere, something worse than was already there.

As I looked I had to tuck my hands under my armpits, a trick I learnt when I lived with my mother, as if they had once again become raw and chapped from the freezing water I used to try to wash a plate so I could eat off it, using a blackened sponge and no washing up liquid. I felt again the rush of sweat break on to my forehead as I heaved over the rotten toilet, never learning the lesson not to eat food that had grown white fur. My mouth dried at the memory of days-old pizza stuck to the top of the box, or at least the remnants of toppings.

I noticed an older woman in the jury dabbing at her eyes when they were shown my bedroom, which made me want to stand up and roar and cover V’s eyes with my hands. I wanted to spare her the sight of the curtainless window, like a large bruised eye, the mattress as thin as paper and the filthy duvet. A shiver started deep in my body, an involuntary memory of all those nights when a freezing wind passed over my head and the cold seeped into my marrowbone so it felt like I would never be warm again.

But those photos missed something else, something rare but nevertheless true: the times it was just Mum and me on the sofa, snuggled under a blanket with the telly on. When she’d used her money for food rather than vodka so my belly had stopped hurting. Before the fourth can, when she was still the right side of lucid.

‘It’s going to be OK, Mikey,’ she’d say, drawing me into her. ‘I just need to get through this and then we’ll start again.’ I would nestle into her sweaty, threadbare bathrobe and wish she was telling the truth. Wish that I hadn’t reached an age when I knew that people could lie to themselves as much as others.

When Louise gave her evidence I realised that she is a different sort of liar than my mother, a worse sort. There are people out there who see nothing wrong in lying at all. There are people out there who inhabit lies, who let them soak in and devour them. I will never be one of those people, but at the same time I am not sure the jury would understand the bald truth of what happened between V and me. I look over at them and their flat, bland faces and I know they are so disappointingly ordinary. There is no way they could ever understand the space which V and I occupy, no way they could understand our truth.

‘None of our friends ever liked Mike,’ Louise said. ‘We all tried for Verity’s sake, but there was no getting through to him. It was almost impossible to engage him in conversation. He would come out with us, but he always stuck by Verity’s side, staring at her and whispering in her ear. And he didn’t have any friends of his own, so he was always there and he didn’t like it if she went out without him. We found him creepy, the sort of person you didn’t want to be left alone with …

‘Yes, Verity did confide in me towards the end of her relationship, probably a year or so after Mike went to New York. The things she told me were quite frankly worrying. We all told her it was unhealthy, but she seemed enthralled by him, if that’s the right word …

‘I think it is fair to say she was scared of him, yes. But also some of us worried she was a bit obsessed by him …

‘Angus was so much better suited to Verity. We all breathed a massive sigh of relief when she met him. It was like getting the old Verity back, fun and carefree, not always looking over her shoulder …

‘Mike seemed very agitated at the wedding, almost at times as if he wasn’t sure where he was. I bumped into him outside the marquee after the speeches and he was in quite a state – he was bent over, as if he couldn’t catch his breath. I asked him if he was all right, but he didn’t answer. I tried to rub his back a bit, like you do when someone’s sick, but he didn’t move, so I asked him if he was still in love with Verity. He stood up at that and pushed me so hard I fell over. Then he stood over me and he looked so furious that I really thought he was going to hit me or kick me or something, but he just walked away.’

When Xander stood I could almost believe he was holding a gun as he walked to the witness box. He didn’t preamble, he just came straight out with it. ‘You propositioned Mr Hayes for sex on the night of the wedding, didn’t you?’

Louise’s eyes widened. ‘No,’ she said, ‘absolutely not.’

‘You followed him outside when he went to get some fresh air and told him you’d always fancied him and that your husband, James’ – Xander looked at his papers, although I knew it was only for effect – ‘fucks like a rabbit.’ There were titters from the jury and Louise turned the colour of freshly fallen snow. I wondered if James was sitting somewhere in front of me.

But she recovered her composure and looked straight at me. ‘Michael Hayes is a fantasist,’ she said. ‘I would never do anything like that. And, for the record, I have never fancied him.’

‘But what reason would Mr Hayes have for pushing you? He says he removed your hands from his groin and, because you were so drunk, you fell over.’

Louise opened her mouth and she looked momentarily like a fish. ‘That is not true.’ But her tone had weakened.

‘He says you were very angry,’ Xander continued. ‘You shouted expletives after him when he walked away. Angry enough to come here and lie about him in court.’

‘No,’ Louise said. ‘That’s not how it happened at all.’

‘No further questions, my lord.’ Xander returned to his table with a spring in his step. I think he would have winked at me if he thought he could get away with it.

Recently a confusion has settled over me which is blanketing my thoughts. Sitting in the courtroom day after day has made me understand that I must sculpt my story in the best way for the right outcome. I have an idea, but the idea also feels wrong. Is lying sometimes the best policy? Is it possible to want the best for someone and yet act in a way which seems the opposite?

Elaine once told me that writing things down helps to simplify problems. List the pros on one side and the cons on the other, she advised, although at the time we were only talking about which GCSEs I should take. And it does undeniably help; when I read our story, mine and V’s, over and over, it calms me. I have always thought that numbers were my friend, but maybe words are as well?

Before I go to sleep each night I hear Xander saying how I don’t want V out in the world having fun whilst I rot away in here. He is of course wrong, as he is about most things, but the things he is wrong about usually also contain an element of truth. What he is right about is that V and I must continue along the same path, our journeys must be conjoined. I think he imagines I want her incarcerated out of some sick feeling of vengeance, or even to keep her away from the world, neither of which is true. I don’t doubt V’s loyalty to me and I don’t think she would be capable of being out in the world having fun without me. I think in fact she would barely be able to function. Which is the reason that I am coming to believe properly in Xander’s strategy. V would be lost without me, she wouldn’t know what to do with herself, she would be stranded and alone. It has always been my job to keep her safe and if I am in here, then she must be in the safest place for her.

Every day in court she looks thinner and weaker, which worries me terribly, but also makes me feel like she can’t be left alone for years without me. I know she must be pining for me and worrying about me, her mind spinning a future she can’t imagine. I’ve noticed she never arrives with a coffee any more and her skin looks tighter across her face, her hair even looks slightly unwashed and she picks at the skin at the side of her nails. She looks like she is falling apart and I know some people would think that is because of the strain of the trial, but I know it is the strain of being without me and worrying about my future. If we accept our fate together and continue along the same path then she will get better; she will put some weight on her bones and a bloom back in her cheeks; her hair will shine again and her mouth will turn upwards into a smile. I know she just needs certainty, my lovely girl, and that certainty will bring with it understanding and peace of mind.

Elaine and Suzi shared a day in court, which seemed strangely right. Suzi went first, dressed in a pale grey suit which was almost the same colour as her skin. She could barely keep still and her hands worried in her lap for the whole time she was there, her eyes filling with tears every time she looked over at V.

‘We welcomed Mike into our lives,’ she was saying to Petra by the time I tuned in. ‘He was a sweet boy, but it was easy to see he was very troubled. There was always something about him which Colin and I never entirely trusted.’

‘Can you elaborate?’

Suzi has lost so much weight her skin now hangs off her face, making her look like an old lizard. I don’t think we will be able to see her when all this is over.

‘There was nothing specific. It was more just a feeling that he was too in love with Verity, if that makes sense. We excused it because of his upbringing, but it often made us uneasy.’

‘Can you give an example of something which made you uneasy?’

‘I know it sounds silly, but even the way he looked at her concerned us, as if he was looking into her rather than at her, if that makes sense. And he never took his eyes off her. You know how you’re aware if you’re staring at someone, you look away because you feel embarrassed. But Mike never looked away. He never even seemed to realise how uncomfortable it made Colin and me. And he was always in contact with her, always had to know where she was and what she was doing. And he didn’t really have any friends, so all their socialising was with her friends and us. He spent nearly every holiday with us, always came for Christmas, that sort of thing. She felt very responsible for him and his happiness, and it worried Colin and me that she should take something like that on at such a young age.’

‘Did you talk to Verity about this?’

‘Oh yes, towards the end of their relationship especially, as it made her extremely upset. She was terrified of hurting him. She said it wasn’t like ending things with a normal person because his rejection by his mother made him vulnerable.’

I had to turn my head to V at that point, but she only gave me her taut profile. She was sitting very still with her eyes on her lap, but I saw the tension in her cheek, which I knew was how she stopped herself crying. And suddenly this whole thing seemed even more absurd than it already did. Here we are, two people who love each other, being separated by a stupid mistake which could have happened to anyone.

I turned back and Suzi was talking again, so I realised I must have missed Petra’s question. ‘Yes, we knew she had started seeing Angus. She had planned to tell Mike when he came back from New York at Christmas and the stress made her quite ill.’

It was possible that Suzi had always hated me, I thought then. It was possible that it had all been a sham, all those shared times, all the dinners and conversations. It was possible that nothing she said was real.

‘Verity shouldn’t have used Mike’s infidelity as an excuse for ending the relationship,’ Suzi was saying. I had missed another question, which made me feel slightly light-headed. ‘She knows that. But I would have probably done the same.’

‘And how did Mr Hayes take the split?’

‘Very badly. Verity had to lock herself in her room the night she told him because of his persistent attempts to speak to her. He slept outside her door on the floor and the next morning refused to move. In the end, Colin and I had to basically tell him to leave.’

‘Where did he go?’ Petra asked.

‘Back to their flat in London. Although he called all day every day. It was ghastly. Verity didn’t answer her phone at all and so he rang the landline, day and night. She got in such a state that in the end Angus drove down and took her away to a hotel for New Year’s so she could get a bit of peace.’

I thought I might fall forward off my chair, but I recovered myself. Suzi was just lying. Everyone was lying apart from me and V.

‘One day Mike sent so many flowers they filled a van. When the woman unloaded them she said she’d never seen anything like it. I had to donate them to the church and hospital.’ Suzi swallowed. ‘That was typical Mike, always going overboard.’

‘Were you ever worried for your daughter’s safety?’ Petra asked, removing her glasses as she spoke.

As I sat there waiting for her answer, I realised Suzi has never been in love. You just have to listen to Liam Gallagher to realise that people like V and me are going to live forever and Suzi and the rest of them are wrong simply because they don’t know what it’s like to really, truly love someone.

‘Towards the end, a bit, maybe,’ she said and she couldn’t help glancing over at me. I held her gaze, without flinching, and she looked away almost immediately. I remembered what she’d looked like at the wedding, how puffed-out and proud she had been. She had been so stupid to ever think that was it.

‘When he first went back to New York after Christmas the contact was so incessant Verity had to change her phone number and she moved in with Angus, but her email was harder to change because of work and he bombarded her daily with ridiculous emails. But then he stopped in February and we thought maybe things had calmed down. When Verity told him about the wedding he even seemed happy for her. Of course, I never thought anything like this would happen.’ Suzi’s voice caught on her last words.

‘And how has Verity handled it all?’ Petra asked.

Suzi’s head dipped momentarily. ‘She’s been amazing when you take into consideration what’s happened to her. Her new husband, whom she loved very much, has been killed, then she’s been hounded by the press and had to put up with all the terrible lies which have been written about her. And now this ridiculous trial. It’s been awful to watch what she’s gone through in these last few months, which should have been the happiest of her life.’

‘So, in your estimation, your daughter and Mr Metcalf were happy and in love and Mr Hayes has a delusional fixation which turned violent?’

‘Objection,’ Xander said. ‘Ms Gardner is not a psychiatrist and cannot diagnose my client.’

‘Overruled,’ said Justice Smithson. He looked at Xander over the top of his glasses as he spoke, almost apologetically. ‘Mrs Walton’s observations of her daughter are pertinent here, although obviously the jury must take into account her relationship with the defendants.’

Suzi looked over to the jury and I saw two pink spots had appeared high up on her cheeks. ‘Absolutely. You don’t see my daughter behind closed doors. We’re not the sort of people to weep and wail in public, but I can assure you she is as devastated as it’s possible to be. I know Angus and Verity were happy and I know Michael is delusional.’ Suzi swallowed again, her eyes brimming with tears.

‘In your mind she wouldn’t have wanted anything bad to happen to Mr Metcalf? Is it possible she could have asked for Mr Hayes’s help to remove him?’

‘God no,’ Suzi’s voice rose with each word. ‘She loved Angus so much. And Mike is the last person she would ask to help her with anything.’

‘Perhaps you could tell us your impressions of Mr Metcalf,’ Petra continued. ‘What sort of man did he appear to you? Were you ever concerned about his treatment of your daughter?’

Suzi would have laughed if she was capable of such a sound at that moment. ‘No, the exact opposite. Angus was the most charming, happy, generous, funny man you could hope to meet. He was very much in love with Verity and always treated her with nothing but respect and adoration. As a mother it was a pleasure to watch them together.’

‘So you don’t think he would have gone to Mr Hayes’s house that night meaning to harm him?’

‘No, but I’m not surprised they got into a fight. I’ve been on the end of some of Michael’s rants and they’re not pleasant.’

‘Could you elaborate, please?’ Petra said, and I knew they’d rehearsed this part.

Suzi clasped her hands together on the wooden ledge in front of the witness box. ‘As I said, he rang the whole time after Verity finished the relationship and I ended up speaking to him quite a lot. He was very rude to me on a number of occasions. He called me a scheming whore once, when I told him that Verity had gone away for New Year.’

I heard an intake of breath from the jury, but I kept my eyes on my hands, my face burning.

Petra approached Suzi and put her hand on her arm. ‘Thank you very much, Mrs Walton. We can all see how hard this has been for you. No further questions, my lord.’

Xander stood up slowly. He wasn’t carrying any notes and he almost ambled over. ‘Mrs Walton, let me second that thanks. This must be unbearably hard for you. I’m a father myself and I can’t imagine what it must be like to see a child of yours go through all of this.’

Suzi looked slightly startled. ‘No, it’s horrible.’

‘Almost unbelievable.’

‘Well, yes.’

He turned to the jury. ‘Verity is your only child, I believe?’

‘Yes.’ I could see the terror in Suzi’s eyes.

‘A longed-for only child. A child you have always idolised and adored.’

‘Of course we adore her,’ Suzi said.

‘A child you’ve always wanted the best for. The best schools, the best clothes, the best opportunities.’ He looked at Suzi as he spoke.

‘What parent doesn’t?’

Xander looked over at me and I felt the jury’s eyes follow him. ‘Oh, there are plenty of parents who don’t want the best for their children. Plenty of children out there who don’t get riding lessons and extra tuition and expensive holidays and fantastical Christmases.’ He paused. ‘I’m just wondering how far the best of everything extends?’

Petra stood up. ‘Objection, my lord. What is the relevance?’

‘Yes, get to the point,’ said Justice Smithson.

‘Did you have an idea of the sort of person you’d have liked Verity to marry?’ Xander asked.

‘No.’

‘But you wanted the best of everything for her, so surely that must have extended to her friends, her lovers, her partners.’

‘Of course we always wanted her to be happy.’

‘You were very pleased about her marriage to Angus Metcalf, I take it?’

‘Yes. He was a lovely man.’

Xander smiled. ‘But he was more than a lovely man, wasn’t he? He was rich and successful and could give Verity an amazing life.’

I followed Suzi’s eyes to V and saw she was sitting forward on her chair, her face white. ‘Yes, but that wasn’t why …’

‘Whereas Mr Hayes is a more troubling prospect, with his background.’

‘No. And if you’re going down that line, Mike is perfectly rich himself. And besides, Verity earns her own money, she’s very well paid.’

‘Yes, but neither of them are in the league of Mr Metcalf. Did you perhaps encourage Verity to leave Mr Hayes for Mr Metcalf?’

‘Objection, my lord,’ Petra shouted.

‘I’m struggling to see the relevance, Mr Jackson,’ Justice Smithson said.

Xander drew in a deep breath, making his chest puff out. ‘I’m not suggesting Mrs Walton is lying,’ he said, pausing. ‘Just maybe that her adoration of her daughter and her obvious obsession with wanting the best for her might have coloured her judgement of not just Mr Hayes, but also Mrs Metcalf’s involvement in this case.’

‘Objection, your honour,’ Petra shouted again. ‘There is no obsession in Mrs Walton’s wanting the best for her daughter.’

‘Sustained,’ Justice Smithson said, although there was a slight smile on his lips.

‘Sorry, my lord,’ Xander said, bobbing at the bench. He turned back to Susan. ‘What did you think about Verity asking Mr Hayes to her wedding?’

Suzi looked over at V again, her eyes darting. ‘I didn’t think it was a good idea.’

‘Did you argue about it?’

‘Not exactly, no.’

‘But you told her your views.’

‘Yes.’

‘And she did it anyway.’

‘Yes.’ Suzi almost raised her hand. ‘But she did it for good reasons. Like I said before, she was always overly concerned that Mike was all right. She felt responsible for him because of his upbringing, which is ridiculous because it had nothing to do with her.’

‘But we do feel responsibility for those we love, don’t we?’ Xander said conversationally, turning to the jury as if he was making a good point at a party.

‘I suppose so.’

Xander left a beat of space before his next question. ‘Do you think your daughter was still in love with Mr Hayes at the time of her marriage?’

The line between V and me tightened again. I remembered our meeting on the street just before her wedding, her body ready to run, her eyes searching for me.

Suzi looked like she’d been slapped. ‘Absolutely not, no.’

‘But she cared about him enough to feel responsibility for his happiness.’

‘That’s totally different. Verity is a kind, caring person.’

Xander walked towards the jury. ‘Did you know about this game, this Crave, your daughter and Mr Hayes played together?’

‘No, of course not.’

‘What do you think about it?’

‘I think it’s strange, but they were young.’

‘Did it surprise you that Verity should play such a game?’

‘I’m not in the habit of speculating about my daughter’s sexuality.’ Suzi looked down and I thought she might cry.

‘But, with that in mind, is it fair to say that you don’t know your daughter as well as you think you do?’

Suzi looked back up, her eyes angry and hard. ‘No, of course it’s not fair to say that. What you’re talking about is different. It’s not what matters.’

Xander nodded. ‘If you say so, Mrs Walton. Did Verity tell you that Mike was back in touch with her? Did she talk to you about the emails or going for a drink with him?’

‘No, but that’s because she didn’t want to worry us.’

‘Would you like to have known?’

‘I’d like to have been able to help her.’

‘So, when Verity came to spend the weekend with you, when Angus was away and after Mr Hayes had been to meet her from work, she didn’t mention anything about this to you or your husband?’

‘No.’

‘And on the Monday after that weekend, when Mr Hayes came to Verity’s house and she claims he assaulted her – did she contact you that night?’

‘No,’ Suzi said and her voice sounded shrunken.

Xander nodded. ‘Thank you, Mrs Walton. No further questions.’

We countered Suzi with Elaine after lunch, as Xander put it. He said the comparison would be brilliant. Naturally we all want to support the underdog, he said, but also our society is still riven along class lines. No one would support a posh, snobby woman with a cut-glass accent over a salt-of-the-earth, foster-care giver dressed in a second-hand coat. I didn’t tell him that Elaine’s coat was not second-hand, simply well worn, as I wasn’t sure he would understand the concept.

Elaine almost stumbled into the witness box, her eyes blinking and her face creased in worry. She smiled over at me and nodded and everyone could see she would have blown me a kiss if she could have. She spoke in a quiet, yet determined tone and she turned and looked at the jury and Justice Smithson, as if wanting to include them and be polite.

‘He was quite a handful when we got him,’ she said. ‘But I could see the sparkle in his eye and I knew it was just a question of chipping away a bit at the hard surface he’d had to build up to find the real Mike.’

‘And who would you say the real Mike is?’ Xander asked.

Elaine looked over at me and I smiled at her because I wanted her to feel comfortable saying anything. ‘He’s a lovely lad,’ she said. ‘He’s always been a bit of a loner, but he’s very clever and part of his anger when we got him, I think, was that all his intelligence was frustrated. You know, it took him a bit of time to learn to trust Barry and me, but when he did he was a pleasure to have around.’

‘I believe you had him for longer than any other foster child?’

Elaine nodded. ‘Yes and he stayed on with us after he turned sixteen.’

‘Which is unusual why?’

Elaine turned to the jury. ‘Sorry. The state stops paying foster carers when a child reaches sixteen. They’re supposed to get a place of their own, but there was no way we were going to send Mike out into the world to fend for himself then. Poor lad had spent his childhood looking after himself; it didn’t seem right to make him do it again so soon. Plus he’d have had to start working and it would have been criminal for him to miss out on A levels and university.’ One of the women in the back row of the jury nodded vigorously.

‘But you must have seen something pretty special in him to make you take that on?’ Xander asked.

‘We did,’ Elaine said. ‘He’s not really tough like some of the boys are. Sometimes when you’ve had an upbringing like Mike’s you become Mr Hard Man, which Mike did for a while at school. But I think his real response was to look for love, to work hard and to make sure he was never in the place of his childhood again. Barry and I had to help him achieve that.’

‘So, by the time Mr Hayes went to university would you say he seemed like a perfectly normal young man?’

‘Yes, quiet and studious, but well balanced, I’d say.’

It was easy to see that the jury loved Elaine. They’d talk about her afterwards and marvel at her kindness in taking on someone as fucked up as me. I balled my hands into fists and held them in my lap.

‘And he met Verity in the second year. When did you meet her?’

Elaine looked over at V and her face was open, but when I looked at V she had her head tilted down towards her lap. ‘We probably met her about six or so months after they started going out. We always loved Verity; she was a gorgeous girl and she made Mike very happy, which is all you ever want, isn’t it?’

‘And did Mike seem to love her too much, as Mrs Walton suggested, would you say?’

Elaine cocked her head to one side. ‘I don’t know how you love someone too much. He was certainly very keen on her, if that’s what you mean. There were never any other girls or anything like that.’

‘So you must have been surprised when they split up?’

‘In a way. But then again, relationships always change.’

And that is the problem with life. No one else ever really sees what you do. Even Elaine, even she hadn’t seen what V and I are to each other. Only V and I knew and that was the way it would always be.

‘How did Mike seem, after the split?’

Elaine shifted her weight. ‘He didn’t tell us when it happened. I rang him to say happy New Year in early January and he started crying and blurted it all out. About the other woman and everything. He sounded terribly unhappy.’

Xander glanced at the jury. ‘Yes, to be clear, Mr Hayes had a one-night stand in New York which he told Verity about and that was the reason she gave him for ending their relationship.’

‘Yes.’

‘Even though she had started seeing Mr Metcalf by then?’

‘I don’t know anything about that.’

‘It was a very honourable thing of Mike to do though, wouldn’t you say? I mean, he could easily have never told Verity about the one-night stand and she would have been unlikely to find out.’

Elaine nodded. ‘That’s typical Mike, though. He always did the right thing. He’s very moral.’

Xander let the comment rest in the air for a bit before asking his next question. ‘I take it you kept in contact with Mike after that?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘And how did he seem?’

‘He remained very upset for a couple of months, but then he started to recover himself and after a while I felt like he was back to normal.’

‘So, in your estimation, when he came back to London in May he was happy and over Verity?’

‘I would say so.’

‘When he got back did you talk about Verity at all?’ Xander tapped his hand against the wood of his table.

‘Only in relation to her wedding. I knew Mike was going, so I asked him about it and he seemed fine.’

‘No more questions, my lord,’ Xander said, beaming at Elaine and then the jury as he sat back down.

Petra stood and walked to where Xander had been standing. ‘I’m interested by your assertion that Mr Hayes seemed fine about the wedding, when Mrs Metcalf rung you to say she was worried about him.’

Elaine looked over at me. ‘That was after the wedding, when they got back from honeymoon. I rang Mike after Verity called me and he admitted he’d sent her some emails he regretted, but he said he’d sorted it out and everything was all right.’

‘Why did Mrs Metcalf contact you do you think?’

Elaine looked at Justice Smithson and Xander, almost as if she expected them to stop the question. ‘Because we’d talked about Mike over the years. She wanted to see if I knew what was going on.’

It made me feel strange to think of them discussing me without my knowing; how my name could be pushed into the air and not touch me; how I never, ever wanted anyone to decide anything about me again.

Petra looked at the jury. ‘Point fifteen in your notes.’ There was the sound of a shuffle of papers. ‘But perhaps I can read one of the emails Mr Hayes sent to Mrs Metcalf whilst she was on her honeymoon.’ Petra put on her glasses and looked at the paper in her hand:

There was a palpable silence in the court when she had finished and I was aware of Xander shifting in his seat.

‘I haven’t heard that before,’ Elaine said and I could feel her look over at me, even though I kept my eyes lowered. I felt frightened for the first time as this would be hard to explain to those who don’t know us.

‘Perhaps you then also haven’t read the email he sent Mrs Metcalf in January last year in which he details the ways he could exterminate Carly, the woman with whom he’d had a one-night stand. He mentions suffocation, poisoning, hitting her over the head. He says he’s sure no one would miss her.’

Elaine blanched. ‘No. But I’m sure he didn’t mean it that way.’

‘Would you say these are the emails of a rational person?’

Elaine looked up, down, her eyes darting. ‘I don’t know, I haven’t seen the emails.’

‘What did Mrs Metcalf say when she rang you?’

‘She said she’d had a couple of emails from Mike while she was on honeymoon and she was worried about his state of mind.’ Elaine hesitated. ‘When they were together we’d had a few conversations about how therapy would be good for him. He was deeply affected by his upbringing, as you’d expect. She wanted to talk to me about trying to persuade him to see someone.’

Petra nodded. ‘How would you say Mr Hayes’s upbringing affected him?’

‘It made him suspicious of people. He has a hard time trusting them, which is why he doesn’t have many friends. But then on the other hand, if he does invest in you he gives everything to that relationship. You know, it really matters to him.’ She paused for a moment. ‘But the worst part is how unlovable it used to make him feel, like he wasn’t really worthy of attention. It took him a long time to realise that Barry and I wanted the best for him and he never really got the hang of making friends. When he was younger I used to tell him to invite friends round for tea and stuff, but he never did. It used to break my heart thinking about him in that playground day after day all alone. I once asked him what he did at lunchtimes and he said he liked building things out of stones. Sometimes I’d look at the clock at one-ish and have a bit of a cry thinking about him.’

Something dropped through me when she said that, a bit like one of the stones had found its way back to me, its smooth shiny surface passing through my bones and blood, resting in the end in my internal organs.

Petra removed her glasses and tapped them against her leg. A muscle in her cheek was twitching. ‘But would you not say his upbringing also made violence seem commonplace? Would you not say his easy chat about exterminating Carly is very worrying and his thoughts about Mrs Metcalf’s marriage extend into a realm of fantasy?’

‘Objection, my lord,’ said Xander. ‘This is pure conjecture.’

‘Overruled,’ said Justice Smithson. ‘Although the jury would do well to note that Mrs Marks is not an expert, just someone who knows the defendant well.’

‘I think Mike loved Verity as much as he said,’ Elaine said.

‘Perhaps,’ Petra said. ‘But wouldn’t you say there are parts of his correspondence with her which contain worrying things for him to have thought. The fact, for example, that he was convinced the marriage was a mistake. And that he was ready to rescue her at any time.’

‘He would have rescued her at any time, if she had needed it,’ Elaine said and I loved her at that moment.

‘Yes but she didn’t need rescuing,’ Petra said. ‘She was happy.’

‘I know,’ Elaine conceded.

‘Did Mrs Metcalf ever give you any reason to believe she wasn’t happy in her marriage or that she regretted splitting from Mr Hayes?’

‘No.’

‘Did she leave you with the impression that she wanted to meet with Mr Hayes or was thinking of restarting their relationship?’

‘No.’

I saw movement out of the corner of my eye and turned to see that V had dropped something which she was leaning down to retrieve from the floor. When she straightened I saw it was only a tissue, which she used to wipe at her nose.

I wasn’t annoyed with Elaine, because why should she understand the nature of our Crave? That was what made it so special, the fact that only V and I could decipher its intricacies. It was worth being misunderstood for, even worth going to prison for.

‘Would you say Mr Hayes is a fantasist?’ Petra asked.

Elaine looked over at me and this time I met her eyes. She smiled ever so slightly at me. ‘No, just confused.’ I smiled back.

Petra looked at the jury. ‘Very confused, some might say.’ I looked back again at V as surely it was impossible that Petra had just said some Oasis lyrics in the middle of the trial without being instructed to do so? I kept my eyes fixed on the side of V’s head, where her hairline was pulled into a tight ponytail, but she didn’t turn towards me. I willed her to, just once, so I could let her know I got it, I too understood that we are the only people ever to have felt the way we do. But her eyes stayed trained on her lap.

‘I believe, Mrs Marks, that Mr Hayes bought your house for you from the council eighteen months ago.’

Elaine blinked. ‘Yes, he did.’

‘That was very generous of him.’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you ask him to buy it?’

‘No. In fact, he didn’t tell Barry and I until he’d almost done it.’

‘If someone had done that for me I would feel very, very grateful to them.’

Elaine looked at me. ‘We are. We’d have lost the house if Mike hadn’t bought it when the council decided to sell.’

I smiled at her. I would have bought Elaine’s house for her a hundred times.

‘I would find it hard to say anything bad about someone who had done that for me,’ Petra said, ruining the moment.

But Elaine looked straight at her. ‘I know what you’re implying, but that’s not right. Mike is as lovely as I said. He bought the house because he’s a good lad.’

‘I understand that you care very much for Mr Hayes and, in his own way, he probably cares for you. But that shouldn’t stop you from telling this court what you really think him capable of.’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ Elaine said and it was as if her hair stood on end.

‘I mean,’ Petra said, ‘I think Michael Hayes is a dangerous fantasist and I think you feel the same way.’

‘I do not.’

‘But can you sit there and say that you have no concerns about him at all? Can you honestly say you find the fact he killed Mr Metcalf totally shocking, totally out of character?’

Elaine hesitated, looking over at me. ‘Mike wouldn’t have meant to kill Mr Metcalf. He would never intentionally hurt anyone.’

‘Yes, but with his violent past and his stalking of Verity, are you surprised?’

Xander leapt up. ‘Objection. Mr Hayes is not on trial for stalking.’

‘Sustained,’ said Justice Smithson.

‘Apologies,’ Petra said, ‘wrong word. Perhaps I should say his devotion to Mrs Metcalf. Are you surprised this all ended in violence?’

Elaine scrunched up her face and for a moment I thought she was going to shout. ‘Not much surprises me when you’ve seen the things I have. When you’ve listened to the stories I’ve heard about children that make you wish you didn’t have ears.’

‘I understand that, Mrs Marks. I understand the nature of what you do. But you’ve already said you saw something different in Mr Hayes. Is part of that difference his instability, his violence?’

‘No.’ Elaine shook her head. ‘No, it’s not.’

‘Would you like to tell the court about the time you and Verity had to call an ambulance because Mr Hayes had become so out of control?’

Elaine looked first at Petra, then me. ‘That was years ago.’

‘Four years to be precise. And I think we would still like to hear about it.’

I wanted to put my hands over my ears, but I knew how that would look.

Elaine drew in a deep breath. ‘It was his birthday and we were having supper at home, just Mike, Verity, Barry and me. His mum had sent him a card and I should have handled it better. I should have waited for a quiet time to give it to him, but I just handed it over, across the dinner table. He read it to himself and Verity asked if she could see it, but he didn’t reply. He went very red and I wanted to reach out and snatch the card back because I realised what I’d done. He hadn’t spoken to his mother or heard from her for years and I just handed the card across the dinner table like a great big idiot. He stayed silent for ages and none of us could make him even look up, but then he threw the card on the table and went into the garden. Then he started screaming and we all went outside and tried to get him to stop, but we couldn’t. We couldn’t get him to move at all. We called an ambulance because we didn’t know what else to do.’

It’s ridiculous for Elaine to blame herself and I must remember to tell her that when this is all over. She wasn’t to know how seeing those bald words ‘To Mike, Love Mum’ written round the printed Happy Birthday was going to be too much. If you’d asked me before it happened, I wouldn’t have known it was going to be too much. And even though I was sitting round a table with V, Elaine and Barry, those words seemed like the bleakest, hardest thing I’d ever seen. It was like nothing else existed, as if they had picked me up and thrown me back into my bare room in my miserable flat. I don’t remember leaving the table, I don’t remember going into the garden, but I can still hear the sound of the scream, or more accurately I can still feel it, because it wasn’t a scream of pain; it was more like a release, like an air bubble popping, like an acknowledgment of all the times I never made a sound.

‘Were you worried for your safety?’

‘No – I was worried about his.’

I sneaked another look at V but she still had her head down, although she was shredding the tissue she had been holding, its white fibres falling to the floor at her feet.

Petra put her glasses back on and flicked through her notes. ‘I have the medical report here. Michael was seen by a Dr Hahn that evening. He was injected with a high dose of Valium and spent the night on the ward. Is that correct?’

‘Yes.’

‘Dr Hahn’s diagnosis reads as follows, and I quote: “Severe case of nervous exhaustion, semi-psychotic episode brought on by shock or maybe PTS.” That’s post-traumatic stress. “Am satisfied no need for sectioning, but have advised patient and family to seek help from GP. Patient would benefit greatly from a course of therapy and possibly medication. Have advised they seek this help at the earliest opportunity.”’ Petra looked back up at Elaine. ‘Did Michael visit the GP?’

‘No.’

‘Did you want him to? Did Verity want him to?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you argue about it?’

‘A bit.’

‘What were Mr Hayes’s reasons for not going?’

‘He said he was fine.’

‘But in your and Verity’s opinion he wasn’t fine?’

‘We thought he could do with some help.’

Petra sighed and turned her back on Elaine, placing the papers back on her desk.

‘He’s a good lad,’ Elaine said, her voice rising over the court. ‘Mike is a good lad.’

It appears I still haven’t learnt that people can always surprise you. I told Xander not to worry about Kaitlyn; I said I was pretty sure she was in love with me and either way we were good friends, so she would be on my side. We like to do that, don’t we? Pretend to ourselves that we know someone, that we’ve worked them out, that their motives are clear, that we have insight. But really it’s all an illusion. None of us knows anything about what goes on in the heart of another. You have to reach the level which V and I have to achieve that and it takes so many years and so many experiences that there is only ever one person with whom you can hope to have that connection in life.

I even felt sorry for Kaitlyn as she took the stand because she looked so translucent, as if the wood she was surrounded by was reflected in her skin. She was dressed in much the same way when V and I saw her cast surreptitious glances over at her as the court settled. I knew without looking that V wasn’t returning the looks and I knew also that the luminosity of V’s presence would be intimidating Kaitlyn. In the end she turned her watery blue eyes to me and her mouth flicked up into a small smile, which I reciprocated.

‘I believe you and Mr Hayes have spent quite a bit of time together since he started working at Bartleby’s?’ Petra said.

‘Yes,’ Kaitlyn replied. ‘We got on well from the beginning.’

‘And what were your initial impressions of him?’

‘I was surprised by how modest he was, if that’s the right word. I mean, with his reputation, I was expecting one of those brash City boys, but Mike was never like that.’

‘What reputation?’

‘Mainly how well he’d done at Schwarz. When his appointment was announced, Lord Falls, our chairman, made a really big deal out of it and we all expected this loud, cocky trader to walk in. But he was the opposite of that.’ Kaitlyn smiled over at me again, which I was starting to find a bit irritating. I hoped V didn’t think there was actually anything between us.

‘Although I believe things never quite came together for Mr Hayes workwise?’ Petra said, which seemed like an odd question.

‘No. He was quite …’ Kaitlyn looked like she was searching for the word ‘… quite volatile.’

‘In what way?’ Petra asked and I too wanted to know the answer.

‘I have friends on his team and they would often talk about him shouting at them. He once made my friend Lottie cry. He told her she was useless and incompetent in front of their whole team.’

I felt a click in my brain, like a wheel I was unaware of turning.

‘Is that behaviour unusual?’

‘Not as unusual as it should be. But also, Lottie lives next door to Mike and he never really acknowledged her. She said they could pass each other in the street and he wouldn’t even smile. I stay at her house quite a bit and it often sounded like there was a party going on next door, when we knew he was home alone.’

‘A party?’

‘Yes. Lots of loud music and banging.’

‘Maybe Mr Hayes was in fact having a party?’

‘No, Mike didn’t know enough people to have a party.’ Kaitlyn glanced up at me apologetically, but I didn’t mind her saying that because who is there worth knowing? ‘I know this sounds terrible, but once Lottie and I were so intrigued we stood on a bench to look over the garden wall. All the lights were on in Mike’s kitchen and he was sort of running around, banging into the walls and the table, like he didn’t even register they were there. He was playing music at top volume, Oasis I think it was, and he was crying. It was really sad. Both Lottie and I were quite upset by it.’

I tried to breathe deeply but my body felt as blocked as my brain.

‘Did you talk to him about what you’d seen?’

‘No, I was too embarrassed. I just tried to be as friendly as I could and make it clear that he could talk to me if he needed to.’

‘Would you say Mr Hayes is a heavy drinker?’

‘Yes,’ Kaitlyn said and I felt the room tip. I saw my mother passed out on the sofa and tried to work out if it made it better that my sofa came from Heal’s and hers was full of cigarette burns. There is no law that says we become our parents, Elaine once said to me.

‘He often came to work looking the worse for wear and he often smelt of stale alcohol. At the time I thought that was maybe what was affecting his performance.’

‘But you still spent time together outside of work?’

‘Yes, a bit. We went for drinks and he came to my house for dinner one night.’ A faint blush rose up Kaitlyn’s cheeks, which in anyone else would have gone unnoticed, but in her radiated like a beacon.

‘And what did you talk about?’

‘All sorts,’ Kaitlyn said. ‘He told me about his upbringing and how he always felt like an outsider, which I sympathised with, working in the environment I’m in. We talked about work, a bit. And of course Verity.’ She nodded over at V when she said this and I couldn’t help following her. V was looking straight at her, her face set like a mask. I repeated the word ‘sorry’ in my head over and over as I stared at the side of V’s head, willing her to hear. Eventually she rubbed the side of her face and I relaxed slightly, knowing she’d received the message.

‘And what did he say about Mrs Metcalf?’ Petra asked, looking over at V herself.

Kaitlyn bit her bottom lip. ‘He was very protective over her. I could tell something was up between them but he didn’t admit it for ages.’

‘What do you mean by something was up?’

‘Well, she was never around for a start and he was always making excuses about where she was and stuff.’ Kaitlyn looked at me again and I could tell she was sorry for what she was saying.

‘So you were under the impression that Mr Hayes and Verity were a couple?’ Petra asked, but I could tell in her tone this was rehearsed and I dreaded the answer.

‘Oh yes. He referred to her as his girlfriend the first time we went out after work. I bumped into him once in a deli near to where we live and he said he was buying supper for them both.’

‘He specifically said that?’

‘Yes. He bought steaks because he said they were Verity’s favourite. I felt sorry for him because he seemed so agonised by the decision; it felt painful.’

‘But Verity wasn’t there?’

‘Not in the shop, no.’

‘Nor at home?’

‘I presume not.’

‘But he gave you the impression that they lived together at Windsor Terrace?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did Mr Hayes ever confide in you about his relationship with Mrs Metcalf?’

‘Yes.’

I felt a wash of shame run through me when Kaitlyn answered; my whole body cringed at V knowing I had ever discussed her with anyone else. ‘After I’d known him for a few months he told me that she’d moved out, but he gave the impression it was just so they could sort out their differences.’

‘Which were?’

‘I think he said they disagreed about how they should live.’

Petra raised her eyebrows and let out a stream of air. ‘So I take it you had no idea about Verity’s marriage?’

Kaitlyn shook her head. ‘None at all. In fact I bumped into Mike on what I now know was the morning of the wedding and he told me it was Verity’s sister who was getting married.’

‘And you never had cause to doubt him?’

‘None at all. I felt sorry for him. If I’m honest I thought it sounded like Verity was playing him a bit, but he was too in love with her to do anything about it.’

‘But I believe this wedding was how you began to uncover the extent of Mr Hayes’s lies just before the murder.’

‘Yes,’ Kaitlyn said and I sat up straighter, as if called to attention. ‘I knew Mike was hiding something and I had tried googling him and Verity, but he is virtually non-existent online and I didn’t know Verity’s surname, so I didn’t really come up with anything. But one night, about a week before the murder, I was scrolling through Facebook, you know the way you do when you’re bored, looking at photos of friends of friends without really knowing why you’re doing it. Anyway, I came across an album of photos of an acquaintance who’d been to Angus Metcalf’s wedding. I’d read about it in The Standard so I started looking. I’d seen a photo of Verity at Mike’s house and suddenly I’m looking at her in all the pictures and I realised she was the bride.’

I could feel my breath high in my throat, like a trapped bird.

‘What did you do with the information?’ Petra asked.

‘I confided in Lottie, but we didn’t really know what to do.’ Kaitlyn paused for a second. ‘It made me realise that he’d built this whole fantasy around Verity and I was worried about what he might do.’ Kaitlyn glanced up at me and her translucent skin coloured slightly. ‘I know it sounds ridiculous after everything’s that happened but I still think Mike is a genuinely nice guy and I think he believes the lies he tells. I don’t think he’s trying to deceive anyone more than himself. And he’s very convincing. Like I said, when I first met him I really thought Verity was playing him, I wanted to help him get out of what I thought was a damaging relationship.’ She shook her head.

My seat felt too small for me. I couldn’t remember if what Kaitlyn was saying was true or not. It felt like there were only versions of the truth and nothing was absolute. Something was opening beneath me, a hole which threatened to swallow me and a feeling of inescapable terror washed through me. ‘It’s OK,’ I said under my breath, ‘V and I are in love and that’s the only truth worth knowing.’

Petra nodded sagely. ‘I believe you were staying at Lottie’s house, next door to Mr Hayes, on the night of the murder.’

‘That’s correct.’

‘Perhaps you could tell us what you saw.’

Kaitlyn shifted her weight. ‘I’d been worried about Mike that evening anyway because I bumped into him on the way home from work and he said he was on his way to see Verity. He was incredibly agitated and wasn’t really making sense. He said something about her needing him, but it didn’t ring true, especially considering what I knew by then about the wedding. He’d called in sick to work that day and he looked feverish. I tried to stop him, but he wasn’t paying any attention and was a bit rude, if I’m honest. Lottie and I discussed it all evening and decided I would talk to Mike the next day and, if that didn’t work, we’d maybe try to talk to the company doctor or someone about him.’ She paused for a moment. ‘We went to bed around midnight, but were woken at about two twenty a.m. by shouting outside. We got up and looked out of the bedroom window and saw a man I now know to be Angus Metcalf banging on Mike’s door. We talked about going down but he seemed drunk and angry and we didn’t know what to do. After about ten minutes Mike opened the door and the shouting intensified. We couldn’t see anything because they’d gone just inside the house, but it was pretty obvious they were fighting, so I called the police.’

‘Did you go downstairs?’

‘Not at first, no. We were scared. But then Verity arrived in a taxi and went running up the path and we could hear her screaming so I went outside. Lottie tried to stop me, but I had to help.’

‘And what did you find?’

Kaitlyn touched her finger to her lip. ‘It was horrible. Mr Metcalf was lying just inside the door, covered in blood, not moving at all. But the strangest thing was that Mike and Verity were standing just behind him, embracing.’

‘I know Mr Jackson made a lot of this when he questioned you, Miss Porter, but to be clear, when you say embracing what do you mean? Were they kissing?’

‘They weren’t kissing, no. I could only see Verity’s back. She was leaning against Mike and he had his arms wrapped tightly around her.’

‘Where were her arms?’

Kaitlyn thought for a moment. ‘By her side I think. But I’m not sure.’

‘So she wasn’t returning his embrace, as you put it.’

‘I don’t know. But whatever, it was really strange. I mean, her husband is on the floor dying or dead and she’s allowing the man who killed him to hug her.’ And of course Kaitlyn couldn’t understand this. No one will ever understand V and me, which is what makes us so wonderful.

‘Is it possible that she was in a state of shock?’

‘I don’t know. I can’t imagine how it could be seen as normal behaviour however you want to say it.’

Petra looked down at her notes and I saw her neck had blotches of red on it. ‘I put it to you, Miss Porter, that you are in love with Mr Hayes and therefore jealous of Mrs Metcalf. That you know you saw a woman in a state of shock, being taken advantage of by a delusional man, but your personal feelings have coloured your testimony.’

Kaitlyn laughed lightly. She shook her head. ‘No, you’re completely wrong. When I said I stay with Lottie a lot, that’s because we’re partners. She’s my girlfriend. I can assure you I have no feelings of those types for Mike. And I have no feelings whatsoever for Mrs Metcalf.’

I felt myself blushing as she said the words, a strange shame seeping through me at my arrogance. At my inability to see the signs. Maybe there will never be pictures in clouds for me.

Petra coughed, but Kaitlyn stood firm, her eyes level.

I felt a strange sensation rise through my body as I flicked through all the times Kaitlyn and I had spent together, all the things she’d said, all the fleeting touches, all the half-sentences. Knowing this truth about her and Lottie altered it entirely. What I had interpreted as love on her part had really been friendship, concern. The sensation flipped in my stomach and passed out through my head, leaving me feeling dizzy. I had got so much wrong, I had misunderstood Kaitlyn in almost every way, and the thought was terrifying.

It was V’s turn to take the stand yesterday, which means we are here at the moment I have been turning over in my head. I must testify tomorrow and I only have tonight to make my final decision. To separate wrong from right, truth from lies, fact from fantasy. I must separate and then rearrange and do what is right for only V and me.

She was wearing the same black suit, this time with a pale blue shirt. She had flat ballet pumps on her feet, her hair tied in a low ponytail and no make-up on her face. There were simple pearls in her lobes and naturally the eagle hung around her neck, its silver brilliance resting peacefully in the hollow at the bottom of her throat, between her delicate collar bones. She was very pale and because she has lost so much weight her bones jut out of her face, making her look harsher than usual. My heart sped at the sight of her, so small and delicate, as she stood inside the giant witness box. Fear struck at me with the thought that this strategy is perhaps too much and maybe V is too delicate to handle all the scrutiny.

I remembered her suddenly in all those bars, when I’d felt she was a butterfly surrounded by flies. And fast on the heels of that thought came the next: if we do both end up in prison she will be surrounded by flies for years, except I won’t be physically able to save her. I won’t even be able to see her. The thought lodged in my throat and I couldn’t pull my breath into my lungs so I started to feel light-headed. I shut my eyes and counted to ten. I have to banish the bad thoughts and instead focus on the thought of her packed away like a precious jewel, ready and waiting to be taken out again when the time is right.

‘Mrs Metcalf,’ Petra began. ‘Perhaps you could start by telling the court about the history of your relationship with Mr Hayes.’

It looked like it was painful for V to take a breath. I knew where Suzi and Colin were sitting and I saw her glance up at them briefly before she began. ‘We met at Bristol University, during our second year. We started dating and after we graduated we moved to London and rented a flat together. He went to America six years later and I stayed on in London. We carried on a long-distance relationship, but we didn’t see much of each other because of work and it became a bit strained between us. I ended the relationship about thirteen months ago.’

‘Was it a happy relationship, before the end?’ She was keeping her movements relaxed today.

‘Yes,’ V said. ‘We were very happy for the first eight or so years. It only turned towards the end, I’d say the last six months.’

‘And why would you say that was?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe the distance? Or maybe we grew apart a bit?’

‘Can you elaborate?’

‘I began to find his, his …’ V looked up at Petra, but then down again. ‘… his, I suppose, need of me, too much.’

‘In what way?’ Petra asked and I hated her at that moment, purely and simply, for everything she was making V say.

‘He’d always been very connected to me, but when he went to New York it got worse. He had to know what I was doing at all times, and if I changed my plans or did anything spontaneously we had to discuss it for hours.’ V swallowed. ‘It felt like nothing was ever enough. I had to send him weekly emails with my movements for the week listed in them.’

‘If I may I am going to read the jury one of these exchanges, although they are all in your files, item twenty-one,’ Petra said, turning towards the jury as she spoke. She looked back down at her papers. ‘“Monday gym after work, Tuesday meetings all day so won’t be able to speak to you but will go straight home, Wednesday dinner with Louise, meeting her straight from work, Thursday leaving drinks in the office for Sam, Friday will catch a train straight to Steeple.” Mr Hayes replied the same day: “Didn’t you have dinner with Louise last week? Why do you need to see her again so soon? And which Sam? Why do you feel like you have to go to everyone’s leaving drinks? I would prefer it if you went straight home and we can have a proper chat.”’ She looked up and back to V. ‘There are lots of similar exchanges between you two. Did you not find them a bit odd?’

‘Yes,’ V said. ‘But I also didn’t want to fight when he was so far away.’

‘I believe Mr Hayes also liked you to sleep with Skype on?’

‘Yes, he liked the laptop to be on the pillow next to me.’

‘And you did that?’

‘A couple of times, yes. It was easier than saying no.’

‘Would you say Mr Hayes is controlling?’

V lifted her hand but then dropped it again. ‘In some ways, yes.’

‘Were you scared of him?’

‘No, I wouldn’t say scared.’

Petra moved forward marginally. ‘So, to be clear, you hadn’t minded this attention before he left for New York?’

‘When we were at university and after when we lived in London, I think I was flattered by it. But we were much younger and I think when you’re young you want to be adored more, don’t you think?’ She looked up as she spoke, but really she had asked the question to no one. ‘Mike and I were in a bit of a bubble and I think when he went away I realised that things couldn’t go on the way they had been. I guess I just wanted a more normal life.’

Petra looked over at the jury. ‘I’m asking you this next question because so much has been made of it in the press. But I would like it noted that I don’t think your sexuality has any bearing on this case or any other. Unfortunately, though, it is not something which can be ignored.’ I looked at the jury as well and saw how uncomfortable they were. She turned back to V. ‘When you say you were in a bubble, are you talking about this game you and Mr Hayes played, this Crave which the press has made so much of?’

V hesitated and rubbed at a point above her eyebrow where I knew her headaches started. ‘I think that had a lot to do with it. It felt like something private and special between us and I suppose it bound us together in the way things like that do.’

‘How often did you Crave?’

‘Not a lot. Maybe once a month.’

‘Would you describe what you did as sexually deviant?’

V almost laughed. ‘God no, it was just stupid adolescent fun. We went to a bar, I got chatted up and Mike broke it up. It turned us on, the thought that another man found me attractive. That’s it. No one ever got hurt; it was just a bit of fun.’

‘And who started it?’

V’s head flicked towards me involuntarily, but she stopped herself from actually looking at me. ‘We were at a party once, just after our finals, and someone started chatting me up and Mike got a bit heated. We left the party and laughed about it, but it became obvious that we’d both been turned on by it. A few days later we went clubbing, just the two of us, and Mike suggested I go and stand by the bar on my own. He said he wanted to see how long it took for me to be chatted up. We were both drunk and I did it and pretty soon this man approached me and Mike came steaming over. It sort of went from there.’

‘So it was Mr Hayes’s idea?’

‘I suppose it was, yes.’

Petra nodded. ‘So, perhaps you can talk us through the end of your relationship with Mr Hayes. You said things had been going wrong for about six months.’

V nodded. ‘Yes. I started to feel very stifled by him and his constant need to know everything about me stopped seeming sweet and started to become irritating. My work was very busy and it became exhausting juggling the two things.’ She paused, her eyes wide as though she was scared. ‘Then I met Angus. He came in to do a pitch and I had to run him through something I was working on afterwards and then he rang me the next day and …’ She trailed off and I thought she was going to cry. ‘He was just very different from Mike. He was calm and self-assured and he seemed in control of himself and his emotions. We went on a few dates and I realised I was falling for him.’

‘And this happened when?’

‘Well, I met Angus around September the year before last, but we didn’t start seeing each other until about November and even then we took it very slowly because of Mike. I knew I was going to have to finish things with Mike, but I felt very confused and I also knew how badly he’d take it. My plan was to tell him face-to-face when he came home at Christmas.’

‘Would you say you had fallen in love with Mr Metcalf by then?’

‘Yes,’ V said, very simply. ‘I’ve never loved anyone like I loved Angus.’

It was possible, I thought, that I had died and gone to hell. The room had become very hot and I could feel water dripping down my back. My mind slithered, not able to keep up with what V was saying, not able to process it into the meaning I knew was there, into what I knew she would be wanting me to hear. Stop listening to the words, I kept telling myself, except they were all I could hear.

‘But you were still concerned for Mr Hayes at that point?’ Petra asked stupidly.

‘Yes, very much so,’ V answered. ‘Naturally we’d talked lots about his childhood over the years and I knew he was much more affected by it than he admitted, even to himself. I know the reason he doesn’t get close to many people is because he finds it hard to believe anyone will love him. He was always going on about how he wasn’t good enough for me. And I understand that. My God, it’s amazing he’s done as well as he has with a start like he had.’ Her voice caught and my brain stopped slithering. ‘But I couldn’t let that mean I sacrificed my life to make his happy. I knew telling him was going to be awful and I knew he was going to take it badly, but I had to do it.’

‘Of course you did,’ Petra said. ‘Your mother said it made you ill.’

‘Yes, I felt very agitated for weeks before he came home. I barely slept at all. I had to take time off work and go and stay with my parents.’

‘But it turned out Mr Hayes had been unfaithful to you in New York, which he admitted to you?’

‘Yes. I can’t tell you how relieved I felt when he told me that,’ V said. ‘Looking back now, I can see how cowardly I was to use that as an excuse and I wish I hadn’t done it, but at the time it just felt like a massive release.’

‘Perhaps you thought Mr Hayes didn’t care as much about you as you’d thought?’

‘There was that as well. I mean, I was surprised that he’d done it, but his excuses were very irritating. He tried to blame me for it, going on and on about how lonely he’d been, as if I was the one who’d made him go to New York.’

‘Which you hadn’t?’

‘No, of course not. In fact, when he applied for the job I remember being very upset. But Mike had this obsession with retiring by the time we were forty-five. I don’t know why, but I always presumed it had something to do with his upbringing and how out of control he’d always felt. I think it’s very important for him to feel in control now and I suppose money helps with that.’

I reached out and put my hand against the solid wood of the box in which I sat, contained and safe. I felt the warden look at me and I would have punched him if he’d touched me. Because at that moment I still hadn’t entirely worked out what V was doing, why she was swapping and spinning our story.

‘How did Mr Hayes take the ending of your relationship?’

‘Very badly. It was dreadful. He started screaming and crying and begging me not to end it. He grabbed me round the legs and I had to slap him to get him to let go of me because I was so scared. My parents had to ask him to leave our house the next day because he wouldn’t leave me alone and then he bombarded me with phone calls and texts and emails. He sent so many flowers my mother had to donate them to the church. Angus came and took me away in the end and I think if he hadn’t done that I might have gone mad.’

I concentrated on the feel of the wood beneath my fingers, old and ridged, and ultimately unconcerned.

‘But Mr Hayes went back to New York in the end?’

‘Eventually, yes. He’d bought me a ticket to come and spend New Year with him there even though I’d told him a hundred times I wasn’t going to, way before our conversation about splitting up. When I didn’t turn up for that flight I think he began to get the message and then I changed my phone number and told him I wasn’t going back to our flat. In the end he went back to New York, but the emails continued for about six weeks. It got to the stage where Angus would go on to my account every morning and evening and delete them so I wouldn’t even have to know how many he’d sent.’

An image of monkey man Angus reading my private words to V flashed into my brain and I almost wished he wasn’t dead so that I could feel my hand smash into his face again.

Petra walked towards the jury. ‘Item thirteen in your folders. And then they just stopped?’

‘Yes. One day they stopped and that was it. At first I didn’t believe it but as time went on I really thought things were OK. Then Angus and I got engaged and I was so happy I let the thought of Mike drift to the back of my mind. I always knew I was going to have to tell him about the wedding, but I kept putting it off and then one day, out of the blue, I got this email from him saying he was coming back to live in London and so I replied and told him about the marriage.’

‘And how did he react to that?’

‘It took him a few days to reply, but when he did he sounded fine. He congratulated me and I really thought we’d moved on and could be friends.’

Petra was still over by the jury and she put her hand on to their box, so she could have almost reached out and touched the fat man nearest to her if she’d wanted. ‘Now this is where I think some people might question you. Why did you still want to be friends with Mr Hayes?’

V looked over to Petra so I knew the jury would be getting the full shock of her beauty. ‘We’d meant so much to each other,’ she said and I saw her throat move with the words. It was as if I was able to watch them form in her before she said them. ‘And I knew how vulnerable he was and how few people he had in his life. I didn’t want him to be unhappy. I wanted nothing more than to see him settled with someone nice. It was stupid of me.’

‘Or kind-hearted,’ Petra said, removing her hand. ‘So, he came to your wedding and you didn’t see him before then?’

‘We bumped into each other once. He was shopping on Kensington High Street and I lived just off it, so.’

I waited for more because V must have known, but she held her counsel.

‘How did Mr Hayes seem?’

‘Fine. We chatted about his new house and the wedding. It was a five-minute meeting, nothing more.’

‘And how did he seem at the wedding?’

‘Again, I only saw him briefly when we said hello in the line, but I’ve heard what everyone else has said. Perhaps he did seem a bit anxious. I don’t really remember.’

‘Then you went on honeymoon.’

‘Yes, and that’s when I received the next two emails.’

‘Item sixteen in your folders,’ Petra said to the jury. I heard the rustle of paper and I knew what they were reading.

‘They were a terrible shock,’ V said. ‘I got in quite a state about them. They ruined a couple of days of the honeymoon. Angus was furious; he wanted to call the police, but I stopped him. We agreed that the best thing to do was leave it till we got home and then compose an email that made Mike feel valued and listened to but which spelt out the fact that I loved Angus and didn’t want to be with him.’

‘Why did you stop Angus calling the police?’

V opened her mouth but then she swallowed and her shoulders tensed, so I knew she was trying not to cry. ‘I think I still felt guilty. I wish I had done now. It was a massive mistake.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Because after we got back Mike turned up at my work and made it clear that he thought the marriage was a sham and I really wanted to be with him. It became clear that he thought it was all part of some sort of Crave.’

‘And he told you this when you went for a drink with him in the bar opposite your office?’

‘Yes.’

‘But you didn’t go straight home and tell Angus?’ Petra said, which was the first reasonable question she had asked.

V looked down and swallowed again. ‘No. He was going away on a business trip and I knew he’d have freaked out and called the police and worried the whole time he was away. I thought if I waited till he got back then we could deal with it together. I really didn’t think Mike would do anything more than he’d already done. I thought I could handle it.’

‘Except that didn’t turn out to be the case, did it?’ Petra walked towards V, who looked like she was shivering. ‘I’m really sorry to ask you to tell us about the next part, Verity, but I’m afraid you need to tell the jury what happened.’

‘I know.’ A tear rolled down V’s cheek and off the bottom of her face. ‘I went to my parents’ for the weekend and got back on Sunday night. Angus was due back very early on Tuesday morning and I hadn’t heard from Mike, so I thought maybe he’d got the message. But then he turned up at the house on Monday evening, stinking of alcohol. He forced his way in and it became apparent that he thought we had some sort of agreement. That I was planning to leave Angus and move in with him.’

‘I believe Mr Hayes kissed you. That you ended up on the floor together.’

V nodded, more tears falling. ‘Yes. I think he would have raped me if I hadn’t stopped him.’

‘Objection,’ Xander said, standing. ‘Mr Hayes denies assaulting Mrs Metcalf. He says this encounter was entirely consensual.’

Justice Smithson looked at the jury. ‘The jury will take into account that this case has not been heard yet and a verdict has not been reached, so Mrs Metcalf and Mr Hayes have differing versions of this event.’

V gasped suddenly, as if she was drowning, pulling her head upwards and forwards. ‘That was the worst part,’ she said in a strangled voice. ‘Mike seemed to think I wanted it all to happen. I had to play along to get him to leave. I had to pretend that I wanted to leave Angus and be with him.’ She put her hand over her mouth, as if containing the words, and her eyes looked desperate. She looked in fact momentarily mad, just as she had when she’d been ill before, when she’d said life felt like it was happening behind a wall she couldn’t climb. And that is when what she was doing started to make sense to me. When she’d been ill she used to say she couldn’t understand anything that was said to her and it was as though words churned in her head. And of course she is feeling that way now, of course all of this is more than she can bear. I forget sometimes how much I hurt her with Carly and how delicate this new life of hers is. The reality must collide with her construction in her mind and cause her to mis-think. She must be terrified at the moment and I am the only one who can make her feel safe again.

‘Can you describe to us what happened when Mr Hayes kissed you?’ Petra asked ghoulishly.

‘Mike is very strong,’ V said and I felt the jury turn to look at me. ‘He had me round the waist and I could, I mean, I could feel he was excited. I tried not to kiss him at first but I thought if I did then he might go away.’

‘How did you end up on the floor?’

‘Mike had me in a really tight grip, pressed against his chest, and I could feel that he was trying to manoeuvre me to lie down, but I wasn’t giving in. So he sort of picked me up and pulled me to the ground. Then, before I could get up again, he laid right on top of me with his whole weight. I felt like I couldn’t breathe.’

‘Did he try to have sex with you?’

V was crying again. ‘Yes, he tried to force my legs apart and pull down my trousers. I felt him trying to open the zip on his trousers.’

‘Did you tell him to stop?’

‘Yes.’

‘How many times did you have to tell him to stop before he did?’

‘Four, maybe five. I had to shout because it was like he was in a trance, it felt like I wasn’t getting through to him.’

‘But did he stop eventually?’

‘Yes, although he was angry. He shouted at me and said something about being bored with hearing about Angus.’

‘So you went along with what Mr Hayes was saying about leaving your husband because you were so scared?’

‘Yes.’

‘Not because you had any intention of leaving Mr Metcalf?’

‘God, no.’

‘So I take it you managed to get him to leave?’

‘Yes.’

‘What did you do after he had gone?’

‘I didn’t know what to do. Angus was in the air so I couldn’t contact him and my head was spinning. I was very ill that night and the next day. I couldn’t stop being sick and I was so weak I found it hard to stand to go to the bathroom. By the time Angus got home I was in a terrible state. I was running a temperature; I think I was a bit delirious. I didn’t have the strength to say anything, let alone tell him what had happened. I was going to, of course, I was going to call the police and everything. But then Mike came back that evening and started saying how we were in love with each other and I was going to leave Angus and go and live with him. I managed to get him to leave again and told Angus everything. It was terrible how upset and angry Angus was, how awful he felt at not having been able to protect me.’ V had given up her fight to control her tears, which now streamed down her face. ‘I feel so terrible about how unhappy I made Angus at the end. How sad and angry. He put me back to bed after we’d agreed that we would call the police in the morning and I must have gone to sleep because the next thing I knew I woke up with a jolt. I could tell the house was empty even lying in bed.’ She gasped as she spoke, again as if the air could save her, her face contracting.

‘What time was this?’

‘One thirty.’

‘What did you do then?’

‘I shouted for Angus and then started looking for him, although I knew he wasn’t in the house. Then I noticed the computer was on and a file I’d created for the wedding was open with all the names and addresses of everyone we’d invited. I knew then that he must have gone to see Mike.’

‘The jury will note that there are twenty-three missed calls on Mr Metcalf’s mobile phone from Mrs Metcalf between one forty-seven and two thirty-one a.m. I would also like to play the court a recording of the voicemail Mrs Metcalf left Mr Metcalf at two oh six a.m.’

Petra signalled to someone and then V’s voice burst into the room, her tone shrill and high, her voice clouded with tears. ‘Gus, I know where you’re going, but please don’t. You don’t know what he’s like. Please, please don’t. It’s not worth it. We’ll call the police and they’ll deal with it. Please call me. Oh Gus, please.’

No one spoke for a minute and the silence fell over the court like a blanket. I held my own hands together, but I could feel the shiver begin in my body, as if it had leapt from V to me, as if our communication was so strong it was impossible for our bodies not to respond to each other. I kept my eyes on hers and eventually she looked up briefly, straight into me.

‘Did Mr Metcalf call you back?’

V shook her head and she almost seemed to vibrate. ‘No. I never spoke to him again.’

‘So, when you couldn’t get hold of your husband what did you do?’

V looked back up, but not at me. ‘I rang Mike. I told him Gus was on his way over and not to answer the door. I told him I was getting in a taxi.’

‘Which you did?’

‘Yes.’

‘You arrived at Mr Hayes’s house just after two thirty.’

V shut her eyes momentarily and her head swayed. She raised her hand and it connected with the eagle. I wanted to leap the barriers and take her in my arms, because I knew what it would be costing her to lie about what we mean to each other. To say that she thought I was going to rape her must be like her taking a knife to her own soul. I wanted to lift her up and soar into the air and out of all this violence and mess and dread. But I am not Superman, I am only human and there is a cleverer way to save her. One that is only now becoming clear.

It is obvious that V thinks it is necessary for one of us to remain on the outside, keeping our life ticking over, and that that person has to be her because there is no denying that I threw the punch which killed Angus. But she is wrong, she hasn’t seen the problem right through to the end and her confusion is written all over her face. I know that tomorrow, when I sit where she has sat today, I have one chance to save her, one chance to make everything all right again.

‘Gus was lying on the ground just inside Mike’s front door,’ V said, her voice shaking. ‘Mike was on top of him, punching and punching him. I ran and pushed Mike off and was screaming for him to stop.’ Her breath heaved inside her, like a gale battering her ribs.

Petra lowered her voice. ‘I need you to explain to the court how it was that you were found with Mr Hayes’s arms around you when the police and Miss Porter arrived.’

V shook her head and another stream of tears ran down her cheek. ‘I don’t remember much of that. Nothing felt real. I remember feeling sure I was going to faint and being sort of pulled upwards. But I don’t think I even knew it was Mike holding me up.’

‘How did you feel when you found out Mr Hayes had killed your husband?’ Petra asked and it was like the whole court held its breath.

V’s eyes opened wider, as if she could see something denied to the rest of us. ‘It was like the whole world had fallen in on me. It still feels like that now. When I wake up in the morning it’s like I have a wall of concrete on my chest. I’m scared of everything. I find it hard to concentrate or think straight. I miss Angus every single second of every minute of every hour of every day.’

And there it was. The admission of what I had already worked out. Those were the words she used to say to me when she was ill before, how she couldn’t concentrate or think straight. It was like she was talking directly to me. It wasn’t Angus she missed every second of every minute of every hour of every day, it was me.

Petra shook her head. ‘Were you surprised at the violence Mr Hayes showed?’

‘I never thought anything like this would happen,’ V said. ‘But in hindsight I suppose I’m not surprised. It doesn’t feel like something Mike isn’t capable of.’

‘So you believe Mr Hayes to be a violent and dangerous man?’

‘I do,’ V said, looking straight at me as her tears fell silently. ‘I should have stopped him when I had the chance.’

Xander got his chance with V after lunch, although she didn’t look as if any sustenance had passed her pale lips.

‘Mrs Metcalf, I am interested in your dismissal of the game you played with Mr Hayes, this Crave.’ V looked up at him wearily and her head looked heavy for her neck. ‘You called it a bit of adolescent fun, even though you were both in your twenties. Is that correct?’

‘Yes. I probably shouldn’t have used the word adolescent.’

‘And maybe you shouldn’t have dismissed it as a bit of fun. I suggest it meant much more to you than a bit of fun.’

V looked at the spot I knew Suzi to be. ‘But that’s all it was, a bit of fun.’

‘Sexually charged fun in which you manipulated a stranger and Mr Hayes to make you aroused.’

‘It was hardly manipulation. And it aroused us both.’

‘Did you ever play this game with Mr Metcalf?’

I had known the question was coming but still my heart lurched like I was on a rollercoaster.

‘No,’ V said, and the definiteness of her tone reassured me.

‘Why not?’

‘Because I didn’t want to.’

‘So you discussed it with him?’

‘No, I don’t think I did.’

‘Were you ashamed of it? Embarrassed to talk to him about it?’

‘No, absolutely not.’ V leant her weight on to the witness box, but then stood straight again. ‘I didn’t want to do anything like that with Angus. Our relationship wasn’t like that, it was more than that. That game was just a childish stupid thing. It didn’t have a place in the relationship Angus and I had.’

The room felt swimmy, as if we had been suddenly transported to the jungle and the humidity was high. But I had to remind myself that she was only doing what she mistakenly thought was the right thing for us.

‘That’s quite a sudden dismissal of something you had played for many years, something others would find quite hard to comprehend.’

Verity looked up and her skin seemed tight across her face, like she had been wrapped in cellophane. ‘You’re making too much of this. No one ever got hurt, or even involved beyond a bit of mild flirtation.’

‘Except the girl in America,’ Xander said and I saw his chest puff out as he spoke.

V looked like she had been slapped. Petra also sat up straighter and I knew V hadn’t told her, which proved there were parts of us she was holding back, parts of the Crave she wanted to keep just for us.

‘Is it true that you and Mr Hayes picked up a girl in a bar when you were on holiday two years ago whom you took back to your hotel room and had sex with while Mr Hayes watched?’

Petra stood. ‘Objection, my lord. As far as I’m aware Mrs Metcalf is not being tried for her sexuality.’

‘Overruled,’ said Justice Smithson.

‘For the record,’ Petra said, ‘it is also no longer a criminal offence to be a sexually active woman.’

‘Sit down, Ms Gardner,’ Judge Smithson said. ‘You are being ridiculous.’ He stared at Petra from his stand, his anger clearly radiating off him. Petra’s cheeks coloured and she opened her mouth, but then sat heavily back on to her chair.

‘Please answer the question, Mrs Metcalf,’ Xander said. ‘Did you pick up a woman and have sex with her whilst Mr Hayes watched?’

‘Yes.’ V jutted out her chin, her jaw set tight.

‘And whose idea was it to do that?’

‘Mine. I was curious about having sex with a woman but I didn’t want to do it without Mike being there.’

‘Why were you curious, Mrs Metcalf? Was it something you’d never done before?’

‘Yes.’

Xander looked down at the papers in his hands. ‘That’s strange because I have statements from an Angela Burrows who says you and she had a sexual relationship for three months in the first year of university.’

I looked between Xander and V.

I saw V’s shoulders rise, but then they dropped again. ‘Yes,’ she said.

‘Yes what?’

‘Yes I had a sexual relationship with Angela.’

‘Did Mr Hayes know about it?’

‘No.’

I can’t remember Angela Burrows but next time I am allowed on to a computer I shall look her up.

‘So, when you asked him to watch you having sex with a woman because you were curious, you were lying?’

‘Not exactly. I was curious. I was curious about it in that situation.’

‘But you chose to lie to get your own way.’

‘It was hardly a lie.’

Xander tipped his head to one side. ‘We will have to disagree about that, Mrs Metcalf. Either way, however, it seems fair to say that you and Mr Hayes were involved in an intricate, highly sexual game which went on for many years and which few other people knew about?’

‘That’s unfair. You’re twisting things and making them sound different from how they were.’

I wanted to tell her to stop looking so angry.

‘Could you tell us about the Kitten Club, Mrs Metcalf,’ Xander said.

I felt my body pull upwards at those words and I saw V do the same. She held her hand to her face and appeared to wobble slightly.

‘Mrs Metcalf, are you all right?’ Justice Smithson asked, leaning over his bench.

‘I feel a bit faint,’ V said.

‘Can someone get Mrs Metcalf some water. And a chair,’ the judge said and I was aware of movement. I leaned forward, screaming at V in my head, and she must have heard because she looked up, her eyes pools of misery. We have another signal, one we learnt when we wanted to let the other know that we hadn’t told someone anything. Because we had so many secrets, so many pacts and stories which existed between us, it was sometimes dangerous to be in conversation with other people. As soon as I knew she was looking I opened my eyes wide and turned my head to the right so she could be sure that I hadn’t discussed this with Xander and she could tell the truth.

‘Are you able to continue?’ Justice Smithson asked when V had been seated on a chair with water at her side.

‘Yes,’ V said, ‘I’m sorry.’

Xander stepped forward again. ‘You were about to tell us about the Kitten Club.’

‘It’s a private members’ club.’

‘A private members’ club which specialises in fulfilling sexual fantasies,’ Xander said. ‘I believe in layman’s terms they organise orgies. Is that correct?’

‘It is.’

‘And you and Mr Hayes were members?’

‘We only went once.’

‘You paid five hundred pounds and you only went once?’

‘We realised it wasn’t for us when we got there. We didn’t even take part the one time we went.’

‘What made you think you’d enjoy it at all?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘It was just the sort of thing you and Mr Hayes were into then?’

‘Well, it turned out not to be.’

‘But it wasn’t out of the question that you would do something like this?’

‘I don’t see how this is relevant in any way.’ V turned to look at the judge, but he kept his eyes on the papers in front of him.

Xander ignored her as well. ‘One more thing about this Kitten Club,’ he said, sounding as if the words tasted bad on his tongue. ‘I believe when you register you have to provide names. They call them code names. And they advise you not to use your real names. Perhaps you could tell the court the names you and Mr Hayes used.’

V looked straight at Xander. ‘Truth and Lies.’

Xander looked at the jury. ‘Truth and Lies,’ he repeated and I thought I heard an intake of breath somewhere.

‘It was just a play on my name. It didn’t mean anything.’

But Xander acted as though he hadn’t heard her again. ‘You lied to Mr Hayes about the ending of your relationship, didn’t you, choosing to lay all the blame at his door rather than taking any responsibility yourself. You blamed him for his one-night stand, when in fact you were having an affair with Angus Metcalf.’

‘I’ve already said I regret that.’

Xander turned from the witness box and walked towards the jury. ‘Would you say you have a face you present to the world and a face you wear in private, Mrs Metcalf?’

‘Objection, your honour,’ Petra said.

‘Sustained,’ Justice Smithson replied, which surprised me.

‘All right then,’ Xander said. ‘Will you please explain to us why on earth you didn’t tell your husband that Mr Hayes came to meet you from work after you received those emails on honeymoon which you said upset you so much? You went for a drink with him and you failed to mention that to your husband.’

‘It was stupid of me. I was trying to protect both Mike and Angus.’

‘Or were you perhaps thinking about rekindling your relationship? Perhaps Mr Hayes isn’t as delusional as you keep implying, but actually a pretty good judge of character and motive. Perhaps he was able to see that you were keen to restart what had been a very intense relationship in which you were both clearly very attracted to each other?’

I felt myself getting hard and had to put my hands in my lap.

‘That is absolutely not true,’ V said.

‘Which part?’

‘All of it.’

‘So you weren’t ever involved in an intense relationship and you weren’t ever very attracted to each other?’

V’s chin dipped. ‘No, that’s not what I meant. I meant I wasn’t thinking about rekindling anything and I do think Mike is delusional.’

By now, I wasn’t even troubled when V said these things because I knew what she was doing and I love her for it. I love that she is trying to preserve our life. I love that we are still working towards the same goal, just in different ways.

‘But an easy mistake for Mr Hayes to make considering your past and the fact that you were again involved in a secret communication?’

‘It was hardly a secret communication.’

‘It was if no one else knew about it.’ Xander turned and walked back across the room. ‘Mr Hayes is very confused by your assertion that he assaulted you the night he came to your house when Mr Metcalf was away. He says the kiss you shared was entirely consensual and that when you asked him to stop he did. Is that true?’

V’s eyes were pleading. ‘It’s true that he stopped when I asked him to, although I had to say no a few times before he got off me. I had to shout at him. And he probably thinks the kiss was consensual because I wanted him to believe that, so I could make him stop.’

Xander frowned. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t follow. You kissed him to make him stop.’

‘I didn’t want to make him angry. I was scared. All I was focused on was getting him to leave. I thought he might rape me.’

‘So, let me get this straight. You were so scared of Mr Hayes you played along with his sexual advances to make him go away, even though you have an intricate, highly sexual history with each other. Then you get him out of your house and you don’t immediately call the police, or your parents, or anyone?’

V’s eyes were now swimming in tears. ‘I know it sounds strange, but I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t even know if the police would take me seriously if I did call them.’

Xander puffed out his cheeks as if he couldn’t get his head round anything V was saying. ‘Mr Hayes says that when you went for a drink with him after work you told him Angus was going to be away and he took it as an invitation to come round.’

V reached out and grabbed the edge of the stand, her knuckles white. ‘Oh God, don’t be ridiculous. I told Mike Angus was away because I didn’t want him to try to contact me until he got back.’

Xander raised an eyebrow. ‘But you still let him in when he turned up on your doorstep?’

‘I told him it wasn’t a good idea, but he’s much stronger than me.’

‘But he didn’t break down the door or anything to gain entry, did he?’

‘No. But I made it clear I didn’t want him there. And I tried to shut the door, but he pushed it open so he could come inside.’

‘But if you’d minded that much you could have shouted at that point, or pushed back. I don’t think there is any suggestion you fought each other.’

‘No, of course we didn’t. I thought maybe I could talk some sense into him.’

‘After you shared a kiss, Mr Hayes says you talked for a quite a while about you leaving Angus and coming to live with him.’ Xander paused. ‘Mr Hayes says you said you wished things had worked out between you both.’

V’s eyes were so filled with tears they looked like they were shaking. ‘Yes I did. And every moment made my skin crawl. I’ve explained why I did all those things. It was to get him to leave.’

‘It’s a strange thing to say to someone though, you must admit. That you wished things had worked out between you, when you were trying to get rid of him, and married to someone else.’

‘It’s not a strange thing to say if you know Mike like I do,’ V said and with those words my whole body relaxed, as if it had been held upright by string which had finally been cut. Nobody knows anyone the way we know each other, and now V had admitted it in court, in front of all these people.

‘Did you ask Mr Hayes to help you get out of your marriage? To help you get rid of your husband?’ Xander asked.

‘No, of course I didn’t. I didn’t want my marriage to end.’

Xander sighed. ‘Perhaps, Mrs Metcalf, you could tell us what you did when Mr Hayes left after the alleged assault?’

‘It isn’t alleged, he assaulted me.’ She shook her head and another tear escaped. ‘After he’d gone all I could do was shower and get into bed and then I started being sick in the night and I couldn’t stop. I don’t know what happened. It was horrible.’

‘Perhaps you were feeling like you were heading for another breakdown?’

V looked up, her tears suddenly dried. ‘A what?’

‘A nervous breakdown?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Did you take anti-depressants for a year after leaving university?’

V looked round the court and a sound like a laugh escaped from her. ‘Are you serious? Half the country is on anti-depressants. It doesn’t mean anything.’

Xander opened his eyes as wide as they would go and looked at the jury. ‘So by your estimation six of these good people are currently taking anti-depressants. Perhaps you wouldn’t mind raising your hand if you are.’ They all stayed still; a couple even looked quite upset.

He shook his head at V. ‘Mrs Metcalf, I have to say, the part of this whole story that I’m finding hardest to get my head round is how you were found by the police in the arms of Mr Hayes, whilst your husband lay dying on the floor.’

V gasped. ‘Oh God, I’ve explained that.’

‘You’ve said you don’t know how it happened,’ Xander said. ‘But that seems unlikely when you remember everything else so well.’

‘But I don’t remember clearly,’ V said, her voice pleading.

‘Perhaps it happened because you and Mr Hayes are in love, as he says? Perhaps you were comforting each other because you were both shocked and upset that your game-playing had ended in this tragic way?’

‘No,’ V said, but her voice sounded as thin as water.

And that is one of the major flaws in V’s plan: nothing she said on the stand today really added up. What I am starting to understand is that quite apart from the fact that we can’t be separated, we also must remain true to who we are. We must make sense and nothing makes sense if one of us denies our love.

‘Why did you call Mr Hayes to warn him your husband was on his way round to Mr Hayes’s house on the night of the murder?’ Xander said and it all felt relentless.

‘I wasn’t warning Mike. I was trying to protect Angus.’

‘But if that was true why on earth didn’t you call the police?’

‘I don’t know. I didn’t think of it.’

‘You didn’t think of it.’ Xander sounded exasperated. ‘Mrs Metcalf, we all heard your message. You sounded deeply distressed. Do you really expect us to believe that you didn’t consider calling the police?’

‘Yes, because it’s the truth.’

‘Or perhaps you were scared to because you realised that your game had gone a bit too far? Perhaps you were worried someone was going to get hurt and you knew you would be implicated?’

V stifled a cry. ‘No, not at all. I was only worried about Angus at that moment.’

‘Would you say you’re good at ending relationships, Mrs Metcalf?’ Xander asked, turning back to V.

The question was obviously not what V had been expecting. ‘I don’t know. Who is?’

‘You like to use others, don’t you? Like with Mr Sage and Mr Hayes.’

‘God, I was a teenager with Gordon and I’ve explained the situation with Mike.’

‘Would you say you’re good at your job?’

V looked surprised again. ‘Yes.’

‘I believe you’re one of the youngest people ever to be taken on by the Calthorpe Centre, in a scientific role. Remind us what you’re working on again.’

‘I’m part of a team which is working on the idea of artificial intelligence.’

‘So, replacing humans with robots?’

‘That’s a very simplistic way of putting it and no, of course we’re not trying to do that. If anything we’re trying to help humans with the programmes we hope to create.’

Xander raised his eyebrows and turned to the jury. ‘You must have been very single-minded to have climbed to the top. Very focused. Worked very hard.’

‘Yes, I have.’

Petra stood again. ‘My lord, are we now trying Mrs Metcalf for being a woman with a good job?’

The judge looked over at Petra again, his lips pursed. ‘I am sure that is not what my honourable colleague is implying, is it, Mr Jackson?’

Xander laughed lightly. ‘Of course not, my lord. I am just trying to establish if Mrs Metcalf is the sort of person to become easily confused, or to not see logical ways out of situations.’

‘I’m good at my job, yes,’ V answered, her voice thin.

Xander tapped the rolled-up paper he was holding against his leg. ‘I don’t suppose that either you or Mr Hayes wanted Mr Metcalf dead.’ He looked at the jury. ‘I think we all can see that neither he nor you are hardened murderers. But I think it is fair to say you are a woman who enjoys game-playing and sex.’ He let the word hang in the air. ‘You are clearly clever and adept at problem-solving. And I think you are good at getting other people to do your dirty work for you. So, when you found yourself attracted once again to Mr Hayes, you started looking for his help to get out of your marriage.’

‘No. That is completely not true.’ I could tell V would be crying again in a minute.

‘Come on,’ Xander said. ‘It would have been very embarrassing to end that marriage only a couple of months after such a lavish wedding.’

‘But I didn’t want to end the marriage.’

‘And there is an obvious connection between you and Mr Hayes. Christ, we can all feel it right here, right now. It’s like electricity passing between you.’ Xander moved his hand as he spoke and I felt the jury looking between us, so they must have seen the shimmering, neon string attached to both our hearts. ‘And it’s hardly surprising. You’re both very good-looking, intelligent people who have this secret sex game you’ve played together for years, who’ve flirted with the idea of orgies and homosexuality. It’s hardly a leap of the imagination to see what’s happened here.’

‘Objection,’ Petra shouted, standing up.

Justice Smithson banged his hand on the table. ‘Sustained. Mr Jackson, your questioning is crossing the line.’

Xander bowed his head lightly to the judge and then Petra. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I got carried away with the atmosphere. No further questions, my lord.’

He walked back to his seat calmly, but the air in the courtroom was anything but. It fizzed and squealed around us, enclosing and disposing of us. V and I were breathing in the same air, our bodies recycling it to keep each other alive, as the moments passed in thundering heartbeats.

V stood shakily to exit the witness box and I thought she might stumble but she made it back to our box, where she sat with her head dropped and her back curved away from me.

Xander looked tired when we met in our strange airless debriefing room at the end of the day. I was angry with him for bringing up the Kitten Club without warning me, but he countered with his own anger which, I realised, was just as vibrant as mine.

‘Was she lying?’ he asked, like a threat. ‘Did you go more than once?’

‘No,’ I answered. ‘It was just as she said.’

‘Shame,’ Xander said, rubbing his temples like he had a headache.

‘I don’t even see how it helps anyway. I mean, I did all the same things she did. Petra’s bound to ask me about everything.’

Xander looked at me disdainfully. ‘Grow up, Mike. It’s totally different for you.’

It is morning now and I haven’t slept. I have had to go over and over all the things that were said yesterday. Writing it down has helped somewhat. I am sitting on my bunk now, watching the sun break milkily in the fogged sky and all I know is this: Verity is truth. She is my truth. The only truth. What we know and do is the only thing that matters. It transcends all the petty lies and misrepresentations, all the innuendos and gossip. We rise above it like the eagle does above the mountains. We look down and see mess but it doesn’t touch us. I need to use the truth today to reach a greater truth, a greater place of safety in which V and I can live forever, untouched by all the banality which constitutes this sorry world.

After watching you on the stand yesterday, V, it was like you were giving me permission to lie. You lied for what you thought was our good, but you got it wrong in your confusion, and now I must swoop in like the eagle and guide your hand. I now know what I must do, V. I know how to save you, my love, my darling, and nothing has ever felt more wonderful.

I am just back from court, but I am compelled to write because the adrenaline is still coursing through my veins. V, all of this has always been for you. I even understand now why I am writing at all: this will stand as a record of our pure, unending love, binding us together for all eternity. We will share and celebrate these words forever and the way we have conspired with our enemies to bring us to the ultimate craving truth of our love. When you read this, as you surely must, I want you to know that I own every word I uttered today. Every single movement I made in there I made for you, my love.

There was real hate in Petra’s eyes when she stood to cross-examine me. Her long thin body vibrated with distaste and her voice was harsh. ‘Mr Hayes, I put it to you that you are a fantasist. A dangerous fantasist at that.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m not.’

‘But then you would hardly admit to it, would you?’ She put on her glasses and flicked through her notes. ‘We have of course heard from Mrs Lascelles, your old headmistress, and I have several school reports and social service referrals in my possession and they all talk about your lack of empathy, your trouble with making friends, your tendency towards violence and your sexualised language.’

I still don’t recognise this person, though hazy memories are appearing through the smoke of my mind. I can just about make out chairs flying across rooms and girls crying and adults pinning me to the floor. ‘I left school a long time ago.’

‘Not that long,’ Petra replied. ‘So you don’t deny how you behaved back then?’

‘I can’t exactly remember. But I think we’ve established I had a bad childhood. I was an angry kid.’

‘Would you agree it’s fair to say you’ve never dealt with that anger?’ Petra asked, removing her glasses and beginning her walk.

‘No. I think I’ve dealt with it.’

‘But I mean professionally. You’ve never seen anyone, have you, even though your foster mother and Mrs Metcalf, doctors even, have advised this.’

‘No. I’ve never felt the need.’

‘But I think we’d all agree that the abuse you suffered would have left deep scars which it is almost impossible to eradicate without professional help.’

I watched her legs as she walked, willing her to trip and break her neck. ‘I don’t know. I feel fine.’

‘Do you think the emails you sent Mrs Metcalf after your break-up and then again whilst she was on her honeymoon were the actions of a rational person?’

‘I was very upset, both times.’

‘Yes, but don’t you think they were extreme?’

‘I’ve already said I was very upset when I wrote them. I’m not proud of them at all.’

Petra looked at the jury. ‘I know you all have these in your notes, but perhaps I could read one out to you, dated February the fourteenth last year.’ She put her glasses on and opened the papers in front of her:

Petra looked up as she finished and I could feel the stunned silence of the courtroom like a presence in the air. ‘There are quite a few emails like that,’ she said.

I nodded, feeling as if there was something pressing on the backs of my eyes. ‘I’m very ashamed I wrote those things. I didn’t mean them. I was desperate.’

‘They sound more than desperate to me,’ she said. ‘They sound dangerous.’

‘Objection,’ Xander said.

‘Sustained.’

Petra shook her head. ‘Why did you stop writing to Mrs Metcalf after that email?’

‘Because I realised there was no point continuing. I knew I would have to do something big to win her back.’

‘Which is when you decided to come back to the UK?’

‘Yes.’

‘How did you feel when you found out she was getting married?’

I squeezed my hands together in my lap. ‘I was shocked.’ Xander had told me not to say that the marriage was part of the Crave.

‘You didn’t feel upset?’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘But you didn’t talk to anyone about it? In fact, you concocted an elaborate charade in which you pretended to your work colleagues that you and Verity were still partners.’

My skin felt itchy. ‘It was easier to do that than talk about what had happened.’

‘Maybe it was easier to pretend to yourself as well?’

‘No, I knew the situation.’

‘You were just determined to reverse it?’

‘I knew Verity wanted that as well.’

Petra paused for a moment, but then spoke again. ‘From what I can tell you assumed an awful lot about what Mrs Metcalf was feeling from a couple of very brief emails and meetings when you came back to London. There are no records of any phone calls between you, no email correspondence apart from the scant few in the files, no meetings.’

‘I know Verity very well,’ I said, keeping my eyes on Petra. ‘I don’t need to spend lots of time with her to know what she is thinking.’

‘You also clearly don’t need to listen to her,’ Petra said, glancing over at the jury. ‘She specifically told you she was in love with Angus and not interested in restarting anything with you almost every time you communicated.’

‘You don’t understand,’ I said and I knew my voice had risen, so I pinched on the side of my hand in the way Xander had taught me to do.

‘Go on then, educate me.’

‘We have all these secret ways of communicating which only we understand.’

‘Oh yes,’ Petra said, her voice heavy with sarcasm. ‘You think she doesn’t mean the things she says. So, when she says no, she actually means yes, is that it?’

‘No. I don’t mean …’

‘Like when you’re forcing yourself on a woman sexually and she’s telling you no and you keep going because really no means yes. Is that what you mean?’

‘Objection, my lord,’ Xander said, standing. ‘How is this relevant?’

‘Yes, Ms Gardner,’ Judge Smithson said, ‘you do seem to be concerning yourself with political point-scoring in this trial.’

Petra looked down and her face was a deep red. ‘Apologies, my lord, if you feel that way. But I think we can agree that it is relevant, given that Mr Hayes failed to stop kissing Mrs Metcalf when she first asked him to on the night of the alleged assault.’

The judge waved his assent, but it was obvious he was annoyed.

Xander caught my eye and lowered his shoulders, so I did the same and it made me feel a bit better. ‘Of course I don’t think no means yes,’ I said. ‘I stopped when Verity asked me to.’

‘She had to ask you more than once, I believe. She had to shout. She says you had her pinned to the floor.’

‘She wanted to kiss me.’

‘How on earth do you know that?’

‘From the way she responded.’

‘I put it to you that you wanted Mr Metcalf dead,’ Petra said, looking straight at me. ‘I have the medical reports and your injuries were mostly superficial. Mr Metcalf, however, sustained a dislocated jaw, a broken nose, cheek-and jawbone, a fractured skull and extensive bleeding on the brain. You hit him very hard numerous times. Much harder than he hit you, much harder than was necessary to stop him punching you.’

‘I didn’t mean to kill him.’

‘You must have hated him simply because Verity loved him.’

‘No,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘I didn’t hate him. I felt sorry for him.’

‘But he had everything you wanted.’

‘No, he didn’t. He thought he did. But Verity didn’t love him.’

‘But Verity has sat where you are now and told us she loved him.’

‘She doesn’t mean it.’

‘Oh right, so we’re back here. Back to not believing the words which come out of a woman’s mouth because they always mean the opposite.’

‘Objection,’ Xander said. ‘Mr Hayes has never claimed to be talking for all women.’

‘Sustained,’ said Justice Smithson. ‘Ms Gardner, your point?’

‘My point, my lord,’ said Petra, walking towards me, ‘is that you, Mr Hayes, seem to have established this narrative in which you know Verity better even than she knows herself. Only you know what is best for her or how she should live. Only you understand what she means. Only you hear the things she doesn’t say and convince yourself that she has spoken.’

‘No, you don’t understand.’ The desire to cause Petra physical harm raged inside me.

‘And when she broke away from this and was happy in a life which had nothing to do with you, you couldn’t bear it and killed Mr Metcalf in a fit of jealousy and rage, in the way you had been conditioned to behave since childhood.’

‘That is not true.’ I could feel the sweat dripping from my brow and the tension in my shoulders which would result in a mean headache.

‘But it is also not true that Mrs Metcalf wanted to be with you or end her marriage, is it? And it is certainly not true that she ever asked you to help her get rid of Mr Metcalf.’

‘You don’t understand,’ I said again and I felt our truth slipping away from me.

‘Your childhood sounds terrible,’ Petra said. ‘Do you hate your mother, Mr Hayes?’

I thought of the woman in my waste-paper basket. ‘No.’

‘But you refuse to see her?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why is that?’

‘Because there’s no point.’

‘Did you read the article in the Mirror in which she appeared very contrite and begged to see you?’

It felt like the walls were closing in and I didn’t know where we were going. ‘Yes?’

‘So why not see her now then?’

‘Because she doesn’t mean it.’

Petra spun to the jury. ‘There. Another woman who says one thing and means another.’

‘I didn’t mean …’ I started to say, but Xander shushed me with his hand.

‘I don’t think you trust women,’ Petra said, turning back to me. ‘Or men for that matter. I think you have constructed your own internal world because that is the only place you feel safe.’

‘Objection,’ Xander said. ‘I didn’t realise Ms Gardner was a psychologist.’

‘You might do well to save those types of remarks for your closing statement, Ms Gardner,’ Justice Smithson said.

‘Sorry, my lord,’ Petra said. ‘You’re right. Because of course Mr Hayes is too deeply involved in this fantasy to ever admit to any of it.’ She walked over to where I was standing until she was so close I could see her make-up creased in the lines round her eyes and smell her synthetic floral stench. ‘I don’t even believe you love Mrs Metcalf,’ she said, her eyes locked on me.

‘Of course I love her,’ I shouted, the sound deafening in the silent court.

Petra turned her back on me and I wanted to vault the witness box and push her to the ground. ‘No,’ she said finally. ‘You’re in love with the idea of being in love. You can’t love someone and put them through what you’ve made Mrs Metcalf endure.’

‘But you don’t understand,’ I said, and even though I stopped myself shouting there was a tremor in my voice. ‘You have no idea.’

‘What, because I’m a woman?’ Petra said as she turned back to face me again.

‘No, because you’re not me or Verity.’

‘I would just ask you to do the decent thing and tell the truth about Mrs Metcalf,’ she said, looking directly into my eyes. ‘If you love her like you say you do then for God’s sake let her go and admit that you’re lying about her involvement in her husband’s murder. Lying about what she feels for you. Lying, in fact, about your whole relationship, which exists only inside your own head.’

I held her gaze, her stupid cow-like brown eyes. I shook my head. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I stand by everything I have said. Verity and I are very much in love. We didn’t want Angus to die, but there was no way we weren’t going to be together.’

Petra shook her head and turned away. ‘No further questions, my lord.’

Xander leant over his table as he asked the first question. ‘How did you feel when Mrs Metcalf ended the relationship last Christmas?’

‘Shocked and saddened. But I also understood. I had betrayed her massively and I knew I had to pay for what I’d done.’

‘That’s an interesting phrase. Pay for what you’d done. Is that what Verity said to you?’

‘No, but I know the rules.’

Xander raised an eyebrow. ‘What rules?’

It felt like there was too much to say and not enough time. You see I knew, V, that you were the only person in the room who would understand what I was talking about and, at that moment, I felt nothing but contempt for everyone else. How boring, I thought, not to be us. ‘Our rules. The rules we live by.’

‘Is that why you stopped contacting Mrs Metcalf in February after you returned to New York?’

I could feel my heart beating through my shirt, hard and fast. ‘Yes. I knew I had to make amends. I knew I couldn’t just say sorry, I knew I had to show her how sorry I was. So, I set about making plans to come home and buy a house and start creating the sort of life we’d always talked about.’

‘You must have been pretty shocked then to find out she was engaged,’ Xander said. He kept his eyes on me as he spoke and I knew he was willing me not to say what I thought.

‘I was,’ I said, keeping my voice steady. ‘But I also realised how much I had hurt her and it felt like a natural reaction.’

He smiled because I had remembered. ‘Are you saying that you think Angus was a rebound relationship?’

I shrugged, as casually as I could, keeping my mind fixed on all the times we’d played this out, as I’m sure you did, V, with Petra. ‘I couldn’t say, but it seems like a very short amount of time to go from a long-term relationship to engagement.’

Xander nodded. ‘And did you attempt to contact Mrs Metcalf on your return?’

‘I emailed her to say I was back and said I was looking forward to the wedding and meeting Angus and how they should come round sometime.’

‘So all very friendly?’ Xander said. Then he looked at the jury. ‘Emails are item twelve in your folder.’

‘Yes, she said we should get together after the wedding. But then I bumped into her like she said, a couple of weeks before the wedding.’

‘And how was that?’

I swallowed because it felt like my throat was blocked. I drank from the water in front of me. ‘It was strange,’ I said, pausing. ‘I think it was strange for both of us. It still felt like there was a strong connection between us and it upset me, if I’m honest.’ Keep to the timeline, Xander had instructed me, remember it as though your life depends on it, which of course it did.

‘But you still went to the wedding?’

‘Yes, although I wish I hadn’t because it was horrid to see Verity marry Angus. It made me realise that I wasn’t over her. In fact it made me realise I was still in love with her.’

‘So, when was the next time you saw Mrs Metcalf after the wedding?’ Xander asked.

‘I went to meet her after work. I felt I had to say a few things to her and she agreed to a drink. I told her I loved her still and I thought she’d made a mistake marrying Angus.’

‘And what did she say?’

I looked up at that and over at you then, V. Xander had told me not to, but I found I couldn’t stop myself. You were staring at me, your face ashen and your eyes black and hard and I knew then that you hadn’t yet understood what I was doing. I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.

‘Mr Hayes, you must answer the question,’ Justice Smithson said.

‘She seemed very confused,’ I said. ‘She said she loved Angus, but she was distressed and she kept giving me our secret signal.’

‘Your secret signal?’ Xander said. ‘What’s that?’

‘When we Craved her signal to me, when she wanted me to come over and rescue her, was to pull on the silver eagle she wears round her neck.’ We all looked at you as I said this and the eagle was there, resting gently on your skin. You sweetly put your hand to it, but then dropped it back into your lap.

Xander turned back to me. ‘And is that when Mrs Metcalf mentioned Angus was going away for a few days?’

‘Yes. I took it to mean that she wanted me to come round and we could start sorting all the mess out. But she was away at the weekend, so I went round on the Monday evening and she let me in.’

‘Mrs Metcalf says you assaulted her.’

My eyes stung with the effort it was taking not to cry. ‘I think Verity is very confused and that’s understandable. It was wrong of us to kiss, but we couldn’t help ourselves. And like Verity said, when she asked me to stop I did. We talked for ages afterwards about what we were going to do and how she would break it to Angus.’

‘And you left afterwards. She didn’t have to shout or ask you to go? She didn’t call the police?’

I shook my head. ‘No. We agreed she would tell Angus the next day and come and live with me.’

‘But you didn’t hear from her the next day?’

‘No. I started to get worried that Angus had hurt her in some way or something had happened, so I went round again. I should have left when he told me she was ill as Verity had made it clear she wanted to be the one to tell him, which would have been the right thing to do. But my impatience got the better of me and I blurted it out. He was very shocked and she was very upset and I left so they could sort it out. I went home and fell asleep and the next thing I knew was when Verity rang me to say Angus was on his way round.’ I realised I had been talking quickly and my breath was coming in short, ragged bursts.

Xander flipped open the pages he was holding. ‘I also have the medical reports, which show that both you and Mr Metcalf sustained injuries consistent with a fist fight. Is that your memory of what happened?’

‘Yes.’

‘Who would you say started the fight?’

‘Mr Metcalf. As soon as I opened the door he went for me.’

‘So he didn’t try to speak to you first?’

‘No. Not at all.’

‘Witnesses have testified to the fact that he was standing shouting outside your house for a good ten minutes before you opened the door. Why was that?’

‘Because Verity had told me not to let him in.’

‘Why do you think she said that?’

‘She said she didn’t want either of us getting hurt.’

‘Either of you?’

‘Yes.’

‘So what made you open the door then?’

I thought back to those minutes in the kitchen. ‘It’s hard to explain. Lots of people have shouted at me in my life and I wanted him to stop.’

‘What do you feel about the fact that you killed Mr Metcalf?’

I looked at my hands and it still felt unreal that they had ended another person’s life. ‘I feel devastated,’ I said, remembering the word Xander wanted me to use. ‘Of course I wanted Verity to leave him, but I didn’t want anything bad to happen to him.’

And that is the truth. Or maybe the real truth is that I didn’t care what happened to Angus. I don’t think you really cared either, V, although I know you didn’t want him dead. I don’t think either of us really cares what happens to anyone apart from you and me. I don’t wish death on others, but at the same time there are so many pointless people out there, so many disposable lives. Our truth is nothing stranger than that we need no one else; you and I are all there is.

‘What was it like when Verity was ill after you left university? When she took anti-depressants?’

I could feel your eyes on me, V, and I’m sorry but I had to play the line here, even though we both know it’s not what I meant. We both know I loved that time. ‘It wasn’t nice, but we got through it.’

‘I believe you learnt how to meditate in order to help her?’

‘Yes, it’s a useful skill.’

‘Would you say you are a naturally calm person, Mr Hayes?’

‘I think so.’

‘And how about the descriptions others have given of you being a bit of a loner, an outsider, hard to make friends with, but very loyal.’

I nodded. ‘I think all that is true. I did have a hard childhood, but I was also very lucky to be taken on by Elaine and Barry, who taught me that there are good people out there. Maybe I did love Verity too much, like her mother said, but also I’m not sure what that means. I do love her. And she loves me.’

Xander nodded and it felt like we were all breathing more heavily. ‘Mr Hayes, I am very interested in your take on the game, the Crave, you played with Mrs Metcalf during your relationship.’

‘It’s hard to explain to outsiders. It was just as Verity said. We’d go to a bar and I’d hang back so a man could approach her and then I’d go over and break it up.’

‘Mrs Metcalf testified that it aroused you both. Is that true?’

‘Yes.’

‘I believe sometimes you had sex afterwards in the bars or clubs where these events took place.’

‘Yes, we did.’

Xander walked towards the jury. ‘And did you always enjoy these nights?’

‘Yes. If Verity was happy then so was I.’

‘How do you feel now you know that she was lying to you about being curious about having sex with a woman, when in fact she’d had a lesbian relationship already?’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said, and it doesn’t, V.

‘And what about the Kitten Club. What did you feel about that?’

After your testimony, V, when Xander and I were talking about whether or not you’d lied about how many times we had been to the Kitten Club, and I said it had only been once, there was something about the way he said the word ‘Shame’ which made me finally understand what all this is about for these idiots who are not us. It unlocked the problem for me, made me see a way out of the mess. Give them what they want and they will all go away.

Yes, V, you and I will have to sacrifice a few years of our lives because this world isn’t ready yet to appreciate love in its purest, most simple form. This world deals in violence and lies, deceit and deception. It cannot see purity even when it is placed in front of its nose, choosing instead to turn away and scoff. Well, let them. We don’t care, do we, V? We are so much more than that.

That is the reason I did what I did next.

‘I enjoyed it,’ I said. ‘We both did.’

Xander looked up, as if he hadn’t heard me correctly and his voice shook slightly when he next spoke. But I recognised the shake, it was one of desire; it was the sound of someone getting what they want. ‘But I thought Mrs Metcalf said you only went once? And you didn’t take part?’

I kept my voice steady. ‘We went a few times. And we did take part.’

Xander almost smiled. ‘You took part in orgies? You and Mrs Metcalf?’

‘Yes.’

You cried out at this point, V; the tears gushed from your eyes, the eagle bouncing up and down with your heartbeat.

‘Can you tell the court what you did?’ Xander asked, almost licking his lips.

Momentarily I lost my nerve. I wanted to ignore the greater good and stop the pain at that second. I stood up, my eyes locked on yours. ‘Forgive me, V,’ I shouted. ‘It’s for the best, I promise. I love you.’

You opened your mouth but the only sounds were those of your sobs.

Petra stood up. ‘This has to stop, my lord.’

‘Your defendant cannot address Mrs Metcalf,’ Judge Smithson said. ‘Unless he wants to be found in contempt of court.’

Xander walked towards me and I sat back down, my whole body shaking. The whole room seemed to be shaking. But I drew strength from your continued distress, V, because I knew we were together in our pain; I knew I had more lies to tell about you, and that telling them was the only certain way to protect you, to keep you safe while I was locked away. ‘Mike, you need to tell the court what sort of a hold Mrs Metcalf had over you.’

We hadn’t prepared that question and I felt it run into me like a punch. ‘We are very much in love,’ I said and my voice sounded hard and loud.

Xander nodded, conciliatory. ‘Yes, I don’t doubt that. But would you have done anything for her?’

‘Absolutely. I still would.’

‘There’s nothing you wouldn’t do?’

‘Nothing.’

The silence throbbed around us. ‘Even after all this? Even after all she’s said about you?’

I nodded. ‘Verity will have her reasons. It will be OK.’

I remembered something else last night, V, something which came to me late as I lay on my bunk turning everything over in my mind. I remembered when we went into that gift shop in Edinburgh, the year we went to the festival. How we were looking through a pile of quotes on wooden plaques and laughing and then you stopped. How you held one up and said it was the first quote you’d ever come across which actually meant something worth remembering. I read it over your shoulder that day: I must be cruel only to be kind; Thus bad begins and worse remains behind.

‘We should remember that, Mikey,’ you said to me, ‘Shakespeare is always right.’ And I didn’t understand then why you thought that, but I do now, I absolutely do now.

We must work and bend the truth. Others might see it differently, but, my darling, our kind of cruelty is love by any other name.

Xander snapped shut the papers. ‘Did Mrs Metcalf ever ask you to hurt Mr Metcalf in any way?’

I paused, but only briefly. And, V, I looked straight at you. Remember that. I took a breath deep into my stomach because we had reached the moment I have spent the last weeks debating: what constitutes the truth? Does it exist only in what we say to each other in flimsy puffs of air, often without real thought? Or is it, as I suspect, more than that? No, surely it is the foundation of all we are. It is in our bones, in our being. It begs to be interpreted in order to reach its true potential.

‘She asked me to help her,’ I said, my heart hammering in my chest and my blood singing in my ears.

Xander stood still for a moment and it was good to see him wrong-footed. I felt him look straight at me but I didn’t return his stare because I was never going to take my eyes off you. ‘When did this happen?’

‘When I went to her house on the Monday. After we kissed we spent a lot of time talking about how we were going to handle the situation, like I’ve said.’ I stopped for a moment, remembering how the floor had felt underneath me, how we’d sat up, how we’d shivered with desire. ‘As you know she said that she wished things had worked out between us.’

My God, V, you are the most beautiful being ever to have existed, that’s what I thought when I looked at you then. I could swim into you and lie still forever. But I knew Xander and all the rest of them would need more. I knew the story needed a more definite climax.

‘She told me she wanted to get out of the marriage but that she couldn’t do it alone. She asked for my help.’ The words pricked me as they left my body.

‘Mr Hayes, what did these words mean to you?’ Xander asked through my thoughts.

‘That she was scared because she hates confrontation. I’ve always saved her from bad situations and she knew I could help her with this one. Verity didn’t want Angus dead, just like I didn’t want him dead. But we had to be together. Do you understand that? It is simply impossible that we don’t end up together.’

I was speaking only to you, V, and you never moved your gaze from mine for one second. You stopped crying. And I knew then that you finally understood what I had done.

Xander and Petra spent ages summing up, all going over and over the same wrong thoughts in the same wrong ways. And then the judge could have had his lines written for him by Xander. He spent a lot of time summarising the legal issues: how to find me guilty of murder was the most serious verdict the jury could bring against me. How to do so they had to be absolutely certain of my intention to kill Angus at the moment I hit him. How they had to be sure I wasn’t acting in self-defence. He also reminded them about my upbringing and the mental strain I had been under at the time. He told them that the option to convict of manslaughter was a realistic expectation.

He did little to hide his revulsion for you, V. He reminded the jury how you had lied, even under oath, about Angela and the Kitten Club, and how you find it hard to remove yourself from unwanted situations, especially ending relationships. He talked for a long time about, as he put it, your extreme and unusual sexual appetites, and how you clearly used your sexuality to exert control over me. I shut my eyes as he spoke to stop myself from screaming out in your defence, but these are the trolls we have to deal with. These are the maggots who would not be fit to feed on our corpses.

In the end we only had to wait twenty-four hours before we were called back in. I was found not guilty of murder, but guilty of manslaughter. And you, my love, were found guilty of accessory to manslaughter. I looked over to you when the verdicts were read out and I saw your knees buckle and how your warden had to steady you with her arm. Suzi cried out, but I’m not sure you heard. We had to stay standing to hear Judge Smithson talk about how tragic this case has been and how he believed that neither of us had meant for it to end in Angus’s death. He spoke about responsibility and the dangers involved in game-playing and using others.

I remember completely clearly only one line that he said: ‘You, Mr Hayes, have fallen victim to two emotionally deficient women in your life and I only hope that when you leave prison you choose your future partners with more caution.’ It took me a while to realise he was talking about you, V, and my mother.

He gave us both eight years, but Xander says we will appeal and it’s likely to be cut to about five. With good behaviour he reckons we should be out in three to four. It’s not that long.

Terry let me watch the news on his TV when I got back from court. We sat together on his fetid bunk and watched Petra stalk down the steps of the courthouse. There were lots of reporters jostling around her and she allowed them to settle before she began to speak.

‘In my opinion, the wrong person has been on trial in this case,’ she said, her anger bristling off her like a force field. ‘Verity Metcalf appears to have been on trial for her sexuality throughout this sham of a trial, which at times has felt like we were back in seventeenth-century Salem. I did not expect to be standing in a twenty-first-century courtroom and hearing words like “enchanted” and “beguiled” used about a clever, thoughtful woman. The lies and gossip which have enveloped this case have resulted not only in a dangerous man receiving a reduced sentence which will see him back on our streets in only a few short years, but with an innocent woman being convicted of a crime she did not commit.’

She chose a camera and looked down the lens, out to us. ‘Anyone who tells you that we have achieved equality should think hard about what has happened here; should wonder at why none of this even appears unusual or shocking. We in the legal system should all feel ashamed of ourselves today, for justice has not been served.’

I felt a coldness rest in my stomach, but Terry shoved me in the ribs. ‘Fucking women’s libbers,’ he said. ‘They’re all dykes, the lot of them. What they need is a good seeing-to by a real man.’ He laughed hollowly, the sound rattling round his chest. I didn’t reply, instead climbing up on to my bunk to find the fog had lifted for the night and I could see the stars through my tiny window.

And so we are here, V. Both shut up in our boxes, waiting for the moment we can be together again. Xander forwards me lots of requests from writers and journalists and production companies, all of whom are eager to tell my side of the story, as they put it. He tries to persuade me to talk to them, saying it would be good for me, but really it’s just because he’s vain and would like to see himself mirrored by a handsome actor. So far I have refused all requests, but I am starting to wonder. News changes quickly and gossip is overtaken. We are bound together by this story, our shared truth, and maybe we need to prolong it. Maybe we need to cement it forever on screens and in books so that we are always bound together by words.

Thank you for dropping the assault charges. I know of course that you never really meant it to go to court; it was simply another part of the Crave, another way to take us close to the edge before pulling back. And you were right to plead no contest to Angus’s family’s ridiculous civil action about the will. I recognised what they were when I saw them in court. But it doesn’t matter; we wouldn’t have ever touched a penny of his money anyway, would we, my love?

V, I know you like instant gratification and I know you will be finding the thought of spending even three years without me very hard, which is why I write to you every day. Long letters all about our glorious future.

I especially like to talk to you about our home. The garden will be spectacular this spring, but it will be perfect when we return. Anna told me that all gardens need three years to properly settle and become the spaces they are meant to be. I lie on my bunk and think of this and it is like we planned it. You will be amazed at the cleverness of the planting and I can see you there, sitting amongst the swaying flowers as I cook us supper on the barbeque. We can lie on the hot stones and look up at the clouds and you can teach me again to see pictures. We will make love in every room of the house and I will show you the numbers of the women in the cupboard in the kitchen, which I have decided we can’t paint over. We will tell each other their stories; we will give them their proper endings.

We will get on aeroplanes, V, and lie on deserted beaches where the breeze kisses our skin. We will drink cocktails in strange hotel rooms where no one knows our names and swim in seas deeper than our imagination. We will hold each other tight every night, our bodies wrapping around one another, our heads resting against each other. We will sleep peacefully, our breaths in union, warm and deep. And I won’t wake in the night and want to uncoil your brain because I will know what is there. You will put your hand on my chest and feel my heartbeat and I will kiss every inch of your body. We, my darling, are creatures of perfection held in a state of waiting, our anticipation making our reunion all the better in the end.

V, we have managed what all other lovers yearn but fail to do. We have eclipsed the world and exist only within our hearts. We have almost reached a state of perfection, a state in which our communication is all that matters. I shut my eyes and think about all the wonderful days and weeks and months and years of togetherness stretching on before us, in sickness and in health, forsaking all others, till death do us part, forever and ever, amen.

Oh God, V, you made me wait, but I have finally received a reply to all the letters I have written. It was a postcard on which you had written three words in capital letters: ‘YOU ARE NOT.’

I turned the card over and on the front was a photograph of an eagle, soaring high in the sky over snow-capped mountains. I laid the card on my bunk, its four corners in perfect line with each other, and then sat cross-legged in front of it. I stayed very still like that for a long time, just savouring the moment.

I shut my eyes because I had to process everything. I had to allow the eagle to soar into my brain and show me the way, just as you always intended. My darling, I know what others will think you mean with these words, but I also know you would never be crass and obvious. I love how you used our three-word code and the way you make me work, that nothing is straightforward with you. I know what you really mean. But I don’t need you to tell me that I am not guilty.

The Crave I know is over. We don’t need it any more. We are beyond that now. Beyond anything outside of ourselves. But for old times’ sake, I crossed out your three words and replaced them with the ones which will always mean something just to us: ‘I CRAVE YOU.’ I readdressed it and put it into the prison mail system, so you should receive it tomorrow.

You, V, are the only person who has ever known what I need to survive in this world. I know Elaine and Barry, even my mother, tried their best, but you are the only person who has ever seen deep inside me, who has touched my soul.

We are humans, flailing and mistaken, but that doesn’t matter. Because we love, we can forgive. We know the truth. We know what love is: the kindest and the cruellest emotion.

I am coming for you, V. I am coming.