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Three Little Lies Page 24
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I had my back to the kitchen door, so although I looked round when I heard it click shut, I was too late to see who it was that had closed it, and whether they had seen what I had seen.
Olivia
July 2007
He stands up, the prosecution barrister, and there’s a pause before he speaks. As he looks over the papers in his hand, which I’m sure don’t pertain to the case, he somehow manages to give the impression that he is shocked and horrified at what Daniel has done. Allegedly done. Without even speaking, he has the jury in the palm of his elegantly manicured hand. They are waiting with bated breath to see how he will begin. He pinches the bridge of his nose.
‘Mr Monkton, I’d like to take you once more through the events of the evening of the thirty-first of December 2006.’
Daniel nods, but he looks frightened. I clench my fists a little tighter, wishing I had a hand to hold, someone who wouldn’t care if I squeezed so hard it hurt. I think of Tony’s face at our silent breakfast table this morning, the way he leafed through the paper without seeing it. I have pretended to understand his absence from court; I have let him off, but I wonder if I will ever be able to forgive him for not being at my side for the most terrible experience of my life.
‘This New Year’s Eve party at your parents’ home – at what time did proceedings begin?’
‘The…’ He stops to clear his throat. ‘The first guests arrived around seven p.m., I suppose.’
‘And did you start drinking alcohol at around that time?’
‘Yes, I think so.’
‘You think so?’
‘No, I did.’ He runs out of breath and has to stop to gulp in air. ‘Around that time.’
‘And what were you drinking?’
‘There was some champagne; I had a bit of that. And then beer, mostly.’
‘Champagne and beer.’ The barrister looks down for a few seconds, as though lost in thought, then appears to remember himself and turns to Daniel again.
‘And what time did Miss Barton arrive at the party?’
‘I don’t know. I didn’t answer the door to her.’
The barrister consults his papers. ‘In her evidence, she says she arrived at around eight p.m. You don’t have any reason to disbelieve that, do you?’
‘No.’
‘And at what time did you first encounter her at the party?’
‘Not for a while. I was in my room with my brother and some friends. I think we came down around eight-thirty to get some more beer from the kitchen. That was the first time I saw her.’
‘Did you speak to her?’
‘Yes, just hello, that sort of thing. I think she said Happy New Year, maybe.’
He’s saying too much. He sounds as if he’s trying to please the barrister, give him the answers he wants. Why is he doing that?
‘You then went back to your bedroom, with the beer?’
‘Yes.’
‘At ten o’clock, only an hour or so later, you kissed Miss Barton passionately in the hallway, and went upstairs with her.’
‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘So what happened in the interim period? How did you get from drinking in your room with friends, to taking Miss Barton to your bedroom?’
Daniel looks uncertainly at the jury and back to the barrister. ‘I wouldn’t say I took her. She wanted to go.’
The barrister stops a fraction short of raising his eyes to the heavens. ‘I do apologise. How did you get from drinking with friends to kissing Miss Barton in the hallway and going together with her to your room?’
‘We all came down to get some more drinks, me and my friends.’
‘At what time?’ He sounds… bored. I know it’s a tactic, it must be, but it’s working. He’s managing to subtly discredit everything Daniel says without appearing to be doing so. I am horrified at how theatrical it is. I want to stand up and shout at him: THIS IS NOT A GAME! This is my son. His life. My life.
‘Around nine-thirty, I guess. It’s hard to remember. We’d been drinking.’
‘Indeed,’ he says smoothly. ‘And how intoxicated would you say you were?’
‘It’s hard to say.’
‘Well, were you, for example, in full control of your actions?’
‘Yes,’ he says, his brow furrowed in the way it used to be when he bent over the kitchen table doing his homework.
‘And so you came down at nine-thirty, and that was when you began talking to Miss Barton?’
‘Yes. I was going from the kitchen to the piano room, and I saw her in the hall, rummaging through the coats. She seemed upset.’
‘You thought she was leaving?’
‘Yes. She was crying.’
‘And did she tell you what was wrong?’
‘She said it was nothing, that she’d had too much to drink.’
‘How well did you know Miss Barton at this point?’
‘I’d seen her around the house a lot. She was a friend of Sasha’s, my parents’ goddaughter who lives with us. I’d chatted to her before, seen her at parties. But I didn’t know her very well. I’d probably never had a conversation longer than about five minutes with her.’
‘So you’d never kissed her before?’
‘No! Nothing like that.’
‘You and Miss Barton had never had sexual intercourse, or any kind of sexual contact?’
‘No! I hardly knew her.’
The barrister makes a little moue with his mouth, as if to express doubt.
‘So you began to talk, and what… one thing led to another?’ He says this with slight distaste, as if this is something that would never happen in his own life: one thing leading to another.
‘Yes, I suppose so,’ he says, with a brief, agonised glance up at me. My heart clutches in my chest at this evidence of his boyish embarrassment at having to talk about these things in front of me. Last night he offered me a way out, said he would understand if I couldn’t face it, but I could hear what he was saying underneath his words: please be there; please don’t abandon me.
‘Miss Barton was intoxicated, wasn’t she?’
He looks down at his hands, which are folded together in front of him.
‘A bit, I suppose. It was a New Year’s Eve party.’
‘Mr Monkton, when you and Miss Barton were engaged in sexual intercourse, she asked you to stop, didn’t she?’
‘No.’
‘She said no. She told you that you were hurting her?’
‘No.’
‘When I asked you a moment ago if Miss Barton seemed intoxicated, you said…’ He makes a great show of consulting his notes, although he clearly knows perfectly well what comes next in this drama he is starring in. ‘You said: “A bit, I suppose. It was a New Year’s Eve party.” Miss Barton was incapable of consenting to sexual intercourse. Did she consent, Mr Monkton?’
‘Yes!’ The word explodes from him like a bullet from a gun. His barrister shoots him a warning look and he takes a breath, looking at the floor, a deep red staining his cheeks. I pray for it to be over, or for the judge to call for a break, but the barrister has more cards to play.
‘Yes,’ Daniel says again, more calmly. ‘She did not show any signs of being out of control. She appeared a bit drunk, but she consented fully to everything we did. She… enjoyed it,’ he adds stiffly.
‘Can you account for the fact that when police searched your room, a broken bottle with your fingerprints and DNA on it – the bottle that has been proven to be the one that cut Miss Barton’s thighs – and a T-shirt of yours, stained with her blood, were found buried at the bottom of your wardrobe?’
‘No, I can’t.’ His voice is so low I can hardly hear it.
‘You can’t.’ The barrister shuffles some papers around on the table in front of him. ‘You have told us,’ he goes on, his tone indicating that whatever it was, it was a pack of lies, ‘that you had never had any kind of sexual contact with Miss Barton before that night.’
‘That’s right,’ Daniel says, lo
oking up and straight at the barrister in his ridiculous wig. I have a momentary urge to stand up and scream at the ridiculous pantomime unfolding before me. Why do we have these rituals, these protocols that must not be deviated from, these absurd costumes? Is it to intimidate the rest of us, those of us not privy to this world of secret handshakes and Latin phrases? To force us into confessing to things we haven’t done?
‘So how do you explain Miss Barton’s assertion that she had been in a controlling and abusive sexual relationship with you for the three months leading up to New Year’s Eve 2006?’
The red blotches have faded from his cheeks and his hands clasp the rail in front of him, the skin stretched tightly over his knuckles.
‘I can’t explain it,’ he says grimly. ‘She’s lying. I can only assume that she has some sort of… problems… That she wants the attention.’
‘You have no idea why Miss Barton swears that you and she had been involved in an abusive relationship for three months? That this was not the first time you had raped her? But merely the first time you had done more than rape her? That this time the fact that you had pushed her, and cut her with broken glass, leaving injuries that other people could see if she chose to show them, had given her the courage to speak out about what you were doing to her?’
Daniel doesn’t reply; he simply stares at the barrister, his face closed and unreadable. I don’t believe in God, but I find myself praying to him nonetheless. Not for the jury to find Daniel not guilty, although I do want that (somewhere deep inside, in my womb, perhaps, where I grew him, I want that regardless of whether he is guilty or not); but what I find myself praying is this: Please God, let him not have done it. Which, with a thundering jolt to my heart, forces me to face the unpalatable truth: I am not sure that he didn’t.
Olivia
September 2017
Why did Ellen have to dig it all up? It’s been hard enough having Daniel back in our lives, after I spent so long shoring up my heart against him. I don’t, I won’t, believe that he had anything to do with Sasha going missing, despite what I know. Despite what I did. But then I would have sworn he wasn’t a rapist until a judge and jury forced me to believe it.
It was a hideous shock, opening the door a few weeks back to find him standing there. I don’t expect a ring at the door on a Friday night anyway, certainly not these days. There was a time when friends would pop in at any and all times, saying they were going to stay for one drink, but finding themselves still there hours later, eating a meal I’d thrown together in my famous way, gathering round the piano, singing, talking, laughing. It’s been a long time since that happened, though. Over ten years. Perhaps it would have faded anyway; our friends are all ageing, and everybody texts all the time now. Nobody ever calls or wants to meet up.
Daniel’s face was a heartbreaking mixture of hope and fear. We stood there for a few seconds, neither of us speaking. I suppose he was waiting to see if I would send him away or invite him in. I simply didn’t know what the correct response was; what my response was. It was as though someone had paralysed my brain, or put it into a deep freeze, whence it couldn’t separate right from wrong, love from hate.
He was the first to break the silence. ‘Mum?’ he said hesitantly, as if perhaps I hadn’t recognised him.
‘Yes,’ I said, although I wasn’t sure what question I was answering.
‘Could I… come in?’
A sort of automatic response kicked in and I stepped back to let him pass. The door closed behind him with a soft thud. Still I stood there, not knowing how I felt.
‘Is it OK if we go into the kitchen?’ He spoke as if to a stranger, someone who had never been to the house before. My mind filled with images of him clattering into the hall, kicking off his shoes, flinging his coat on to a peg, bursting into the kitchen, helping himself from the fridge. I had to clamp down, lock those memories away. If I started thinking like that I’d be lost. I walked silently into the kitchen and he followed. I stood with my back to the Aga and he faced me, half-leaning against the dresser. Behind him I could see the marks that refused to disappear, where I had ripped off the sellotape that had stuck the family photos to the edge of the shelves. I hadn’t been able to bear removing only the ones that had him in them, so I took them all down and stuffed them in an envelope, hid it away in the loft.
‘What are you doing here?’ I found my voice, although it didn’t sound like mine. It was hard, spiky.
‘Dad told me about… being unwell.’
‘He’s dying, Daniel. No need to be so delicate. And since when did Dad tell you anything?’
‘I didn’t know he hadn’t told you. We’ve been in email contact for a while now. Sorry you’re finding out like this.’
‘Where are you staying?’ Despite myself, concern crept in. He heard it; I could see it in the downward tilt of his shoulders.
‘With a friend,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry, Mum.’
‘Don’t worry?’ My façade dropped and ten years of pain soared through my body. ‘You turn up after all this time and you’re telling me not to worry? My worrying days are over, Daniel. I am beyond worry. In fact, I’m beyond everything. I don’t feel anything any more. That’s what you did to me. That’s what you have made me.’
His face twisted, and I thought he was going to cry, but then he shifted his weight off the dresser and moved towards the door.
‘I shouldn’t have come, I’m sorry.’
I followed him back into the hall, not saying anything in case I opened my mouth and begged him to stay.
‘Bye, Mum,’ he said quietly, and then he was gone. I wanted to sink to the floor and sob like a child, but I am a sixty-year-old woman, so I went back to the kitchen and poured myself a glass of wine and sat, shaking, at the table to drink it.
I am back there now, drinking again. I must be careful; we can’t have two alcoholics in the house. My eyes keep being drawn back to the bare spots on the dresser where the sellotape was, where the evidence of our happy family life used to be. I’ve been resisting the urge, but the wine has loosened my self-control, and Tony is out at the pub, won’t be back for hours. He said he was meeting a friend and I colluded in the lie, knowing that he’ll be sitting alone at the bar, engaging anyone who is foolish enough to linger too long next to him in his self-centred conversation.
I have to get the wooden step from the kitchen to reach up and unhook the loft hatch, and even then it’s a struggle. It’s years since I’ve been up here. I pull the ladder down, unleashing an avalanche of dust that sticks in my throat and makes my eyes gritty. At the top of the ladder I fumble for the light switch, unable to remember exactly where it is. I snap it on and the loft is bathed in yellow light. There are piles of boxes, and everywhere remnants of a life I cannot bear to think of. A mini shopping trolley lurks in one corner, two moth-eaten bears sitting at drunken angles in the seat at the front; next to it is a wooden rocking horse given to me by my mother when Daniel was little. It had belonged to me as a child, a fact that fascinated him, his toddler brain entranced by the idea of me as a small girl, my hair in pigtails. Once, we spent an entire afternoon going through the albums of family photos that my mother had painstakingly stuck in, photos that went back years, featuring forbidding-looking Victorian ladies in black, high-necked dresses and hats, all annotated in my mother’s spidery hand: Great Aunt Mary, 1906. The baby must be Uncle Cecil.
The photos from the dresser must be near the top somewhere, from the last time I was up here. There’s a brown envelope on top of one of the boxes that’s marginally less dusty than anything else. I pick it up and open out an ancient folding wooden chair, sitting down and sliding my thumb under the flap of the envelope. It gives way easily and I reach in and pull out a stack of photos that make my heart flip, even though I knew what to expect. Daniel beams at me from the top of the pile, sitting on a rock at Cheddar Gorge, squinting into the sun, his skin tanned, wearing his favourite Toy Story T-shirt. I swallow, dust on my tongue, unsure whether to go
on, unable to resist. The next one is Daniel and Nicky, older this time, leaning against the car, the Citroën we had when we first moved here. Their dark hair is blowing in the wind and Daniel is laughing at something outrageous Nicky has said. God, I loved this photo, back when I was a normal woman with two sons who loved each other, a great career, a happy husband, friends; a life. Before Sasha. There’s a bitter taste in my mouth that has nothing to do with the dust, and I shove the photos back into the envelope and drop it on the floor.